{"id":136,"date":"2007-10-22T16:38:18","date_gmt":"2007-10-22T20:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattfife.net\/wordpress\/?p=136"},"modified":"2013-07-03T00:34:24","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T07:34:24","slug":"some-random-thoughts-and-a-quick-weekend-shooting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"Some random thoughts and a quick weekend shoot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Saturday was simply wretched &#8211; constant rain and wind all day, so there was no photo shooting. Instead, I had the perennial fun of getting to re-install my OS because the latest driver for my Intel motherboard RAID controller completely pooched the Vista shutdown cycle &#8211; and no amount of restore points helped. Shutdowns would just hang which meant every time you restarted you were told the raid was corrupted\/shutdown improperly and would need to re-verify the whole raid (2+ hours). I&#8217;m now on my 4th Vista re-install, and I&#8217;m becoming more and more unhappy about the stability all the time. (Vista Ultimate 64-bit by the way). Plus that with just weird\/random connectivity problems with my USB ports and odd audio behavior and I was ready to re-install. Now everything works again &#8211; but why? I had the same driver versions installed before, the same patches &#8211; why is the old install so unstable and a fresh one not?\u00a0 That coupled with the latest drivers not always working as well as the previous ones (64-bit versions) and things just feel dodgy in Vista 64 land &#8211; which is very quickly grating on my nerves.\u00a0 I want to do my photos dang it &#8211; not lose all my weekend doing OS re-installs.<\/p>\n<p>On the plus side, I picked up a BFG nVidia 8800 GTS OC, and it&#8217;s very very nice. Unfortunately for me, it came at the expense of my ATI XT1900 going south. A couple notes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The fans on the ATI&#8217;s are universally TOO LOUD. I simply can&#8217;t stand any of their dual-slot fan\/cooling solutions anymore, and their single-slot solutions are only *just* tolerable from the noise standpoint.<\/li>\n<li>My XT1900 was just 2 days out of warranty when it died. &lt;sigh&gt;<\/li>\n<li>3dConnect is the worst company. They never gave me my $75 rebate after 8 months of constant remailing, messages, and emails.\u00a0 They actually have a phone tree that at NO TIME can you actually talk to a real person. I went through the whole tree &#8211; you either leave a message (which will never get returned) or just get an automated response which tells you to go someplace else. Horrible &#8211; 5 thumbs down.\u00a0 On top of that their manufacturing sucked &#8211; cards ran way too hot right out of the box.<\/li>\n<li>Performance wise, the ATI XT1900 from a year ago is about the same performance as the nVidia 8800GTS released this year (as far as Steam\/Half-life 2\/CounterStrike:Source are concerned &#8211; which is what I do) nVidia cards suck on Half-life, which means you need to get a high-end one in order to get similar performance.<\/li>\n<li>The 8800GTS is QUIET &#8211; I have yet to hear its fans kick on.<\/li>\n<li>Now that I have DX10 compliant card at home, i can try some coding experiments out (muhahaha!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Got up early on Sunday morning, hit mass early, and then went for a little shooting &#8211; and it wasn&#8217;t a bad day for it. I got a couple of shots, but I think the best ones are done for the year. On the fun side, I saw a total Nikon fanboy at the Gardens. Nikon D200 hat, Nikon everything. The gardens filled up with people fast when they opened for the general public (photo members can get in 2 hours earlier than general public), so after shooting and the folks started pouring in &#8211; I took off. This was from a weekend or so ago, but it&#8217;s still a good shot. I&#8217;m going to start looking into some really big prints here 30-40&#8243; range for a large wall-size photo. Now that I have this 5D, the 4200&#215;1900 resolution should be able to do so without any trouble.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mattfife.net\/special\/j08-3.jpg?resize=416%2C277\" width=\"416\" height=\"277\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saturday was simply wretched &#8211; constant rain and wind all day, so there was no photo shooting. Instead, I had the perennial fun of getting to re-install my OS because the latest driver for my Intel motherboard RAID controller completely pooched the Vista shutdown cycle &#8211; and no amount of restore points helped. Shutdowns would just hang which meant every time you restarted you were told the raid was corrupted\/shutdown improperly and would need to re-verify the whole raid (2+&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=136\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,14,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogroll","category-photography","category-technical"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WECr-2c","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1194,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/1194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}