my life, my thoughts, my world.

Went out to Fryar Field today to take some pictures of the current Aiborne class jumping. An officer I know got me onto the drop zone for some pretty good angles.

The rest of the pictures are here.

Flickr photo set pics from earlier today. All taken on main post at FBGA, with my Canon 350D and my Sigma 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lense. I’ve got filters on the way (UV, circular polarizer, and warming for each of my lenses.)

Today was supposed to be a good ride for me and some friends headed up to Atlanta for the night. Instead it turned into a lesson in field expedient emergency aid. The route was to be simple – US 27 out of Columbus, GA to GA 190 (Pine Mountain), ride GA 190 until it hit GA 36 and ran into US 19 north into I-75 into Atlanta.

Roughly 12 miles into GA 190 I ride into a decreasing radius left turn with an elevation change – uphill into the turn, downhill out of it. I checked my rearview after my front end bobbled a bit exiting the turn just in time to see my friends Marc and Sara lowside and go off the road. The u-turn skills I honed in the MSF ERC kicked in, along with a healthy dose of adrenaline. The SV stood up quickly, slowed down and whipped around and I twisted the grip to get back to them.

If I said I didn’t think Sara was dead while I was riding back to them, I would be lying to you. I saw was her laying face up and not moving, with Marc standing above her looking confused. Luckily I was quite wrong and she was just laying there trying not to pass out. After convincing myself that nothing was broken, I helped her get out of the helmet and jacket so she could breathe.

While this is going on, I realize I don’t have any first aid supplies with me. My tank bag had the following inside:

• 1 long sleeved shirt
• A toothbrush and toothpaste
• Deoderant
• My Digital RebelXT and lenses
• Gerber multitool and a whet stone

None of that is going to fix a broken person. Clearly I need help because I have bleeding friends – so I turn to the road and attempt to flag down fellow motorcyclists. To my surprise, and quite honestly disgust, no less than 10 motorcyclists rode right past us looking at the wreckage and going on their merry way. One guy did stop and ask if we needed help – in the course of small talk we find out he’s stationed at Ft. Benning as well, A. Co 3BN 75RGR RGT. That’s right, we just happened to end up with a Ranger to help us out. He didn’t really have any first aid gear either, but he did have a clean undershirt, and water – which was better than I could do with just a clean shirt and no water.

The two of us cut the shirt up, washed some wounds off, and applied our makeshift field dressings while another family – apparently parents of a Boy Scout – pulled over to give us water, and call for more help. In the end four LEOs were on the scene, an ambulance, a fire truck, four first responders, and the medical examiner. Apparently the word was that two riders crashed head-on. I guess someone assumed that since my bike was parked facing Marc’s bike that we’d crashed into each other.

Anyway, Marc and Sara are both ok. I’m quite certain neither is feeling great right now, but it could have been much worse. Both have banged extremities on their left sides. Marc’s forearm is pretty much all road rash right now, and his knee is pretty skinned up too. Sara’s left hand is fairly well beaten up, and her knee has seen better days.

Tomorrow I’ll post pictures of the bike, and their helmets. If there’s any point to this it’s simply WEAR YOUR GEAR.

Edit to add a photo of my new on-bike first aid kit

I just put together a “patch ‘em up till the real medics show up” kit to ride with under my seat. Guess I broke my own rule of always being prepared. I had my 9mm with me… but I wasn’t prepared for an emergency of the medical nature – at least not as prepared as I should have been.

Several bandages both square and wraps, bactine spray, and neosporine + pain relief, acetominphen, some medical tape, 4 pairs of gloves, and two 45″ athletic shoe laces should I need to splint anything or make a tourniquet.

Edit to add pics of the helmets

In a quest to be able to use one of my desktops for image manipulation, I came to the realization that my gamma was horribly off on this monitor. Having absolutely no clue how to go about fixing that in linux, I turned to Google and found this.

It’s a pretty easy process, and is quite well detailed in the linked article above. Basically crank the contrast on your monitor to max, drop your monitor’s brightness to min, and download this test image.

Open the linked image and note the scale on the left, and the black bars on the right. The one’s over the A and B will turn grey as you increase the brightness. You’re trying to get A to be black right at 2.2, at which point B will be quite grey. That alone is pretty close, or was on my monitor rather.

From there if you feel like messing with your red, green, or blue gamma – go here and tweak each channel until the horizontal bars near your target gamma (2.2) blend in w/ the background. For me this only required opening a terminal and typing xgamma -rgamma 1.053 -ggamma 1.180 -bgamma 1.136

To make that persist across reboots either run the above xgamma line at login for your user, or add Gamma 1.053 1.180 1.135 to the Monitor section of your xorg.conf.

Today I took the opportunity to take a ride with two of the guys I was in Iraq with. We took the same route as I did before I came home on R&R. This time it was more fun. Sometime soon, if the weather holds up I’ll make a run out to Wolfpen Gap, and ultimately Deal’s Gap.

.. and I’m back at Ft. Benning. I got in at 0600, carried my guitars up the stairs, and passed out for about 45 minutes before one of my sergeants came in and woke me up. Naturally I expected that to happen, so I wasn’t that asleep. Just unloading the truck now, it needs gas, and it really needs to be washed so I’ll probably do that today before I sign in off of leave.

It’s getting to be about time for me to head back to Ft. Benning and go back to work. Leave has been good for the most part – I’ve had the chance to see some good friends, fix my truck, ride my motorcycle, visit with family, and figure some things out. I was thinking I would go back tomorrow, and sign back in from leave to save a few days – I’ve rethought that and I won’t be signing back in until Friday or Saturday. I’m still leaving tomorrow though. Unpacking, and getting my BDUs in order (they need new rank, and combat patches – and my boots haven’t been polished since 2004.) I’d rather have some free time to get that taken care of, than have to do it all in one night, and get up in the morning for PT.

Figured I’d take some more pictures of a few guitars @ the house. All are hosted on my flickr.

All images hosted on my flickr account.

Stars and Stripes over Houston

The 610 Loop

Concrete Hill

Ship Channel Bridge

Texas Cyclone

Refinery

Refinery

Refinery at night

I couldn’t really think of anything to photograph last night, so I figured I’d check out the reports that Sigma glass tends to be darker in general than Canon glass. I happen to have two lenses both with 50mm focal lengths and a tripod. The Canon lense in question is their inexpensive 50mm f/1.8, and the Sigma is their “digital” 18-50mm f/3.5-5.6. Given that I can’t go below f/5.6 at 50mm on the Sigma, I set the camera body (Canon Digital Rebel XT, or 350D) to f/5.6 with a shutter speed of 1/3sec.

The photo through the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lense.

The photo through the Sigma 18-50 f/3.5-5.6 lense.

With the Sigma lense being designed for the smaller crop sensor, and the Canon being an EF lense, rather than an EF-S probably makes a difference as to how much light gets through even at the same aperture. Anyway, in my test the Sigma is in fact darker, by about a third of a stop.