Contest Pictures

Hope I Can Get 2 Good Shots From The Next Camera

Picked up the finished photos for entry #1 in the Drive By Photo Contest. Yikes! They are uniformly bad. The ones mounted on the cockpit brace showed too much car and not enough scenery. The shots of something in the rear view mirror are a possibility, but I’m going to have to defeat the flash as it washes out all the color out of the mirror because it is so close. The pictures with the car hood in it and scenery in front, didn’t work as the flash illuminated the BLUE hood and left the scenery dark. I’m not sure if there is any metering going on in the camera, as some photos look like there is and others don’t. There were a couple that came out OK, but hardly worth blowing up to 8 x 12.

As long as you buy two cameras you are entitled to 2 entries and it doesn’t matter which camera the entries come from. Hopefully we will get 2 good pictures from the next camera.

I may scan a couple tomorrow and see if I can tweak them in PaintShopPro. They won’t be eligible for the contest, but I’ll get a picture to post on my photography blog…

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TAG! You’re It South Carolina

I made up a little web page of the newspaper article from the Sunday paper about license plates that featured yours truly, seeing as the newspaper didn’t. OCR’d the words and scanned in the pictures, so here I am in all my media glory: Specialty License Plates Say It All

Dropped of the disposable camera tonight. Pictures will be ready tomorrow. We are going to wait to buy entry #2 in the Drive By Photo Contest until we have seen #1.

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I Hate Tuesdays

Spent the morning driving around town snapping pictures recognizable (at least I hope recognizable) as being in Aiken county with just a bit of car showing. They were done using a disposable camera with a built in flash, so I have little idea exactly how they will turn out. They are for the First Annual Aiken Drive By Photo Contest. You can enter more than once, so I think I will grab another entry packet when I turn in the first tomorrow.

It was weird being off work today because we treated yesterday just like a regular Sunday – had lunch with our regular group, watched an X-Files episode and I even trimmed around my beard. So my dysfunctional mind is frantically trying to categorize what today was. Oh well, soon it will be morning and I’ll be able to classify tomorrow as a Monday.

Smooth Move Mr. Cyclist Guy

As mentioned the other day, I did in fact make the Sunday paper. I had actually forgotten all about it until I picked up the paper off my lawn this morning.

A picture of the cute kid who went to Camp Sertoma that is partially funded by the sale of the license plate he posed next to was at the top and the first one written about in the article. I snagged about 5 minutes of my allotted 15, by having my picture and words taking up the second half of the article. I wish I could link you to the article, but our little paper hasn’t posted the article yet (and when they do, they don’t do pictures.)

My plate is from the Palmetto Cycling Coalition which is a statewide organization to help promote cycling awareness, both to the general public and state government. Across the top is emblazoned “SHARE THE ROAD.” In the article I am quoted as saying that I hoped that this would make people aware that cyclists are people and not just something in their way.

Cut to several hours later…On our usual Sunday morning ride with some other ABC members we are coming back into town on the last leg of our journey. I was in the front of the group of five riding along close to the white line when a pickup truck blows by fairly close. As I look up to glare at the driver, I see him gesture with his hand towards the right, as if to say get off the road. Obviously he hasn’t read his morning paper yet. Usually, I just give a friendly wave as if I misinterpreted their intention, but for whatever reason today it struck me wrong, so I gave him the finger. He is about 30 yards up the road by now and returns my one-fingered salute in kind. And his brake lights come on, but just for a second. Perhaps his wife in the passenger seat was screaming at him like mine, who was riding right behind me, was screaming at me. Now I’m hoping he didn’t read the paper because maybe he would see my smiling face (and name) and put it together that was me on the bike.

Because yesterday was so busy, when I got home last night I barely had the energy to post, let alone read my usual blogs, so imagine my surprise when I read this blurb in Will’s blog and thought how close I had come having something like that happen to me.

Splat

Nice turn out for the Bug Splat. We had 6 Miatas do the route, plus one Chevy S-10 and a Camry. There were three Miatas that didn’t participate. The OTM belonged to a couple of members whose cars are not running right now. Big engine problems for both, both basically self-inflicted. One non-participant was us, the judges, another just literally got back in town from a two week vacation and another that just popped in to say hi. The cleanest car was an easy call, as was the closest to the dot, but biggest and most was a little more difficult. Two cars were pretty covered and the same two also had a couple of large mayflies plastered on their fronts. The big bug winner and recipient of the big trophy was chosen because of the intangibles, his was still twitching on arrival at the finish and trailing behind it was a long streak of bug blood. So the other woman was awarded the most bugs prize.

Oh yeah, I changed the oil and rotated the tires this morning at 120,200 miles. I had the filter so all it cost was the oil.

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Chasing Papi

I read the video reviews every Friday so I can get some ideas for movies to put in my Netflix queue. The Augusta Chronicle publishes about a half dozen condensed versions of the Roger Ebert review. (I don’t always agree with Roger, but I always find him entertaining.) Here is the review for the movie Chasing Papi:

A feature-length jiggle show designed to display Roselyn Sanchez, Sofia Vergara and Jaci Velasquez in a way that would make your average Maxim reader feel right at home. They play the girlfriends of the three-timing Papi (Eduardo Verastegui), and when they arrive simultaneously at his home the plot requires them to run through a lot of scenes wearing high heels and squealing with passion or fear or delight, while a stupendous amount of jiggling goes on.

The primordial man in me is intrigued by this and is trying to figure out how to “accidentally” get Netflix to deliver this movie.

Here is his full review.