ionosphere

Archive for the ‘Tech Business’ Category

This video is directly from YouTube. Sure it’s been around for a while but… is it a concern that during those years in the White House… Oh jeez — I meant to hit that other button. Other versions of this exist on YouTube and a simple search can locate them.

This is what I do to rest my eyes when I take a break from painting. I hope to finish my painting this weekend and maybe go somewhere that we can draw on the spot or paint. I think that I should have number of them going at once. 

I suppose I ought to get back to my Watercolor image now. Wash is dry.

WPaudio WordPress Player has been put to use here — hear?

In my article “About “ionos­phere” and Bill Beauchamp” I gave my background and explained why the name ionos­phere is being used for my website and now my blog. I’d recorded some HF Radio stuff while living in my apartment prior to getting married and moving here to Pennsylvania. I’d saved digital .wav files and just converted them so that they could be used on my site. With the exception of a missing on-screen volume control, I’m very happy with the addition. You’ll find the audio files at the bottom of the page linked above.

If you have a WordPress blog I think that you’d also find Todd Iceton’s program very useful. The current WPaudio WordPress MP3 Player version is 2.2.0 and can be downloaded by following the link provided or found at WordPress.org’s website.

I put a couple players on the other page and I’ll drop another one here. This was recorded (captured) using the Japan Radio NRD-545 DSP Shortwave Receiver and saving directly to the hard drive.

Last Wednesday evening my Olympus Camera was returned to me from DigiTech Camera Repair in Monrovia, California. This digital camera had been down for a long time but I had it under a stack of papers next to the drawing board here in the basement. I’d taken good care of it and had picked it up maybe a month and a half ago thinking that it was a pity that it didn’t work as it was in excellent condition physi­cally. It had performed well through it’s warranty period and even through an extended 3 year warranty with Mack Camera. I just couldn’t bring myself to tossing it in the trash. Have you seen that show called “Hoarders” on the Discovery Channel? I’m not quite that bad but I guess I do possess some of those traits…

It was during our trip to Cape May that the camera that I’d bought as a replacement to my original clicked to a sudden halt with a broken shutter. (same type) because I’d purchased all the acces­sories initially. The camera had been purchased to allow me to continue shooting for my graphic design work and illus­tration after the first Olympus E-20N stopped working abruptly with the addition of a couple 2 gigabyte Compact Flash Cards. It just stopped cold. Until I got the info from DigiTech I had no idea why…

I should preface this by saying that multiple attempts were made to get the Olympus fixed by the people who made it. No dice. Not even an answer.

Suddenly dead in the water and knowing that the older rather beat up Olympus wasn’t worth repairing… I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. I certainly am not in a position where I can go out and choose the camera of my dreams right now… and I was pretty much out of luck. I looked over Olympus’ site again and see them clearly state that they no longer support the camera. So I started looking online. Remembering that this used replacement was also found online — I hesitantly searched for someone that might be able to look at my camera. I didn’t really have much hope of it actually being repaired — but I wondered. The cost of a new digital SLR is out of reach right now and with family events approaching — I needed a solution. Google Search was my answer.

One shop was apolo­getic saying that Olympus doesn’t have any info available on the camera any longer and they couldn’t even get parts. Some didn’t answer my query at all. DigiTech Camera Repair got back to me quickly with a more than fair price, so off it went for service. The used camera must have had something very inter­esting happen to it. It has a fine chalky material in all of it’s seams and believe it or not — even inside the lens. I’m not really sure how someone goes about ripping the rubber grip off the camera body? — They did here. Let it suffice to say that I’m glad I wasn’t there. Lens shown below.

When I saw an email titled “Olympus E-20N” from DigiTech I winced a little. Expecting the worst, I opened it and was pleas­antly surprised…

John had dropped me a note to let me know that my camera was ready. Not only was it ready but he had done the work more quickly than I’d expected. Most impor­tantly John held to his estimate. Exactly. So with his work, John let me have a camera to use again and in the process converted a couple of pounds of scrap metal into a contributing member of society. I immedi­ately set about testing using my family as subjects and those shots are shown below and above.

The problem with the camera was that the electrical circuitry was shot. John repaired that and then noticed that the camera couldn’t recognize a memory card. So it seems as if the memory cards that I intro­duced were the downfall of the camera. They shorted out the card writing circuitry and in turn the main circuit as well. I use one of those big honker Lithium Polymer LIPO batteries that sits where a power drive film advancement system would have been on a tradi­tional film camera. So I don’t have tons of megapixels to spare but I’ll get my shot and it will work fine for me without running out of memory or battery power. I appre­ciate John’s work and there are links to DigiTech in this article and in the side widget area. My images follow.  There you go… a happy ending for a change.

Good to go… Thanks John !!!

Got an excellent bit of news by email on Saturday afternoon

My digital camera that died/fried several years back is coming home.  It went to California and a week later here it comes. Very reasonable price and a fast turnaround. The power circuit and the card writing circuitry were blown. The fellow who did the work was in Monrovia, California and I’d guess that I’ll have the camera back later this week. I’m surely thrilled by this turn of events and I’ll post links to the guy’s business as soon as I have the device in my hands and see it working again for myself.  I didn’t think that it was going to be good news when I saw that note — but I was very pleas­antly surprised.

I’ll let you know how it goes and graph­i­cally demon­strate the results. Been without an SLR since Cape May and I miss it. Which also reminds me that I should post a gallery of Cape May Victorians so that the “replacement” camera can have death with dignity.

I am a subscriber to a Desktop Publishing Newsletter at About​.Com that is written by Jacci Howard Bear. Today’s article discussed a recent article by Smashing Magazine about Instant Gratification literally killing Good Design. That shouldn’t be a big surprise.

While I don’t think that anything will change, there are some inter­esting thoughts for us graphics people and it was worth going to the link at Smashing Magazine. I’d also suggest that the Desktop Publishing Newsletter has some very solid ideas — so sign up. 

If you have time that is…

Yes. The Olympus E-20N that I bought back years ago in New Jersey has been sent for resurrection.

It stopped working several years ago — just as I upgraded to bigger and better Compact Flash Memory cards. There I was already to go shooting with absolutely no worry of  running out of storage space while shooting and damn if the camera didn’t just go to sleep on me. Matters were made worse when I wrote to Olympus USA on Long Island and didn’t even get a response as to where I could take my now out of warranty camera for service. So I went searching and found a company in California that I will certainly talk up a lot if they can just get my original digital working again.

The shot above was one of the last sessions with the Olympus prior to it freezing up.

In the interim period I purchased a used and rather beat up E-20N from a well known online retailer. It was sold as being in “mint” condition. It was functional but somehow the rubber padding on the camera that covered the body where you held it — had been ripped away and replaced with a black rubber or asphalt-like material that I’d swear was “coaxseal” — something that I used to keep moisture out of my connectors and junctions in coaxial cable commu­ni­ca­tions settings. Each time that I went shooting — the gunk would come off on my hands and small pieces of it would fall onto my shirts and mark them. Others using the camera also noticed the same thing as when they used it they would also have to wipe their hands clean afterward. Apparently the vendor’s idea of mint condition meant covered with gum?

When Sue and I were down in Cape May, NJ earlier this month I shot dawn coming through the window and the beautiful golden light went immedi­ately to black on my second shot that morning. It was the click of death for that shutter and you could no longer even look through the viewfinder. It was just black. So — since that was the second camera with such intense body coating trouble… I decided to see if there was anyone out there who felt that they could take on the challenge of repairing a digital camera that Olympus themselves no longer support in any way. It arrived in California last Friday morning and the fellow doing the work notified me by email that he’d received it and would let me know when the repair was complete.

I hope that Olympus America knows that they are building ill will by not even giving a repeat buyer so much as a simple answer about repair. I was thrilled back when I bought this camera and it’s acces­sories and just so sad when it ceased to exist. I took very good care of the equipment and never intro­duced it to a hard shock of any sort — extreme temper­a­tures of hot or cold… and I never got it wet. Failure of the camera was purely an internal wear issue and quite likely electrical in nature rather than a mechanical problem. When it comes back I’ll let you all know what it cost, who did the work, and just what the problem seemed to be.

I can’t wait for it’s return. Many images to make. Reference to gather. Time exposures to make… ya know?

Change is inevitable — so I’m changing this page layout

Just set up a new fixed width blog with what I hope will be easier to read text. All of my widgets and images in the main column will be out of whack for a while but it all will be lots better once I get it organized.  I used the latest version of Artisteer to mess with the theme and it worked out pretty well.

I had this blog design finished last month but Sue and I spent a long weekend down in Cape May and Passover then Easter came into play as well. Really nice here again today with temper­a­tures in the 80s but we are cooling off tonight and expect a line of strong thunder­storms before that happens. It has just been one extreme after another all winter long right into early Spring. I wrote a couple of long entries here about specific storms we’d had and sure enough the next week another would come along that was bigger and badder than the one that preceded it. All photog­raphy is currently offline. I took a shot at sunrise looking over the ocean from our deck and it was a fatal digital click that was heard in Cape May. I was fortunate enough to have captured a number of spectacular Victorians the day before though.

Is everyone aware that Cape May surely seems to be haunted? We were taking some shots at one of the old Hotels when a piece of siding hit the sidewalk a couple of feet away. With so many Nor’easters coming through over the past couple months — slightly hard to imagine that on this gust free, almost totally still day that a piece of siding just happened to coinci­den­tally float by…  Some pictures to follow later on.

Sue and I drew pictures of Cape May Lighthouse from various angles. Unfortunately the museum and light­house itself was closed due to the off-season. Tree damage around the parking area there showed that they had the same nasty winds that we’d had recently. Never seen so many broken limbs in my life.

B