As hurricane Wilma rips across southern Florida, my little house in Duluth is reaping the rewards of not being in southern Florida. It’s a beautiful morning. The temperature is hovering around 45, the sun is just coming up, and there’s a very nice breeze kicking things around outside and fascinating my cats, who apparently like the cooler temps as much as I do.

The younger of the two (“Boo”) has been busy expressing her joy over the last few days by barfing all over the house. I’m so glad I cleaned the carpets last week. Guess I’ll get to do it again tonight.

I set out to film a high school football team last Friday night, the result of an invitation by a parent of one of the players at Brookwood HS who is also the parent of a player at Furman. She convinced the Brookwood booster club to pay me to take pictures of the seniors on the team (it was “Senior Night”), and also asked me to stick around and shoot the rest of the game with an eye towards selling “action” shots to parents of players who wanted them.

I was a bit leery of doing this – particularly if up-front money was involved – because I’ve historically had very bad luck shooting this team. This is in part due to the fact that – like most high school teams – they play at night, which makes “action” shooting pretty difficult. High school stadiums are rarely equipped with the kind of lighting that I’ve gotten used to shooting night games at colleges; and the addition of a commercial grade flash, while helpful, hasn’t done the trick for me on the few previous times I’ve shot this team. They also wear dark uniforms, which doesn’t help things at all.

So we negotiated a ridiculously low price ($100) for the “posed” senior pictures – which would take place on the 50-yard line before the game in relatively good light – and then I got a player roster with indications of which parents would be most likely to want action shots. I told my contact that I’d make the pictures available on a best-effort basis, and that I reserved the right to tell hopeful parents that I just didn’t get anything good enough to print.

Fantastically, I got to see first-hand how much I’ve improved since the last time I attempted to shoot a high school game. I actually managed to get a good number of decent shots and setup a website yesterday with thumbnails and ordering information for parents who are interested.

Now, as they say, I can sit back and watch the money roll in.

On Saturday, I drove up to Greenville and shot the Furman vs. Elon game, flushed with excitement about my chances because of the successful Friday-night game and because my pictures from last week (at The Citadel) were among the best I’ve ever taken.

On the positive side, Furman clicked on all cylinders and blew Elon off the field (45-6)…meaning that they’re good. On the negative side, Furman clicked on all cylinders and blew Elon off the field (45-6)…meaning that I was pretty much bored silly and took some absolutely terrible pictures. Early in the second half, the reserve players started coming into the game, so I spent a lot of the afternoon shooting them – I’d gotten a request from one of their parents to do so a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t spent a great deal of time seeing what I got, but I’m hoping that the parental enthusiasm over seeing little Jimmy get to play will overshadow the fact that my pictures of little Jimmy are blurred, poorly-framed, and lack any type of excitement.

I’ve almost finished painting my office (a spare bedroom), and – while it isn’t exactly what I had in mind – I think it’s going to look extremely cool. I’d intended to paint the wall around my fireplace with a deep maroon color. My furniture is black leather, my fireplace is black, and most of my throws and pillows are maroon…so I figured a maroon accent wall would work out well.

At the last minute last week, I decided to paint my office maroon instead – sort of a formal, studious color, right? So I took the gallon of paint that I’d purchased for the accent wall, got two more of the same color, and started in on the office.

It ain’t maroon. It’s bright red. At least it was after the first coat was applied. The second coat darkened it somewhat, but it’s still more red than maroon. The third coat verified the fact that I’m going to have a red office. But I think it’s going to look very nice once I paint the ceiling and trim (white). Then it’s back to the Home Depot to find some MAROON paint for the accent wall around the fireplace.

I’ll be spending a lot of time cleaning, painting, and eating beans this week. And enjoying the cool weather, of course.

Gas prices this week, incidentally, are hovering around $2.65. Too expensive. Why can’t manufacturers REALLY start to explore hybrid technology?

Later, all.

TWD

As Hurricane Tammy bears down on the southeast, I feel kind of like I’m caught up in a little hurricane of my own.

Actually, the hurricane is supposed to be right around Greenville at game time this Saturday, which should be interesting. A friend of mine from work was thinking about coming to a game this year and taking some pictures. She went to Stephen F. Austin (in Texas), a team that’s played us one time – and knocked us out of the playoffs in 1989 in a snowstorm. My friend’s name is Tammy. We came to a decision that this weekend ain’t gonna be the one that she goes to Greenville. Hurricanes, snowstorms, Tammy, Stephen F. Austin, losing big games….the karma just isn’t there, dudes…

At any rate, my little storms at work finally got the best of me yesterday, and I was forced to send an email out to a number of people and say, “I don’t know what you all want me to do. Please use little words and tell me.”

I was totally serious. Two days ago, I found myself on a conference call promising to have something done on November 27th. After the call, I had to ask a co-worker what it was that I’d promised to do.

BEI currently has a number of different important (read “company-saving”) initiatives going on:

• IPTV – interactive television sent over extremely high-speed DSL connections)
• HSDA (aka WBB) – Wireless high-speed internet access
• CyberCSR – A web-based ordering/billing system for our current customers.
• ITC 5.503 – An upgraded to our primary customer-service software
• UDM (Universal Domain Migration) – bringing BEI’s networking structure into the larger corporate system
• BEIWEB – A complete overhaul of our affiliate intranet/reporting systems.

While all of these things are wonderful from a staying-in-business standpoint, our president has decided that we should be able to accomplish them all without benefit of any increase in headcount. We currently have two UNIX administrators and one Windows administrator (that’d be me). The UNIX people are sort of overwhelmed with their contributions to ITC 5.503 – you can imagine how I’m faring, having to deal with ALL of the projects at once. I’ve become sort of a deer caught in the headlights.

Take this morning, for example. My part of the ITC upgrade is to upgrade a system called “Compass” – the Windows front-end to the ITC back-end. I wasn’t aware that I needed to do ANYTHING until two days ago, when I was informed at about 7:00 AM that I needed to have the “test corp” updated that day. I scrambled around, found out what software needed to be installed, and installed it. Then I let a UNIX guy on to the box to tweak the database settings – bam. Box crashed. Operating system corrupted.

So the upgrade became a complete rebuild. I’ve rebuilt the box. I’ve installed all of the necessary application software. I’ve engaged developers and experts in Trinidad and California. As of 10 minutes ago, users still couldn’t use the application and nobody knows why. Since this is an application-based problem, I have know idea what the problem is (and, to be honest, that’s not my job anyway). However, because I’m the only Windows admin, I’m the one getting the calls from users…and all I can do is say, “We’re working on it,” before sending ever-more frantic voicemails to Trinidad and California.

The IPTV project, while being VERY cool, is an absolute monster. I’m supposed to have 138 servers delivered tomorrow. All will have to be unboxed, racked, have an operating system installed, and be individually configured to do the job that they’re supposed to do. I’m dearly hoping that we’ll get some help from our corporate brethren on this one, but I’m not actually counting on it.

CyberCSR has been going on for over a year and involves fighting with our corporate internet centers in Birmingham and Charlotte – people who, quite frankly, are so interested in taking over our infrastructure completely that they’re setting up “security rules” that could only be complied with by asking customers to give us their first-born before we allow them to access their bill.

What’s just super-terrible is that all of these projects are inter-related and dependent on each other. IPTV can’t go into effect unless people can sign up online, which needs CyberCSR. CyberCSR can’t function unless the billing software is updated to ITC 5.503. IPTV also depends upon our technicians having access to Wireless Broadband (WBB). We can neither sell this stuff nor work on it unless our reporting system (BEIWEB) is operational – and I can’t complete UDM because BEIWEB is having a problem operating in the corporate network.

One of the UNIX admins, being a very helpful lady, has taken the initiative of “helping me” by ordering Windows servers – but she doesn’t always keep me informed of what servers she’s ordered – I might make the mistake of assuming that she’s taken care of something, only to find out the day before I’m supposed to have it operational that the server hasn’t even been spec’d out, much less ordered. It’s sort of freaking me out.

So today, I’ve got a user screaming at me because Compass isn’t working yet, but I need to go to a meeting downtown for UDM-related stuff.

There are times when I hate my job.

The November 27th thing? That’s when I promised that I’d have CyberCSR working, apparently.

But hey, I took a really cool picture a few days ago. This is my cat, Bo. I set the shutter speed to half a second and zoomed in on him while I was making the exposure. I like the “saintly” effect that it created. Looks like a radial blur out of Photoshop, but this came straight out of the camera.

Later, y’all.

Where’d September go? All I remember is sitting in traffic.

And football. Always football. My college team has continued to limp along since being crushed a few weeks ago in the second week of the season. They coasted to an easy win against Samford in week three, won in double-overtime vs. Hostra two weeks ago, and were in the process of destroying a vastly-outmanned Gardner-Webb squad last weekend before most of the starters left the game in the second quarter. The game ended up with Furman on top, 48-31 and featured something like 1,000 yards total offense (both teams).

Our defense continues to be suspect, and the game next week – against a very good Appalachian State team – will probably answer a lot of questions about Furman’s chances to live up to their pre-season #1 rankings.

The worst part about a blow-out win like last weekend’s is that it’s tough for me to take the right pictures. The radio crew at the games selects three “Players-of-the-Game” – offense, defense, and special teams. As part of my sponsorship deal, I’m supposed to provide them with a decent photo of each of those players, which is enlarged to a life-sized portrait to be used on banners which hang in the athletic offices.

Must admit that it’s a serious ego stroke to walk down the hall there and see a string of banners made with my pictures stretching back over the last couple of years, but this is the first year that I’ve actually been contractually obligated to get those pictures. Because the players of the game aren’t chosen by the crew until very late in the game – sometimes after the game is over – I’ve usually just got to hope that the chosen players have been on the field and visible enough so that I manage to catch their images during the course of shooting the game. In a game like last weekend’s, that becomes a tall order because there are so many different faces on the field. I got lucky in one respect because I was informed late in the fourth quarter that the special team player was going to be the long-snapper (the guy who snaps the ball for punts, field goal attempts, and point-after-touchdown attempts. About thirty seconds after I learned that, Furman scored and I was able to shoot the long-snapper on the PAT. If I hadn’t been told in advance, there’s no way I would’ve taken the kid’s picture.

I also managed to snag a couple of useable shots of the offensive player, but it appears that I completely dropped the ball on the defensive player – so I’ll be digging through the photos from the last two home games today to see if I can find one of this kid – isolated enough so that nobody will know that it wasn’t from this game. Not a huge deal, but when you consider that I take 600-700 pictures per game, it becomes a time-consuming task.

I handed a couple of my cameras off to “assistants” this past weekend. It’s interesting to see what other people manage to shoot, but it also gave me about 300 extra pictures to wade through. I was trying to put up a slideshow yesterday, and really sort of lost interest after about an hour of staring at photos. One guy spent a lot of time photographing his friends, his daughters, the crowd, people on the sideline…I did manage to use a couple of his shots, but it was basically a yawn-fest. Sort of like watching your neighbor’s home movies.

I managed to get a few decent shots, too. The second-string quarterback made my day with this shot.

My favorite shot this year (actually, my favorite shot of all time) was taken last week, however. It happened after the game when a guy I know from my website let his kid try to kick an extra point. I got down on my stomach directly in front of the kid and snapped the following – and nearly wet myself when I saw what I’d gotten. This is the type of shot that makes the whole idea of sports shooting appealing. You can’t really see how good this is at this size, but it’s going to make a great poster for me.

Listening to the internet broadcast of the last game at the moment – I’m on the radio! Woohoo! Man I’m a geek. In my defense, I was taken by surprise. I was wandering around in the endzone and I yelled over to the sideline reporter to ask him if the radio guys had picked their players yet. He told me no and then shoved a microphone in my face and started asking me questions about the players of the game that are selected by my website (I award “The Unofficial Player of the Game” each week).

Went skating with a friend late last week and managed to completely wear him out. It was kind of cool because he’s a big hiker-type guy and I figured I’d be vomitting by the time we’d finished. It worked out the other way – he was heaving after about 10 miles and had to quit. I continued on for another 10 miles or so.

Had to rotate the wheels on my skates a few weeks ago – I’d completely worn away the inside edge on the leading wheels. I’ve been paranoid ever since that my wheels are going to fall off when I’m tearing down a hill or something. Hasn’t happened yet. Knock on wood.

Well, I’ve completely wasted a morning between checking emails and looking at backups from the weekend (yeah – I actually am getting some work done). Hope everyone has a fun week and doesn’t get hit by a hurricane or anything.