Month: January 2009

There was once a day not so long ago when I had a wealth of knowledge about photography, photo equipment, color photo processors, digital image retouching and the hardware and software that it entailed. …..well, 11 years later and a lot of that has changed. When I was doing it, digital cameras were terrible. They didn’t even compare to a good SLR or medium format camera. So, I stuck with what I knew, emulsion based photography, and got passed up.
My wonderful wife, after hearing me comment on not have a decent non-point-and-shoot digital camera, went and bought me a Canon Digital Rebel XTi for xmas of 2006. I love canon’s digital offering. The only problem was, all of my old photo lenses are Pentax based, as I liked Pentax for film. [Does anyone want to buy some Pentax lenses?!?!? I have a bunch]
So, on to digital imaging.

Anyone that knows me knows that I love T-Shirts. They’ve been pretty much the only thing I have worn for the bulk of my life, much to my mother and wife’s dismay. That said, there are a lot of shirt ideas that I’ve had in the past but I’ve never had any mechanism for making them. Often it’s not economical for local print shops to make just 1 or 2 shirts from a design, so a consumer needs to order them in bulk, making it not economical for the consumer. Enter the internet. There are so many ways to get this done now, from Custom Ink.com, to Zazzle and Cafe Press to Spreadshirt there are a myriad of ways to get a shirt made.
I opted to put most of my stuff on Spreadshirt so that anyone can buy a shirt that I thought was cool enough to make. I’ve added a link to the “shop” at the top of the page for anyone that wants to look.
This brings me to my newest shirt, the “Mac from It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia RIOT shirt“.
I didn’t find an “official” one so I decided to make one. It also has a small barcode of “RIOT” on the bottom of the back of the shirt, just for an added touch. There were a few others out there but I preferfed a different font (even if it wasn’t exact).

My cousin Tony sent this to me and I was in tears laughing as I watched it. Listening to someone that has never seen any of the star wars movies all the way through try to explain the plot is pretty funny. The animations help a little too.

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Image manipulation via either Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever is a wonderful tool and can provide hours of entertainment. In keeping with the skateboarding theme of the last few days, I decided to mess a little with some of the images and came up with this:

So retro! So old school! Wow, it’s a xeroxed image!

Reminiscent of the old do-it-yourself style that was so common in early skateboarding, I just had to have this image from the archives on a some sort of apparel.
Through the magic and wonder that is the internet, I had nearly instant gratification. A Short Sleeved T- Shirt, a long sleeved T-Shirt, and even the always stylish hooded sweatshirt. Now you can show your colors if you were a Clinton or Wapella, Illinois skateboarder from the early days.

Many know that I was, and still am, a huge fan of skateboarding. I started around age 12 (1987), while in Jr. High and continued through college up through probably 4-5 years ago.
Being from a smaller Midwestern town there is not a lot to do, and not a terribly large amount of outside culture. Magazines are something that we’d read to get updated on the newest tricks, what was new, who rode for what team, etc. There was no internet, and videos were often too expensive for most of us. Being the industrious bunch we were we tried to make our own skate ‘zine (several, actually), without the help of a computer, scanner, digital camera or any experience whatsoever. Well, I had totally forgotten about the very first one, titled “Cold Locals” circa 1988-1989 until I happened across it while looking for something completely different in a box from my parents house that I had never looked in. In there were a bunch of old skate pictures from the late 1980’s up through probably 1991 or 1992. Since I cherish these pictures (yes, the tricks are a little dated as are the clothes) so I thought I’d post a few on here along with scans of the very first (and only) issue of “Cold Locals”.

Cold Locals were:
Nick Buraglio
BJ Obermeyer
Gabe Stith
for reasons that I don’t remember Ryan Holt wasn’t in this issue but was a major part of our skate crew back then.

Scans of the ‘zine can be found here and below is a slideshow which contains the entire ‘zine as well as some other late 1980’s – early 1990’s skateboarding images of us.

A recent post about integrating our new son into our family of four legged kids led me to a goldmine that I never knew existed. Von Welch sent me a funny video from Cracked.com. I had no idea that they had video, and most of it is pretty darned funny. Anyway, Von sent me this video, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

There is a wealth of other funny stuff, like this video about 5 things that you shouldn’t be able to buy on ebay:

I have a feeling that this site is going to be a time vortex for me. Thanks Von.

It’s a widely known fact that I love good coffee. There is something about waking up to the great smell of coffee brewing and then getting a drink of the first cup of the day that is invigorating.
I like to cook, and I really like to make interesting things and I really, really like to make stuff that tastes good (who doesn’t?), so when I make coffee I try to make the best tasting coffee that I can. Well, thanks to Twitter, I discovered Ken from Weekly Roast (actually he added me after I posted about my French Press)

So, when I found that Ken had a blog detailing the finer points of brewing a good cup of coffee. He also has a start up business roasting and sellingfresh coffee beans.
Some of the stuff I already knew, similar to making beer, good tasting coffee depends on good tasting ingredients. Use of a water filter is a must, and freshness is a definite factor in drinking good coffee.
I was already using a french press and have always been pretty adamant about not drinking scorched, old coffee, but some of the things about bean freshness that he posted was pretty surprising to me. Check out his blog and online shop for some great info and coffee. I have a bag waiting for me at home that I can’t wait to try!