Category: my Pics/Photos

  • flickr’d photo: from an airplane window



    DSCN3508, originally uploaded by insidious_plots.

    an old one, taken on a little piece of junk camera, but, it would have been nearly impossible to screw up these shots…
    this is one of many shots i took of a sunrise on a flight from albuquerque to l.a. – if you click on the pic it will take you to where you can see more of them… this shot is one of my favorites – i love the surreal feeling…

    meh, i just typed a bunch of stuff, deleted and started over and then again a couple times, so, i think i’ll stop trying and just let the photo do the talking 😛

    though i will add that, when i first took these photos, i dunno’ maybe three years ago, this was probably the most popular of all of them and no less than five people had this one as the wallpaper on their computer…

  • flickr’d photo: dad dying at home



    DSCI5464_1.jpg, originally uploaded by insidious_plots.

    since i brought up dad in the last pic, i wanted to show another that means a lot to me…

    that is cheryl, a nurse with hospice… hospice nurses are amazing people – dad didn’t like anyone much but he liked cheryl… she did so much to help him and take care of him in his last days… she and the other nurses (but especially her) did so much to help us…

    this pic was taken as discreetly as i could, trying to keep the camera semi-concealed, or at least not calling attention to it so i could get a genuine moment… i am shocked it came out as good as it did, but, focus, etc. is far from perfect… but, the moment is captured and that’s all that matters to me…

    i love the accidental composition of mom looking so concerned yet distant – evocative to me of helplessness or powerlessness – we often felt that way… just watching his life drain away and not in a hospital, surrounded by disconcerting devices and ominous terminology where you expect sickness, but here at home where he hangs all his hats, in his living room, in his favorite chair, the place he probably felt safest for many years… while home i’m sure is a more pleasant place to die, my point is one doesn’t associate home with death… i’m not coming up with the words to fully express what i mean, but if i could always SAY what i felt about what i see or experience, i doubt i would have the desire to do photography…

    so, just look at the picture again with all i said in mind…
    as i said, it’s one that means a lot to me…

  • flickr’d photo: dad’s last cigarette



    IMG_0306.JPG, originally uploaded by insidious_plots.

    this continues to be one that is very meaningful to me… the description on flickr is: “this is where i used to sit with my dad and smoke before he died… i haven’t had the heart to take his last cigarette butt out of his snuffer…”

  • flickr’d photo: old hands

    old hands

    old hands, originally uploaded by insidious_plots.

    ok, let’s see how this works…

    i love this pic and all but it needs some tweaking…
    we were in cloudcroft and got in the car and, in front of us was this old guy leaning against a post with his hands behind the post, as you can see… i scrambled for my cam and only got a couple shots before he moved and this one is the most acceptable…
    i really wish i’d had time to get better, but at least i got something…
    btw, i DID do some gimp work on this, but i seem to have lost that version 🙁

  • new pics

    those of you i stay i contact with know the new developments in my life lately, the rest of you can get in touch with me if you want to know…

    anyway, since it has been since may that i uploaded any pics, i quickly went through the last 5 or 6 months of photos and quickly grabbed some of my favorites… they are uploading as i write this… most are final, edited pics (see, i make prints these days and don’t upload as much) and some are just unfinished product… but, go have a look, i really love some of them in there and there are a few i am very proud of…
    and, btw, billy, christine, catherine, jennifer, and dana, there are pics of you in there…

    btw, i must once again apologize to those who get the email notification of changes to my site… that bug has once again started up that causes my blog to revert back to the default style and, every time that happens, it sends out an email… and then, it is sometimes days until i notice and fix it…

    anyway, i hope to hear from any and all of you, this is a lonely place…
    right now, email is best…

    as always, top right of the page under “my stuff” is the link to flickr, where the new pics are, and all my contact info is right above that…

  • photo page updated

    i had created that photo page a few months ago as a gateway to all my online photo collections and i have now updated it, with a bit more explanation and notes, as well as adding links to the collections i have on flickr…
    if you have never taken a look through my photos, this is a chance to have it be easier to get an overview of than ever…

    the link is always over there on the right in the sidebar, near the top, under “My Stuff” (it says “photos”), but, here is a direct link…

    and, in case you hadn’t noticed, my webcam is back online, now new and somewhat improved…

  • a couple site-related notes

    i know, i know, it seems impossible, but, i actually did a thing or two to the site…
    i noticed that i have had a blog for nearly four years now, in one form or another (and a non-blog site or two for a couple years before that, btw), and it got me thinking about it…

    so, for one, i finally fixed the chat box… after a year or so of my old flooble chatterbox thingy being expired (it was an externally hosted script), i finally installed my own – namely, SmileTAG, an ajax shoutbox gadget… i have gotten some good use out of it for the last year or so over on our local disc golf site, so, i finally added it here…
    since the old chatterbox expired, i lost every message ever left in it 🙁 so, you can try to make me feel a little better by leaving a note and letting me know you stopped by!

    i also added my good friend chris dunn to my “twinners” links – which is the last category in the my links list – and i did a long overdue update to my “Apps I Can’t Live Without” list – which is the first category in my links list…

    also, i have been putting my flickr photostream to much more use and i may continue to do so… if you haven’t been to it lately, you will see i have added a lot of pics and made a few changes…

    i really do want to get caught up on all my photo albums, but, i may just go ahead and start posting current pics and not worry about posting past pics just yet… i don’t know… i spend so little time doing stuff like making albums and updating websites and such anymore… however, i did create a nice-ish page as a starting point for all the photos a while back… it even tells you if the pics are in an album or it is just a directory of files…

    anyway – are there any more updates coming?

    i have no idea… if there are, i will post about them…

    i would, for instance, like to get the webcam/screencast going again…

    we’ll see what happens…

  • march pics/vids (with a twist) and stories

    soooo, where do i start?

    how about with the link…

    March 2006 Pics and Vids

    it’s an interesting month for it this time around…
    firstly, again i have a separate folder for the dozen or so autostitch pics i made and a folder with half a dozen or so webcam grabs, then a couple hundred pics/vids besides…

    firstly, i want to mention that some of the pics are another great example of the church coming out (on very short notice) to help a member in need… cheryl had a pipe burst in her house and we all got calls asking us to help evacuate her stuff out… there are quite a few pics from that…
    elder Dick Gentry and Senior Pastor Robert Hall

    then, there is pics from the resets… they sent a guy out to supervise them this time… Tyler Trbovich… aka “Turbo”…
    i am going to try to keep this story short…
    when i first met him, the first thing i said was that i knew him from somewhere, but, could not figure out where… it must have been something having to do with work… then, as a couple days went by and we talked a bit, come to find out he lived in the dallas area for quite awhile, just like me… (he has even played the disc golf course at veteran’s park in arlington, lucky guy!) well, to keep it short, we were doing a set in farmington, having dinner at the ihop and i mentioned in passing having worked at six flags over texas… he said he had, too… i start feeling an “AHA!” coming on… so, i asked when… he gave the times, during which i worked there, too – and we’re talking like 12 years ago… he said he was security, i said i was a caricaturist, he said he hung out at the caricature booths and started naming names of the artists, as did i… and then, suddenly it came back in a flood, i could remember him leaning against the post watching us draw and everything…
    i am almost certain i have even seen drawings that had him in them and i need to get around to going through my stack… if i get to it and find any, i will scan them and post a follow up to this… and, i even swear i remember a photo with him in it… i think it had both him and melissa (the “caricature groupie”) in it.. i can see it so clearly in my mind…

    it is a small, small world indeed…
    so, anyway, there are pics of him in this set as well…

    moving right along – march had A LOT of disc golf played, and i ended up with 64 pics and vids just from that, so, i put them all in their own folder… but, i also had another reason to put them in their own folder…
    i have been loving JAlbum for months and the BluPlusPlus skin, but, there was still a feature of it i had not tried yet, and that is audio commentary, which they call voice annotation… so, chris and i sat down and did commentary for all 27 videos and a few pics…
    me and chris making the disc golf folder audio commentary
    it was a lot of fun and very cool, BUT, i have to make it very clear that it was an experiment…
    and it did not turn out exactly perfect…
    for one, there is A LOT of skipping… see, we used the windows voice recorder (meh, i was in a hurry and just wanted to try it all out) and it limits recordings to 60 seconds unless you click the timeline bar thingy… but, what we did not realize when we were recording was that when you click it, it makes the recording stutter… some of the recordings came out really stuttery, but, we decided to use them anyway… also, sometimes we were asleep at the switch and it ran out while we were still talking, so, you will get a couple that just cut off in the middle of a sentence…
    on the technical/implementation side, there are also some issues… a major one is that the sound file plays before the video starts playing… very bad… my advice for getting the best experience is to pause the sound file and wait for the vid to load… on that note, the vid does not loop… so, again, the best experience is to probably just keep hitting play on the vid to keep it looping… i originally created this album with the vids converted to avi format and they not only looped, but they played full screen on my secondary monitor… however, they also randomly crashed both firefox and i.e., so, i re-created the album with the original quicktime format vids…

    before i go any further let me say it nice and loud:
    IF YOU ARE ON DIAL-UP YOU SHOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY AVOID THE DISC GOLF FOLDER!!!!!
    the vids are already pretty big and the sound files are pretty big, too, and they both stream, so, if you aren’t on a high-speed connection, you will probably get exasperated pretty quickly…
    (btw, things being how they are in this album, i have also disabled the slideshow mode…)

    ok, a couple more technical notes about it… we originally had sound issues… the file was rolling, but, there was no sound… this happened to me on firefox and those who use internet explorer (*spits*)… however, all i had to do was change my speaker settings from 5.1 to stereo and it works just fine… but, everyone can do me a favor… if you go and view this album and have no sound, please leave a comment here on the post and let me know what browser you use and any other info that might be useful… i may or may not do this audio commentary thing again in the future and would like to know what i am up against… as it is, it came out really rough… not to mention that, as far as content goes, you’ve got two guys on a couch making jokes to each other that probably no one else will get and the albums may or may not even be worth checking out for every one else just to listen to these two bozos amusing themselves…

    hey, it was all just something to try out… we had fun 😛
    if you want to view some “real” disc golf videos, try this google search…

    and, before i leave the subject, there are plenty more disc golf pics and vids already taken (some with chris’s cam, which has much better video and has sound!) and many more to come, i’m sure… between me, gabe, chris, scott (and nathan!) and the rest, we’ve been getting in two or three after-work games during the week at vista hills and then big games saturdays at ladera (i was there EIGHT hours yesterday! and two shifts of opponents!) and more and more people keep agreeing to meet up with us, so, this whole thing is snowballing and i cannot let all this happen with my camera sitting at home 🙂

    alright, anyway, that is about it, i think… badly written post, but, the album has actually been there for a couple of days and i needed to get this post out of the way before the week started, so, that was the quick version 😛
    i had mentioned wanting to have a continually updated photo album, rather than having a new one every month and i still have not decided if i wantr to do that or not yet, but, i am considering uploading pics to my flickr photostream throughout the month, so, if you haven’t yet, and you are interested, you might go subscribe to the rss feed for it… if you have no idea what “subscribe to an rss feed” means, shame on you 😛
    the link to my photostream is up at the top of my sidebar under “my stuff”…

  • feb pics posted and more new stuff

    ok, firstly, the pics from february are up…
    i did sort of a rush job, so, some should have been touched up, and i chose the wrong skin color scheme, so, it isn’t pretty, but, meh, at least they’re finally online…
    anyway, no autostitch pics from feb (march has a few to look forward to, though), but, there are a few webcam shots… also, this set finally has some pics of “Truman“, my new computer, so, everyone can see what i’ve been describing…
    enjoy…

    ok, next, since i get a lot of comments/questions about it, i would like to publicly let everyone know that my webcam sucks (hey, it was $15, you get watcha pay for)… it freezes up quite a bit, so, yes, when you view my webcam image, it might not be live… the program that uploads the images does just fine, so, it will have a current timestamp, but, it doesn’t realize the cam has frozen, so, it just keeps uploading the last image the cam provided before it froze…
    the way it usually works is that after a few hours, the cam just freezes… so, while i’m at work, or when i am out for the day, at some point or another, the cam stops giving new images, and i don’t fix it until i get home…
    BUT FOR THAT MATTER, keep in mind that, when i have it off, i have it set to just leave up the last image it took… i like that better than something that says “cam currently offline”… but, you can tell by the timestamp when i’ve done that…
    anyway, maybe i’ll buy a new cam soon… buuuuuuut, the cam software i use is a bit of a resource hog, so, sometimes i shut it down intentionally when i have several progs open at once… if anyone wants to recommend a lightweight cam app that has ftp, feel free to hit that comment link below and lemme’ know…

    and speaking of new progs, i am now playing around with SCWebCam and am lovin’ it…
    it does something a little different… it takes a snapshot of my monitors and uploads them… soooo, when you look at my sidebar over there, you will see a new image below the webcam thumb and that is a live shot of my computer monitors… click on it and i have a full page set up for it like my webcam page, with the chatterbox and everything… plus, the two pages are also now cross-linked to each other…
    since i am running two monitors and am letting the image be at 80% of actual size, it is pretty large… it may be a problem for those on dial-up… but, i have it auto-refreshing once a minute, so, that will hopefully be enough time for it to download completely…
    (oh, and, in case someone might point it out, yes, SCWebCam also provides webcam features, BUT, it doesn’t have a feature or two i love on ConquerCam, like the dynamic caption that i can change in seconds from a button in the system tray (it’s the blue text at the top of the webcam image)…)

    anyway, that’s it for now… oh, except that i was graciously donated a scanner by manuel, so, perhaps i will start uploading scans of photos from the old days…
    we’ll see…

  • January pics are up and A LOT of site-related stuff

    ok then, it’s what, the eighteenth of february?

    ah well…

    couple new things again this month…
    like last month, i have a folder of panoramic pics made with AutoStitch…
    this month, there is a new folder called “WebCam” and it has a very few notable moments caught on my cam… this will continue from here on out, assuming there are things worth posting and i actually hit that little ‘archive’ button on my cam when those moments happen…
    i have also done something that was much-needed and actually made thumbnails for the vids this time around…

    i think that is all there is to tell, right this way to the January 2006 pics…

    oh, btw, i am playing with the settings in JAlbum to figure out how complicated it would be to start posting my pics semi-live… see, it can generate an album and then, you can add more pics to it and it re-generates all the pages and such… then, i could just continually post pics throughout the month, rather than doing one huge batch every month… just not sure if that’s what i want to do or not…
    we’ll see…

    anyway, site news…

    first, briefly, i’ve changed the way the photos directories display and you can now read the full descriptions of all the folders… that’s awesome, take my word for it… sooner or later all the people who have complained in the past will see it and will no longer complain…

    secondly, since no one else is around to do it, i spend a lot of time cleaning up people’s computers, installing new software and such, and, on my usb swiss army knife i carry my “Christopher Pack” (if google and lifehacker can have one, so can i), so, this all inspired me to add a list of links to info about apps i cant live without… you’ll find said list on the sidebar, under Links, the list is called “Apps I Can’t Live Without”… now everyone can be as 1337 as me 😛
    ok, next, no, i never officially announced it in a post, but, yup, i gotta’ cheapy webcam here in my living room earlier this week… it’s on 24 hours a day, except when it’s not, refreshing every 10 seconds, unless i have it set for every 30 seconds 😛 😛 😛
    needless to say, there’s not much in the way of alwayses and nevers with it, but, it’s already been fun…
    it sits atop my monitor (erm, the primary monitor, the one on the coffee table) and shows me and everything behind me… of course, it’s often too dark to see much… some day i may just point it out the window for the cool view… in the webcam folder of this month’s pics, you can see an example of the view i have in mind… for now, i’ve been having too much fun waving to people and putting little “hello!” messages on it… it has a quick access dynamic caption feature, plus i have it set up to show my foreground window as well as what’s playing on winamp… man, from decade-long recluse to webcammer…
    anyway, over on the sidebar, under “My Stuff”, you’ll see a thumbnail image from it and you can click on it to get to the full webcam image view page thingy… also, i have inserted the chatterbox into it so people can leave comments and, boy have they… never had so many chatterbox comments in the three years or so i’ve had one…

    (btw, as of feb14, i have been back on the internet five years, here’s a little post from a couple years ago about it…)

    oh, almost forgot… huge thing here… i upgraded to WordPress 2.0 here a little while back and it has an import wizard… so, i thought and thought and thought and finally decided to do it, i imported ALL my posts from my old website… that caused me to jump to 170 posts, dating back to april ’03… you can see a month-by-month list on the sidebar under “Archives”, which is right under my webcam thumbnail image… i still need to add category tags to all of them and that is a big job… (my “uncategorized” category grew immensely when i did the import…)
    i wasn’t going to import the old posts and just leave the old site as sort of an old abandoned building to be explored by the venturous… i may still undo the import (if i can figure out how) and stick with that plan… BIIIIIIG difference between the christophercornelius.com website/life and the insidiousplots.com website/life and i have never thought it was a good idea to mix the two…

    ok, anyway, one last thing, as you will catch hints of in the pics, i now have a new computer… the old one died a horrible death… i have a bunch of new pics of it in the upcoming february batch, it is integrated into the home theater system, with dvd, optical digital audio, and everything… i’m lovin’ it, it is so much better than my last one… you can check out more info about it than you could ever care about, i have uploaded the main page of my belarc advisor profile of it, it is the big bold link under “My Stuff”, the very first link, it says “Truman”… you see, i named the computer “Truman”… that’s my dad’s middle name and my dad is the one who got me started in computers when i was 10… he also gave me most of the parts to build this computer and much technical support… THANKS, DAD!

    anyway, whew, what a long post, but, i think i’m done…