Back to business as usual.

It's about time I got back into the swing of regular blog updates. I've been so busy with other things the past week or so that I haven't been able to work through my daily task list enough to get to it. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda.

Last night I worked on the most unintuitive piece of electronic equipment I think I have ever run across. Those of you that don't know me... I'm pretty good with most electronics. I'm one of those folks that can put a PC together from parts. As a side note, I've assembled one in as fast as 20 minutes from completely being in parts to being ready to load the O/S... "back in the day". Anyway, I got one of these USB hard drive enclosures. It's just the enclosure, you then have to get the 2.5" laptop drive to use in it. I had the enclosure for a week or so, I just didn't have time to find a drive (although I did try mooching one off of friends but to no avail). Finally, I just went and got one, a 40 gig Toshiba drive. Should be a no-brainer right? Connect the drive, seal it up, then go! Nope! First, there's very little documentation. Without getting into all the drama, I first had to figure out how to get it to work with my PC. I plugged the wall adapter for the unit in (it chrages a Li-Ion battery inside for portable use) and found that the buttons, one of which is the power button, are disabled when plugged in. Hmmm. I then discovered that the unit will also charge when it's hooked up via USB to the PC AND the power button will work... if it has enough of a charge. The battery didn't have enough of a charge so pressing the power button (and you can't have it connected to the PC then turn it on, it has to be on first) only powered the unit for like half a second before it would turn back off. Grrr.... Finally got the timing right and simultaneously turned it on and plugged it into the USB port all at once and had success. Sort of. Next, I had to go into disk manager in XP and partition the drive, give it a letter and then format it. By the way, none of this was in the documentation. Got it formatted then guess what? I have to run another utility to convert the NTFS format to FAT something (16 or 32, I don't remember now) for it to work because in XP I can only format NTFS... FINALLY, it was all working. What a pain in the rump.

What was all that drama for? Well, now when I'm out shooting photos somewhere and fill up my memory cards, I can plug them into the aforementioned box and it will pull the data over to the hard drive for me and then I can erase the memory cards and keep on going. I won't have to drag a laptop around to off load stuff now. At the end of the day I would then just connect the box to my PC or laptop and move the files off then.

Looks like I'll have an opportunity to shoot a lot this Saturday, first at the track where my racing buddies will be running 2 cars, the #20 Home Depot car and the #21 car John campaigned last year. The second will be for some conutry music guy playing a show in Tuscaloosa or Birmingham. Evidently, he's got a signed record deal with MCA so this is the real deal. A while back, Kyle did some promo videos for him I think and it's through his contacts I was able to get this opportunity.

This Friday I'll be in a video shoot for a client. I think you'll only see my back while I'm looking at a newspaper. I'm not the main character, we've got a professional actor coming up doing that part. There's also a trained animal involved. LOL! I'll let you know how all that goes.

Looking at my schedule, I've got lots going on... Friday - Video, Saturday - Photos, Monday - Taste of the Valley thingy, got client meetings all week then the Addy (advertising) awards the next Saturday evening.

Beats sitting around the house. ;-)