Looking for good camera deals

I am no hardcore professional photographer. But shooting better images has always sparked my interest being in the web design and development industry as most of time we buy stock photography from places like iStockPhoto, Corbis and Getty and others for many of the websites we make. After some time, you get used to looking at very good photos and bad photos. And getting good photos is starting to be like a hobby as I try to learn how to do this and I totally have no photography background.

I currently have a Nikon D50 which is like the cheapest camera out there that can take decent photographer quality photos, although I know there are way better cameras out there, but since I am starting out, I guess the Nikon D50 is a nice one to start with in my novice photography self-exploration.

But now, I need all these other accessories and other stuff to make things a lot more perfect. So far Optics Planet seems to be the right place for all my camera needs. Cameras, lenses, even telescopes and camera binoculars. They have a lot of night vision cameras, scopes, goggles and binoculars too. I guess anything with lens on it. Optics Planet seems to be a good place to start shopping.

Orion Meteor Shower

I heard over the radio that this weekend is the Orion meteor shower. These meteor showers happen once a year and usually are named after the constellation where it occurs. These meteor showers don’t really look like it is raining meteors, but you may get to see one or two or more shooting stars in a night. Shooting stars are not really stars but small objects like rocks that when are captured by the earth’s gravity and accelerates, they generate enough heat to melt them up and being small, they don’t have the opportunity to even reach the earth’s land or sea surface.

Meteor showers that make more than one occurrence of these shooting stars more than once in a night are usually the fragments of a comet left behind from the path a comet takes. And since these comets have a fixed path, so do their fragments have a fixed location and when the earth passes by this path, this is when we see the meteor showers.

Problem is I do not know where to look. I used to have a software on my computer that shows all constellations in the night sky, but I uninstalled it. I usually ask Mike Lopez who has a telescope at home and knows his constellations well but he was offline. I tried searching, and Google was just not that updated with the current sites talking about the meteor shower. And maybe it is about time to buy my own telescope too. And this brings me to thought of all these other stuff I want to buy, like a night vision cameras and binocular cameras. But maybe I’ll do these next time when I have a house with a big back yard to set things up and will probably get into astronomical photography. I think that would be cool.

Mouths and Exerting Physical Effort

I first noticed this from my nephew, Alan Go. My late dad came from a family of 10 brothers and sisters so you can expect me to have cousins that are way older than me. And Alan Go was the son of my older cousins so me and Alan did not really have our ages too far apart. During out BMX years, when fixing bicycles, I noticed Alan when tightening a bolt, or exerting some physical effort, his lips go near to his gums and shows his teeth and the sides of his mouth stretch as if he was going to smile, be he is not smiling. And it is in perfect sync with his physical effort. The more physical effort needed, like when he opens a tight bottle, the more his lips go into that certain position.

I notice this early in other people, and I barely noticed myself, and when I started paying attention to myself, I have another mannerism, where when I exert some physical effort, my lips roll inward and in some occassions, my tongue partially goes out. I also noticed I do not only do this with physical effort, but with mental effort as well like when I am thinking hard on some computer program, or solving whatever PC problem I may have.

When I told this to my wife, she told me about her dad. That his lips keep moving in this certain manner, which I also observed and indeed, it does move when he is exerting some effort.

You think we’re all weird? Well Michael Jordan always takes out his tongue when going for a dunk. Sometimes even just for a lay-up, he takes out his tongue already. We are all weird. 😀

Grow Fast

I remember there was a time when I was riding the MRT which is one of the public transport elevated electrical city trains in the area where I used to go to college. Someone suddenly tapped my shoulder and was asking how I am like he knew me already.

I was still puzzled who I was talking to, until I finally remembered who. He was Alex, who was someone I know from highschool. I was surprised how taller he was and in highschool he was way way smaller, real small. And the big difference was just so great I had no idea who I was talking to at first.

How can someone grow so fast so large? I myself am puzzled, but all I know Alex worked his way to be tall. He was really looking for all remedies that he can do and a friend of ours mention he once accompanied Alex to buy some Chinese growth balls and all these other stuff stretching stuff.

Technology of today is a bit more advanced now. There are known Human Growth Hormones (HGH) such as Sytropin HGH. Sytropin is an advanced blend of HGH, L-group amino acids, and Growth Factors that help you look, feel and perform at your best. This can be purchased without a prescription and has well documented positive results.

So those that want to get a few more inches added to their height that may even simply boost their self esteem, there are many options to do. They do not really just make you grow like magic, they simply enhance the growth process.

Just some random BMX Flatland Freestyler

Just decided to look for any recent BMX flatland freestyle video on Google. This was the more recent one I found, a 14 second video of some dude. In this video he is doing a Firehydrant, to decade, to forkwheelie, to backyard combo. Something I miss doing but I feel like I have no more time for BMX and is deciding to sell my BMX and jut buy a mountain bike. Maybe a hardtail, just to keep my cardio up.

Where will be my next vacation?

Last September 25, 2006 to October 9, 2006, I spent a vacation in the Philippines to attend an SEO Contest awarding and also meet up with my family as well. It was cool but there was 2 major typhoon storms and trees were falling down due to the strong winds and made some areas of Metro Manila to down south of Luzon in the Philippines powerless with on electricity as some electrical post fell down. 2 weeks was a bit short and the storms made my vacation even shorter. Now I’m back in the US and it is getting cold again. Here in San Diego, people love weather since it is not as cold as other places in the US. But I grew up in the equatorial country of the Philippines and it is pretty hot over there, way hotter than San Diego. And when I look for a vacation spot, I like the warm areas as well since even the cold months of being in southern California is too cold for me.

I guess next year I need a tropical beach vacation. I heard the Caribbean is great, along with a cruise ship package. But I’ll do that when I have a mutually convenient time scheduled with my wife and family so it will be even better. There are even more island options for a Caribbean vacation that I have read about on this website. It makes you even more prepared for a vacation, so you know where to stay, what things there are to do, what to eat while you are there, what to see in each tropical island. One thing I like about this Caribbean vacation site is they have a forum where you can learn more about the vacations from people that have been there already. On their site you can learn more about other vacation spots as well such as: Hawaii, Bermuda, Bahamas, South Pacific, Cayman Islands, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and more.

I guess the Caribbean islands is just so great that even the previous Search Bash was held there with Search Bash Jamaica! I guess this is a good idea that other events should also start trying to have them in any of these wonderful Caribbean islands.

Watch Cable TV for Free Online

Most of the time I work in front of the computer and after work, once I get home, I work again at home. And again in front of the computer. I can say I see the computer monitor more often than the TV screen. A few years back, I remember my room where I had a 35″ TV with cable TV and worked at the same time. Even if I do not pay full attention to the TV, once I hear something that catches my attention, I pause for a while and watch what I heard, and goes back working. And the TV is always left on any of the 3 channels: TechTV (Became G4:TechTV and today is G4TV), National Geographic and Discovery Channel.

Now with my situation in the US, I have no TV in my room and I have no plans of buying one in the near future. There is a TV in the living room, but I need work to be done so I just skip the TV all together. Although I have an external USB TV box, my other PC is busted right now, and I do not want to run my work and my TV on the same PC since the software just consumes too much resources.

But recently, I just learned about the Free Cable TV streaming online. So when I am working, I can run this software that streams Cable TV through my Internet connection for free. Although it is another program running on my desktop, it does not use much resources and does not do any observable slow down to my computer.

College Sports

I am not really into Basketball, I do not play the sport and I grew up in the BMX world and Martial Arts. Although I always watch college basketball games when I was in college. That was always fun for me. Now that I have already graduated from college long time ago, I still try to keep up to date sometimes. I go to UAAPGames to be up-to-date. But this is only news that already happened and it would be nice to see it live. Now that I am in the US, a web-cast would be great. If the Philippine Web Awards can do it, and also the last Manny Paquiao fight, I also watched it online. The Atlantic Coast Conference does this on ACC Sports, they have a live web-cast of the games and their most watch sport is soccer. The most watch soccer game is between Maryland at Wake Forest. Now, if the UAAP can do the same, I’d probably watch their games too.

ACC Sports

Vacation Over, Back to Work

Vacation: Over. Back to work again. 2 weeks is to short and I lost a day in travelling from east to west over the International date line with 14 hours of air flight. (Which is 12 hours when done west to east since it rides along the rotation of the earth.) But it was still good well spent quality time with my family.

SEO Contest: With last minute efforts, I was already number 10 that night. But was dancing at 10 and 11. And the top 10 win a prize. And when it was the official results time to refresh it, I moved to 11. Nyhahaha. Some of my friends told me it sucks, but all I can say, the SEO lessons in the contest are priceless. There’s a lot that I have learned in this contest. I have some photos of the Isulong SEOph SEO contest event here.

Michael Turner of HarvestSEO got some photos too and said something about me attending the event. He’s probably right. 🙂

Christine, who is one of the SEO Philippines members wanted to take a photo of everyone and took a picture with my daugher Jamie. and also took a picture with me.

Anton Diaz had a nice photo with me in the center, and also with my wife in the group photo. 🙂

The Storm: The day right after I came to the Philippines was when typhoon Milenyo passed by and knocked down a bunch of trees and electrical post. We had no electricity for 2 days while other areas were worse, up to today, some places in Bicol have no power and even phone lines are dead too.

Photos/Videos: I will try to prepare them and uploaded one by one. I still got to catch up with emails, voicemails, IM’s, snail mails, all waiting for my attention.

Back to Work: Yes, and I miss my family already. I drove my daughter everyday to school, and went with my wife everywhere. I came to the US Tuesday 12am, sorted my stuff, slept at 4am, went to work, came home, slept and… wow, I slept too long! I woke up at 3:30pm and called up the office right away. Well I will get a lot of sleep now, so I can catch up. At 4:40pm, I decided to pass by Einstein Industries just before they go home at 5:00pm and talk to a few friends and leave some dried mangos. Tomorrow is all work again.