FARMVILLE

 Well, I’ve been doing Farmville on Facebook since Thanksgiving 2009 and I think I topped out tonight on Level 70. It will be interesting to see what comes next, another level or being stuck on 70.

I have really devoted a lot of time to this game, usually 3-4 hours a day and I sleep with my notebook in arm’s reach so that I can grab my mouse and click on something without having to get up.

Is that addicted or what?

It has been a fun run but I think now is the time when I need to be getting back into my photography. I don’t think I’ve shot much of anything since Christmas and I do miss driving the Crossfire.

I should be posting some new stuff on here, possibly this weekend.

Have a good evening everyone!

My Trees

I finally got all of my trees trimmed today. Kim's brother-in -law Pete came over with a chain saw and a ladder today and did a wonderful job trimming. It took 3 truck loads to haul all of the branchs away but my yard looks wonderful again!Thanks Pete, Tony, and Kimmy!

New Restaurant in Coal City Illinois

La Piazza Restorante and Pizzari opened this week and tonight I had a great meal, a full slab of Barbecue Ribs followed with a nice portion of Tiramisu. The only negative part of the visit was their coffee. It was made with Coal City water and it was terrible. After sending it back I learned that the coffee was not made in the restaurant but was made next door at Julie's Java. I don't drink Coal City water at home and will not drink it anywhere else. It just has a bad taste and it can't be disguised. Good luck Pizzari, I will be back. The food was great, just try to think... BOTTLED WATER!!! Your clientele will thank you for it.

Twitter

Ok, I just signed up for Twitter at http://twitter.com/rodney_brown

Rain Rain Go Away

Two solid days of rain and this is what happens!

 

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This has really been a fun weekend, sit and watch it rain. I’m glad it finally quit, but it was a little more than my backyard fence could handle. Saturated ground and high winds are not a good mix.

Mom’s dog Bell is back at home after a short visit with Polly and Mom seems to be in great spirits now that she’s back!

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I hope everyone has a good week this week.

And I hope that maybe something good will come from Obama screwing around and giving our children’s children’s money away. My 2 cents worth is for letting these giant companies go bankrupt if they can’t handle their business activities in a manner to make money. Maybe they just got so big that they forgot the business of business. If things continue the way things are going our government will own them all anyway and who’s going to win in that situation?

What about all the little companies that are toughing it out and doing everything they can just to keep their heads above water. Who’s helping them? No one, because they are proud enough not to go begging at the White House for  a hand out.

We, the People, fought and worked to make this country a pinnacle for freedom and success, one that the whole world looked to for inspiration. We inspired people of third world countries and left them with the hope that they too could forge a nation such as ours and gave them dreams of a  better world.

People tend to be shy of using words like Socialism but with our government continually buying in to large banks and insurance companies, guess where we’re headed. I didn’t vote for that and I don’t know anyone who did. Large corporations had nothing to do with winning our freedom, and just where in the Constitution does it say that we should lay down our lives for the likes of AIG? As far as that goes, just what has AIG done for me lately? I don’t even know who that is.

We had to fight to win our freedom over 200 years ago and now we’re just giving it away to GM, Chrysler, Citi-Corp, and who ever else that jumps on the bandwagon.

It’s We, the People. Not we , the super corporation.

Playing with Glass

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Hi everyone! I've spent most of the day taking some pictures of glass and uploading them to my site. I'm still experimenting with light and using a macro lense but they looked pretty good, I thought. I was using a Sigma 105/F2.8 macro, and I love it!

No snow to speak of today but it still looks like it could at any time!

Will try to have some more pix tomorrow!

More Snow Pictures

taken 01-18-2009

with Canon G9 and Sony DSLR A900

in Coal City, Illinois

 

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Another Cold Day

I think we’re supposed to get up to 8 degrees today

This is beginning to get a little old…

Is it about time for Spring?

Waiting for Summer

I'm keeping the Crossfire out of the snow. I shot this using the Canon G9 with the preferred color picker. Not much to report on today, shoveled the walk, had some Hennessy, and then dinner with Kimmy at the Good Table.

I had a problem with my AntiVirus software and had to uninstall, run registry editor to completely remove , and then reinstall. About 3 hours but it's working great now.

I posted a good picture of Mom on Walgreen's website that I took with the Sony DSLR A350.

It turned out pretty good! Used the SAL18-250 lens at 35mm at F/4.5 at ISO-400.

Will try to get some more snow pix tomorrow..

More snow!

Well, it did it again. These are pix taken yesterday. We had a high of 9 below today and it's supposed to hit 20 below tonight. I'm just glad tomorrow is friday and the weekend is almost here.

Snow again tonight

Well, snow again today and again tonight. Then the temp is dropping to the below zero numbers.

I took this one from the car as I was turning into the drive. It looks like we've got 6-8 inches on the ground but it 's the light stuff so it blows around a lot.

It's getting a little old. It would be nice to get back into the 60's or 70's for a while, but I guess that's still 2 or 3 months away.

Testing new lense

Wow, this has been a day! Got another 2 inches of snow so far and it's supposed to do it again tonight.
It was kind of hard to do any photos today but I got out in between snowfalls.The 1st pix is where I do most of my computer related stuff and the other one is my other pc. I try to keep my graphic stuff on one pc and business related stuff on the other.

These are just some pix of some trees on the side of the parking lot at work.

The SAL 70-300 G SSL lense is doing everything I expected and the lense moves very quick and is so quiet you can't hear it focusing. I'm still getting familiar with the DSLR A900 but what I've seen so far is this is really a great camera. I'll try to get some more pix in as the week goes by.

Sony DSLR A900

 Well, another month, another year. We still have about 4 inches of snow on the ground and I' still learning how to use my new Sony DSLR 

A900. I've taken some good shots with it but am still playing with the ISO settings with different lenses with different lighting. 

 The Sony A900 uses lenses that are made for film cameras and I've been playing with the macro's.

  This was made with a Tamron AF28-200mm F3.8/5.6 with minimal lighting at ISO 800. 

 My Sony 70-300 just came in today and I haven't had a chance to play with it yet but will see what I can do with it this weekend. Looks like I'm going to have to start using the tripod for these. This pix came out at 35.7 mb in Sony's raw format. After converting and compressing I got a 13.4mb jpg at 6048x4032 at 350dpi. This was huge.

 At anything above ISO 200 the pix seems to pickup a lot of noise when doing the large format pix, but have only had a chance to use it in limited lighting situations.

 Sorry for the mess on my desk but will try to clean it up a bit this weekend and use some extra lighting.

 Will have more this weekend...

 

October 2008

What a crazy month!

I was up at 4:00am and at work at 7:00 this morning. After work took a few more pix of some flatbed trailers for a site I'm working on, and then I'm on call again for the rest of the week. So, I'll be on the net all week!

I spent the weekend trying to find some decent Autumn shots but I think I'm just a little early. Went to the Goose Lake Reservoir and checked out some backroads between Coal City and Morris. I ended up going back to the office for some trucking shots, and then spent about 5 hours developing a flash layout and then revising 4 other websites.

Then 6, yes 6 hours learning how to take my Sony A350X apart to clean a smear that was on the inner aperture. I didn't do it! It came from the manufacturer like that but it's okay now.

My daughter Bunny came up last weekend Oct 11-13 and brought a gun case that my Dad had left to me. We spent the weekend shopping for scrapbooking supplies in Naperville and checking out TigerDirect. We had a great time!

I still haven't had the time to set up my chromakey screen to see how well it works but hopefully I can get around to it this weekend.