How's this shot? I went to see the Harlem Globetrotters with my two oldest sons, and with the benefit of a day's worth of reflection, I want to share some thoughts, but first, what I learned about my camera:

It's really hard to get good photographs of professional basketball players unless you are on the court, under the basket, and take a LOT of shots. Most of my shots didn't come out, even when I was using the fastest speed of my EOS-20D, which is wicked fast. I also used RAW files for the first time and was very impressed with the results. I also got to use (after negotiating with the security guards), my favorite lens in the world, the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM, which was recommended to me by Clive VanRensburg, one of the best photographers I've ever met. The f/2.8 along with image stabilization lets you get shots like the one at left, (1/125th of a second, f/2.8, 200mm zoom, hand-held indoors), which I'm pretty happy with.

OK, now the fatherhood reflections....I think I messed up on a few fronts; the first was the fact that I bought tickets on the floor. This was bad for too reasons, the first was that they couldn't really see over the people's heads in front of us (we sat directly behind the Globetrotters), and it was selfish.. I wanted close tickets to take pictures, and I should have simply gone for something a few rows up where they would have had an unobstructed view.

The ticket issues was somewhat minor though; the real "downer" was near the end of the night when my older son (actually, he asked me a few times through the night), wanted "stuff". Not food stuff, but "junk", like stuff that they could sign or a flying thing or some more junk that would clutter the house and get thrown away in six months or a year. I wasn't in the mood to waste money on more "stuff", since the house is so cluttered anyway, but it became a big problem. The conversation went back and forth for a while from "No", to "No, you didn't behave well today", to "No, quit asking" to "No, why can't you say 'Thank you for taking me Daddy'". By the end of the night both of us were pissed at each other. Was I right? No doubt we have too much crap/clutter, and the prices for more crap were outrageous ($25 mini-basketballs), and that it would get thrown away, but did I let the cost of one of those things ruin the night/experience/memory? Should I have simply budgeted $20 for each kid for "crap" for the event? Last night I would have said "No", but tonight I'm thinking that is what I should have done. If I could do it again, I'd get slightly worse seats (I don't think my kids really care about the seats), but let them each have some money to do with as they please.

So this took longer to write than I had planned; probably because I was watching YouTube on the other monitor. Still am...

The only question left is "Do I take them to Monster Trucks next week?" I don't know. I'm still torn. I personally want to go myself actually; but do I want to reward the bratty/ungrateful behavior, or do I give everybody another chance, but this time with a budget that they can use for shirts/trinkets/food/whatever. We did buy slurpees and popcorn and water ($20) last night??? I'll have to think about it this week...

I helped my Mom with her computer tonight. What the heck is wrong with my industry where we can't create something that the *rest* of society can use? My Mom was upset that she couldn't connect to her wireless network at home, and really confused why it kept saying Netgear when she had a D-Link. She was going to return her new MacBook because it couldn't connect to her network. Well, as you might suspect, she wasn't connecting to her network, she was connecting to a neighbor's network. So how do you remote diagnose these problems. Well, you don't. Trying to walk somebody through these kind of issues over the phone is nearly impossible and insanely time-consuming. So, I installed a version of UltraVNC SC (SingleClick) that lets you build a client that your friends/family can download and run as an EXE. As long as you have a static IP (or get the same DHCP assignment from your provider), you can have a viewer running and they can connect to your machine and you get to view their desktop.

Pretty sweet, especially when helping your parents. I then did the quick and obvious things, like connect to her router, change her password on the router, change the name of her wireless network (the idiots at Best Buy thought it would be OK to use her last name as the name of her Wireless network so that any neighbor would have that much more information when hacking in), disable SSID broadcast, and use WEP. A little redundant, but a good practice nonetheless. We then set up her Macintosh using a very helpful USC page here. She's elated, and won't be returning her Mac, nor buying a new wireless router (which was her other suggestion).

I have to wrap this up now as my four-year-old just came in (its midnight), so I need to walk him back to his room...