Our internet’s down right now so I’m typing this from my Blackberry and will use the internet at our church to upload the pictures to. This coming week, I’m going to be shooting with a guy that I met off one of the main photography forums that I hang out in alot and learning from one of the best in the bussiness at shooting in M and RAW mode and shooting car shows. The guys work is amazing to say the least. It’ll either be Tuesday or Wed that I’ll be shooting with him and I’ll have those photo’s up when I’m done.

So now I’m just waiting for everyone to wake up and get ready to go, I have plenty of memory cards and batteries for today so I’m good.

1. I’m happy because I’m going to be going CRAZY taking pictures like never before. I’ve ordered more CF cards for my EOS D40 then a human should be allowed to have but for the deal, I couldn’t pass it up.
2. With my health issues, it’s allowed me to spend more time with my wife and kids instead of doing all the other extra things I was doing when I was not at work. So this will bring us closer, at least that’s the plan.
3. My wife’s going to join the choir at church because she loves to sing. That will be a good thing for her to release some stress.

So with the above, that should be enough to keep us going for awhile. I plan on spending a LOT of times in the woods this fall and winter taking pictures instead of shooting deer. This should continue the bond that my daughter and I formed when she went hunting with me, only this time we’ll be shooting deer with a camera instead of a arrow or bullet.

Our son is really getting into skateboarding more then anything else I’ve seen him get into before, after 3 days at school in 7th grade, he’s happy because his popularity has gone up alot since he really starting taking skateboarding seriously. I’ll be taking a few pictures of him and posting them once I get the right setting to really bring out the life and glow around him when he’s doing his tricks.

I’m still not sure where I’m going with my career so I continue to take each day as it comes. As long as our bills are paid and we have a roof over our head and food on our plates, then I consider that a good thing. As my kids get older, I realize that it’s time for them to shine and for me to step away from the things that I’ve done for so many years. It’s easier with my back being a total wreck now because it wasn’t so easy for me to walk away before. But now that I’m getting more obsessed with photography and it’s something that I can involve my family in, it’s just easier.

So now that I have a gallery setup on here for the pictures of my kids and their friends, I’ll start shooting away and you can be damn sure that I’ll have plenty of pictures up. Not all of them will be great or even good since I don’t plan on doing any post processing, (IE: Cleaning up the images) but at least it’ll give me something to look at and get C&C from the professionals with.

I’ve been researching what it takes and how to go about doing everything for the last 2 years or so as well as slowly purchasing all the software that I need to process the photo’s before putting them out in the public’s eye and also on my new portfolio site. So far I’ve had great feedback about most of my pictures but as I’ve been told by many professionals, with every picture they take and every job they take, they learn something new so this isn’t something that I expect to be the goto guy in. Since I’m not taking any college courses on this, everything’s going to be self taught but then again that’s how I learned everything that I know in IT.

This is something that my wife and kids can help me with when I do small jobs and what’s making my wife happy is the fact that I’m going to start cleaning the Den out and turn that into a small studio for doing family portraits as well as anything else I can think of. 99% of the materials that I need can and will be bought off ebay such as the umbrella lights, backdrops, extra flashes, etc.

In about another month or so, I’m going to start making up some flyers and business cards to drop off at some of the stores around the area as well as my church. I’m sure I’m not going to become a millionare off of doing this but it’s a hobby that’s not going to do any damage to my back and it’s something the entire family can be involved in and that makes me happy.

So this year, I plan on being out in the woods during hunting season taking pictures of the wildlife instead of shooting them for food. Yea I know that’s a surprise to a lot of people that know me but I’ll be 40 in 6 months and my body just doesn’t do the things that it used to anymore but that’s due to not listening to the Dr’s when I was younger up until about 2 months ago.

So as I start building the portfolio, I’ll link to some of the pictures and see what people think.

So far when I’m at home, I turn on the WiFi and surf the net using that and am very happy with the speed since it uses my cable modem. I was able to install everything that I need OTA in record speed. And since it’s running the 4.5 OS also, It doesn’t take much to get adjusted to it. I’m waiting for a couple things that some friends are sending for it to help protect it for me from drops.

So in the meantime, I think I’ll just continue to use this until the Bold is released. At least now I know I’ll never be without my BB when I go into buildings where camera phones aren’t allowed, god only knows that I’ve missed plenty of calls and emails because of that issue.

I was up all night also just watching TV and updating the OS in a spare Blackberry 8820 that I have laying around in case my 8810 decides that it doesn’t want to work anymore. While I was waiting for the updating as watching TV, I was thinking about the IRAQ war going on and how it’s affected my household. To be honest, the only things that have been affected is the cost of EVERYTHING that we buy. Gas prices are higher then I could’ve ever imagined, food prices are a joke also because the drivers need to raise their prices to get the food to the markets.

So how does that make me feel? PISSED OFF!!!! Robbery’s have gone up as well because people are losing jobs left and right and they need to feed their families. I can’t say I can condone what they are doing but i can also see in a sense where they are coming from if that’s why they are doing it. If it’s for drugs then I say we castrate them so they can’t breed anymore. I know I’d do anything to take care of my family and make sure they have a roof over their head and food on their plates, god only knows I’ve been doing that now since my kids were born. I always make sure they eat first and then I’ll eat what’s left over if I’m feeling up to it.

So what does the future hold for us? Each day that I wake up, (that is if I was able to sleep the night before), I always go in and give my kids a kiss on the cheek or forehead, whisper I love them, do the same to my wife and get on with my day. Today is going to be a great day outside as I look at the weather bar at the top of firefox, it shows that it’ll be 81 and sunny all day. So I’m thinking maybe we’ll take our dog to the dog park in Lake Orion and let her play with the other dogs, I’m sure my wife will go walking in the fields behind it and I’m sure if we go out then I’ll be taking a LOT of pictures. I sometimes wonder if I should have taken photography classes and gone into that field, it seems more stable to me then IT is and I love doing it just as much as I like doing IT work, hell actually more. It’s just so relaxing and there’s always a special moment that you can catch or a certain view of something that you just can’t forget.

I know that I could try to change fields but to be honest, being color blind kinda hurts that option, at least in my eyes. I try to read as much as I can but I was always told that it doesn’t matter how much you read, it’s doing it that actually teaches you and then there’s that gift of being able to capture that special shot that nobody else saw or was able to catch on camera.

So that’s my thoughts for the start of the weekend, it’s time to get a icebag on my back, refill my coffee cup,
go look at the kids and wife sleeping and make sure things are ready for my daughters camp trip next week.

I love the work that I do but doing EVERYTHING in IT is getting be burned out and fast.  I need set vacation days where I know that I have x amount of days that I can take and not need to worry about only being able to go so far away from home in case someone can’t print, they need a file restored, someone’s Blackberry isn’t working right, a piece of spam came through the filters, etc.

Oh well, my wife wants me to stay because of the $ that I make but I think it’s time to make her understand that if I continue like this, she’ll be feeding me though a straw not so far in the future.

So yesterday Guess and I spent about an hour on IM talking about what we could do to compliment each other and since this was his idea, I let him run with everything. The next thing I knew, he had setup a dedicated forum for outages. It’s been very well received by the community so far and it just gives Dataoutages.com more credibility.

So now I’m just going to sit back and take this all in for a few days before I start moving forward with starting up a couple more lists. Even though we primarily report on Blackberry outages from carriers or from RIM themselves, we don’t want to limit ourselves to just that. There’s plenty of potential and now it’s up to me to figure out what that is. If you have any idea’s, feel free to reply with them.

Over the years I’ve become convinced that the more a person learns, the more people forget. With my health issues, I’ve forgotten things that I used to know and be able to do blindfolded but my dr’s have said that’s normal for some of the health issues that I have.

So I’m thinking that I’ll be posting more often and now with summer coming up, I’ll be doing a lot more with the family and with that comes pictures.

The first one is my wife’s video.

Then we have our daughter’s video