Jason Hancock

I got home relatively early today, so I decided that I wanted to try and cook something new for dinner. Laura and I decided that we wanted to try gourmet stuffed cheeseburgers for dinner. Ingredients: 1.5 lbs ground beef 2 Tbsp. dark beer (We used Newcastle) 1⁄2 of an onion, diced 1⁄2 tsp. seasoned salt 3 pieces of crisp bacon, diced 1 cup cheddar cheese (we actually used 1⁄2 cup cheddar and 1⁄2 cup colby jack) Start by cooking the bacon, allowing it to cool a little bit, then dicing it.

I got a lot done this weekend and managed to have a bunch of fun too! How’s that for a productive weekend? First off, website updates. I posted 4 new galleries of pictures (Grandma Mack’s Disneyland trip, Grandma Mack’s 82nd birthday, Easter, and Picnic Day). I also organanized them and prepped them for long-term achival with the rest of my data. I realized that I’m running out of disk space in a bad way (shooting raw will do that to ya), so I need to figure out what I’m going to do for long term archival and backup.

Last weekend we went to Davis for picnic day. I wrangled my buddy James into going out at sunrise to check out some bridges in the countryside. I shot a couple rolls of film (Kodak Plus-X 125) while I was up there. Since PCC is currently on spring break, I’ll have to wait until next week to develop it. One really positive thing that has come out of my photo class is that I have discovered that I really like proofsheets.

In addition to the filters that I ordered, I also ordered a Domke F2 shoulder bag in black. I was a bit skepical after reading everything online as people either love it or hate it. I love it. My LowePro backpack was good, but it was a hassle to get in and out of and it couldn’t really carry 2 camera bodies very well. The F2 has room for both bodies (D80 and N80), 50mm f/1.

I’ve been working a lot lately. I have been tasked with building some web based data analysis tools. I had to dust of my web designer hat for this one….once I had the code functional, I spent 1⁄2 day making it pretty. I don’t spend as much time as I’d like in Photoshop anymore 🙁 I ordered some filters for my camera - a red #25, a yellow #8, and two circular polarizing filters (52mm and 72mm).

Today, I learned the hard way about character encodings and file conversion utilities. At work, I’m building a system that takes a data dump from system A(a windows server) and imports it into system B(a linux server). System A outputs a file I’m going to call input.txt in utf16 format. System B wants the input in utf-8. At first, I didn’t realize that input.txt was in utf16 format. I looked at the file in vi and saw that the first byte was garbage, then every-other byte was garbage.

I’ve been pretty busy lately. Between my B/W photography class, work, and finding reasons to escape to take pictures, I’ve hardly had any downtime. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a new domain to host my photography portfolio. I started writting a wordpress plugin the other day. It’s almost functional and ready for alpha release. After developing that plugin, I thought that instead of building my whole site end-to-end from scratch, that I should take some framework and build plugins on top of it to do what I want it to.

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

It seems that there’s quite a learning curve to this photography stuff. I thought I was doing well. I had some gear, a light stand, some cheap radio triggers, two flashes, etc. I had filled my head with stuff from the Strobist blog. Now, it was time to see if I was going to be able to put into play anything that I had learned. I started off by inviting Jenny and Eric over for dinner.

The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind. I’ve been doing a lot of DIY photography equipment projects. I’ll detail some of them in different posts. I have learned more about photography in the past couple of weeks than I have since purchasing my D80. A lot of this knowlege has come from reading the Strobist blog. I’m no longer scared to use the manual mode on my camera as I feel that I have a good theoretical handle on how aperature, shutter speed, and ISO each affect the exposure of the image.