McWilliams' World » Photos

Photo dump: First Snow Storm of ’07, Christmas Tree, more

mcwilliams — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 02:45:09 +0000

Just posted a ton of new photos of our Christmas Tree, Tracy snowblowing, some pictures from the kid’s Christmas concert, some funny pictures of myself, and a few others. Check them out!

Won Third Place In Local Guitar Hero Contest

mcwilliams — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 02:38:30 +0000

A few days ago Tracy told be about a Guitar Hero contest that a local bar, The Bar, was running. It had cash prized and two skill levels, $5 to enter. I thought about it and decided to give it a go.

Sign up started at 6pm, contest at 7pm. As I was parking my car I realized; I’m 34 years old, I’ll probably be the oldest guy playing. I kind of rolled my eyes and walked in. I signed up and noticed there weren’t too many signed up.

All in all 9 entries (including Parker-Jon) were in the “expert” group.

The idea was to do pro-face off against each other, with the winner advancing to the next round. Someone would call a coin toss and then roll a die to determine the song, from the top 6 in the set list. We started on Hard difficulty – I was happy about that.

The first two guys started to play and all of a sudden one guy is complaining about the guitar not hitting the notes and being all funky. I’m thinking “typical… you suck and you blame the guitar”. They try another guitar and give it another go. Still no good so they end up just doing single player but still score against score. I’m thinking, “great… now this is going to take twice as long!”

My turns up, I win the coin toss and roll the die and get Slow Ride. LAME! The big screen TV’s positioned near the ceiling so you had to crank your neck to see what was going on; plus since we’re playing on a PS2 (blech! no HD) the screen looked like rhino dung. I was nervous as hell but I did pretty well. Now my opponent’s turn, he actually failed about 20% in. Not sure why. Slow Ride isn’t that hard of a song at all. I think he just gave up. So I sail through to the next round.

Parker has a shot but looses playing Story of My Life (wow…what a dud of a song!). He also lost in the second chance bracket. Must have been nerves. It’s a shame because I consider Parker to be almost on par with me in skill. I was watching him play the other night at home and my jaw dropped as he breezed through some solo sections of songs that I was sure to flub on. He’s got skillz!

A few more guys play and you instantly know who’s good and who isn’t.

My next round was against a 13 or 14 year old playing Sunshine of your Love (another song I could do without). I’m second so I get to see what I’m up against. He managed to score very well. I was worried. I started to play and before I missed a note I had over a 200 note streak going. I won by a few thousand points. The kid did great and I shook his hand.

They started a loser’s bracket so everyone got a second chance. This time on GH2. Parker played Killing In the Name Of but lost. But when we got done playing the whole bar was screaming and shouting and hollering’. I twas cool. Parker was probably the youngest player there and certainly the youngest in the Expert group. He did great and had a fun time!

The final two from the looser bracket and the final two from the expert bracket formed the final four. We played GH2 on Expert and started on the fifth and sixth tiers. The lower two went first and played John the Fisherman. My set, I called and rolled the die and ended up with YYZ. I shook my head. No way am I going to get this, the guy I’m against is too good. So I did my best but it wasn’t good enough.

We then had a face off for second place between myself and the third guy. Anther roll and we get Misirlou. A beast of a song. Tons of super fast strumming. The other guy goes and does pretty well. I know that I’m not going to beat him. I try my best and fell short – again, but hey! still managed to secure third place. I went around and shoot a few hands, said thanks for playing. I wound up winning my money back $10 (between Parker and I).

The guy running the contest stated that they’ll have more of these and may even have Rock Band in the future. A good time was had by all.

[update: Had to fix Parker's side of the story, he actually lost both rounds he was in... sad because he's extremely talented and sometimes can best me!]

My new Pintech electronic drum kit

mcwilliams — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 01:59:55 +0000

I posted before about buying a Pintech electronic drum kit and promising to post pictures.

Here they are.

Big Photo Dump

mcwilliams — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 01:55:19 +0000

Heh heh! I said “dump”!

It’s been a literal eon since I dumped any photos into my Flickr account. I’ve dumped stuff from short trips, Halloween, my new drum kit, etc… It’s all there. Check ‘em out if you want.

Photos: Jonah and Parker skateboarding

mcwilliams — Thu, 31 May 2007 01:55:20 +0000

We had some time Sunday between going to the Memorial Day parade and going to the In-Laws for a cook-out, so the boys begged me to take them to the skate park. We had a pretty good time. No one was there so it was even better.

How I turned a 3 day vacation into an additional week off of work

mcwilliams — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:20:29 +0000

Okay, it wasn’t on purpose! We took the family to The Wilderness Waterpark in Wisconsin Dells, WI for 3 days of fun. This was made possible by a wonderfully generous Christmas gift from Tracy’s folks. So we packed up and went and had a great time. I can’t tell you how many steps I climbed to get on these tube rides; some 3 or 4 stories high.

We managed to squeak another $50 into our budget buy taking a timeshare tour on our second day. Basically had to listen and say no at the end and the kids got 40 tokens for the arcade and we got $50 in Wilderness Cash to spend. That took care of a second night out to eat.

We had a blast. You can check out some of our photos if you want to see the amount of fun we had.

But then we return home. I thought for sure I’d be sore from all the activity of climbing, walking and swimming, but I felt nothing for two days after we got home. Then Friday came and I noticed a little twinge in my back. No biggie, I’ll just stretch a few times throughout the day and that should take care of it. Well, Saturday rolls around and my back has another idea for me. Now the pain is worse then Friday and now it’s shooting down my right leg.

I immediately get on the phone and call the chiropractor to get in and head this off. My normal Dr. isn’t in, but I had to go. He gets me in, rubs my back a bit, adjusts my hips and then tries to adjust (a.k.a. “crack my back”) on my side (which didn’t happen cause I was too tight) and I felt okay. I went home and my pain got worse. I can barely walk on my right leg, I have no power in my calf muscle (can’t lift myself up on my toes). Pain.

Tracy called my family doctor and got some prescriptions for a muscle relaxer and pain pills, which helped. I’m now stuck in bed.

I emailed my boss at work and said I’m not coming in Monday and will let him know after I see my chiropractor again. Monday came and I went in to see the Dr. who immediately knew what was up ’cause I seem to do this every year. So she stretched me out, and then we did some electro-therapy. She said no work till next week. I can work from home so I can at least keep up with what’s going on. We also have two or three more appointments this week. Hopefully that’s all I need to get back up and going again.

I just hate it when this happens. I feel bad for Tracy for having to take care of me. I hate having to pay medical bills. I hate having to ask off of work. It just sucks.

But that’s how I managed to make a three day vacation into an additional week off of work.

Photos: Winter Snow Storm, 2007

mcwilliams — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:04:06 +0000

I took a few shots this morning after I shoveled about 1500lbs of snow off of our flat roof above our bedroom. I think most of them are pretty cool. Check them out.

Guitar Hero = F.U.N.!

mcwilliams — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 20:00:17 +0000

What a weekend! We had one of Parker-Jon’s friends overnight and luckily he has Guitar Hero. So we asked if he’d bring it along. We played non-stop from about 5pm till about 11:30pm and a few more hours in the morning till they left. What a blast! I can’t wait to get this on the 360.

Tracy even got into it mostly playing “I Love Rock-n-Roll” and “Smoke on the Water”. I think she even tried “Iron Man” and a few others. It was quite comical, but she did okay once she go the hang of it.

I loved playing “Cowboys from Hell”, “More than a Feeling” (really good on that one on medium difficulty), “Thunderkiss 65″, and a slew of others.

The kids played just about everything.

I will say this…it’s all in the attitude!

Tales from the “What the hell?!” department

mcwilliams — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 19:47:45 +0000

Okay…our shower/tub has been draining very slow lately. Since we own a fairly old house (nearly 100yrs old), we have a drum trap behind the tub. I’ve tried snaking from the tub, but getting little to no results. I’ve tried enzyme pipe cleaners, plunging, etc… only for it to work temporarily.

Today I decided to open the drum trap, and try snaking from there. Once it bit, I was worried that I wasn’t going to get the line back, since it wouldn’t budge, but I managed to haul it in. Much to my surprise I reeled in a real-looker.

Take a look:

It looks like some cap of sorts. How it managed to get in the pipes, we’ll never know. I’m feeling pretty confident this is the majority of my slow drain problems. Let’s hope!

Update:

Oops…forgot to mention how big this sucker is. It’s about 1.75in long, about 1/2in tall and about 1/2in wide.

Fixing haze in digital photos – my solution

mcwilliams — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:13:43 +0000

Jake Ludington writes an article about fixing haze in digital photos which I somewhat disagree with.

I’m not sure that this technique is the best way considering he suggests using Photoshop’s Unsharpen Mask to remove the haze.

I typically use unsharpen mask to subtly sharpen an image any time I open it for the first time and usually use the following settings:

Amount: 100-200
Radius: 1px
Threshold: 10-15

I’d suggest using the following technique;

After opening your image, use unsharpen mask (as I outlined above) to sharpen the image
Duplicate the original layer and position the new one above it.
Change the new layer’s transparency type to OVERLAY (even with this you greatly reduce the haze – just reduce the fill amount a bit)
With the new layer selected, go to Filters > Other > High Pass
You’ll have to play with the amount but I used 250% (max)

Here are the images:

The untouched image. I just sharpened it a bit with unsharpen mask.

Here we duplicated the image layer, set it to overlay. Looks better already.

Here we duplicated the original layer, set it to overlay and applied a high pass filter on that layer.

You can see the differences and no need to mess around with goofy unsharpen masks. Of course I didn’t play with levels (much better than playing with brightness/contrast) or any other tweaks but just a quick tip on freshening up your older images or making a hazy image pop.