Quite possibly THE dumbest Subaru owner, ever.

My close friends and good customers of mine know that I tend to complain a lot about Subaru owners. Yes yes, we're all part of the wonderful Subaru community (and I really do mean that without any sarcasm), but every now and then, we'll get a e-thug or just a completely unreasonable Subaru owner that manages to piss everyone off. Anyway, on ClubWRX Off-Topic, I came across a thread that definitely takes the cake thus far for being completely and utterly stupid. Here is a link to the thread, but if you're not a registered member of ClubWRX, you can't see it:

http://www.clubwrx.net/forums/off-topic/134307300-moderators-admins.html

For those of you who aren't registered, I'll break down what transpires. The original post:

need my account banned. 04Adrenaline is also viaburn26 and C89ZX7R. thank you.

When asked why, he posts this:

sorry just so emotionally distressed right now due to the fact of a accidental felony charge i got the other morning so now i'm going around deleteing all my crap.

Which of course spurs the question:

how does one get an accidental felony charge?

After some investigating by my astute ClubWRX colleagues, we track down the guy's local forum, which leads to this link:

http://www.wric.com/Global/story.asp?s=9374230

That's right...his "accidental felony" was for trying to extort money from a grocery store chain! Best quote from the article from the police spokesperson:

"He didn't mention a specific dollar amount, he just said make me an offer type of thing, so they made him an offer, and he showed up and we arrested him."

HAHAHAHAHA! Words cannot describe how ridiculous this situation is, and how incredibly short-sighted this person is. What could he have possibly been thinking? This is probably the most epic fail I've read about in recent memory.

To Video Blog, or NOT to Video Blog?

To Video Blog, or NOT to Video Blog? That is the question. Since I got my new Macbook Pro, I now have a built-in iSight camera that has worked pretty well for video chats with my brother and his family. Obviously, I can use it to create video blogs (amongst other things), but would it be worth it? Is anyone going to care if they read a blog or if they actually want to see a video of me saying stuff? Please add a comment and let me know!



On another note, tomorrow is the photography seminar that Josh and I are hosting. I've tested out the projector and it looks like we're pretty much set. That said, I completely forgot to post up my photos of Patrick's car that I took at the first seminar. Here are a few noteworthy ones:





















Finally, you'll notice that I changed the title of this blog to "Shrinking Universe," at least on my ArminAusejo.com blog and on MySpace. Why the reason for the change? Well, "Armin's Photo Blog" was pretty boring and I wanted something that symbolized how big things in our world, whether it be photos, politics, science, among others, can affect us in a more specific, personal matter...hence, the universe is shrinking. "Shrinking Universe" is a namesake from Muse's song of the same name, from the Hullabaloo Soundtrack. The song was also used in the trailer for the movie, "28 Weeks Later".


Anyway, let me know what you think about the video blogging!

Just One

With the weather turning for the worse (as is usually the case here the in the Seattle area), I had enough of a break to take one nice photo of my 08 STI before the rains came:



This also leads me to a photo class that my good friend Josh Mackey and I will be teaching on November 15th:

http://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1617942

Space is limited, but it should be a good time for those who can make it :)

Brian and Kaitlyn's Wedding, 9/13/08

My good friend Brian got married last Saturday, and I happily volunteered to take some photos. I was not the hired photographer for the event, which left me very stress-free and happy to just mess around. Here's a few of the good ones:
























All photos can be found here: http://verdugo.smugmug.com/gallery/6004631_XXAGy

Birthday Wishlist!

Well, it's less than a month to my birthday (October 10th) and my parents already asked what I want. Since I always tend to forget about these kind of things, I figured this is a prime spot to list it. Please keep in mind this is a WISHLIST! Chances are I probably won't get even one of these...haha. In no particular order...

The NEW Apple Macbook Pro -- Allegedly being release on October 14th, this would seriously be the best, most awesome birthday present I could get this year. My trusty Powerbook G4 is starting to show its age, but the past 3 years have been awesome. Moving over to OSX was the best decision I made in my geekdom, both from a productivity standpoint and from a reliability standpoint. But, with the new software available now, everything needs to run on faster hardware...such is the life of computers, and there's not much one can really do about it. If I want to become faster and more efficient in my photo processing, a faster machine is pretty much a necessity.

Nikon D300 DSLR Body -- I honestly thought long and hard about it...D3? D700? As badass as both of these cameras might be, the fact that I have 3 lenses that work best on a DX sensor pretty much logically dictates that the D300 is the best camera body upgrade for me. I played around with Eugene's D300 one night and I was completely surprised how much of an improvement it was over my D200. Plus, if I'm going to be shooting weddings, a second body is definitely going to be necessary. Of course, this kind of puts me into a chicken/egg situation, since the software I'll need to process D300 RAW files either 1) runs relatively slow on my current Powerbook G4 (Lightroom 2) or I simply don't have and need to get (Adobe CS3 or the upcoming CS4), which in turn will also run relatively slow. I'm also running out of disk space, which then leads me to...

MyBook Studio Edition II -- 2 terabytes of RAID storage goodness. I learned back in grad school that a person's entire lifetime can be captured on compressed video within 1 TB, so I'm pretty certain 2 TB will be more than enough for my storage needs for awhile. This one is almost more of a necessity than a new Macbook...I only have 20GB or so left on my Macbook and if I'm going to be doing a lot more photos (especially weddings) with a 12 megapixel D300, I'm going to need that storage space. Don't you hate it when things all tie together?

Sony Ericsson W960i or Sony Ericsson P1i -- I've been asked a number of times by different people why I don't have an iPhone yet. Well, besides the fact that I'm quite happy with my T-Mobile service and plan, I still very much love my Sony Ericsson W810i! It's been a solid phone since I've gotten it, it syncs perfectly with my Mac, signal strength is great, the 2 MP gets the job done, the flashlight is nice and bright, and I've had absolutely zero problems with reliability.

I think that just about wraps it up. I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. I guess we'll see what happens in less than a month!

Adobe Lightroom 2 FTW!

I recently started playing around a bit with Adobe Lightroom 2. This program definitely takes RAW processing to new heights for me. Still using Adobe Photoshop CS2, the amount of things I can do with Lightroom not only cuts down on the steps I take in Photoshop, but it's a whole lot easier too. It does run a bit slow on my aging Powerbook G4, but I think I'll definitely be picking this up when I get a new Macbook Pro :) Some sample photos:

New site redesign, new blog!

Well guys, here it is...I'm moving my main blog posts here to my site, rather than using MySpace anymore. Why? Well, although more people I know are on MySpace (and consequently, Facebook), but using Blogger on my own site gives me much better control over things, and you don't need a MySpace or Facebook account to view it. I decided to go with Blogger since I already had experience with it in the past, and I didn't have to do much configuration on the server side to worry about. w00t!

As for the website, it's a fresh new look, thanks to the template from BluDomain.com. I've gotten some feedback from people already and changed a few things, but how you see it now is how I'm going to keep it, complete with the music. While some people have issues with the music auto playing, it's one click away from turning off and in my opinion, it's part of the complete package. Think what you want, but it's my site after all :) That said, enjoy the entire presentation, especially the photos of course ;)

Armin