Tag: jane ullah

More shenanigans. :P

This is a long overdue update. Life’s been rolling right along. In summary,

  1. I still have my job *knock on wood* although we have no idea what the next round of budget cuts will bring.
  2. I have a second wedding to shoot in June! This is awesome and I’m learning to be patient in this business. It’s all about networking which I suck at, but will have to learn in order to survive! I’m improving on my skills as well and enrolled in a photography class.
  3. I celebrated my birthday several weeks ago. I’m officially in my mid-twenties.
  4. Matt’s done with his spring classes. He smoked his GIS class with an A and passed his CompSci class with a B. So proud of him. :P. Crazy man that he is, he raced a 6hr mountain bike race on May 1, 2010 before his finals this week! It was his first race of the ‘season’ so he’ll only get better from here. Check out my photos from the Dirty Spokes 12/6hr MTB race on my site. The pics are on Facebook as well for you to tag anyone you know! I shot with my Sigma 10 – 20mm and the Nikon 18 – 105mm kit lens for the D90. My pictures weren’t “tack sharp”, but I did the best I could. I had a lot of fun shooting pictures of the bikers who were great. The biggest issues I faced while photographing the race were:
    1. I like using natural light, but in the woods with the trees blocking the light, my lens needed some help getting light in. The 18 – 105mm lens has a maximum aperture of 3.5 at 18mm and 5.6 at 105mm. Zooming in to 105mm meant the light I’d get with the f-stop of f/5.6 was not enough to keep the scene well exposed. An ideal situation would’ve been for me to rent the much faster 70 – 200mm f/2.8 lens which has a wide aperture and more zoom to it. So, I resolved to shoot in raw where I’d be able to bring up the exposure/brightening of some salvageable pictures without depleting the quality too much by editing the jpg directly. I also used my SB-600 flash at certain points to help with illumination and exposure.
    2. I do well with still photography (if I may say so myself. :P). Action photography would prove to be a challenge because you’ve got bikers flying past you at over 20mph. I had hoped to get close-up shots of the bikers’ faces with their bikes, but doing this was tricky because I need to stop the action by using a high shutter speed and get the scene properly exposed at the same time. An all-too-common scenario for me shooting at 105mm without the SB-600 flash was that the scene was dark so I turned the flash on which helps “freeze” the frame as well.
    3. I kept trying to make my lens compensate for the light situation by lowering my shutter speed to ‘unsafe’ levels (unsafe meaning I took the risk of increased blur in my photos to get more light. After getting disgusted with the expectedly blurry pictures, I kept the flash on throughout the event. Depending on how far you’re zoomed in or out, the maximum shutter speed the SB-600 will let you shoot at may vary. I also discovered I might need a battery pack for my flash (or a different grade of AA batteries, possibly Ni-Mh) because my recycling time was painfully slow in comparison to how quickly the bikers were flying by me! Anyway, I’ve learned a LOT about action photography primarily and I am excited for Matt’s next race (whenever that is). Hopefully, what I’ve learned will translate into better race pictures. 🙂 For more of what I’ve been up to (pictorially), keep tabs on my other blog with photos. 🙂
  5. Last month, I won an HP TouchSmart 600-1000t computer!! Surreal, right? Talk about God providing for his flock. Seriously, we had over 300 lbs of single-purpose electronics (60lb speakers, 1 clunky TV, a VCR player, a DVD player, a PlayStation 2 and a bunch of power cords). Our living room was a mess and then comes the most beautiful email I’ve ever seen saying I’d won the TouchSmart 600. 😛 You just have to read my post on Jane Talks Tech to find out more, but suffice it to say that the TouchSmart was what we needed. It rendered said 300lbs of single-purpose equipment redundant.

Getting to back to basics

One sentence that can be used to describe my life right now: following my heart these days. Seriously. I may not be making the most money right now, but I will not trade a high flying job for the wonderful man I married, the wonderful family I married into and the incredible support & love I’m getting from my family & relatives. In other words, I have my own personal slice of heaven right here in Georgia. I’ve made unbelievable personal strides in my life and personal struggles & I’m frankly amazed at myself because I almost didn’t think I had it in me.

As a matter of fact, 2009 is shaping up to be a life-changing year for Matt & I. Let’s count our blessings, shall me:

  1. I’ve quit biting my nails and I’ve been “sober” since the 8th of June, 2009. My nails are growing out beautifully and Matt’s amazed at how ‘quickly’ they seem to have recovered. It’s a huge confidence booster for me because I’m always hiding my fingers when in public and it’s a new & fascinating feeling to be able to simply stretch my hand and not worry if I’m displaying my “good” side or not. 🙂
  2. Matt is kicking butt in his GIS classes. Since he started taking classes in the summer of 2008, he has had solid As in all the courses he has taken! I can’t say how proud I am of him especially considering the grueling nature of his schedule (working at Wally world and on his free days, he’s at school or doing homework). He’s quite the trooper and I draw inspiration from him daily.
  3. I’ve become mentally stronger about myself and I have to say that leaving grad. school was the best decision I ever made, despite the heartwrenching sadness I felt at the time i.e. I felt like a quitter. However, like I tell Matt, sometimes you have to do things that hurt to protect yourself and nurture yourself. I’m not 100% out of the woods, but it’s the little things that indicate to me that I’ve come a long way. I’m learning to not be afraid to let things go, especially things that do not contribute positively to your life.
  4. My family and I are much closer now that they have internet access at home and just the past Saturday, I spent over 1.5 hrs chatting via Yahoo messenger (webcam and talking via the PC-to-PC connection) with them!
  5. I’m actively pursuing other avenues of interest to me i.e. photography, computer science, social service/activism, etc. For instance, I purchased a Nikon D90 early this year and as God would have it, I attended the Flagpole Music Awards and introduced myself to a man who would turn out to be a key figure in my quest to learn more about photography. As it turned out, I kept in touch with this man and he has introduced me to several important people in the community and has taken me under his wing (informally) in teaching me the ropes of photography! On the social service front, I’m a new volunteer for an organization that advocates for children and it is a very humbling task that renews my faith in social service workers and those who serve communities.
  6. My 2 new websites went up this year and are  going strong. They are: (i) Jane Ullah Photography (ii) Jane Talks Tech! so please support me and check out my sites! 🙂

I could go on, but you get the point. I am just incredibly thankful to God for bringing me this far on my journey and the people He has brought into my life. As LG slogan says, Life’s Good(tm). 😀

A smooth migration and webmaster troubles

I lost the better part of traffic for Friday, but I’ll take lost traffic over a botched migration of web hosts any day! Yes, I took the plunge, made a Dreamhost customer happy by using their affiliate code (PS: that’s my own affiliate code and you can use it to sign up for a plan (or simply put my personal email address in the referral section) at Dreamhost too!)  and became a DreamHost customer myself. I tested Dreamhost’s service out for a few days and once I got comfortable with the interface, I migrated all my files after making sure I’d backed up my wordpress files and database. Yes, I’ve been burned and I tried to be super-careful this time so please if you find any oddness going around, feel free to email me or drop a comment.

Also, I took the liberty of updating home page at fadingwhispers.org. I visited one of my favorite sites for free website layouts (Magitek Designs) and I downloaded one that I thought looked particularly appealing. Well, after a lot of trial and error, I altered the layout to my satisfaction and here’s the finished product. Here’s a screenshot:  I just love what I’ve done and it’s also XHTML compliant!
It took me about 2 hrs to tweak this and I’m sure I’ll be doing some more editing. I’m definitely proud of how it turned out. I wasn’t even planning on doing any coding (thanks to WordPress’s fantastic and free themes), but Google Webmaster Tools was having a hard time with the 301 redirect I had done to redirect http://fadingwhispers.org to http://fadingwhispers.org/home. What does that mean? Well, here’s how the Google Webmaster Tools works.

  1. It is basically a tool to keep track of how Google indexes your site and its content. It lets you keep your hand on the pulse of the site, in a manner of speaking vis a vis broken links, sites linking to you, search terms, et cetera.
  2. You add your site and Google tells you that you need to verify or prove your ownership of this site by inserting a meta tag into your index page or uploading a special file.
  3. If all goes well, Google verifies your site properly and you can view crawl statistics and such. In my case, I verified my root site (fadingwhispers.org) before doing the 301 redirect. After creating the .htacess file with the 301 redirect instructions, Google magically un-verified my site. It wouldn’t let me verify my site.

So, there lay my dilemma. Should I take a chance on doing another 301 redirect under my new hosts (Dream Host) or simply throw up a web page that will be a “home page”? Well, I figured that since I had time, I would try to beat some web layout into submission and that’s how my umpteenth website iteration was born. 🙂 The best part about having a simple XHTML home page up is that the Google gods will finally deign to let me see my site statistics. Anyway, to make this potentially long story short, my home page is up and you should check it out! 😀 Shameless plug there. I’ve also been experimenting with various Google adsense formats so please tell me how much you hate/detest/loathe or love/adore/desire these new ad formats.

It’s Friday and I’m as happy as a lark. My husband’s healthy. I’m alive and breathing. My family is doing well. I’ve got my yogurt. I’m content. lol. My website is running smoothly and I simply feel blessed. Here’s to a great weekend.