Well, it’s taken us a few days (weeks) but we finally got the work bench finished and in place. The total amount of work wasn’t that bad, we just had lots of other things going on.
We finished it up by painting the main body orange and the shelf gray to match the concrete. We then took some metal flashing, primed that and painted it the same gray as well. That finished off the edges and removed of some of the sharp corners while adding a few more. Once those were done we used some silicone to keep them in place. After that was all done it was just a matter of picking up and moving it where we wanted it to go. Then we put some of the stuff for the baby clown fish up and it’s serving its purpose. Stuff includes an air pump, a baby bring shrimp hatchery, and a little cube for raising baby sexy shrimp. No, those aren’t our babies, we’re not in that thread. There’s a nice picture of sexy shrimp (that I didn’t take) in that thread to let you know why it’s of any interest.
Three of our friends (Brahm, Charles, and Julia) decided they wanted to come to con on Sunday. Julia had two passes from her brother so she used one and so did Charles. Brahm had to wait in line. Going back to our normal parking space we nearly ran into Kevin on the way out. Since he was heading back to Phoenix we got to use his parking spot
Walking The Floor
We left Brahm to stand in line for a pass. He tends to run into friends of his when he comes to the con so it sounded about right. Charles and Jess headed off (Charles first time at the con) and Julia and I wandered around. Julia was interested in looking at the art and getting some photos of stuff.
During preview night this statute at the Kid Robot booth was completely blank — I thought they were just running late. Turns out they were decorating it as the con went on. As you can probably tell, the majority of the art is done with chalk.
Right next to the Kid Robot booth were these funny glow-in-the-dark, smoking bunnies. I have no idea what that’s from, but they’re kinda cool. As you can see, the glow-in-the-dark one is pretty pricey.
Julia wanted a picture with The Dark Lord Lord of Darkness from Labyrinth.
The guys at Penny-Arcade were nice enough to sit back for a moment while I took a photo of Gabe’s sketching. No doubt these will show up in an upcoming comic some time soon.
This kid had the highest costume-quality to age ratio in the whole place. I’m pretty sure he didn’t build this thing himself. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even know the people who built it. A terrific suit anyway!
While we were waiting for Julia’s chance to get a photo with Lord Vader (lots of kids to beat up) I took a few shots of the (official?) Leia that was hanging out at the Sideshow Collectables booth.
A life-long nightmare/dream is completed when Julia gets her photo with Vader. For scale, Julia’s about 6 ft. tall with her heels on. The dude was big. He apparently got a little squeezy with her too. It’s good to be the Dark Lord of The Sith!
Wrap-up
So the con was pretty big this year. Apparently ~ 140k people showed up, a bit more were turned away on Saturday because the Convention Center was at capacity. Over all I had a great time and can’t wait until next year. I will get my masquerade photos!
We started out with parking issues and rounded it out with timing issues. Over all the day that was supposed to be the best just ended up being “decent”. We did get some more stuff though, so that’s always fun! No pictures just yet Read the last section to find out why
Beforehand
We started out by showing up at Kevin’s place looking for a parking spot. We found a car (that nobody recognized) already there. Oh boy. So we took another spot and called a tow truck. Wah wah waaaaah. By the time we got back the car was gone. I’m pretty sure we ruined somebody’s day, but it wasn’t mine!
Walking the Floor
Once in the con we wandered around for a while and got some more schwag. Jess picked up a t-shirt at the Penny-Arcade booth. I picked up a more different t-shirt, a poster, some stickers, and a quick sketch from Gabe. w00t!
We wandered past the Gaia Online booth and picked up two wicked posters for $15. We went back to the Chris Sanders booth to see if he would do any sketches. He was pooped and turned us down — no biggie. We bought a sticker anyway for Jess’ car. Apparently he made them to put on his truck and decided to sell them at the con too. Good call!
Stargate Panel
Walking to room 20 we noticed a big commotion near the escalators that let out right in front of the door. Apparently after the Battlestar disaster the security people had figured out they should force people into a line ahead of time. The deal now was that you had to go back downstairs (via the escalator) and run down the floor then go back up some escalators and come back on the right side of the little ribbon barrier. Lame-o.
None the less we did make it to the room with enough time to get seats and enjoy the panel.
The MC was none other than “The Gate Technician”, Gary Jones. He’s the guy that’d yell “Unscheduled activation!” and such on SG-1, and always be slightly out of frame. This guy was a blast.
The first panel was SG-1 only. They had Christopher Judge (Teal’c) and a few writers. Eventually Cliff Simon (Ba’al) showed up as a surprise guest. After a few more minutes Robert Picardo (Richard Woosley) showed up too. This panel wasn’t too bad since Chris got along with everybody and stole a bit of the show from Gary. Of course, since Gary is always slightly out of frame, he took every chance he could to get your attention. Overall it was OK.
After 15 - 20 minutes they changed out to the Atlantis cast: Joe Flanigan (Lt. Colonel John Sheppard), Torri Higginson (Dr. Weir), David Hewlett (Rodney McKay), Rachel Luttrell (Teyla), and Paul McGillion (Dr. Beckett). This group got along well enough. Since they’ve only been together for two seasons on a relatively light show they didn’t seem to get along as well as some other panels did. They were still pretty funny. Overall it was OK.
Break
At this point we got phone reception again and found out that Ash wanted to bail. We took her back to her place, ran a few errands and headed back to the con.
The Floor & The Masquerade
By the time we got back it was a bit after 5pm. We puttered around for a while and ran in to my cousin Ricardo. With him in tow I decided to check out where I’d need to line up for the special photographers section of the masquerade. Looking through the program I discovered that there are special photographer tickets required. Oh snap! I ran as best I could through the crowd to find the desk where such tickets were distributed. Naturally I was hours too late. Damn. So, no masquerade photos this year. teh suxor.
Taking the positive approach: next year I’ll probably have a better lens, and a decent flash with a light softener of some sort — so I should get better photos! Yay good photos!
I did manage to get a few photos of some more Storm/Clone Troopers walking around.
Drunk singing Klingons, a Battle Star Galactica preview, and loads of pretty toys. Friday turned out to be a pretty kick-ass day. There were loads of Storm Troopers out, including their King.
Beforehand
I had decided early last week that I should rent a good zoom lens so I could just carry the camera around without the associated bag. I could shove an extra battery or two and some memory cards in my pockets and be done with it. I wanted the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L but the local camera shop (George’s Camera & Video Exchange) didn’t have it available for rental when I wanted it. Instead I ended up with the Canon 24-105mm f/4 L IS. This lens is pretty awesome. For my neck it’s kind of heavy, so learning that it’s actually lighter than the 24-70mm was a welcome surprise! All the photos below were taken with that lens. I like the range quite a bit and can see why the 24-70mm is so popular. There’s a lens comparison (kit lens vs. this one) at the bottom of this post.
Walking the Floor
Immediately after entering the floor I came across this pair of “drunk” singing Klingons. They were performing for some guy with a video camera, but I snapped a few pics anyway. Oh, and if you couldn’t guess, they were singing in Klingon. Yikes.
I also ran across these two Boba Fett at the same time. They didn’t know each other. There was a third one walking around behind them but I couldn’t get his attention. There are more Star Wars characters around than you could shake a stick at.
Of course there are some really awesome looking Storm/Clone troopers walking around. If I’m lucky they’ll all get together on Saturday pre-Masquerade for some awesome photo shoots. I bet there’s a whole battalion.
Like I said, there’s a lot of Storm/Clone troopers. There are so many that a new sub-trooper, the Elvi-Trooper has emerged. Bask in his bling. Be hypnotized by his gyrating hips. Watch out for his blaster. This guy was a great sport and would do a good hip swing right into whatever camera he was aiming for, to get his pose right. The King of Storm Troopers, how can you go wrong?
Battlestar Galactica Panel
Around 1:45 pm we headed up to ballroom 20 for the panel. We got there to find this massive crowd waiting. Apparently the security people hadn’t put together “giant auditorium = giant crowd = we need a line” and just let people gather in a massive huddle. Whoops. Naturally this created a giant mess and took us about 30 minutes to get in the doors. Once we were in though, there was lots of empty seating. Since the ball room is so big there were quite a few hanging displays of the stage so those of us sitting in the back could still see. This 6 MB panorama isn’t the best, but it gives you a good idea of how many people were hanging out by 1 of 4 doors. Yowza.
We were treated to introductions of the panelists including James Callis (Dr. Baltar), Lucy Laweless (one of the Cylons) and Aaron Douglas (Chief Tyrol) standing in for Mary McDonnel (the President). Of course Edward James Olmos was there too and got a standing ovation. He was the least relaxed of the group but seemed to be having a good time. They showed us the Season 3 teaser that’s been playing on SciFi and then had some questions. Over all it was decent and they let us in on a few secrets for Season 3:
It will be very dark.
There will be nudity. Not the kind you like
Lots of time spent on Cylon ships
Back on The Floor
Once we got back on the floor we did some general perusing. I bought a small sketch book (for $10!) from the guy who drew Lilo & Stitch (Chris Sanders). I plan on scanning a few of the sketches and trying my hand at coloring them. After that coloring panel on Thursday it sounds like fun. Or at least a way to kill time.
We also stopped by the Diesel Sweeties/Dumbrella booth and picked up some stickers. $1 each or 5 for $3! Now our laptops are prettier. Hooray! I need to buy some more since I can still see white on the top of my iBook.
The rest of the time I took photos of toys while Jess hunted down books and t-shirts. She ended up buying a replacement Sandman book and a Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta.
Here are some of the cooler toys I saw.
Lens Comparison
Here are photos taken on two different days, once with the Canon Rebel XT Kit 18-55mm lens. This lens is good enough to start out with, but it’s kind of slow (f/3.5-5.6) and doesn’t have the nice USM focusing motor. Here are photos taken under identical lighting with the two lenses at roughly the same settings (ISO 1600, roughly f/4, etc.) I adjusted the white balance and tint in these images to be the same. Maybe somebody with more sophisticated eyes than my own can pick out the difference.
We started out the day by picking up Ash and engineering a garage door opener. More about that later. Jess and I headed for the Coloring for Comics Q&A while Ash wandered around and did her thing. Of course, I took photos along the way.
Beforehand
Ash’s ex (Kevin) has a place just 3 blocks from the convention center. Since he lives in AZ right now it means we can park in his space and walk. Awesome. Of course his parking space is in an underground garage with a gate. We had a garage opener, but lost two of the jumpers while trying to get it together. The resulting, working clicker, is what you see here. Notice the extensive use of the latest in Bobby Pin technology.
Floor Walking
Once we got inside we headed straight for the end of the DC/USPS First Day Stamp Issue. We did this because Jess/Ash’s grandma has a stamp thing and there were going to be some con exclusives. We missed it By the time we got inside they had moved on to DC Nation, which we didn’t stick around for. That gave us about an hour until the Coloring panel, so we wandered the floor.
Back in “Toy Hell” I found this giant statue of Sagat from Street Fighter fame. Quite intimidating.
I managed to find a few more Star Wars characters walking around near the San Diego Star Wars Society booth. I got lined up to take a photo of C3-PO there when some kid got in the way. And stayed in the way. Eventually he started oogling C3-PO who had been standing very still, when he twitched! The kid yelped and ran away, clearing me for the shot. I lub Star Wars fans.
Coloring Panel
Our time was up and we headed up stairs to the Coloring for Comics Q&A. This was a great chance to listen to some of the best (or at least, best paid) colorists talk about how they do what they do. The panel was great since everybody got a long and was really light hearted. A few of the questions were very technical in nature and the artists kind of brushed over them. The point they were driving home was that Good Art Skills + Photoshop = Great Art. The questions were along the lines of “How do I use Photoshop to create good art?” and the answers were along the lines of “It’s just another kind of brush!”
Anyway, it was fun to laugh at everybody and sit in some comfy chairs. Eventually our butts fell asleep and we got up to walk the floor some more.
More Floor Walking
Apparently Maddox got to show up because of some comic he made. About him as a pirate. So of course he dressed up like a king. What a douche bag.
Quite a few of us found this Wonder Woman wandering around at the same time and gang photo’d her. She was nice enough to turn and smile for each photographer and let me pop off a few shots before moving on. Awesome.
Finally we headed out to the Sideshow Collectibles booth where there were some awesome sculptures. I took a ton of photos of the most awesome bits, here they are.
It’s that time of year again: Comic Con International has arrived! w00t! Jessica, Ash (Jess’ sister) and I headed down Wednesday night for two purposes. Primarily: beat the crowds and pick up our four-day badges. Secondarily: get a “sneak peak” at what all the booths will look like and where they are. Also of interest is the program guide, good for circling.
First things first — we took a taxi from Ash’s house in Little Italy. $8, awesome. That dropped us into a huge line. Walking down that line we figured out it was the volunteer line. That’s “people begging for free passes” to you and me. After getting past that line we found an even LONGER line of pre-registered people that wanted to pick up their badges. Awesomely, this line moved in really big sections so time from line to badge was only 12 minutes. That’s a short line for the con. Once we got inside it was photo time!
First up were these three Star Wars hooligans: two clone troopers and one Darth Vader. Pretty sweet.
Having the 50mm prime on I couldn’t get wide enough out to catch them in one photo.
I learned my lesson pretty quickly and stuck with the kit lens: 18-55mm. It’s not the best lens in the world, but these photos have turned out pretty well!
This larger-than-life Batman is made entirely out of Legos!
I found this guy handing out stuff, he mugged well for the camera.
And this guy was just walking around. He was nice enough to stop so I could get a good photo!
Because there’s a Transformers movie coming out soon, and a line of new plastic toys all the time, there was a giant Optimus Prime to draw the people in like flies.
There was a giant rotating Boba Fette. Everybody else was taking photos on the wrong side of him with lights causing huge lens flares. I chose a different point and waited for him to rotate around to me.
I found this awesome Robby the Robot (from Lost in Space) hiding near some of the toy booths. It was pretty hard to get a good angle with a not-too-busy background so I had some fun in Photoshop.
Space Jesus loves us all. I think.
I plan to ask the nice people at this toy booth if I can have the Cactus Kitten sign when the con is over. Maybe they won’t want to take it back home.
Julia, if you’ve got some money to blow there’s some freakin’ sweet Cheshire cat sculptures for sale. They both pretty big — maybe one foot long.
You may recognize this guy from Kingdom Hearts. This is so far the best lit display I found.
I didn’t catch what this robot/gundam was for exactly, but it looked pretty menacing.
This World of Warcraft sculpture had to be one of the worst I saw all night. Being able to see seams is bad news. Yuck.
Batman hiding out on a clock tower near the DC booth.
And finally Spiderman hanging out (hah hah) near the Marvel booth.
Well, that’s all the photos I took Wednesday night. By the time I found Jess & Ash again we had about 20 minutes to clear out. Taking our cue we headed outside and hailed a cab to take us away.
I’ll have more photos and a better report Thursday evening sometime. w00t! CONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!eleven!
We met Jake at the Shores around 8:30pm with our shiny new dry suits in the car. After some fun with the gear we headed out into water. First impression: the squeeze feels “interesting”. Second impression: OMG the water is warm! No hoods & no gloves!
We swam out in to a whopping 8 feet of water to get our weighting adjusted. Since Jess’ fleece fit pretty well she got to drop 2 pounds. Since mine are a size too large (on purpose, but apparently not required) I got to add 3 (I’ll round up to 4). We played around for a while with empty BC’s and got used to the dry suits, a bit. I over-inflated my suit on purpose and then pointed head down forcing all the air into my feet — my fins almost popped off! Jess found some pipe fish and was suitably impressed. I found a rather large somekinda fish.
After ten minutes of playing around we headed out for the canyon for a “real dive”. The water was still calm and quite warm on the surface. On the way down we could see a thermocline coming as the water dropped about 10 degrees. 60° F is still at least 10° F warmer than we’re used to at these depths. Heck, Jake was wearing a 5mm!
Just under the thermocline was a large school of juvenile somekind of rockfish. The usual critters were out including two octopus and one really big bat ray. Naturally that’s when the vis shot down to 0 ft. — it was worth it.
With all the new stuff that was going on with our dry suits Jess and I both got very narced/disoriented. It wasn’t entirely pleasant, but nobody drowned. These suits are going to force us to learn to dive all over again — a worthy endeavor. I had some buoyancy problems and so did Jess. This is stuff that’ll get sorted out pretty shortly.
The best part, of course, was taking off the suit and being dry and in pajamas. omgponies it was AWESOME. I was a bit more impressed than Jess. She managed to do something to one of her wrist seals that made a whole hand go numb. Yikes. Maybe she’ll figure out how to do that with her neck seal next time
Last week Pudge & Butters laid down a smallish clutch of eggs. This morning at about 4:45 AM the first few swam into the light column created by a mini-maglite attached to the tank. It took us better than 2 hours to collect all the larvae (a few dozen). Since they’re only 1-2mm long and can move really fast I don’t have any photos. Let’s just say they’re awesome.
In the mean time their off to David M’s house to be raised on a fat diet of rotifers. Hopefully they’ll make it. In the mean time we’ll be building up our own little breeding system on the workbench. That’s another thing that makes the workbench so sturdy, err, awesome: we can attach stuff we build onto the back!
After watching Bre put together a pretty sweet looking workbench in a few minutes, we decided to finally get industrious and do it ourselves.
We started off with one slight modification to Bre’s plan: no overhang. We had our reasons for this but I’ll get to that later. We started out with the top on the floor and screwed the supports around the edge of the plywood. We then moved on to the legs. Since the legs are 2×4’s I decided to use a triangle of screws in each leg. That seemed like a relatively smooth move. Since we didn’t want the overhang we had to get an extra 2×4. The extra 2×4 meant that we could put two supports in the middle of the work surface. That made it even sturdier. If there’s one thing we value, it ruggedness. By the time we got the shelf supports in, it was even tougher.
The next move was to get the lengthwise support for the shelf going. That made the whole thing even tougher and less wobbly. Yup, it looks pretty awesome — almost like a real workbench. It even sounds good when you thump on the top of it. It sounds… sturdy. Already it could handle a gargantuan load. Awesome. I mean, look at guy! We’re not even done yet and he could dance the macarena on it!
By the time we got the bottom shelf put together it looked like a real workbench. The only problem was that shelf. It did not inspire confidence. The heaviest thing we’d want to put on that would be a bucket of paint — I don’t think it could have handled it. We’ll take care of that later, after some more awesomeness is put on it.
AWESOMENSS! That’s right ladies and germs — self-levelling concrete with “charcoal” color mixed in. We couldn’t find a concrete paddle at Home Despot so we had to go with a “mud mixer” — it got all but the largest, and smallest lumps out. What it missed, our fingers took care of.
Since it’s not every day you get to sign a work bench, well, yeah. The kitty helped too. Begrudgingly.
A few hours and some Mexican food later the concrete was firm enough that we could break down the dams. Jess started priming the whole thing and that’s where we are. Tomorrow (Monday) night we’ll paint it and try putting it in place. Hopefully it’ll still fit.
Friday night I got the idea that stitching together loads of photos to make a panorama would be a blast. I was pretty sure there were a few places in Coronado that would make terrific vantage points. We ended up picking Centennial Park as a good location.
Tripod in hand we set up shop and started panning and snapping away. Having read some time back that there should be about 30% overlap to make aligning easier, I ended up taking only a few photos. Jess suggested a switch to portrait orientation to get some of the water reflections included. A portrait orientation panorama from the convention center to the USS midway using the 100mm lens required 17 photos.
By the time we got back home and I’d loaded all the photos into Photoshop’s Photostitch script, a problem appeared. The sky kept changing colors, creating awful bands across the photo where the seams were. This clearly wasn’t going to work. Reviewing the photos illuminated us to the problem: different exposure settings! I had set the camera to manual focus, natch, but had put it in Av (aperture value) mode! Thinking the lighting would be equal enough since it was a clear day, I didn’t notice when the exposure times changed: from 1/20s to 1/45s. This changed things dramatically. Since you can’t really fix that in RAW post-production we had to reformulate our plan.
Later that night we headed back out to find a clear sky between Coronado and downtown San Diego. Perfect! After tweaking the settings a bit we arrived at: 2 seconds @ f/2.8 on ISO 200. Awesome. In the LCD reviews the photos looked awesome — the camera was catching much more information than our eyes were. I made another pass with a 4 second exposure to satisfy Jess’ curiosity and then we packed up and went home.
This morning I loaded the photos again and found — the same banding. What was left? Finally it occurred to me: Auto White Balance! Since I’d absentmindedly left the camera in AWB the color tint would be different from frame to frame. Loading all the images into CS2’s RAW importer I fixed this by setting them all to ‘Tungsten’, which was pretty good. Running these through Photostitch, now corrected, revealed: more banding. 8O
After reading a few tutorials online I concluded that my photos were OK, it was Photoshop that was being a punk. A bit more research led me to DoubleTake, which had some good reviews. After some dragging, dropping, and clicking (it couldn’t figure out to auto-rotate the portrait orientation photos) I had a decent looking panorama. All I had to do was tweak some of the overlaps by widening some, shifting others, and bingo!
There are two versions available. Both have the DoubleTake watermark on them because I didn’t pay for the software yet. If I end up doing this again, I probably will. I’ll be emailing Henrik soon enough.
UPDATED: Files don’t have watermarks now, since I paid for DoubleTake.
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We finished it up by painting the main body orange and the shelf gray to match the concrete. We then took some metal flashing, primed that and painted it the same gray as well. That finished off the edges and removed of some of the sharp corners while adding a few more. Once those were done we used some silicone to keep them in place. After that was all done it was just a matter of picking up and moving it where we wanted it to go.
Then we put some of the stuff for the baby clown fish up and it’s serving its purpose. Stuff includes an air pump, a baby bring shrimp hatchery, and a little cube for raising baby sexy shrimp. No, those aren’t our babies, we’re not in that thread. There’s a nice picture of sexy shrimp (that I didn’t take) in that thread to let you know why it’s of any interest.
Read the last section to find out why 
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