The Homer Fireworks

"Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it."

My friend John and another coworker of mine were helping out with the fireworks show at Miller Aquatics and Health Club, just outside of Homer, on Wednesday. They invited us out to watch, though I didn't think I'd be home from my bike ride in time to make it out to Homer by 9 pm. Fortunately, I was home in time and we decided at the last minute to go.

The show was really well done and we sat very, very close to the launch site, so we had a different perspective than I've ever had for fireworks before. As you can imagine, I brought my camera to try to get some good shots of the fireworks. It took some getting used to, but I think by the end I started to get some good photos.

The End of June

Photo of the Day

Blog

The top searches leading to my blog are largely the same as last month. Here are some of the less frequent, yet funnier searches:

• bicycle bald tire picture
• boys wrestling camel clutch
• female camel clutch hold
• sexy camel clutch
• "farmer blow"
• eighties instrument keyboard worn over the shoulder
• maple syrup drinking contest

Running

I only ran one time at the beginning of the month, and it was enough to injure my right knee (my good knee). I've been struggling with knee pain all month, and that means no running. I swam farther than I ran in June.

I find it very frustrating that every time I work my way into great shape (typically when my 3-mile time drops close to 17:00) I injure myself and wind up losing months worth of training. Grrr.

Month	Distance	# Workouts	Avg per Workout
January	109.34 Mile	10	10.934 Mile
February	55.83 Mile	7	7.97571 Mile
March	108.792 Mile	10	10.8792 Mile
April	74.85 Mile	8	9.35625 Mile
May	64.5669 Mile	9	7.1741 Mile
June	7. Mile	1	7. Mile
Total	420.378 Mile	45	9.34174 Mile

Cycling

Despite my knee pain I haven't given up on cycling. Yet. I still commute to work and I've been averaging one or so training rides per week, but my fitness is fading. Fast. My total distance for the month was a pathetic 209 miles, less than a typical week last summer.

Fortunately, I was able to get in a couple good rides while we were in San Francisco. Cycling in California is always one of the highlights of my year.

June 2009

Bike	Distance	# Rides	Avg per Ride
Bianchi	61.1 Mile	15	4.07333 Mile
Big Red	4.9 Mile	1	4.9 Mile
Pocket Rocket	80.24 Mile	4	20.06 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird	62.97 Mile	3	20.99 Mile
Total	209.21 Mile	23	9.09609 Mile

January - June 2009

Bike	Distance	# Rides	Avg per Ride
Bianchi	354.6 Mile	78	4.54615 Mile
Big Red	12.07 Mile	4	3.0175 Mile
El Fuego	54.42 Mile	7	7.77429 Mile
Pocket Rocket	201.17 Mile	29	6.9369 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird	1090.62 Mile	27	40.3933 Mile
Total	1712.88 Mile	145	11.813 Mile

Swimming

I was swimming pretty well before the knee problem. Then I took a few weeks off. Now I'm getting back into the swing of it. If I can somehow manage to salvage most of my fitness through swimming until this knee thing goes away... it will be a miracle.

Month	Distance	# Workouts	Avg per Workout
January	1.87452 Kilo Meter	3	0.62484 Kilo Meter
February	14.9504 Kilo Meter	6	2.49174 Kilo Meter
March	19.5224 Kilo Meter	7	2.78892 Kilo Meter
April	13.3502 Kilo Meter	6	2.22504 Kilo Meter
May	12.7806 Kilo Meter	7	1.82579 Kilo Meter
June	17.15 Kilo Meter	8	2.14375 Kilo Meter
Total	79.6282 Kilo Meter	37	2.15211 Kilo Meter

The Insect Photography Workshop

Last week was National Pollinator Week. Who knew?

The UIUC entomology department held a number of events, including an insect photography workshop. I thought it would be fun to try something a little different so I walked over to the Pollinatarium yesterday for the workshop. The workshop leader is a UIUC post-doc in entomology who studies ants (my sister-in-law Kim is an entomologist who studies fire ants in Texas). He also photographs insects for text books.

Among his tips were:

1. Know your subject
2. Use your camera's manual settings
3. Simplify the background
4. Place the subject away from the center of the frame
5. Light is important
6. There is no single correct way to take photographs

We tried to keep these points (and more) in mind as we walked around the nearby prairie & forest to practice. It was a lot of fun. Here are a few of my favorites.

You can see more of my insect photos from the workshop here.

The Electric Slide

Fig's been doing the electric slide lately. Fig takes after her/his daddy.

Clearly when the electric slide line dance was introduced I thought it was totally lame. Apparently that's just because I never saw anyone do it right. As my former ASP staff coworker Wyatt (Y-it) showed me in the summer of 1999, you have to exaggerate the motions.

Wyatt (center-right) teaches Rob (center-left) how to get into the electric slide

Kick that leg

It's electric!

The iPhone

The original iPhone was announced at Macworld Expo in January 2007 while Melissa & I were living in Nicaragua. It was amazing, a phone that ran the same beautiful, wonderful operating system as my desktop and laptop computers. The crowd at the Macworld keynote was disappointed the device wouldn't be available until June. No matter, I wouldn't return to the U.S. until August.

I ordered my iPhone in July and had it shipped to my parents' house so it would be waiting for me upon our return. Around the same time I also ordered a new (non-i) phone for Melissa. We arrived at my parents' house on a Sunday evening. The iPhone was there, in all it's glory, but I couldn't actually use it yet. Apparently, because of the way I set up our account with AT&T, I needed to activate Melissa's phone first. This required talking to AT&T customer service, which wasn't open on a Sunday evening.

The disappointment only lasted a few short hours, which was nothing compared to the months of waiting I already endured. I got everything straightened out with AT&T first thing Monday morning and my iPhone was up and running. I loved it.

Two months later, while I was locking up my bike at work, I dropped my padded carrying case about two feet onto the concrete. The phone slid out face down. I was concerned the concrete might scratch the glass. Even worse, the glass cracked. It was still usable, just less beautiful... but not enough to warrant $199 to replace the screen.

In April 2008 the iPhone (and iPod Touch) developer program was announced and I signed up right away. As a software developer I am exited by the prospect of running my own code on my phone/PDA (much as I did with three previous Palm OS devices, and three Windows Mobile devices). At first Apple highly recommended not using your primary phone for development purposes, so I bought a refurbished iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G was unveiled in June 2008 to much fanfare. I didn't really care that much as AT&T still does not offer 3G data service in Champaign-Urbana. I was excited about the built-in GPS and larger storage capacity, but not enough to upgrade. Fortunately, my employer acquired on which I have been able to use. Score. In the meantime I set up my old iPhone for Melissa.

Finally, earlier this month the iPhone 3GS was announced. More storage, better camera, video recording, built-in digital compass. My AT&T contract was nearly up so I qualified for upgrade pricing. It didn't take much convincing for me to order one. It was Fig's Father's Day present for me. It arrived last night and I've been using it all day today.

from left to right: my original iPhone (now used by Melissa), my iPod Touch (used for development), my employer's iPhone 3G (soon to be returned), my new iPhone 3GS

The Cobb Park Crit

Yesterday was the Cobb Park Criterium in Kankakee. This is one of the closest bike races to Champaign-Urbana, so a lot of my Wild Card Cycling teammates participated. Unfortunately, I've been struggling with some knee pain the past two weeks. It finally seems to be getting better, but I definitely didn't want to aggravate it by racing again too soon.

I still wanted to support the team so I went up to watch the category 4 race (the one I would have been riding). We had six guys in that race -- Mark, Q., Chad, Thomas, Luke, and Nick. Earlier in the day Alexi, Scott, and Art rode in the cat 5 race, while Greg & Karl rode in the masters 50+ race. As with many other types of racing I'm much more accustomed to competing than spectating. I always forget how fun it is to watch friends race.

Mark jumps off the front

Chad in is first race with Wild Card

Just think how fast Luke would be without all that extra hair

Q. takes a flyer

Nick looked as cool as a cucumber the entire race

Thomas takes a flyer

Karl and Scott cheer on the team with one lap to go

I took a lot of photos of my friends (some of which can be seen here, or in the video below), as well as some video footage. I mounted my little Flip video camera to the hot shoe of my Canon 50D DSLR and captured video while I was taking pictures.

I planned to quickly throw together the video clips late last night and post it online. I thought it was kind of cool how the sound of my still camera's shutter can be heard clicking in the video so I spliced in some of the still photos around the time they were taken. Once this was in place the video clearly needed a soundtrack, so I added the greatest cycling music from the greatest cycling movie (American Flyers). This took considerably more time. I finally finished around 2 a.m., but it was totally worth it.



If you can watch this without a huge smile on your face you clearly haven't seen American Flyers enough times.

The Worst Ad Campaign. Ever.

Surely I can't be the only one who's horribly offended by this ad campaign for Sherwin Williams paint. "Cover the Earth". With paint. Really?

When I first saw this a few years ago I thought to myself, "Somebody's going to get fired for that...". I assumed it would be quickly retracted and a public apolgy would be issued. Nope, they're still pushing on with it.