It's Krrunch Time Baby!

This is my entry for the Nuffnang Regional Blogger awards, I hope you enjoy it!

The video is fairly self explanatory but for those of you who don't want to load it here's the deal...




Sometimes days are boring. Very boring... so boring that I might die of boredom.

Luckily Pringles can hear the call of a bored guy even from inside a cupboard.

They formulate a plan of attack and get going!

There are many obstacles they have to face on their perilous journey... including stairs

And also being killed by careless (but pretty) passers by.

And falling into carelessly placed musical instruments.

The death toll is high but they are determined!

They manage to open doors but can't find me.

After a long journey they manage to get to me, the person crying out for help from this boredom!

They jump in my mouth and IT'S KRRUNCH TIME BABY!

I love to party with my little Pringle man.

But also I'm hungry so his time is up!

The end!

I hope you enjoyed this video as much as I enjoyed making it! Nuffnang, please send me to the awards!

Photo Post!!!

Wow, it has been a while hasn't it? Well, this is what I have been working on lately as far as photography goes. If you want to know how I did any of these or want to know what equipment I used, feel free to ask! Because that's how you learn. By asking.

Neutral Density Filters

Check it out! I told you I’d get around to writing about the new ND filter. ND stands for neutral density and comes in varying grades varying from 1 to 8. Mine is an ND 8 by a company called Tian Ya. Yes it is from Hong Kong and isn’t a well known brand like Cokin or Hoya, But those were $40 and mine was $12. But does it work!??! That is indeed the most important thing. Below are two pictures, both done on manual with settings of f/22 1/8s shutter speed an ISO value of 100. The first is without the filter and the second is with.









As you can see, the filter allows you to capture bright details with a slower shutter speed, so if you wanted the clouds streaking across the sky, this is the filter for you. Obviously the trees in the shot are under exposed and you could achieve the same look in the picture I have shown by using a faster shutter speed, but that’s not the point I was trying to make. I just wanted to show the amount of light it blocks out. It’s kind of like sunglasses for your lens! And it goes on just as easy, just screw it into your lenses existing threading. The one that I got has threading on both sides so I can screw on my macro or wide angle lenses on top of the ND filter, or another ND filter on top to make it an ND 16!!!

Titanium Optics 0.42x High-Definition Super Wide Angle Fisheye lens review

Hello! Got a brand new lens, thought I’d review it. I want to get into band photography so a couple of things are good to have. 1. A lens with a very wide aperture and 2. A wide-angle lens to help capture the whole stage. If you look around you’ll see that unless you are buying a fixed focal length lens, anything with an aperture wider than 3.5 starts to get expensive. By expensive I mean, more than what I can afford when I’m not selling photos and have a lot of other bills to pay, so I started looking for a wide-angle lens. Thing is, my little D60 entry level camera is all I have right now and if something happened to the sensor or lens while I was changing lenses at a busy club where beer and sweat and who knows what else is flying about, I would be very disappointed, and that’s when I discovered lens converters. Does the same thing (but not as well) and you just screw it on to your existing lens. Perfect! So I started shopping around, found a few on eBay and settled on this one, the Titanium Optics 0.42x High-Definition Super Wide Angle Fisheye lens. Ordered it, 5 days later it was here and here it is!


It came in a pretty big box stuffed with newspapers, which was nice, kept it safe. Inside the box the lens came in a nice little faux-leather pouch and there were instructions but me being a dude didn’t take any notice. So after 5 minutes of looking at it from different angles and unscrewing things then putting them back together and still not being able to get it onto the camera I looked at the instructions. They didn’t help. But after a bit more fiddling I got it! The lens comes in two parts joined together, which have to be joined to use the wide angle lens, but then you can take off the wide angle part and it becomes a macro lens!!! Two lenses for the price of one and that one only cost $120.00AUD.Sot the wide-angle lens joins with the macro lens, which joins the 52mm adapter, which joins your existing lens. Simple! As you can see from the pictures, it works really well!

This Is on a tripod, without the wide-angle, about a foot away from my double bass

Exact same everything, but now it has the wide-angle screwed on

Of course, you might not want that whole tunnel vision thing where the image becomes a circle, but that's one of the things that I like most about this converter. The more you zoom out, the more the image becomes distorted. If you don't want to distort the image, you just want to be able to fit more in, then zoom in all the way. Or you can go half n half where the lens in zoomed in enough to get rid of the tunnel vision, but out a bit to get some distortion.


And an example of the macro lens. This one is a strange one, although I haven't used a macro lens before, you have to be REALLY close to get it to work. This could just be that I haven't figured out the trick to it yet, but I'm not a big macro buff and don't plan to be, so I'm OK getting really close sometimes. Here's a flower.

Photography

Photos!!! I have taken up photography in a big way and I have been thinking about making this a designated photography blog. I think it might be a good idea because it can be a blog about photography from a beginner’s point of view. I always do a LOT of research and could share my knowledge as I learn. In the meanwhile, you can have a look at some of the pictures I have done already at www.jimmya.deviantart.com

The Internet... PART 2

Ok so last time we were at the stage that it was going to take like 2 weeks to get the internet set up and we were going with Internode. They were charging us $215 to send us a modem/router which was going to be here in the next 4-5 days. Well you know what ended up happening?

Internode did as they promised and had our internet connected at the last possible moment of the 10 working days. Now interestingly enough there was no router at this point. and considering it had been 2 weeks and not the 4ish days they had promised, Nikki decided to give them a call to see what was going on.

She had several long and ridiculous calls Nikki managed to asertain that Internode had been out of stock the day that we had ordered and they guy that processed the order hadn't bothered to tell us. So 2 weeks on nobody hadn't bothered to call to let us know and they weren't going to be in stock for another week and a half. WTF? How hard is it to call the person who has paid you $200 for a modem to tell them it's going to be late.

If they had called we wouldn't have minded so much. But as it stood they were going to take as long as it would have taken us originally to get naked adsl which would have been cheaper and better for us. We just couldn't wait any longer. So after a bit of arguing Nikki canceled the order and we trekked to JB HiFi and found a good modem/router with a nice discount and a whole bunch of extras for a lot cheaper. It also has a lifetime guarentee which is nice.

To top this all off Nikki is taking Three mobile broadband to the Telecommunications ombudsman because of their bullshit practices. I am too mad to even write about that now. Three are such morons, they really shouldn't be in business. Ugh.

The internet... PART 1

(In Benders voice) Behold! The Internet!

So for a while now we have been living in our townhouse, and making do with 3 mobile Broadband and going to the parent's house to use the net. Now that we're fancy business entrepreneurs we can finally afford fast awesome internet of our own. Now I am by no means an expert in this field so I was reliant on what my own research and the "helpful" people working for the net companies could tell me.

We were looking at Optus, Internode, AAPT, iiNet, and TPG. Lots of funny names, a few funny commercials, no funny call centre operators. Broadband isn’t the fastest any more, now there is ADSL or ADSL2 or ADSL2+ and after that there is naked ADSL2+ or extreme ADSL2+ or naked extreme ADSL2+. Seriously. And for Naked things you don’t need to have a phone line which is great for us because we don’t use our home phone but then we find out we need to call up Telstra and have them turn on our phone line for us to continue not using it but it’s just a one-off payment of $59, not a monthly fee, oh but it will be 3-8 weeks once they flick the switch for us to be on the internet. But if we want it done in 3-7 days then we need to pay line rental and incur a monthly fee of $27.95. And did I mention peak and off-peak times? Oh yes, you can get on a 20GB plan but that’s split between 10GB during peak hours (12pm-2am) and 10GB off-peak (2am to 12pm) but in the off-peak they only charge you for half your usage, but doesn’t that make the plan a 30GB plan? And don’t forget to ask if they charge you for uploads as well as downloads!

I think that they do this on purpose to make people’s head explode and once they tape it all back together they end up just throwing their money at the big ol’ interweb companies and saying “here, please take my money and just give me something that will enable my computer to check my mail!” which is almost what we ended up doing. Now we are on a $59.95 a month Extreme ADSL2+ plan with 25GB of usage as well as paying a $59.00 one-off payment to Telstra for them to start charging us $27.95 a month in line rental as well as a one-off $129 fee to Internode to start charging us the $59.95 a month and also a one off payment of $199 for the modem and some other one-off fee for them to ship it up here, but hey, we will be online within 10 days and somehow, this ended up being the cheapest, easiest option for us.

Oh and guess what, now after talking to Nikki (who was on the phone signing up for the bloody thing as I was writing this) the guys at Internode (even though they checked out address twice and told us we were eligible) have informed us that we don’t have the correct exchange in our area for extreme adsl2+ and now we have to put up with stuffy old adsl. ARGH. Also even though we were told that could pay via invoice rather than direct debit because we had to buy a wireless router we now have to pay by credit card. Oh but don’t worry because we’re able to call up again and wait on hold for 39084019384 minutes to talk to the accounting team and change it later.

For the love of god people where does it end?