:: MIS Insights ::

I got my d70 serviced the other day. A year without maintenance cleaning and lousy lens-replacement process can be belly bad for your CCD.

Here are the cleaning details:

WHAT: CCD cleaning
WHERE: Digital Columbia Sales Center - #129 G. Roxas St. San Francisco Del Monte, QC. (It’s near G. Araneta, Quezon City). Yes, there’s parking with a guard.
HOW MUCH: 750 pesos
HOW LONG IT WILL TAKE: 30-45 minutes depending on how dirty your camera is. Mine took one hour.

Check out my multiply for sample shots before and after the cleaning.

I’m posting this to help my fellow Nikon photographers out there

My camera is 11 months old already by my watch. I got it last October 2006. However, I only started using it 6 months ago. When I got the camera, I wasn’t really into photography. Sure, I liked to take pictures, but I didn’t see myself as a legion of the dark side, snapping shots here and there. Here’s the evolution of my appreciation of Photography.

Kuwait. I was 6/7 years old. This is my earliest recollection of my introduction to Photography. My father worked at Kuwait and would always send us pictures.

Argentina. 1994. With parties, events and road-trips left and right, a camera was an essential weekend item. We were using a film-based Nikon F401 back then. It’s still with me right now, though with a broken latch. If I get the chance, I’ll try to have it restored.

High School. 1998. My father got a Panasonic NV DCF Digital Camera. At the infancy of Digital Photography, this 640k pixel (that’s .6 megapixel), runs on three AAA batteries and packing a whooping 2MB Compact Flash Card baby was a beauty on its own. I tried to use it, but the battery drain got to me. Even though I was using rechargeables, a set lasted for only 50 shots - just enough for 50 basic-quality jpeg shots at 640k.

Hong Kong 2007. Last April, I was forced to learn photography the hard way. Rarely touching my D70 from October 2006 to April 2007, I went to Hong Kong not knowing how to operate my camera. What do you mean you don’t know? Isn’t it as simple as clicking away to take pictures? At automatic mode, I agree. Unfortunately, there are just some shots that Auto-mode can’t wing. So there I was. Taking shots and learning by day, reading the manual and understanding as much jargon as possible at night.

Camera Magazine. My mother brought me a camera magazine from an airport she visited. It was just a normal issue of a photography magazine, but that magazine showed me what I could have been doing with my camera. Needless to say, I was challenged and got inspired by the pictures I saw. I looked at the photos and made it a point to learn how the pictures in the magazine were taken.

18-70. Somewhere down the road, my kit lens broke down. Not wanting to dampen my growing appreciation of photography, my father lent me his zoom, wide-angle and 50mm fixed focal lenses. These different lenses really broadened my view of photography (literally).

HP Coffeetalks. These coffeetalks are great. Terrible lighting, hyperactive people and limited sniping spots, what better training can you ask for?

Franz and his D40. Monday - Franz didn’t want to get into such hobby. Tuesday - I lent him my camera. Wednesday - Franz shows me a camera pricelist. Thursday - Franz wants to buy one already. I couldn’t join him in buying because I was busy. Friday - Not able to take it anymore, he bought a camera on his own. Photography Saturdays have never been the same since then.

1000 shots. I started the year wanting to take 1,000 shots per month. With a batting average of 1 good shot per 100, that would mean 10 cool pictures per month. I could live with that. The more pictures I take, the more chances of winning right? I can clearly remember that this was my New Year’s Resolution. At first, I thought it was impossible. What kind of subjects or events can I take a thousand pictures of? Nine months into 2007, I’ve shot over 50,000 exposures and my batting average just keeps improving through time.

So far, these are the landmarks that have helped me appreciate and understand Photography. What about yours? What’s your motivation for Photography?

Have you ever wanted to insert page numbers in your Microsoft Word Documents without counting the first few pages of the document? If you use Microsoft Word’s insert page numbers function, you’ll find that Word starts counting from the first page of the document. This can be bothersome if you have Title Pages and you don’t want to include them in the count.

Here’s what you can do:

1. With your document open at Microsoft Word, click on View and then Header and Footer.
2. Align your input cursor (the blinking pipe where the characters you type pop up) where you want it (Left, Middle or Right). This is where your page numbers will show up.
3. Insert your custom formula for page numbers. What does that mean? Simply put, it is programming your own page numbers. Don’t worry, it’s easy, lets try it out…

To insert your current page numbers:

1. Press CTRL and F9. You will get bold curly braces { }.
2. Type the word page between the braces so that you have { page }.

To start your page numbers from a different number:

1. Press CTRL and F9. You will get bold curly braces { }.
2. Type = in between the curly braces. You should have { = }.
3. Press CTRL and F9 again. You should now have { = {} }.
4. Type the word page between the second pair of braces so that you have { = { page} }.
5. Here’s the cool part. Depending on what number you want to start with, add or subtract as needed.
   If I needed my pages to start at 4, I would use: { = { page} + 3 }.
   If I wanted to start at page 10, { = { page} + 9 }.

To avoid putting page numbers at certain pages:

1. { if { page } < 4 "" "{page}"}. Translation: If the page number is less than 4, we will not write anything (check out the empty quotes - the first set of quotes is the action to be performed if the condition holds true). Otherwise (second set of quotes), write the page number (as described earlier).

So, to avoid numbering the first few pages and start numbering at a specified page:

1. { if { page } < 4 "" "{ = {page} - 3 } "} will not show any page numbers on pages 1 to 3 (less than 4) and start displaying page number 1 at page 4 (4-3).

There you go!

This is the second time that ERD Commander 2005 has bailed me out. It’s a Windows XP recovery application that allows you to do lots of cool stuff! The application is stored in a CD which you use to boot up your system with. It will load its own files and drivers so you have less stuff to worry about.

1. Password Reset

Have you ever gotten into the Windows login page after boot up only to find yourself stumped because you forgot your password? Worry no more! ERDC has a nifty tool which allows you to change the passwords of Windows User Accounts.

Sure, there are other ways to crack reset an account’s password. You can go to the recovery console, overwrite this file with that. You can use another account to reset your password. You can use a password reset disk. You can bring it to a competent technician who will only tell you “Let’s Reformat the Computer” (Where you don’t actually reformat the computer ~ you reformat the hard drive).

However, this is the simplest non-destructive way that I’ve found - Using a third party tool.

2. System Restore Point

I installed a Windows automatic update a few days ago. It was only this morning that I had to reboot my computer (it hanged). During bootup, it stayed on the progress bar for 20 minutes! I checked out Safe Mode and found that it hanged after loading the MUP.SYS file. I tried recovery console and it hanged when performing chkdsk. After browsing around in the internet, I found a forum post speculating that this might be a SATA-drive related issue caused by a System Update. My computer hanged when I tried to access my SATA drive - my primary is an IDE drive and I have a SATA slave.

Lucky me, I didn’t turn off my System Restore points. My desktop is set up to create one every day. So, I used ERDC’s System Restore Functionality and went back in time for around 2 days. I restarted my computer and it worked!

There are a lot of other things that ERDC can do, but these two are my personal testimonials based from experiences on the product. Worth mentioning though is its ability to configure your desktop for internet via LAN (so you can read troubleshooting guides online) and drive mounting (access your other hard drives over the network to backup your files!).

GJ ERD Commander! Good Job!

Disclaimer: I am in no way employed, sponsored or affiliated with Winternals (ERD Commander Developer) or Microsoft (which bought Winternals July 2006).

Yesterday marks the first ever formal photography lecture that I conducted! Teaching a while ago made me realize just how much I’ve missed the classroom setup. You see, I like teaching — especially what I like. In other words, I like teaching what I like. Teaching allows me to learn more than what I know. There’s always a new question out there that I haven’t heard or got an answer to. Whenever I teach, I don’t see myself only as a teacher, but as another student in the room too.

For my pedagogical sharing today, I had three participants and I’m poised to get more next week! I wonder if I should give Cip, Cheng and Remar a certificate…

While I’m no Pro, I’m fairly confident that I’ve covered the basics of photography. The course makes no biased lectures between SLRs and Compact Cameras nor film and digital — after all, it’s a class about photography designed for:

• people who want to get introduced to the basic concepts of photography. For those who just want to know.
• people who just bought a camera like Cip and Pat who each got a D40 last weekend. The course introduced how they can start using their babies.
• people eying a camera in the future like Remar who’s contemplating on buying a Ca– Nikon. The course will help him in determine the camera and accessories he will need to buy.

Already, my mind is full of ideas how I can communicate my next lessons. Next target: a Photography workshop before September ends.

As my blog-readers and colleagues will know, I use WikiMedia as my Notepad. Here are two of the coolest things I’ve learned because I didn’t Read The Fancy Manual:

You can rename page titles!

Page Titles serve two notable functions:

• Title of the Page - This is the Title found at the top of the Wiki Article. duh. Sometimes, you just want to rename the page title so that it becomes more relevant to your content.
• URL Stub - Page Titles become part of the web address that leads to your Wiki Article. An article with a page title of “ATG Setup Notes” might have a local page address of http://localhost/wiki/ATG_Setup_Notes. As such, you may want to fix your Page Title so that people who don’t want to use search will have an easier time of typing or taking note of your article’s page address.

How to rename wiki articles: Use the Move tab found at the top of the page. If you can’t find it, either you don’t have permission rights, the page is protected from such actions or you haven’t logged in.

You can delete pages!

After collating and organizing some of the information I had earlier, some pages no longer became necessary. Here’s how you do it:

Prerequisite: Your account must belong to the bureaucrats and sysop (b&s) wiki user groups.

If you’re like me, you created a separate personal account from the default root account. I use my Pipboy user account to write my local articles while I use the bogart user account to administer the Wiki environment. Pipboy must belong to the b&s user groups to be able to delete pages. How do you include an account into a user group? Use your root Wiki account (in my case, it’s the bogartuser account). It’s the sysop account you created during installation.

After you login to your Wiki installation using your sysop account, go to the Special Pages section (it’s a link on the left) and look for User rights management at the bottom of the page. From there, look for your personal account and include them in the b&s user groups.

Additional (Unlikely) Prerequisite: If you’re my number one fan, you also forgot your sysop account details. No worries!!! If you know how to use MySQL (or PhpMyAdmin), then worry no more! This snippet will reset your sysop account to what you want it to:

UPDATE wikipedia_aug_2007user SET user_password = md5( concat( user_id, '-', md5( 'olats' ) ) ) WHERE user_name = 'bogart';

Where:
wikipedia_aug_2007user - wiki database
olats - new password
bogart - sysop account

If you forgot the username for the sysop account, you can browse the user table and look for the user_name column.

Once you’re done with that, log-in to the sysop account then set up your personal account as I told you earlier.

You should now have a Delete tab at the top your screen when viewing deletable pages!

Very Nice!

I got this from the Jay’s talk in the last HP WSNT-BIDS coffee talk. When giving feedback to other people, here’s a useful formula to get you started:

When you [insert action that person did], it [insert impact to you or others here]. Can we [suggest what can be done about the feedback] next time?

For example:

When you answered a phone call in the last meeting, it distracted the audience. Can we silent our phones and avoid answering them in the succeeding meetings?

The objective of a feedback is to stop an undesirable event from happening. In this case, we want the person to stop answering phones during meetings because it is distracting. The following, however, is not a feedback:

You work slow like a turtle on a leisure stroll. Can’t you work any faster?

Where the former statement had a specific and repeatable action, the last one was very subjective. Instead of using a verb (an action word), it used the adjective lazy. The problem when using adjectives is that they are descriptive words based on personal interpretations. What might be slow for one person might be too fast for another. The following would be a better form of feedback, I suppose:

If you keep submitting your reports past the deadline, other deliverables dependent on your task gets delayed also. Can we agree on a timetable which we can use to satisfy the customer’s expectation on a timely manner?

Feedbacks aren’t only meant to prevent bad stuff from happening again though. They’re also there to keep good things happening over and over. Here’s what I told Bacchus during the event:

When you invited me for coffee during my first week at HP, I felt very welcome and good about the company. I appreciate the gesture in the same way that I know new hires will too.

The following though, is not a feedback:

You’re a good Project Manager. Keep it up!

In contrast to:

Your persistent and encouraging mobilization of resources has helped the team deliver quality work on time. Others can learn a thing or two from what you do best.

Giving feedback takes practice though. It’s a form of communication that’s devoid of emotion. It’s not something you do once in a while and expect to do correctly every time. As Filipinos who put a lot of value in what they hear and say, objective and constructive feedbacks might take some practice. I’d recommend doing it every day. Try it out with your seatmate. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.