I Hate Christmas Travel

Laurel and I have had an awful time traveling to the midwest this Christmas. It all started on the morning of the 22nd when I decided that I didn't need to check the status of my flight from home. Bad decision. We got to the airport, after a $37 cab ride, and found out that our flight into Cincinnati was cancelled. So, after a 20 minute phone conversation with someone from Delta we decided to change our flight to go through Atlanta and end up in Detroit instead of going through Cinci to end up in Toledo. There were no rental cars left in Detroit so I was able to get my mom to drive by Detroit on the way to Toledo to pick us up. So we left at 10pm on our flight to ATL, after about $120 worth of cab rides in Seattle that day. I couldn't sleep at all because I was in the middle seat and it was very hot and uncomfortable. We arrived at 6am local time, 3 am Pacific time and waited. And waited. And waited.

At about 10am they finally cancelled our flight to Detroit so we went to wait in line to reschedule our flight. But it wasn't even a line to talk to a human, it was a line to a phone. We tried calling the same line from our cell phone but it was constantly busy so we decided to wait it out to get the direct line. We waited 3 hours in line and then when we got to the phone we had to wait about half an hour to get a person on the line and another half hour to get our flights resolved. Laurel talked to the guy because I was too pissed off. There were no flights to anywhere in Ohio or Michigan within the next couple days so we asked if we could get a flight to Indy since that was where we were leaving from a week later. They said yes but that we couldn't get that flight because it was not within the 100 mile radius of our original destination. Let me get this straight: They can't get us to our destination within the next couple day, have refused to pay for a hotel in Atlanta where they sent us, and won't send us to the city that we will be leaving from a week later. Laurel argued this point and the guy finally gave up. So, we got a 5pm flight to Indy. But no tickets yet.

We were told to goto A2 to pick up the tickets but when we got there (15 minutes of walking later) we were told that they couldn't print out the tickets yet. So we spent the next several hours walking back and forth between the A gate and the B gate to try to get boarding passes. At 4pm we finally succeeded, but we didn't know where we were leaving from because they kept on changing it and the person at the gate counters were confused too. I'd like to say something right now. I hate those fucking electric cars that go up and down the terminal making loud beeping noises and making people get out of the way. 90% of the time they have perfectly healthy people who must be the laziest human beings on earth and the most inconsiderate people too. There were lots of people stranded in ATL and not much room to move around and they these stupid things take up even more of our space. And the beeping! My god, don't they understand that we are tired and can't take that noise. Why do they beep? Can't they make them silent or come up with a better sound? The noise pollution we have to deal with is something that I will write another blog entry about.

So, at about 8pm we finally left to Indy, I was so happy when the plane left the gate. I hadn't slept in like 40 hours. When we got to Indy our bags weren't there, which is what we expected so we talked to the baggage people and filed a claim and they said they would send the bags to Laurel's parent's house in Muncie where we were going to be staying. The next day we tried calling the 800 number but it was busy, we tried over and over again for the next 4 days and today I finally got through, after about a hundred redials, and after another half hour of holding I found out our bags were still in Detroit and they hadn't even tried to send them to us. So, they said they were send them to Indy, but they couldn't get a hold of Detroit so they had to email them. They said that most of the flights were cancelled from Detroit to Indy anyways because of the computer problem that grounded all Comair flights. The computer problem happened because they used only 15 bits to represent the flight change number for the month which meant they could only handle 32768 changes per month. And the crazy thing is that when that number was exceeded the whole system crashed. Wow, great programmers. It's amazing that small decisions we make and software engineers can have disastrous effects.

Pickled Herring

I've just recently acquired a taste for Pickled Herring. I had never had it before about a month ago. I picked up two tins of it the last time I was at Ikea thinking that since I like other canned seafood (like sardines and smoked oysters) I might possibly like this stuff too. My first taste was pretty much what you would expect. It was weird. It was sweeter than I had expected and also very salty. I wasn't sure I liked it but I promptly finished the tin. Then a few weeks later I had a big craving for it again. I opened up the second tin and enjoyed every last bit of it. This time I had also included a glass of vodka and combination of the strong sweet/salty fish with the strong but clean tasting vodka was really very good. Now, I've also acquired a taste for vodka which I didn't have before, of course only when it's drunk with pickled herring.

So, yesterday I trekked over to Olsen's Scandinavian Foods in Ballard and bought two more tins of Abba Matjes Herring and a large can of some other brand that was cheaper. Mmmmm, pickled herring.

The Zone System

I think I've finally figured out how to use the zone system with my new camera. I learned photography on one of the original Nikon F's from 1959 which didn't have a built-in light meter. So I got very used to the incident light reading from my external light meter. I almost always shot better pictures than my classmates (at least before they learned the zone system) because the light meter didn't lie to me. Now I have a Panasonic LC1 with a built in light meter (of course, it's a digital camera) so I want to learn to take great pictures with it (of course, I spent a lot of money on it).

This is what I've been doing:

1. Set the white balance to B&W (it's easier to learn about light and how your camera sees it in B&W)
2. Set the meter style to 'spot' (it puts a tiny '+' in the middle of the screen so I can take acurate readings from small objects)
3. Set the F-stop dial to a manual setting. I would start with the lowest if I was indoors, the highest if I was ourdoors and it was sunny (not likely since it's december in Seattle), and somewhere in between. (Of course, you could set the shutter speed here instead if you wanted shutter priority)
4. Set the shutter speed dial to 'A' and press the shutter button half way while pointing at your subject. Your computer with a lens, uhhh, I mean camera, will then tell you what shutter speed (or aperature if you did the opposite) would be appropriate if your subject is middle grey.
5. Now move the shutter speed dial the number of steps difference between middle grey and your subject's zone. If you are shooting something that you visualize in zone 7 and your camera displayed 1/60 then set it to 1/250 and you'll be all good. Don't forget the law of reciprocity, it's your friend during this step.

Now practice this. Take lots of pictures. The LCD monitor in the back of your camera helps a lot with seeing how the picture turned out. The best thing to try is to take pictures of each of the zones with exactly what the meter tells you to use. It would be especially nice to use a solid sheet or screen full of that color. I think this exercise helps you understand your camera better. When you are done view your pictures in the gimp or photoshop and use the color picker tool to see what shade of grey your picture is made of. Most likely all of your pictures will be around 128/255. Interesting, no?

Now that I've wrapped my brain around this I'm going to try to figure out how to take multiple zone readings and incorporate them into one photo.