An Insolent Southern Man

One of the most commonly asked questions I get about backpacking is "Where do you sleep?" For me personally, about 80% of the time, I sleep in shelters which have wooden sleeping platforms. The rest of the time, I'm in a tent. I have been known to bivy out on the open ground once and a while, but that's really a rare thing with me these days.

First of all, I hope everyone had a good Christmas. I know I did. Second, we got a new griddle, but I didn't make French toast over the weekend when it snowed. (If that doesn't make any sense, then you need to go back and read here.)

--

Okay, I know it doesn't sound all that grand, but she said that all she wanted was an under-the-cabinet mounted can opener. She told me this a week before Christmas. I've been to 38 stores in 3 cities in two separate states. I've called about a dozen more. Even the Black & Decker outlet store doesn't have them. What am I to do? I hate giving gift cards. To me, giving someone a gift card is like saying, "Hey. Merry Christmas and all that. Here's how much you're worth to me." If the gift isn't called for or expected, then a gift card will suffice. I don't think you should give your mom a gift card as a primary gift for Christmas. If you disagree, then that's fine. I just don't feel like it's something I could do.

I guess this is my official review of it. I honestly hate the back end of Blogger. Yeah, it's simple and clean, easy to understand and navigate, but it's boring and bland. I hate having to hit "preview" to see what my post will look like. I've tried coming around with it, but as of late, I was writing posts in MS Word and then copying and pasting them into the oh-so-boring Blogger UI. That really didn't solve any problems or help me get over my annoyances, but it I did it anyway.

I read Lifehacker everyday. I've used it as a trusted source for tips and tricks for quite a while now. Today, I read an article about keeping your inbox spam free. Those if you who know me, know that I've been having problems now with spam and my yahoo! powered @bellsouth accounts now for the last couple of months. So, I thought after reading the article on Lifehacker, that I would beat spam to the punch by signing up for this service. I really should have did a little homework first. If you Google "Boxbe" you'll find a lot of people complaining that the service has apparently failed.

I want to apologize to anyone that might have received any messages on my behalf regarding this service. I have opted out, and closed my account. Hopefully, that will be the end of it. Again, sorry for any inconvenience or intrusion this has incurred.

--

Wednesday night, I went to a little pizza place called Your Pie for the Athens Holiday Tweetup. A tweetup is where people from Twitter meet up in real life.

So anyway, we met at Your Pie in the Five Points area of Athens. It was quite a cozy little place and there were about 15 or 20 "tweeps" there. Your Pie provided us with some awesome pizza. I highly recommend you visit any one of their 3 locations in Athens.

I could kick myself for not taking any photos. I guess I was having such a good time talking to people that I forgot.

I really had a blast meeting and talking to new people that I've only interacted with over Twitter before. I thought it was a great experience and I highly recommend that, if you're on Twitter, that you get out to one of these events. If you do, I'll likely see you there. =D

Oh, I almost forgot... Follow @AthensTweetup to find out when the next meetup is!

--

I've always been a bit savvy when it came to computers. No, I'm not on the programmer or developer level, but I'd say a decent user - more or less. I wouldn't call myself a complete computer geek. I'm not ready to join the Geek Squad at my local Best Buy store. But ever since I broke my leg, I've been stumbling around, messing with my computers more and more. At first, it was a tweak here and there in Windows Vista. Next came the upgrade to Windows 7. After that, I got more and more interested in making a dual boot computer. I've seen several blogs online about making what's known as a "hackintosh," but after further reading, realized that neither of my machines here at the house could be configured to run OSX. Boo. :-(

The weather forecast is for snow flurries Sunday night through Monday morning. There's no chance listed for any accumulation, but one thing that's 100% for certain, the grocery store's milk section will look like this:


Having worked in a grocery store, I can tell you that people around here go absolutely nuts. Most folks act like they're not going to be able to get out for days. Milk, eggs, and bread become hot commodities. Am I missing something here? Are we supposed to make French toast when it snows? Is that some sort of southern thing I missed?

I've been at the store part time now for going on 3 years. It's snowed twice since. It's even snowed 10-12 inches, and we were still open. And you know people are going to be out riding around looking at the winter wonderland too. My point is, there's no need to panic. No need to rush out and buy up all the milk, eggs, and bread. (Unless that French toast thing is true...) Just sit back and enjoy it for the 12 hours it's on the ground because you know it's going to be gone tomorrow. =D

--

Night photography is what drew me back into the idea of getting an SLR camera and shooting. I saw people on Flickr doing it, and I thought I would like to try my hand at it. When I got my camera though, it wasn't as easy as the people on Flickr made it out to be. It took me a while to figure out the ins and outs of it. Little did I know that I had only touched the very tip of the iceberg.

Recently, I've noticed that all I seem to do is hang out on Facebook. It's to the point that I think it's become a real problem for me. So, in order to take back my life via self discipline, I've decided to opt out of it for a while. To explain myself, I kind of went through the whole thought process as if I were interviewing myself. It's kind of kooky, but it works.

I read a blog every day posted by the caretakers at the lodge on top of Mt LeConte in the Smokies. During the warmer months, the lodge is open to the public. They take reservations for people that wish to hike up and spend the night there. I think a shared bunkhouse that will sleep four will set you back about $100 or so, but good luck getting a spot. From what I understand, it's in such demand, that a lottery is how they decide who gets to stay.

I've never cooked anything that required so much prep. It also made my recently cleaned kitchen look like a garbage truck had an accident in it. Nonetheless, I wanted to try something different. So I figured since it was freezing outside, that soup would be an appropriate supper.

In the quest to capture ideas when they happen, and share them with you whenever possible, I recently downloaded an app for my iPhone called BloggerPlus. I like the idea if being able to post and share on the go. This is my first post using it, and I just wanted to see how well it worked. I'm sure that later on, I'll be writing up a review and posting it here as well.

BTW - I already use the WordPress mobile app for my studio blog, but I've never actually posted anything with it. I've just used it to moderate comments. This being a Blogger blog, that app obviously wouldn't work.

Why not just take notes and remember things and write the post later? If you really need my answer to that, then go back and read my first post.

--Posted from my iPhone

I'm a backpacker. I have been since about 1992 or so. I love being on some high mountain ridge in the fall, looking down into a blaze colored valley. Or maybe spending a summer night up in a hollow under a rhododendron thicket by a rushing stream. Even walking on snow covered trails in sub freezing weather in the dead of winter, when you might go an entire weekend without seeing another soul is a great time for me. It's quiet then. Very peaceful. There's been times you could stop moving and your ears would start ringing from trying to hear anything in the silence.

Before you get knee deep in this post, I do realize that I just posted yesterday about an app on the iPhone that makes taking photos easy and fun, and that today's post somewhat contradicts that. But the difference is that there aren't people taking events, weddings, and portrait sessions away from hard working professionals by rushing out and buying the Hipstamatic app for the iPhone. (At least none that I know of...)

Take a look at this exceptionally misleading commercial:


More and more people are rushing out to their local Best Buy stores and buying SLR cameras, only to be using them in full automatic mode, with plastic kit lenses, and of course... not having a clue how to use them. Worse yet, they're buying higher end cameras like the 5D Mark II. All because of commercials like these and sales floor people that don't know the products their selling, combined with the American need to have the newest product available. No matter what - we gotta beat them Joneses!

I know of a couple of people that within the last year, just jumped out and bought high end cameras without any knowledge about photography at all. They just simply like taking bar or beach photos with their point and shoots, and they thought that an SLR would take them to that next level. A few weeks later, they're calling around to their friends with real experience, looking for the Richard Avedon button. Problem is, there isn't one. Learning how to use an SLR takes a lot of time, especially if you're just getting started. Aperture, shutter speed, white balance, ISO, all of these things are important in good photography. No auto mode is going to get you there without a LOT of luck.

What's worse is when you take someone like this and get them into Photoshop. Then things can get down right funny. It almost always happens too. They'll go out, buy and expensive camera, and when the photos don't turn out like they thought they would, they immediately assume it needs to be run through the gauntlet in Photoshop. Before long, the masterpiece is a haloed, over-saturated, over-sharpened piece of HDR crap that they'll post on Flickr, and a hundred other idiots that also don't know any better will ooh and ah over until our budding photographer is convinced that they're doing the right thing.

I've got more opinions about Flickr. I have a love/hate relationship with that site. I'll save that for another day.

_

If you live in Georgia, then you probably know that we had a cold front move though earlier in the week. It's been really windy since it went through too. Before the front came, my yard was buried under a sea of leaves from the nine enormous oak, and four mature pecan trees that are located on our lot. You may or may not know that I've been nursing a broken leg since the end of September. I'm getting around better now, but I'm not ready to get out and rake leaves. Even if I were, I'd still not likely get out and actually rake them. Run over them with the lawnmower is more like it, but not rake the whole yard into piles in which to burn, bag up, compost, or whatever.

My neighbor across the road however, doesn't share my contentment to let nature take her course leave the yard covered. She has a couple of white pines in her yard, which they keep the needles neatly raked up around the trunks of the trees. She's an elderly lady that has a grandson, who is older than I am, living with her. I've been living here since 2001, and I've never known him to have a job either. Yet, she pays a man to come and mow their grass and keep the yard neat and clean every week or so. To make matters worse, they own a John Deere riding mower -and her grown, unemployed grandson still doesn't cut her grass! ( I've actually seen him do it once. That was earlier this year. And that was the first time ever in the almost ten years I've been here.)

Since they live to the east, and these post front, super strong prevailing winds have been out of the west, guess whose yard is now covered in leaves? Not mine!

_

I have to admit it, I play with the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone. I know, I know... all the cool photographers hate it. You now what? I don't give a $#!+. In fact, I'm sick of all the elitist attitude. I liked photography a whole lot more when I was having fun and it was less of a job. I used to get out and ride around, looking for old houses, barns, and other rural southern scenes to shoot. After I started doing portraits, I lost interest in scenes almost altogether. Sure, I like looking at other people's work, but I didn't care to get out and shoot stuff myself.

Now, before we go any further, let's get something straight. Not every post I do here is going to be photography related. This is just what happens to be on my mind today. Since this is a Blogger blog site, it's a whole lot easier for me to just use Picasa to upload and host my images. Sure, I could use Flickr, but I don't want to post everything over there just so I can use it here. I've got all of my hiking and backpacking photos over there, and I'd like to keep it that way. Last night I installed the Picasa App on my laptop, and it scanned though my libraries, and I happened to come across my iPhone photos from back in the summer. That's what led me to thinking about Hipstamatic.

I've got a load of photos on there that I really, really like on there. Like this one:



I love this photo! What I love even more was that I all I did was choose a few settings, point the thing , and shoot. A few seconds later and "POOF!" - Instant cool photo.

So why do most photographers I know hate this app? I actually think they hate it because of a few reasons: 1.) They see a little too much of it coming from people. 2.) It takes better photos than the ones they spend hours in Photoshop trying to make themselves. 3.) Perhaps it's because it allows common users to make photos that are more interesting than the ones they invested time and energy into making. Either way, it's a shortcut that anyone can use to make retro-looking photos.

That being said, it's not an end all means. There's still looks you can't do with it. There will always be the art form of carefully crafting an image. So my advice to the naysayers is to get off your high horses and let it be. If you're being shown up by a Hipstamatic photo, then perhaps you need to step up your game instead of hating the app.

-

 Well, here I am. Let me throw out a disclaimer here first: This blog will have profanity in it. As I intend to complain a lot, and sometimes I get a little heated. This blog will name names. I don't care who you are. This blog will be upfront and honest as I can be about whatever it is I may talk about. With that being said, I'm not an expert, scientist, psychologist, social expert, or anything else for that matter... I'm just a man with opinions. Some count, some (most) don't. I like to think that my ideas and opinions are facts, but we both know that that's not always true...

 Now, without further ado, here's my first post. Enjoy!

 I'm not gonna joke around with you. This blog has been on my mind for months. Hell, I might have even thought of it last year. I can't remember. I do remember posting some garbage on Facebook about it after a day of mowing the grass here at the house.

 I have an 18" Cub Cadet push mower, and it takes me a long time to cut my yard. Therefore, I have lots of time to think about things. Seems like I have some of the best ideas while I'm out there sweating and pushing. I guess mindless work has that effect. Why do I push mow my lawn? Because the riding mower broke a long time ago, and I don't have the time or the inclination to fix it.

 Anyway, mindless work seems to have that effect on me. I could remember standing in front of the CNC machine at work, watching it and thinking about something completely unrelated. Over the last couple of years, I've been working part time at a local grocery store, and I'd have days where I'd come up with some of the best ideas while I was stocking the shelves.

 The worst part was forgetting the idea by the time I got home. I'm not talking about coming home and trying to remember what it was that I thought of in the first place, I'm talking about NEVER thinking about it again. Like, it never happened, gone...

 I thought I had cured that stigma when I got an iPhone. I signed up and downloaded Evernote, but the problem there is that the app is so damn sketchy, and it takes too long to do anything in it. I often found myself on an aisle in the store, fiddling with my phone, trying desperately to record a thought, only to have a customer walk by and ask me where the sour cream or the Ziploc bags were. By then, the thought or idea was gone. Or, if it wasn't, then it would be by the time I got my phone back out and waited on Evernote's slow user interface to wake up and work for me. Worse, I'd be caught by a manger messing with the phone while I was supposed to be working.

 So why are our minds like this? Why is it that I can sit around this house with a broken leg, all the free time in the world, and can't come up with a decent idea like I could if I were engaged in a mindless task? If you know the answer, or this happens to you, feel free to explain or share your thoughts in the comments section.

_