All posts by Leonardo Torio

Technology

New Toy

I’ve had a DSLR for over a year now. I had been wanting one ever since I bought the Canon SD700IS. The compact flash was good and I got a lot of use out of it, but I wanted to take better pictures.

When Best Buy put the Canon Rebel T3i on sale, I had to get it. Not only did I get the body, but I also got the kit lens, an EF-S 18-55mm IS II. The bundle also included the EF-S 55-200mm IS II, a second camera battery and the Canon 100SX camera bag. I ended up also purchasing a SanDisk 64GB Extreme SD card. A little while later, I picked up the Canon Speedlite 430EX II, which was also on sale.

The great thing about the Canon T3i is it’s wireless triggering capabilities. I’m able to take the off-camera flash, place it far off-camera and still trigger it.

When it came to remote triggering the camera, I settled for the RC-6 IR remote. It worked most of the time, but fails in bright sunlight. Thus, my search for an RF trigger began.

Well, my search ended with the Yongnuo RF-603C II wireless flash trigger. I got it in the mail today and I’ve spent a couple of minutes playing around with it. What I like about this trigger is that it’s both an off-camera flash trigger and a remote camera trigger depending on how you connect the transceivers. For $40, it’s a wicked deal.

Next in my sights: a backdrop and stand followed by a lighting kit!

Dream

Doggie Dream

I have a love/hate relationship with Mr. Gator.

I’d love to take him for a walk, but he hates me.

“Who’s Mr. Gator?” you ask? He is my MIL’s dog, Pepper’s brother and is commonly called Ben (short for Benji or Benjamin, I think).

Then you ask, “Wait, who’s this Pepper you now speak of?”

He’s my fiance’s dog, also known as Pisser. We proudly call him our “son”.

I don’t remember my dreams, so it’s odd when I do.

I had one of those odd dreams last night. It involved Mr. Gator, Pisser and doggie treats.

It started with me booming the instruction to sit to Mr. Gator.

When he finally say down, I tossed him a treat and, like most normal dogs, he caught it in the air.

That’s when Pepper, my fiancee’s dog, came trotting around.

It wasn’t fair that I gave Mr. Gator a treat so I calmly commanded Pepper to sit.

He did so I tossed him a treat.

Unfortunately, Pepper doesn’t play fetch so instead of catching the treat in the air, it hit him in the face and landed on the floor.

Plus, instead of looking for the treat, he just sat there looking at me, giving me the “Where’s my treat?” face.

I had to point to the treat on the floor before he finally caught on and got his snack.

Uncategorized

The Return of Leo’s Place

In what seems like forever, I’ve finally gotten my blog back up and running. “Where’s all the old content?” you ask. Gone. The reason my original blog disappeared was due to a mixture of hardware failure, user error and lack of a good backup. Which is sad because I had a couple of well written posts of which I was proud. Oh well, time to move on to better things.

Now that I’m up and running again, I’ve made sure I have an automated backup to my NAS. I’d like to put copies on my 1TB Google Drive, but I’ve been using up a lot of bandwidth with my photos and iTunes backups. Still, an addition 400MB of bandwidth isn’t bad so I’ll have to setup a task to remind me to get that done.

A couple other things on my plate include:

  • finish reading The Bridge (an Obama biography)
  • edit Faith’s first birthday video (she’s almost four now, I’m definitely running behind)
  • edit the Fourth Threads book release video (they already have a high resolution MP4, but I’d like to get them a DVD for archival purposes)
  • get photos of Elim Chapel in the morning for our wedding website
  • get photos of the Fort Garry at night for our wedding website
  • finish writing the plot synopsis for my book
  • document and upgrade ownCloud to the latest version
  • document and upgrade Tiny Tiny RSS to the latest version
  • write up a SPEC so I can build a Tiny Tiny RSS RPM to submit to the EPEL and possibly be the maintainer
  • start the iOS and Windows Phone apps for GPS logging (clones of GPS Logger on Android)

I really should give myself some deadlines for these tasks to I can motivate myself to finish. Perhaps I’ll do that on Monday (yes, I’m a procrastinator).