I finally found a new look that does require me to reformat a lot of posts. There’s still work that needs to be done, but it looks to be relatively minor. I have contemplated removing all previous posts except for the ones that frequently bring new visitors. I may still do that, but for now I’ll leave it as it is. It won’t be a full out deletion, rather just setting the status of a post to unpublished. Blogging just isn’t what it used to be for me. Back when I started, Facebook was still in its infancy. Today, Facebook is the preferred way to stay in touch over a blog. So… if you don’t have an account at Facebook, go ahead and sign up and add me as your friend.

I know I haven’t posted on this blog in quite a while. It’s not that I’ve given up on it or intend to stop blogging… I just have been blogging a little more on my photography blog. As my previous post had mentioned, I am attempting to do a Photo-A-Day this year. So far it has been going pretty good. Only a few days have I felt like “Oh man I don’t have it yet and maybe I should just skip today”, but I haven’t (yet). If you don’t follow the other blog, check out these posts:
http://www.justinacuffphotography.com/2009/02/07/photowalk-with-student-photography-club-downtown-knoxville
http://www.justinacuffphotography.com/2009/01/22/charlie-hall-concert-january-17-2009
http://www.justinacuffphotography.com/2009/01/04/holiday-express-at-the-ut-gardens

It has made me reflect on one thing though. How much better off would I be if I had that dedication in my prayer/spiritual life? A couple of years ago, I had made a New Year’s resolution to read through the entire Bible. It was going good until I got to Numbers. Genesis, Exodus, and even Leviticus were easy to read, but man… not Numbers. Until I got to Psalms, I was struggling to keep on schedule. It wasn’t until I got to the New Testament that I was able to catch up to the schedule and keep with it until I finished.

In addition to Facebook, I’ll be posting the Photo-A-Day photos in my other gallery at http://photoaday.justinacuff.com/. I still may post some additional ones here or on my photography site, but that site will be the final destination for the photos.

Technorati Tags: photography, photo-a-day, PAD

To all ya’ll that still read this blog (Hi Mom and Dad) or have subscribed to my RSS feed… Happy New Year! This year, instead of resolutions, I’m going to do a project. This is nothing original, as it has been done by many people, but I going to try and do a Photo-A-Day project in 2009. I’m not sure where I’ll post them, but I’ll be figuring something out soon enough. The next post on my blog will probably be where I am posting them.

The rules are simple. Every day I will commit to taking one photograph and sharing it. The camera does not matter. It may be one of my digital SLRs, one of my point and shoots, or even with my camera phone. I may not get around to posting each image every day, but I will commit to taking an image everyday. I know there are just going to be some days that I am unable to get to a computer. I’ll try to get no more than a week behind. Some photo’s may have commentary, others may just be the image itself. All photos posted are eligible for critique and/or praise.

Technorati Tags: photo-a-day, PAD, 2009, project, resolutions, photography

Merry Christmas everyone! This year Christmas came early and was pretty much done with by Saturday the 20th for our family. I left Knoxville to go to my Grandma Acuff’s (my last living grandparent) house. The food was good and we did the card exchange. All of us are older and only one of us has a kid, so not a whole lot of gift giving anymore goes on. Afterwards we came back to my parent’s house and did Christmas there. Rachel and Bryan had to leave on Sunday, so we needed to do it Saturday night or Sunday morning. So we finished up Christmas by Saturday evening. It’s kind of a strange feeling to be done with Christmas so early. When I got back to Knoxville, my smoke detector was chirping that it needs to be replaced. Living close to Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Wal-Mart make it really convenient to just pick up things as I need them, but its not so convenient when you remember that people are still getting their last minute Christmas shopping done.

A few days ago, I saw where Dreamhost was offering its users unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and 50GB of personal backup space if they would be one of the first to volunteer to move over to the new servers in their new data center. That has always been one thing I was scared of. What if one my posts gets really popular and appears on a site like Digg or Slashdot. I didn’t think it would ever happen (it hasn’t so far), but if it did, it would be very costly in overbandwidth charges. I doubt the money that accrues in the Amazon and Goggle accounts would cover it. Now I don’t have to worry about that.

I signed up to be one of the firsts to be moved. Really I only have two things that may break. This blog and gallery. The fix is real simple, so I am not concerned about it. If it breaks at least I know what needs to be done. I’ve also got two other accounts with Dreamhost. One for work and one for Laurel and the CSC. Both of those sites pretty much are static sites only, so I’m not even concerned that they might break. However, the offer of unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space is too hard to pass up… so I signed them up too.

If you’re a Dreamhost customer, just go to https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=billing.accounts& and volunteer to be one of the firsts to be moved and they upgrade your plan to the Unlimited Plan for FREE.

Technorati Tags: dreamhost, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space

Ok, so yesterday someone said they tried to comment on something on my blog but something went wrong. They weren’t exactly sure what happened. My blog has a pretty aggressive spam filter running on it, but usually most legitimate posts will go up immediately. So I thought maybe she had posted a comment, but it went to spam first. So this morning I was going through the spam queue to see if I saw a legitimate post. I didn’t see it, but there was one entry that caught my eye.

I’d say the majority of the spam this blog gets is probably due to that class of pharmaceuticals, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it using BibleGateway as the place to find it. And in case your curious…

Technorati Tags: BibleGateway

Technorati Tags: Cades Cove, Hyatt Lane, HDR, photography

Two gas stations, both located on the UT Strip. There is only about a quarter of a mile of difference between the two. Is it a supply thing? Probably. Is it a demand thing? Probably. Is it a gouging thing? You decide.

Technorati Tags: knoxville gas prices, gas shortage, pilot gas, bp gas

Normally when my gas tank sits in between a quarter and a half tank of gas, I just drive it for a few more days until it gets close to empty and then I fill up. But last night, the news agencies started reporting a gas shortage in Knoxville. They showed people that were waiting 5-6 cars back to get gas. So I got to thinking… I’m going to need gas in a few more days, why not top it off. So this morning, I went to Kroger and topped of my gas tank. The gas price wasn’t much higher than it was the day before. However, now they are reporting gas at over $4.50/gallon and expecting to go over $5.00/gallon before tonight.

So yes, I contributed to the mass hysteria involving gas supply in Knoxville which has caused gas prices to rise today. Truthfully, even though I live just on the edge of the Knoxville/Powell border, it’s not too far to ride a bicycle from. However, the main roads I would have to ride to get to work are not very bicycle friendly. In addition to drivers not being used to bicycles, there is just no shoulder room. Believe it or not, I felt safer riding in the road when I lived off Broadway than any of my current choices. Hopefully more expensive gas will mean fewer cars on the road thus making it safer for bicycles.

On my way home, it seems that the current price is $4.49/gallon. Needless to say, I’m glad I topped of my tank this morning when it was “just” $3.59/gallon.

Technorati Tags: knoxville gas prices, gas shortage, bicycle, bike

Besides owning justinacuff.net and justinacuff.com, a few months ago I also added justinacuffphotography.com to the list of domain names that I own. When I eventually move from the category of hobbyist amateur to professional freelancer, I’ll need to have a site setup. The problem with domain names is that if you don’t secure them now, someone else may do it later and you’ll be left looking for another name. In the mean time, I’ll use it to post a sample photo that was taken recently that I think is pretty good and describe how I got it. I probably won’t go into great detail, but it will be a start. Check it on out. Here’s a sample of the kind of photos you might see on there:

Technorati Tags: justinacuffphotography.com, justinacuff photography

http://www.yearbookyourself.com/

Real Senior Picture	1950	1952
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1996	1998	2000

Tuseday of this week I had gone to Big Ridge State Park to see if I could get a map of the park, ride my bike a bit, and then see if there is anything else worth photographing. I hadn’t really been paying attention to the full moon schedule but as I looked up, the moon looked like it was going to be full in the next few days. I called my up dad to see if he could look up the full moon schedule. If Tuesday would have fallen between the 2 days before or two days after a full moon, I probably would have just gone up then, but alas it was still early. In the past, there were a couple of times some folks would go up to Cumberland Falls from the moonbow, but I had never made it with them.

Since the full moon fell on a Friday, I figured I would plan to go up then. First I asked if any of the other photographers from church wanted to go. Only Anthony F. was able to go. Since I still had room for a couple of people in my car, I sent a message out to the CSC summer list. Calvin was the only one to respond. He probably didn’t know what all was going to be involved. For those that might be reading this and wondering if hiking is involved, there is none. We meet up at Laurel at 5:30 to make the drive. It only takes about 1.5 hours to get there from Knoxville, but since I had never been there, I wanted to get there a little bit early to scope it out.

When we arrived, it wasn’t crowded just yet. We walked around to the different overlooks and took some photographs of the falls. For one of the overlooks, we had to wait because a wedding was going on. After looking at the different overlooks, it appeared that the first main overlook would probably give you the best view. Anthony and I setup our tripods and waited and waited and waited and waited some more. The rangers had said that the moon would probably clear the ridge after 11:00 or so. When the moon clears the ridge, the way it signs down on the mist, it creates the moonbow. The moonbow is pretty faint to the naked eye. Truthfully, its not all that impressive. However, when recorded on camera, you can see amazing detail. People were wowing as I would finish my exposure. I got a few email addresses of people that wanted a copy of my pictures. Unfortunately for them, I’m no longer a photographer that just gives away work. I now sell prints. If the prints make me too much money, then I’ll need to register as a business. I figure I’ll cross that bridge when I get close to that amount. I’ll probably go through them in the next week and really clean them up before I email them address in the gallery.

Moonbows only occur in two places in the world pretty predictably. The other place is at Victoria Falls on the Zambia and Zimbabwe border in Southern Africa. There are some other places it occurs if several conditions are right, but at Cumberland Falls, the main condition that needs to be meet is the full moon. Anyways, I bet right now you want to see the rest of the pictures. I have them posted to my gallery under: http://gallery2.justinacuff.net/v/Misc/Cumberland_Falls_Moonbow_2008-07-18/.

Tips for Photographing the Moonbow

• You need to use a manual camera that has a bulb exposure.
• You need to use a tripod.
• Flash does not work.
• Point and shoot cameras will not work. Really, if you try to take a picture with your point and shoot in the night landscape mode, it’s not going to work. You’re just being rude and blinding everyone else around you. You need a camera that you can do an exposure greater than 30 seconds.
• The exposure on the picture in this post was ISO 200, 4 minutes @f/4.0. Next time I think I will shoot ISO 400, 4 minutes @f/8.0 for a little bit greater depth of field.

Technorati Tags: Cumberland Falls, Moonbow, Big Ridge State Park, Cumberland Falls State Park

So this is the first time in several years that I have been in Knoxville for the 4th of July. This is also the first time in a few years that I haven’t been in Brazil for the 4th. Since my parents are up and I wasn’t sure what the weather was going to do, I just decided to stay home instead of meeting up with some friends at World’s Fair Park for the fireworks. We were treated with quite a display of local fireworks before the ones at World’s Fair Park began.

Unfortunately, pretty much every view around my house is going to involve powerlines. Here’s a sampling of what we could see. All the while, there were fireworks going off behind ya, and to both sides. This is one of those times a full frame camera with a fisheye lens could show just how many fireworks displays were going on at once. All this despite fireworks being illegal in Knox County. They say you can get a $50 fine if caught and a $200 fine if someone is harmed or if property is damaged. Since everybody is doing it, I would assume its too much for cops to go around fining people for shooting fireworks, so just make sure your safe and you should be fine.

This final picture just gives you an idea of what the fireworks display at World’s Fair Park looked like from my house. Not too bad, but if you really want to photograph them, you’re better off getting closer by going to World’s Fair Park.

Here’s the rest of the pictures: Link

Technorati Tags: Fireworks, Illegal Fireworks, July 4th, Knoxville, Knox County, World’s Fair Park

$4.95 x 102 months of service = $504.90
vs
Purchase RCADCM245 in 2000 = $99.00

Well it finally happened. My cable modem bit the dust. It just wouldn’t stay connected. I could be watching something on YouTube, or downloading something and all of a sudden my connection would freeze. This had been happening since last week. I finally got around to calling Knology to confirm that they weren’t doing anything to the data traffic. Once it was confirmed, the reality set in. It was time to replace my cable modem.

The downside of owning your own cable modem is that you have to do all the troubleshooting and are responsible for any repairs or replacement. Seeing that I didn’t have an internet connection it was kind of hard to locate the best deal on a modem so I kind of just settled for what was available. I found a Linksys CM100 for a reasonable price and came home and called Knology up to add it to my account. The new modem is DOCSIS 2.0 so I’m already seeing a little bit faster speed increase. The connection is stable, so that pretty much confirms that it was just the modem biting the dust.

So as long as $4.95*(12+x) is less than $99 + $70 + $cost to replace new modem after x months have past, then it’s still cheaper to buy.

Oh yeah… I’ve now officially been a homeowner for 1 year! Really, just looking for a way to update this blog.

Technorati Tags: cable modem, rca dcm245, linksys cm100, knology, buy, rent