After some awesome gravy, Velvet Underground records a new pair of pants we’re ready to roll.  It’s noon already so lets hope we don’t miss the big show.

14:57 – And it’s over. Pics will come when I’m back in Seattle.

14:55 – Ladies get your panties in a bunch it’s Tony Buffet time.

14:54 – Wonderful speach John.

14:48 – Lots of ambulance and police around.

14:45 – Time for somewhat serious John Stewart.

14:39 – John Oliver comes to the rescue.

14:31 – R2D2 too.

14:29 – Kareem is on my team.

14:25 – Colbert is naked at participating Burger Kings???

14:23 – Threatdown time.

14:20 – Colbert is soooo sexy.

14:14 – Sheryl is on.

14:11 – The Kid is here.

14:06 – WWE is showing its support.

14:02 – Sweetest sweater ever.

14:00 – John should marry America.

13:54 – Getting close to the jumbotron.

13:45 – It’s award time.

13:40 – Wyatt is being serious, Jones trying to be the same.

13:33 – Join in the “Love train”.

13:29 – Ozzy’s rocking the “Crazy train”.

13:24 – Still very crowded.

13:15 – The cop horses are here.

13:11 – Finally hear Colbert.

13:08 – Too crowded and noisy, can’t hear/see what’s happening.

12:50 – At the rally, anthem is finished.

So I’m finally in Baltimore.  Spent a lot of time on Sea-tac tarmac due to mechanical problems. Stupid Airbus 320.  Now I’m on the train station waiting for the train to arrive.  Board says it’s one hour late. I’m not happy about this.  I’m starving and this place is deserted, apart from a bunch of college students crazy enough to pull the same move like me.  Ill leave you with what I’ve been staring at for the last 15 minutes.  Tomorrow watch out for a continually updating live blog from the rally.

After many months of no updates, here is a big one.  Rally to restore sanity is on tomorrow and I’m headed to D.C.  Managed to get a place to stay at a friend’s house and recently have been upgraded from sleeping on the floor to sleeping on a couch.  I got my sleeping bag so it really doesn’t matter, this time of the year is warm so a park bench would do.  I got a ticket to D.C. for $230, which was a steal, when I compare it to the tickets my work had to pay for last time I went to D.C.

I’m getting ready to head out, since my plane is leaving at 12pm and it should drop me off in Baltimore around 10pm local time.  I’m bringing my camera and will post the pics once I’m done with them.  In the mean time I will post here and possibly upload some phone photos of the rally.

This year I decided to treat myself big time for Christmas.  I decided that after 4-5 years of using a Nikon D70s it was a time for upgrade.  After a lot of tought and deliberation I decided to go ahead and get myself a brand new Nikon D300s.

As good as D70s served me I did have a few issues with it.  Most notable was a tiny viewfinder and relatively in-flexible AF system.  In addition the high ISO noise was not something everyone would be comfortable with, but I learned how to shoot dance at 800 ISO, which produced decent photos.  For the most part the noise at high ISO was not as much of a problem as the loss of contrast was.  As soon as I bump the D70s to 800 ISO or past it, the photo contrast, vibrance and general color reproduction go to hell.   When this is coupled with a plethora of dance photos I take it really bums me out when I loose a lot of color dynamics from the stage lights.  This was good enough for me to force an upgrade.

More…

Since I got a whole week off between Christmas and New Years I did a lot of work on my home network.  I upgraded all of my machines to the latest possible versions.  I even moved my router/firewall from Gentoo to Debian Lenny system.  This was a big job since it was not a simple upgrade.  I also moved it from a hard disk based system to a CF card one.  This seems to work great.  Basically CF card gets mounted as read-only and everything that’s needed during system run is written to a temporary filesystem in RAM.  This goes around the problem where CF cards die if a number of writes exceeds around 100,000, or so depending on a card.  The instructions I used are available here, they are a pretty good start, but I needed to tweak them a bit to get everything I need for this machine to work, mainly DNS/DHCP server and webmin.