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Well, a little light show started to kick up around the metro last night (its 3:30 in the morning right now…) and it was pretty fun.

I saw on radar where the storms were forming and where I thought they were going and decided to go and scout out a spot I found a few years ago up by Shoreview, MN to get the lightning hitting the towers. Well, the towers did not take a hit but the light show was pretty cool.

I shot about 45 minutes of footage and just dubbed everything in to edit at a later date.

Here are the photos from tonight.

It’s no secret that I’ve been up to something which is why I stayed home from the weekends insane chasing. Well, it is all about the server. I’ve been busting ass trying to get the new Linux machine up and running.

What is it? Made my own youtube for all the BNVN Stringers.WHODA JIGGA

WHAT?yeah, been busting ass learning code and encoding, trans coding, php, sql, decoding, re-coding, c++ encoding Linux fedora crapola to the point where I’m getting sick of it.But, the end result will be something bad ass in a few more weeks.

Well, today was an interesting day. I had two interviews today for a couple of gigs but the one gig that sounded promising was for an out state Sr. photojournalist position. If I get that gig, hello northeast region. It sounds like they were hella interested but for me to move out east it would take a chunk of change.

I’m also looking at the south east area too and I have a couple more gigs I’m working on down in Florida but I won’t hear back from them until next week or the week after. The Florida gig would rock since I have a lot of friends down there and the weather does not suck that bad and I can go scuba diving a lot more then I do up here.

Since today and yesterday were huge outbreak days with hundreds of chasers out there, I stayed home to let my crews go out there and chase. Well, there are a ton of chasers the last time I looked at the tracking stuff with spotternetwork and swiftwx. How many people? 135 people out there right now as I type this up.

But I’m not bummed that I stayed home, I have been working on this other project for the new website and it is coming along pretty slick! The beta server I’m working on is doing some stuff I could have only dreamed of and now I’m making the dreams work! So when this is all said and done, the new BNVN.com site is going to rock!!!

Okay, so it was not in Liquordale, that is just a song I’m listening to right now by The Peelers but it sounded cool.

Here is a Daylight Lightning Photograph, not a vid cap like some losers try to pull off calling it a day light lightning photo but a real daylight lightning photograph with the Nikon D70s.

This was taken near Fairbault MN the other day. I was distracting myself from the real work and studying for the new programming stuff so I figured I would look through the photos. Note the hail shaft and how I stayed OUT of it!!! This was a photo taken with about a Half second exposure at ASA 100 with an F-Stop of F22.
So if you want to try and shoot daylight lightning, that’s how… 🙂

Well, it is 4:30 in the morning and I just got my new beta testing server up and running. This is the new server to get the new website for BNVN back up and running.This has been a real learning process to get up and running. It is the first time I setup a server on my own and have it up and running.

This is going to be my May project since I’m not liking the weather setup and my gut forecast shows that the gas prices are going to go through the roof as the price of footage for news is worthless as people are giving their stuff away just to get their names on TV. I know, it is pretty insane to give footage away when the networks have a ton of money for footage and are laughing their ass off as people give there footage away just to get their name on tv.

So with the hurricane documentary done and out there for people to beta view and let them review it, I’m pretty bored and looking for something to do now that I’m well on my way with the scripting setup on the beta server. 

I’m just focusing on the site editing and getting that up and running with the beta server. The beta server is going be the home server before I get the new web server up and running. I’m making the beta server script and automate everything for the new setup. Since all the footage catalogs are already made, I just need to time code the footage then trans code. The trans coding is going to be the automated scripting.
So my job now is press enter for the most part and walk away. Bored bored bored but it needs to be done.

Okay it was not a long dive and the water was a little cold but I got in my first dive at Calhoun today. I was able to get down to 49 feet and the visibility was pretty good.

Well, it is not a bust since I woke up this morning to the sounds of the weather alarms going off and busted out west. Right now I’m sitting on the MN and South Dakota boarder area in the Tornado Watch and just waiting to see if this is worth hanging around for. But I was able to come out and shoot some stock footage for another project that I’m working on of some stuff in Western MN so it is not a total bust. As soon as I wrap up this photo and video shoot out here and get back to the chase or looking at the stats, I’ll figure out if I’ll hang around for the rest of the weather or no weather events or go home.

Ok, almost done with the dvd encoding stuff then letting the computer go on auto pilot as I go scuba diving.

Wow, this is a lot of stuff to work with here with Encore.

Well, the coffee is brewing and the Adobe Encore is loaded on the computer and now I have to figure out how to use it.

The DVD project is done for the most part. The editing is done and I just need to work on the credits, dvd layout, paperwork and graphics.

So since the new DVD project is so huge that it has to go on a dual layer DVD and I needed to get my hands on Adobe Encore to be able to work with the massive thing on one disk. Otherwise it would be a 2 disk format.As for the project reviews. This is what is been said so far.”Video Looks like it’s 100% perfect – No problems that I could find!”

But I’m happy to be on a normal schedule again. I woke up this morning at 5am and hope to get this stuff done by noon and then off to the lake to go scuba diving.