Paris

Wore an old jacket today and found subway tickets from Paris. Sad, I think this is a sign that I need to plan a trip back to Europe soon.

Back that thing up

Over the past 17 or so years of owning computers I never put much thought into a serious data backup strategy. I figured the likelihood of my disks crashing were pretty low, so why bother? Several crashed drives and a stolen laptop later (I don’t learn good) I decided to invest in an external drive to back up my data using Time Machine. Now this was sufficient until Carter was born, then I started taking a ridiculous amount of 21 megapixel baby pictures & HD videos and now my drive space is tapped out. If either of my drives were to crash I’d be pretty much screwed and I’d lose pretty much the first 7 months of Carter’s life. Not good.

Being the research hound that I am, I literally spent days trying to figure out what to do until I found the perfect solution. Enter the Drobo. The Drobo is a 4 bay backup “robot” that automatically backs up all of your data, you just pop in the empty 3.5″ drives of your choice (size, brand and speed don’t matter, the Drobo handles the details) and it automatically starts the backup process. What I like about it is the fact that it has 4 bays, so I can use one drive to back up my laptop using Time Machine (hooking up the Drobo to my Airport Extreme Base Station), then another drive to mirror the Time Machine backup just in case my laptop drive and the first Drobo backup happen to fail at the same time. Not likely, but Murphy’s Law tends to apply with these physical drives. Then with the 3rd slot, I can use this drive to house all of my large media that I don’t want clogging up my laptop drive, and the 4th drive can be set up as a mirror to automatically back up drive 3.

So the Drobo pretty much has me fully covered in case of serious catastrophic multiple drive failure, protecting my data for Carter to one day be able to see every single raw image and second of HD video that I’ve taken of him since birth. Also, the drives are hot-swappable so if any of them fails I can just swap out the crashed disk with a new one and it will auto-heal and repair itself without any downtime. Hopefully it works as advertised, I will post a follow up on my thoughts after I get the thing up and running.

Gala to Benefit the SF Ronald McDonald House

Before this weekend I thought a Ronald McDonald House was the children’s play area at McD’s…turns out I was wrong. Seriously though, I had heard of the RMH but never knew what exactly it was until I had the opportunity to shoot this event. Turns out they provide free care and a place to stay for families of children undergoing medical treatment, all through the help of generous donors and volunteers.

The event was hosted at San Francisco’s beautiful Fairmont Hotel by ABC 7′s Cheryl Jennings and Mike Nicco with a special appearance by Jonny Moseley, gold medal winner for downhill skiing at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Here’s a fun fact, Jonny actually had a PS2 game called “Mad Trix” and hosted an episode of SNL in 2002.

Cheryl and Mike

Jonny Moseley

Coordinator of the event Jennifer Consalvi and Wayne Kaleck of Gene Hiller Menswear

Please check out the gallery for the rest of the photos from the event.

Sassy City Chicks Sample Sale

Last week I had the opportunity to work with Moanalani Jeffrey and shoot the Sassy City Chicks sample sale at Fort Mason. It’s a semi annual women’s sample sale that happens in several cities across the country.

I’m not going to act like I know anything about the designers or products so I’ll just post a few pics from the event.

The event was sponsored by GM, yes they were using the trunk of this ZR1 to display women’s accessories.

For the rest of the photos from the event check out the gallery.

Chris’s Baby Shower

I was being annoying at Chris’s baby shower and made everyone stare into my camera for a few seconds each. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with the footage but I figured at the very least I could splice it all together for some memories of the day.

My little moneymaker.

With the ubiquity of child star train wreck stories these days, I used to wonder why a parent would push their kid into show business knowing the likely consequences. Well I wouldn’t say that I COMPLETELY understand now, but a strange thing happened recently.

A few weeks back, I posted a clip on Vimeo of Carter that I took while he was getting his first bath at the hospital. Then out of the blue I get an email from a producer who happened to see the clip, asking if I would sell her the rights so she could use it in a video for a corporate client. Cha Ching. Let’s just say the little guy could easily pay for his own diapers for the next few months.

Tempting as it is, Carter will not be pursuing an acting career anytime soon. Chris and I have decided to add his earnings to his college fund, sadly the rest will have to come from our own sweat and hard work. Or the MegaMillions.

He’s gonna be in pictures

The  first month of Carter’s life has been a completely exhausting, amazing, sleep deprived whirlwind. As tough as they say being a parent is, crank that knob to 11 and that sounds about right. Carter’s been growing at a brisk pace and I feel the need to make more of an effort to capture this guy’s life as it’s (too) quickly unfolding before my very eyes.

Not-hungry face

When I hold him I get sad thinking how he’s going to grow up to be a teenager that will ultimately hate me, so I’ve been doing my best to smother him now while he can’t talk or run away.  Give me some love son!