Jeremey's Weblog

So busy!

I've been meaning to post about Chinatown, Monterey, etc. (all stuff we did this weekend). But alas, I've been crazy busy. And I've got audio stuff to talk about. And and and... sigh. Hopefully work will return to only a dull roar tomorrow. :)

Redwoods

One of the amazing things about this part of Northern California are the redwood forests. In Felton (about 10 minutes inland from Santa Cruz) there's a railroad that takes you on a tour up through a redwood forest. The train is pulled by an old steam engine originally designed for logging (it can take 12% grades!)

The trees are just amazing. They're HUGE and they're TALL (the tallest ones in that forest are about 300 ft. tall). More amazing to me, though, is their age. One grove that the tour stops at (you get out) is made up of a ring of trees that all formed from a "mother" tree in the middle (they're all really the same tree). The "child" trees are 900 years old, and the "mother" was 2000 years old when it died (as the children grow, they starve the mother for light and water).

So those child trees were alive long before Europeans found the "New World"... they would've been "born" around the time of the crusades. So that would put the mother being "born" sometime well before the rise of ancient Rome and maybe even before ancient Greece. That's just really mind-blowing to think about. There's a pervasive sense of ancient in that forest.

Doings

Wow... with family here, we've been busy!

In-laws Inbound

My in-laws are coming to visit tonight... I get to show off beautiful (pouring rain) Northern California. Woohoo! That reminds me, I need to take a picture of my dam.

Dam!

So I had to build a dam last night at 12:30 am. Our garage is full of all our stuff from Texas and it has been pouring rain and so last night we discovered that the water leaking in from the side door to the garage was getting dangerously close to the aforementioned stuff. So I go outside in the pouring rain to see what can be done.

It turns out that the people who decided to do all this gravel and landscaping and such along the side of the house also thought it would be clever to make the concrete slab at the entrance to the side door of the garage the lowest point on that side of the house. I wonder why water congregates there.

Happily, there were several large stepping stones neatly arranged along the side of the house, plus a whole bunch of loose gravel to cover up the mud and dirt. So I took the stepping stones and set as many as I could down in front of the garage door, all butted right against each other, and then I took a bunch of gravel and filled in all around and on top. A dam! Very nice. Of course the water still wanted to congregate, so with a bunch more moving of gravel it was redirected out into the front yard (which is sloped away from the house).

Yay. Our stuff was saved. I was really, really, really soaked.

Eisley

"Telescope Eyes" by Eisley is the free download this week on iTunes! Very very cool!

Once More, With Edits

Here's a "more finished" version of the better jelly photo.

Amazing Jellies

Canon 10D, 24mm, ISO 1600, 1/60, f/2.8

Canon 10D, 24mm, ISO 3200, 1/50, f/2.8

ISOs and Jellyfish

I'm gonna geek out about my camera a little... fair warning. I did something today that I could not reasonably do before I got my digital SLR: I shot useable photographs at ISO 1600 and 3200, right next to shots at ISO 100. If you've ever had to agonize over what film to load in your camera (and in particular, what speed [aka ISO]), and especially if after two shots you desperately wanted something radically different, then this is an amazing thing.

We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium today... they have an amazing jellyfish exhibit. But it's rather dark. Aside from the jellyfish' own bio-luminescence, there's very little light to be found. Not nearly enough to take a photograph with. But turning on your flash will pretty much ruin the photo of the jelly.

So what to do... ahah! On your digital SLR, you just crank the ISO dial around to something absurd like 1600 or 3200 (which doesn't even show up as a number, it just reads "H" for "High"), and snap away. But aren't the results incredibly noisy, you ask? Not on a Canon CMOS! 3200 is kinda noisy, but 1600 looks better than most (all?) ISO 400 negative film (and maybe even better than that). Amazing. I'll follow with a post of a couple photos.

Hail, Hail, Our Stuff's All Here!

The movers came tonight... a little bit early (expected them tomorrow). Time for a big, giant, WOOHOO! It's like Christmas in... uh... March. My amp, my recording gear, my Tele... yesss.

I feel alot better about all the crap we moved. I was worried it was a LOT, but in our garage it doesn't look absurd. Whew. Not that I know where to put it all. We have a living room and three other rooms (aka bedrooms), and that's it. So the guest bedroom may also be the office, the recording studio, the creative workshop, and the photo lab. I hope our guests don't mind sleeping with the Tele. It doesn't snore.