Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Where have I been?

It's been a while since I put up some new posts.  You might ask "Where have you been?", and my answer would be "IN HELL"!

Yes, hell.  There's nothing like having your central air conditioning system fail in the middle of a New York heat wave in July, but that's what happened here almost two weeks ago.  The upstairs of the house maxed out at 92 degrees one night, so we moved all the mattresses downstairs and have been sleeping on the Living Room and Dining Room floors for the past two weeks because the air conditioner downstairs is working fine.  It's a good thing that I built this house with two AC zones!

This was fun for a few days because the kids got a kick out of our "camp out" downstairs, but now I think we're all getting pretty tired of it and are ready to get back to finally using the upstairs half of the house again.  Thankfully the repair guys are coming next week, and after I drop $2,800 dollars on this crappy situation we'll be back to a cool house.  This has been occupying a lot of my time lately.....

Other than that we've been having fun!  We're doing some family trips (pictures coming soon!), we've gone to the beach, we went to the Rush concert the other night, we went to a NY Red Bulls soccer match, and I've been watching some good Formula 1 and IndyCar races on TV.  We even went to the Indy race in Watkins Glen, NY over July 4th weekend.  Fun!

This has not left much time for photography or writing new posts for this blog, but I've been squeezing in some nice shots on our trips and I have some good upcoming posts in mind.

My most pressing photography issue right now is getting a handle on how to process digital video.  When I bought my Canon 7D, one of my goals was to use it on our trips to capture quick video clips here and there instead of using a dedicated video camera.  Well, this was a good plan, but I've discovered that I don't quite have the pieces in place yet to make this work from end-to-end. 

For starters, I've discovered that my old computer from 2003 is nowhere near powerful enough to play full high definition video from the 7D.  Strike one, I need a new computer.  You also need special video editing software to view, play, edit, and montage the video clips.  Strike two, I need special video editing software.  I'm fearing what strike three might be, but for now I need to get a handle on how to technically handle this new digital format in my house.  This will be the subject of a post in the near future...

Until then, enjoy your summer and there are more posts coming soon!