Burnerblog

This is beautiful:

Every now and then, Sherry and I take the time (and the hit on the budget) to get new furniture. Our livingroom has been a fine example of Heinz 57 high art, but now, it all matches and is contemporary. Yes, Sherry and I prefer the classic look, but in our livingroom, with the plasma TV and all the electronics, we went for something more contemporary. Now, with our new couch and recliner, the entire room is matching, although the painting over the fireplace is a classic still life and the carpet is an oriental type rug (yes, I used the word oriental because those carpets are still called that!). I do like it quite a bit, however, and Brendon gave us his seal of approval just moments ago, declaring the new couch “comfy and cool.”

High praise, indeed.

Oh… as for the picture, I took it without flash indoors facing a window that has full sunlight outside. There wasn’t much I could do without getting the speedlight, setting it up, etc. I just wanted a quick photo of the couch and chair. Also visible in this picture is the old couch behind this one which a friend will be picking up this weekend along with the old brown recliner from my office (the Queen Ann chair is now in my office).

While not staged or posed like the picture of Gelli was, this is the most recent photo of my son, Brendon. We were at a soccer game and I snapped this photo of him as he sat down on some bleachers for a rest from standing.

At 10:40 p.m. tonight, the server that Burnerblog started life on was shut down for the last time. The old Compaq ProLiant 1600 has finally been put to rest. The old dual-processor (350 mhz) server has outlived it’s usefulness, and has been retired. For over five years, “Burner” has served me well without any hiccups or serious hardware issues. In it’s service, there have been three hard drive failures, all of which never interrupted service due to its being on a RAID 5 array.

The old server was a workhorse, and taught me a lot about Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 Advanced Server. It was my first NAT server, first FTP server, first email server (POP/SMTP), and also my first webserver.

Rest in peace, faithful server. You have served your time well.

I took this picture of Gelli yesterday afternoon in the livingroom using natural light at 1/80s at f/2.2. I did some post-processing in Photoshop CS2 and added the natural color of her eyes back into the photo. It’s not as striking as say, someone who has blue eyes, but they do stand out on the print I made, and it’s already on the wall in my office. She’s a good model, and a good sport; she puts up with my posing her.

I thought the cloaking stuff the British were working on was cool, but this German invention kicks ass!!! I can’t say I haven’t thought of this, but at least someone put the idea into practice.

Now… when can I try it?