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In late June 2014, we took a family vacation. We left from St. Louis and drove west to the promise land. Colorado, that’s my promise land. The beautiful country, the place I would go if I were rich and could move all of our family (immediate and extended) to one place without thinking about the cost involved in such an undertaking.

Our family of four (myself and my wife, plus a 3 year old daughter, and recently turned 1yr old son) visited Denver, friends, family, and then we went further west, to a place 50 miles from the nearest town, at 9500’, deep into Wilderness country.

We went to Trapper’s Lake.

Things have been quiet around here, so I figured it was a good time for a status update that is longer than 140 characters.

We are in the middle of the process of planning our next move, true to our nature, we’ve been in Half Moon Bay for less than 18 months, and we’ll be heading back east. We’re going back to St. Louis in December, and currently looking for a place to live. I’ll be working from home and travelling back to San Mateo at least once a month to be in the office at DNNCorp.

The move and planning for such is taking up most of our time, though I am also travelling a lot for work lately, headed to Columbus next week and San Antonio after that.

Here’s a photo of Natalie and Jacqueline taken earlier this evening.

Mommy and Jacqueline at Sunset

If you are looking for tips at taking 365 photos in a year, check out the list at the end of the article. As many of you know, or should, I planned to do a couple of things in 2011 in terms of blogging and photo taking.

  1. Blog every day
  2. Post a photo of myself taken every day #Flickr365
  3. Post a photo of Jacqueline taken every day #Baby365

Well, I only completed one of those things (#Baby365), but I must admit I am glad about which one I did complete and the ones I didn’t!

Every day in 2011 Natalie or myself took a photo of Jacqueline, and while we didn’t always get them posted to flickr the same day, I think we did get that done on at least 355 of those days. You might think, oh that isn't hard, taking a photo, so what. Well I tel you what, it wasn't easy. Try doing ANYTHING out of the ordinary for 365 straight days, it takes some effort.

#Baby365 Photos

You can see the full collection of the #Baby365 photos in the Flickr Set found here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chammond/sets/72157625597966645/).

All along I had plans of doing something more with the photos, and while I am not completed with everything, I have two things you can see online now.

#Baby365 Videos

The first is you can see a compilation video of the 365 photos set to music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kHmTe2hNMM

Then of course there is the faster cropped version, which I personally prefer. I think it shows an interesting view of Jacqueline growing up over the past year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFnhpweyzoE

She has grown up a lot over the past year, too fast if you ask myself or Natalie, but that is how parenthood goes.

2012 #Toddler366

Stay tuned for #Toddler365 #Toddler366 here for 2012 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chammond/sets/72157628676234297/)

Some tips if you are thinking of doing any #Baby365, #Toddler365 or #Anything365.

These are just a few things I can think of off the top of my head that should help you with your project. I will try to update the list if I think of anything else.

  1. Set a reminder on your phone/computer to remind you EVERY day to do something, possibly two reminders
  2. Don't clear the reminder until it is done, there is no snooze here, leave it on
  3. Use a good camera, we have a number of days that were taken with Natalie's phone and they leave a lot to be desired
  4. Be diligent about tagging and uploading photos into a Set on Flickr. If you name them, tag them, etc, it makes them easier to find/organize later
  5. Check out Downloadr from http://janten.com/downloadr/ at the end of the year to download and organize the photos if you want to create a video like I did. You might think you can pull all the photos from your original collection, but that can be a bear depending on how you organize things. Also if you don't have all the photos in your collection (I use Lightroom) but you do have all the photos on Flickr, Downloadr helps immensly.
  6. Try to take a full face photo every time, we didn't for 2011 and I think things could have turned out a lot better if we had tried to do that.
  7. Make sure your camera keeps EXIF data and you have it enabled in Flickr, it makes sorting things a lot easier (sorting your set of photos on flickr, sorting your photos to create a video, etc)

I’ve spent the last two evenings in the French Quarter. No, not drinking it up and partying like a college kid, but like a 34 year old married man, walking around with a camera looking for interesting things to take pictures of. No pictures of people yet, but check out some of the photos I took tonight.

Doors off Bourbon Street Doors off Bourbon Street

So I am home from CMSExpo and I am trying to go through photos. I’ve finally (I think) given up on Windows Live Photo Gallery, as my library of 543 GB of photos (146k files).

I downloaded Adobe’s Lightroom 3 for a 30 day trial to see how it works. Anyone have any opinions on how best to manage all your photos for processing?

I sort my photos on the file system by year/month/date (into folders for each). Fortunately for me I also tend to remember when an event occurred, so finding photos comes fairly easily because of this.

So here it goes. The second attempt at writing this blog post. I had it 50% complete about 10 minutes ago, but then Windows Live Writer started typing backwards and then completely crapped out and went away. 2010 In Review
Tonight after another day of DotNetNuke training I went up to Mountain View to meet up with a friend for dinner. This friend used to live/race cars in St. Louis, but now lives out here in California and works for Google. I took the opportunity to drive up to the Google campus and take a look around a bit. I also realized that the exit for the Campus is the exit in which I got into my first car accident, back in 1995. We were on our way to a Live (the band) concert, and I ran into the stopped traffic at the exit, a friend then running into me.
So tonight I took for for San Francisco, it wasn’t too far, about an hour drive from my hotel down to Pier 39, maybe a little further due to traffic. I got the camera out, and after fighting with the parking meter headed off to take some photos. I hit the Pier for a while, taking a collection of photos, and then headed off to find Lombard street, the windy part. Fortunately I’ve been using my Droid (phone) for navigation this trip, and ...

Denver really goes all out in lighting up City Hall for the holidays. Check out this photo I took down there earlier this evening.

Denver City Hall

I’ve still got quite a few photos to go through from the Amsterdam trip, though I did post another one this evening as well.

Amsterdam Ferrari

I was reminded by my Aunt tonight that 5 years ago this evening we were sitting in Busch Stadium watching the Boston Red Sox win their first World Series in 86 years! We were there for Game 4 of the 2004 World Series!

It was a great night to be a Red Sox Fan. I made a decent blog post about the game that you can read here, and I took HUNDREDS of photos of the game, available via my photo gallery.

Even though the baseball season is over for 2009, it’s still good to relish in the Red Sox Championships from 2004 and 2007! Go Phillies, beat those damn Yankees.

So this weekend has flown by! It’s almost 1:30am on Monday morning and I am wrapping up writing another chapter for the book. I’m going to call it a night and try to finish up the remainder of the work tomorrow, I basically have to read/review the chapter and take screenshots and then I can submit it to the editor.

So what have I been up to this weekend? Well Friday night Natalie and I watched Wanted, an Angelina Jolie movie, I must say the movie wasn’t what we expected, I knew it would be silly, but this one was exceptionally hard to believe because of the stunts/effects.

Saturday my buddy Terec and I spent the day driving around MO and IL hunting Bald Eagles. Now, before you freak out, we were hunting them to take photos! We rented a very $$$ lens from a local camera shop and spent nearly 11 hours driving around trying to get great shots. I took way more photos than he did, at a rate of about 4 to 1, but I would say from the previews I’ve seen of his, he got way better photos than I did. I can however claim the closest/largest in flight shot as I had grabbed the big lens at one point in Pere Marquette park, just after that a Bald Eagle came soaring by.

Bald Eagle In Flight

I’ve only uploaded a few shots, you can see them over on Flickr.

After shooting all day we ended up back at my house, Nick came over and Natalie got back from her girl’s night out with her sister. We rocked out to Rockband2 for a few hours before I kicked the guys out and crashed for the evening. I slept in this morning and then headed off to the office to meet up with Pat and talk about the next two weeks of book work. We are coming up on our February 20th deadline quickly! We are anxious to be done with this first phase of writing, and looking forward to hopefully having something resembling downtime during the editing/reviewing process! We’ll see how that works out :D

If this isn't just one of the coolest things of 2008 I don't know what is. Flickr now allows for video uploads!!!

What's the big deal you might ask, there are already other video services, well I am a huge fan of Flickr, and would much rather upload my videos to Flickr, the same place I upload all my photos. Their clips have a maximum length of 90 seconds, PERFECT for autocross runs!

 

The above video is my first upload for Flickr. It's actually a very poor video, the camera mount I used this past weekend frankly sucks! I'll hopefully get a new one tomorrow.

A few weeks ago at St. Pat's some of my fraternity brother's were giving me trouble about owning the Corvette. They thought if I owned the Corvette I also needed to have a Mustache.

Well here it is, probably the only mustache I will ever grow.

Natalie loves it (not). I think it looks great (not). It is coming off in the morning (so)!

Ten years ago today my dad retired from the Air Force after thirty years, and life as our family knew it changed forever. I loved being a military brat and am extremely proud of the service my father provided to our great country for 30 years.

In honor of dad's retirement ceremony 10 years ago I figured I'd post a link to the photos I have from that day. These photos were some of the very first digital photos I ever took.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chammond/sets/72157603241213401/

So after loading up the car on the trailer tonight I ran out ot chesterfield valley and took some pictures of the eclipse. I'm still processing photos but will upload a few tonight to my flickr account.
Earlier today I started working on a new DotNetNuke Module that displays Flickr Photos. The initial version is posted on my photos page so you can see my 50 most recent Flickr photos. There is still a lot left to do with this module, but at least it is displaying photos for now. http://www.chrishammond.com/photos.aspx
Since I was up here in Maine, I figured I'd shoot my old friend Dustin Price an email. Dustin and I went to school together in Riverside from 6th to 9th grade before I moved to Indiana the summer after freshman year. He lives down in Dover New Hampshire so I took a drive down there last evening after finishing up with the day's training class. We played poker for a few too many hours then snapped these photos. I say a few too many hours because I was winning till about halfway through, then my game fell apart! See you in April...
I've been tweaking a new blog layout today. Not sure it'll last, but for now this is it.I've also added my latest Flickr photos to the top of the page, so as I add photos to flickr they'll appear here as...
So The Mad Blogger (TMB) went out shopping for a car this evening, trying to repair the chaos that was earlier today.Long story short (it's too late right now, long story to come tomorrow), TMB is VERY happy this morning(night). TMB has a new ride. An 05 Chevy Tahoe Z71 with less than 8k miles on it! TMB will ALSO be getting some 20's tomorrow morning for the Tahoe. Photos and the rest of the story to come tomorrow!Flickr...
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Chris Hammond

Chris Hammond

is a father, husband, leader, developer, photographer and car guy. Chris has long specialized in ASP.NET and DotNetNuke (DNN) development, so you will find a variety of posts relating to those topics. For more information check out the about Chris Hammond page.

If you are looking for DotNetNuke consulting please visit Christoc.com Software Solutions

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