I still don't really know what I'm doing.

We just watched the video from last night's band performance at the game. I used a new Canon external microphone. A few things:

AGC really must be turned off. The thing hears the drumline, pulls the volume down, and everything else mutes into nothingness.

I really wish I hadn't dropped and lost the headphones I brought along for monitoring. Luckily they were $3 headphones from Deal Extreme, so no great loss. I've had two sets of earbuds die on me this week though, and then I lost those.

When the band is on the field and I'm in the stands, I'm thinking I should be using shotgun mode. It's too far to get any stereo anyway, and in stereo mode you get way too much of people around you talking.

I should have tried with the wind guard off; there wasn't really any wind anyway. I don't know if it makes much difference.

Plusses: Things like the lighting failure are the sort of thing you remember, and I got the moment of failure recorded. The jungle drumbeats and faint images of band members dancing around in the dark are great.

There's a concert Monday that has several bands I don't care about, so maybe I can get some experimentation done there.

Wow, lightning take N+1

Some of you may recall that we had a nearby lightning strike in late summer 2007. You may recall this photo that I posted when I discovered in November that the dog's containment system had taken a pretty direct strike which had blown up the transformer and left the inside of the box a smoked-out slag pile.

(clickable)

I was just doing the final buttoning-up of the wire reinstall, and I built a little bracket to hold the new transmitter in a permanent location (the ebay sale I got it on didn't include the bracket). In the new location I had to plug it in to the same place the old transmitter was plugged into for the wire to reach. I hadn't used that outlet before because it's hard to get to (I put it there years ago for the transmitter, but it now has a stationary tool box in front of it). I hadn't looked at it since the lightning strike. When I dug back to it, here's what I found:

(click me too)
Note that even the plastic over the ground plug is fractured away. I guess that's what you call a fairly direct hit. It's no wonder we had some equipment damage.

Anyone have any experience with whole-house surge protectors?

Camcorder thoughts

Just because I've had people ask me about stuff in the past...
I'm really liking the new camcorder. In particular, recording to memory cards is something I really like. I'm VERY glad to be done with tape (except I need to archive the old stuff).

The quality is outstanding. Every time I come home I can pop the card in the machine and back up 30 minutes worth of video in 3 minutes. I don't have to worry about jostling the thing and either damaging the mechanism or causing a tracking failure from the impact.

I suppose there's a chance of card failure causing me grief down the road, but I'm not really worried about it.

Once I turned the sharpening and saturation down to minimum, the 3 megapixel still photos are good enough that I feel I can leave the still camera at home for casual use. It's certainly not my choice for dedicated still photography, even semi-casual use that I'd use the P&S instead of the SLR for. But it does mean I can carry just one relatively small camera.
Sample from last night, Tom with a member of his favorite mammalian species:

USB problem maybe solved

Remember I was having major USB problems earlier? I think they're all OS problems, and I think they only happen sometimes when I come back from Hibernate. I've been using Hibernate quite a bit lately and it's not unusual for me to be running a session that's been hibernated dozens of times from a reboot weeks ago.

Both times I've had significant problems with USB (had some last night) a reboot cleared them up. I swear I tried that when I first noticed these issues, but it may have just hibernated again. Hopefully that's the end of it.

I may be mistaken, but I've found some support online for the notion that several OSs, not just Windows, have trouble properly re-initializing the USB systems after coming back from hibernation.