/sys/admin/blog

I finally tried some of Starbuck’s new Via instant coffee and it’s actually pretty good. It’s not regular instant freeze-dried-whatever-the-hell-instant-coffee-is crap. Via is “micro ground” coffee beans that you just add hot water to and you’ve got a cup of coffee. You can see some fine particles in the last sip of the cup but you can’t detect them in the coffee in a bad way.

Via is going to be my coffee of choice for the next camping trip for sure.

Hearing about Google Wave and not sure what it is? There is a good 10 minute video from Google showing some examples of it being used here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw&feature=player_embedded

Cool stuff. I think I’m going to plan poker nights with it… if only more of my friends can just get accounts already!

Just a sampling of my favorites from the past week:

“Why didn’t you tell us in advance of the unscheduled outage you didn’t know would happen?”

“Is there any technical reason you’re doing this?”

“It’s your job to figure out what I really needed even though you gave me exactly what I asked for, that’s called customer service.”

Sigh.

Thank you to all of you that make IT work! Happy System Administration Day!!!

Shooting macro photography without a tripod is hard. You need a lot of light and you’re trying to balance the depth of field with a fast enough shutter speed to get a sharp picture. Bump your ISO up too high and you loose detail and get noise.

So here’s a little trick I picked up. Set your exposure compensation down a stop or two. You’ll under-expose the shot but the detail will be there. Back home you can push the exposure back up in post processing the RAW file.

I got this little guy hand held at ISO: 400, Exposure: 1/45 sec, Aperture: 8.0 with -1 stop set. It works!

I plan on posting more on some of the features that those of you with digital SLRs should learn how to use and get off of that blasted full auto mode… however, let’s start with a basic thing: RAW.

If you’re not shooting RAW, that’s an easy one to turn on. If you’re nervous about it, most cameras will let you set RAW + JPEG and you can at least have the option of the power of RAW files. Granted, it will take more storage on your card but it’s worth it. Trust me… here’s a good article on RAW vs. JPG.