My favorite photo accessory
Aug 31st
is this little cleaning instrument called the Lens Pen. Keeps all my lenses nice and clean. I thought I had lost mine and was ready to pull the trigger on a new one, but just found it while rummaging through one of my many camera backpacks — a Lowepro CompuTrekker AW in this case.
The other two backpacks I have are a Lowepro Rover AW II & a Tamrac Adventure 9. Why do I own 3 different photo backpacks? Unfortunately because they all serve a different purpose.
The Rover AW is the one I use the most as the “walk around” backpack. It’s got a lot of space in the upper compartment to hold miscellaneous items like food, a flash, a small book, other nick naks, and even the 70-200 f/2.8 IS. It also looks the least like a camera bag which is a plus.
The CompuTrekker is all business as it is designed to only carry camera gear + a laptop. I normally l use this on trips where I won’t need the versatility of a multi-use backpack like the Rover AW II. I like to carry-on all my camera gear + laptop so this bag works perfectly as it allows me to carry on another personal item if needed (like a carry-on roller luggage with my clothes 
).
Lastly, I also have a Tamrac Adventure 9. I bought it specifically for my trip to China/Hong Kong earlier this year. I didn’t want to bring a ton of camera gear with me, but I still wanted a multi-use pack that also held a laptop. The Adventure 9 fit my 20D, 17-40 f/4, and 24-105 f/4 IS, my Dell Inspiron 600m, and all the other related camera & laptop accessories and had a tiny bit of room left over.
Incidentally, I also bought the 20D & 24-105 f/4 IS specifically for this trip as well, as my other setup is a brick and a half: 1D MK II & 24-70 f/2.8. It came down to compromises in the end, but my main priority was to pack as light as possible while not crimping my photo-fu too much. In retrospect, it didn’t hamper me at all, except for all the situations that I really needed to shoot 8.5 frames per second while on vacation (not).
But anyways — this series of events (finding the Lens Pen &Â writing this post) was prompted by me wanting to take photos of the Adventure 9 as I’m finally getting around to posting it up for sale. My 24-70 f/2.8 will likely follow soon after.
on tweaking
Aug 29th
To follow-up on yesterday’s post…I wish I could say the tweaking that I’ve done to my 2001 Audi S4 was just a matter of taking up my time and nothing out of my wallet. Talk about money pit! I started modifying it with 5k miles on the odometer and the odometer is about 103k mi. now. I guess think I should breath a sigh of relief that it has survived nearly 100k miles in some state of peformance modification and only to have suffered relatively minor German gremlins from time to time, especially since most of the modifications were on the performance-enhancing side which undoubtedly put more stress on the car.
I replaced the passenger-side CV joint just 2 months ago and looks like the driver’s side is on its way out, as well as evidenced by the grease forming on the inside of the wheel that I noticed over the weekend while camping. At least this time I caught it early on before all the grease gets out of the boot and makes a mess of everything.
installed mod_deflate
Aug 28th
Never one to leave good enough alone, I configured mod_deflate this evening to squeeze out a little more performance out of the server that hosts this site and a few others. Not like it really needed it bandwidth savings-wise since nothing bandwidth-intensive is hosted on this box (yet), but I’ve always been a bite of an optimization nut and a tweaker. Thankfully tweaking this server is free other than my time.
2gb log files are bad
Aug 24th
Especially if they cause the primary DNS for a domain to hang. Not the server that runs this site, but one that I am involved in developing applications on. I’m far from a linux expert, but I know enough to be dangerous! rndc kept returning a “connection refused” message when called. So I checked rndc.conf, named.conf, rndc.key and everything looked peachy. It wasn’t until I did a `ls -lh`in the logs directory that I noticed that bind-queries.log was 2GB in size. On a hunch, i renamed that file and then tried rndc again. Presto! Too bad I went through nearly 5 hours of troubleshooting to get to that point, but glad to have found the root of the problem.
how well travelled are you?
Aug 21st
***Your Travel Profile:***
You Are Well Traveled in the Western United States (58%)
You Are Somewhat Well Traveled in Canada (40%)
You Are Somewhat Well Traveled in the Northeastern United States (29%)
You Are Somewhat Well Traveled in the Midwestern United States (25%)
You Are Somewhat Well Traveled in Asia (21%)
You Are Mostly Untraveled in the Southern United States (15%)
You Are Mostly Untraveled in Latin America (7%)
You Are Mostly Untraveled in Western Europe (7%)
You Are Untraveled in Africa (0%)
You Are Untraveled in Australia (0%)
You Are Untraveled in Eastern Europe (0%)
You Are Untraveled in New Zealand (0%)
You Are Untraveled in Scandinavia (0%)
You Are Untraveled in Southern Europe (0%)
You Are Untraveled in the Middle East (0%)
You Are Untraveled in the United Kingdom (0%)
How Well Traveled Are You?
http://www.blogthings.com/howwelltraveledareyouquiz/
