At about 5am this morning my grandpa, William Storie, succumed to the cancer in his body.

R.I.P.

I just want to archive this so perhaps some other poor soul will be able to google search and save themselves some time :)

So about a year ago I replaced our set of ghost-enabled boot disks with Bart's Corporate ModBoot cdrom boot disk. This tool creates an environment that lets you customize a boot cdrom with several floppy-based MSDOS boot images. We use these all the time because we mount network shares within DOS, and then use ghost to create images. In the past you would have to create a floppy with a small set of DOS network drivers, and then create as many as you needed to cover the driver set you used. My boss had probably 5-10 DOS boot disks just for this purpose. Now we have a single CD that's easy to maintain and customize.

Well the way DOS booting works is that it uses a file called config.sys to setup the initial environment (memory, the shell, etc...). During the boot process it tells the system to run a program called command.com, and it passes it the /p flag. That flag tells it the new shell is "permanent" and also causes it to run a file called autoexec.bat. This file contains a bunch of code that sets up the rest of the DOS environment by loading drivers and such. Simple stuff.

Well yesterday I wanted to add a new driver to my image for Intel network cards, so I did and rebuilt the corresponding image. Suddenly my boot cd failed when command.com ran with the following error:

"Bad command or file name"

...I spent hours trying to determine what had changed from the last time I created the image to this time. The autoexec.bat file looked the same, no related software had been upgraded, and I tried building other images (that hadn't changed) with the same result. I was doing WinDiffs on the resulting floppy images with no luck.

It turns out that somehow the autoexec.bat file had been saved in "unix" mode.

This means the DOS carriage returns weren't there like they had been when I built things before. So when DOS tried to execute this script it couldn't understand the file and just failed. Looking at the problem now it's so damn simple, but it took about 8 hours of my life to figure out what had happened. Hopefully this will save someone else some grief if they run into something similar.

But seriously, if you need DOS boot disks, nu2.nu's set of disks is worth some consideration.

This site needs some overhaul. I'm not sure what yet....but something needs to be done.

...priority one is to add more content, I know :)

So what makes a great pizza? Let me just say that a little divine intervention doesn't hurt:

If it's hard to see click on the image for a better view.

To do our part on this festive "holiday" Shannon and I decided to carve some pumpkins with her sister. Here's what Shannon and I ended up with:

Shannon did the witch and I did the ghost. Let's just hope we actually get some kids to come see them! The rest of the good time were captured here:

2005/10/30 Pumpkin Carving :)

Well Shannon's sister is staying with us tonight so we decided to head out to the Chaska v-ball match. Danielle's potentially last match is monday night and I (and Shannon) wanted to take some pics to commemorate it. I got two free rolls of Kodak 800 film so the chaska game was a perfect chance to practice with my longer lenses indoors.

I shot primarily with my Tamron 200mm/3.4 to capture the most light despite the fixed focal length. My other option was a Sun 80~210mm/4.8 that I worried wasn't fast enough. Given that focal length I had to manually compensate the exposures down -1 to -2 just to get the shutter speeds I wanted to use (I didn't bring a tripod). I've read the rule of thumb is to shoot at 1/N where N is the smallest number available that's larger than your focal length. So in my case I would shoot at 1/250 to ensure I get steady shots when shooting without a tripod. Well, all things combined I got some shots that had enough light, but they had a lot more grain than I expected. I had a few shots there weren't grainy, but there was no compensation so the shutter was open longer and they turned out blurry. Out of 24 I only got about 6 or 7 that were worth anything, and even that's a stretch. I kind of cheated by converting a few to black and white to give them a newspaper image feel (and I think make the grain more acceptable). Given the results though it was well worth knowing the limits of shooting indoor sports with those lenses. The small gallery is available here:

Chaska match 2005/10/20

This past weekend marked the last wedding of Shannon and I's wedding season for 2005. Shelley and Phill tied the knot on saturday with a great wedding and reception. I took 2 rolls of photos with the Nikon FE, and Shannon took a lot with the DSC-W5. She was lucky enough to be a bridesmaid too so she got some fun stuff I never would have gotten. I shot the whole day with ASA 400 speed Kodak film and my 28mm wide-angle lens. At Shannon's suggestion I got the pics developed at Walmart this time and the prints (from the 35mm shots) turned out really nice. Almost every picture was exposed correctly, but the CD they gave me seemed to have many pics over-exposed. I was looking at them on my laptop, which I know is not calibrated correctly, so that's part of the reason. The color profile on my work display is pretty accurate and they don't look so bad there so I decided to upload the shots without any touching up (at least at this point). So if they seem overexposed, it might be your screen, or the pics could be incorrect too. I'm new to all this so I'll investigate it a bit more and clean up those that really need it.

Oh, and I was trying to get shots of the dance like our photographer did at my wedding. If you see a bunch of poorly composed shots of the dance, that's what was going on. I had the aperture set at F/11 and was shooting with a 1/4 sec shutter speed to try to blur the background, but get a sharp shot of the dancer in the shot. The reception hall had white walls and ceiling so I think a lot more light got in the background of the shot than I expected. So they didn't turn out quite like I wanted, but oh well :) I read somewhere once that you should get a bunch of good shots and a few bad ones on a roll because then you're doing something right, but still experimenting with something new. So that's my excuse ;)

You can see the gallery here:

Shelley and Phill -- 2005/10/15

Well, I have a confession. It seems that the photo bug has finally hit me after seeing what's possible with our wedding photos. I recently dusted off my Dad's old Nikon FE 35mm SLR camera and started playing. I've taken pictures in the past with it, but I was never really serious about the results until now. The first time I really spent time and money was at our friend Tonia and Jon's wedding a couple weeks ago. You can click here and see the results. A lot of those pics were shot using our new Sony DSC-W5 point and shoot camera, but it should be clear which was which.

My Dad bought 4 lenses over the years, and 3 have survived unharmed till today. The aforementioned wedding was shot with a Nikkor 50mm/1.4 lens that unfortunately had it's aperture mechanism break. It's basically stuck at F/1.4, which means the depth of field is *extremely* narrow and taking clear pictures is quite difficult. I also have a 200mm fixed lens, an 80~210mm zoom lens, and a 28mm wide-angle lens, which serves as the primary lens now the 50mm is busted. Learning about the techniques and methods behind photography is quite fascinating. I only wish I didn't have to experiment with a film camera, although the type of picture you get is much more interesting to view. There's a certain look to a 35mm shot that digital cameras just don't seem to replicate, but that comes at the cost of film and developing :(

My most recent shooting attempt was my sisters wedding this past weekend. I used the 28mm fixed lens for the entire day. Thank god I wasn't the actual photographer because I stupidly shot the whole thing with the flash on a manual setting that basically over exposed many shots. The flash is a "manual" flash, but it still has the ability to detect how far away the subject is and meter accordingly. Provided you set the camera to a certain aperture you are relatively certain to get a decent exposure. Well, I had mis-read the settings and set it to fully manual, which means it blasts away and relies on you to set the camera's shutter speed to compensate. I did not do this, cause I'm new to all this, and too many shots came out over exposed. It's a stupid mistake, but I learned a lesson out of it so it was not a total waste. Her photographer was done by 6 though, so I was able to get some shots that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Should you be curious the gallery is here:

Katie and Dan's wedding

Pictures aside, it was a beautiful wedding, and the weather was perfect. Katie looks so happy with Dan and that makes me happy too :)

I've been waiting until we had the hi-res versions of them, but the wedding pictures from our photographer are available:

http://www.sstorie.com/gallery/Wedding/Professional/

What more needs to be said?

RENT (the movie!)