On Sunday evening I decided to have a cup of Maxwell House “Cinnamon Royale” instant coffee for a treat. This was probably my second or third cup made using this tin. Anyways I took out a clean insulated mug and checked it as always because our dishwasher leaves crud in them sometimes. It was clean. I then put my four heaping spoonful’s into the mug and added boiling water to it. I stirred it up and noticed some dark spots that weren’t dissolving. I figured it was just clumps of coffee mix until I saw the red and yellow shell. There was some sort of beetle like thing floating in my coffee. Then I noticed two more smaller versions of the same thing. Yuck! Given that the mug was clean and I’ve never seen a bug like this in Calgary I figure this obviously came from my tin of coffee. How disgusting! I’m wondering how many of the little ones I’ve consumed without noticing them.

Anyways I took a couple pics with our digicam. They didn’t turn out too well but you can see this isn’t a normal local bug. It seemed to kind of resemble a yellow and red spotted beetle-spider for lack of a better description. Needless to say this is the last Maxwell House instant coffee I am touching for a very very long time!

Update: 2004/12/07 I received a response back from Kraft.

Subject: RE: Your Comment/Question

Thanks for visiting our web site.  We're sorry to learn that you were
disappointed with our product.  

We give careful attention to each step of preparation and packaging in our
manufacturing process.  Samples from each production run are evaluated
before shipment in an effort to prevent any unsatisfactory products from
entering distribution.  

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.  We're sending you
reimbursement, via first class mail, which you should receive in 7-10
business days.  

Please add our site, http://www.kraftcanada.com, to your bookmarks and visit
us again soon!

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jsc-kraft@nddn.net

About half way through my tin of instant coffee I found a "family" of
insects quite unlike any I have ever seen in Calgary.  The were sort of a
beetle/spider looking thing with a yellow and black shell with black spots.

So yay. I guess I get my money back anyways. I would have rather just not had this happen in the first place. Yuck.

Came across the the Universal Light Code. It’s basically a nifty system of mapping common lighting situations to a letter code. (ie. Full sunlight = B, City skyline after sunset = G, ….) Then there is series of tables that can associate the letter code with various aperture / SS combinations. It’s kind of a neat and very thorough looking system and given my latest two purchases of Soviet RFs with no meters it looks really useful. The guy who came up with the ULC also sells a card with fancy wheel called the BLACK CAT Extended Range Exposure Guide which looks pretty handy although all the information is freely available on his website. Jim Doty provides a good explaination of using the system.

The creator of the ULC also has some pretty decent Rules of Thumb.

On Friday night Anji and I went to her company Christmas party which was quite enjoyable. The food was very tasty.

Saturday morning Dad came over and we started work building our deck. Naturally a couple hours into the job it started snowing pretty hard and it was really cold. But we persevered and essentially finished the upper deck (just needs railings and all the decking to be screwed down) and dad finished the beam for the lower one. Attaching the ledger board for the lower deck turned out to be a bit of a disaster. It needs to be attached to concrete so we tried using normal drills and masonry bits which worked, although really slowly, until we toasted one of the drills. Grrr. So Saturday evening I made an emergency run to Rona to rent a concrete drill and buy a new power drill. Given that the $20 rental fee is significantly less than the replacement cost of a drill I’m regretting not renting it in the first place. In any case we got the ledger bolted to the house before Dad had to head out. It’s all looking really good. That evening we got together with Scott, Candice, Grace and Tara and made Pizzas for dinner. Mmmm.

Sunday morning I was up at 6:30am working on the lower deck. I’ve finished setting all the joists and screwed it some more decking. I saved the hammering until later as I don’t want to start a fued with our neighbors At 1:30pm Mike, Wes and I went to the Museum of the Regiments to take some photos of the tanks and other armored vehicles. I think I’ll have some good ones out of that. I dropped off my film yesterday evening so I should have them back tonight. When I got home Kailey was napping so Anji and I worked on sticking up the border in her new room (we painted last weekend). Unfortunately the border doesn’t seem to be sticking enough and keeps peeling away from the wall. Grrr. Last night we went over to my parents for dinner and a visit. A nice full weekend but we sure got a lot accomplished.

Update: Pictures from our trip to the Museum are here.

Was looking Rick Olsen’s site which has some neat tech tips for old cameras including repair info and how they work. If you are curious how the shutter timing works for purely mechanical cameras this site has the goods.

Here is a nifty tip for improving flash shots. It’s basically using a white card mounted behind out flash to split the flash and provide some fill flash in addition to the bounce flash. This would limit the shadows around eyes you would otherwise get. Sounds like he gets really good results out of this but as be points out you look like kind of a geek.

http://rick_oleson.tripod.com/index-82.html

He also has a rather nifty exposure meter (link below or PDF of it). It’s just a slide-rule type thingy the author built to go with his meter-less Minnox. I think I’ll try it out with my FED 3 and KIEV 4a.

http://rick_oleson.tripod.com/index-43.html

Update: I just got some prints back that I did using the reflector approach described above and must say it definately helps. Here is a portrait of Kailey I did using a flash reflector cut out of cardboard and electrical taped to the flash.

Anji and I are wanting to build a deck and get after it here. Originally this seemed pretty simple. We essentially want two separate 13×12 decks where one is 8″ down from our kitchen door and the other is 8″ down from that. We already have the concrete footings poured and rough plans drawn up. Seemed so simple. Yesterday I was browsing on the City of Calgary website and found this information about building residential wood decks. It seems that if your decks is over 23″ (ours is at 28″ at the high point) you need to getting a building permit which requires me to draw up plans and present them to the city blah blah blah. Ugh

We were originally planning on having the top deck edged in bench seats instead of a railing but since we are building a deck over 2′ tall it doesn’t sound like that is an option. It’s so tempting to just say to heck with it and build it anyways because we are so close to the limit and assume nobody will really notice nor care. Or we could alter our plans a bit and try and drop the top deck a few inches but I’m not to keen on that either. Rather frustrating. I’d like to get the plans finalized this week and the materials ordering this weekend so I can get after it. I don’t want this project to drag on indefinitely.

I just bought a Kiev 4a range-finder off E-Bay to add to my collection After WW2 the Russians took the Carl Zeiss camera equipment and started manufacturing Contax clones from Russia. Supposedly these are pretty decent and way cheaper than the real thing.

On Saturday morning Mike and I headed out to K-Country to try and snap some cool pics. We just drove down Sibbald Creek Trail and stopped when we found something interesting. The most amusing stop was this partially frozen beaver pond. We were in plain view from the highway trudging around with tripods and multiple SLRs taking pictures of ice, water and beaver shrapnel. People driving by were probably thinking we were nuts. I think we stopped in four places and I took four rolls of film. Unfortunately none of my pics were great and a lot were downright lousy. Oh well. I still had a great time.

Found a really cool gadget I’ll just have to build. It’s a little device for timing the shutter speed of a camera. Handy since all my cameras are fairly old and possibly not as accurate as they should be. Especially the new FED 3 when it shows up.

I just caved and bought a FED 3B Rangefinder off E-Bay. It was produced between 1963 and 1980 in the Ukraine. The unit I purchased comes with a Industar-61L/D (2.8/55mm) lens. It’s a clone of a Leica range-finder that was pretty popular (and way cheaper). It’s a pretty sweet camera. It also has a pretty interesting past. Seems like it’s named after the head, Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB). The NKVD turned various orphanages into labor camps in an effort to convert the Soviet Union into a more industrial nation. The FED 3B is one of the products produced by these camps. Here is an interesting page on it.

It’s being shipped from the Ukraine so hopefully it arrives intact and as advertised. I’m looking forward to playing with it. I also have my eye on the Argus C3 and the Zorki 6 but I’m pretty certain Anji would kill me if I bought all of these too.

I feel so lucky. I was sent this reasonably authentic looking Paypal scam this morning. I took screen caps and stuff just in case anyone cares.