This should make it easier

Happy NewYear! Time to start blogging again. Found blogpress in the AppStore months ago which I thought would help me blog on my iPad. Unfortunately it has been crashing up until now. Been busy as of late with cooking, dancing, traveling and working. I've got to work on my consistency in the blogosphere or it will go back to boring. To highlight some stuff I've been doing:














I'd like to start posting about my multitude of hobbies weekly, but we will see how it goes. For now, twice a week sounds like an attainable goal. If you're reading this, don't give up on me. Not for, at least, another month. Ciao for now!

New Digs

Scared shitless is how I would describe the thought of me getting a second property, but that is precisely what I did. The process of buying a home from a seller is a bit of a pain in the ass. My first home is a condo that I bought brand new, while in construction. That process was painless. No negotiating, no waiting, no "highest and best offer". Then again, it was also much, much simpler to get a loan back then.

And that is where I am currently at in the process. My paranoia is running high, as I read articles online describing the difficulty of getting a loan. Because I have a first home, the loan officer calculated my debt to income ration using a full payment, and not having to rent it out. I've been fortunate over the last several years as well as have been without a car payment, so my credit score is high, my debit is low, and I will hopefully have an FHA loan in the next month. But I had to make sure that being self employed + having a second home + the current loan environment wasn't going to harm me and it doesn't seem it will.

Speaking of FHA, it is absolutely awesome that I qualify for it. Obviously this isn't my first home, but unbeknownst to me, my first home was purchased with a conventional loan and not an FHA loan. As a result, I only need to put down a minimum of 3.5%. I want to keep my payment at a manageable amount should I wish to rent it out in the future so I'm putting down 10%. The important part here is that I don't need to put down 20% on a conventional loan! The only thing about the FHA loan is that I have to pay the MIP (mortgage insurance premium) for 5 years, regardless if I only have 78% (the % BOA requires for not having MIP) of the loan value left. Although, I can refinance to a conventional sometime in the next couple years and remove the MIP that way if it ends up monetarily advantageous. Although I find it hard to believe it will be. The interest rates will likely be higher, and the amount saved in MIP will likely be spent, and then some, in the closing costs. In any event, I dabbled in the idea of putting down more, so I asked my loan officer about putting down 15%. Here is what would happen: My loan payment would decrease 20 bucks and my interest rate would stay the same. At a pretty awesome, I think, 4.75%. In other words, why the hell would I put down more? It seems that 10% seems to be a perfect amount to put down for me. Needless to say, I don't envision financing being a problem, but the final word hasn't come down yet, as it usually takes a full 45 days to process an FHA loan, according to bank of america.

So that has been the process up until now. Next step is to find a home inspector, hope that goes well, and then play the waiting game. Ciao for now.

Just gotta do it

So my dreams of having a sweet automated process for handling pictures almost came true, except that it was taking too long. So, I'm doing it half automated, half by hand, and let me just tell you that it is TIME CONSUMING. Trying to break into the photography business is hard knocks! I might as well work at McDonalds because that would pay more!

The one thing that I have figured out is using aperture to export images on a web page, but have it customized to use my own template. I am using fancybox to create a nice lightbox effect for my photos. I'll have to share my process at some point, but barely have time to write this post, much less a how-to on all that I'm doing. The cliff notes version is that I use Aperture to export all the thumbs and regular files, then opening up each of the files in an editor and using regular expressions to replace file names. I need to still figure out a fast way to change the page links and get the style sheets looking nice, but I hopefully should be able to drop a div into the Beyond Just Dance's home page. We'll know for sure tonight, because I'd like it online before tomorrow night's Flower Power 70s party! Ciao for now!

Evernote ftw

Today, my accountant asked me what a particular charge was for because it was uncategorized in my Quickbooks. I had no clue whatsoever what it was and my only hope was that I took a picture of the receipt and stored it in evernote. At first I tried doing the search for the amount, and it came up with nothing. It was awesome though, because it was able to do character recognition on my search. When I went to the date of the transaction, I found the receipt and realized why it couldn't find it during the search. It was the amount after tip and my handwriting is, well, let's say my penmanship needs a little work. So, the little act of keeping track of receipts kind of helped me. And it isn't that bad of a pain in the ass anymore. It's pretty much habit now. The only problem that I have had is that my iPhone 3gs is lagging badly. I think I have too much crap on it. Where is my iPhone 5????

Organizing in Aperture

Last night was spent organizing and consolidating all my photos in aperture. I utilized referenced external masters so that I could export my projects for metadata rating on the go without having the monstrously sized masters along with them. It works beautifully! I exported some projects to dropbox, opened it up from my laptop and rated pictures without needing the masters. I am able to rate the images and reimport the project with all the ratings and organizational changes that I made.

I also decided that I'm just going to do plain text along the bottom. It's my first picture set and it's only going to get better. Here is what I did:

So figuring out how to market these is a bit of a learning process as well. I plan on uploading the pics to the internet, so people can look at them for free all they want, but if they want higher quality and printable images, those will cost. How much? This is also a learning process. Hopefully I can come up with a good and efficient system, because right now, things take FOREVER. I'm confident that with my mac and my skillz that I'll find a way, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Image Resolution, Photoshop Actions, and $.

It's amazing how much I didn't know about how photos were edited and printed! Today I was doing research on image resolution and learned that, while 72 pixels/in is sufficient for the web, if I wanted a high quality print, I'd need to be printing at 300 pixels/in. So I took one of my favorite photos of the night and created 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10 versions of it and sent it off through Aperture to be printed, just to see how it turns out. I've never had any image sent off to be printed before, so learning how they get delivered, what they'll look like, the type of paper, etc. I believe will be valuable. This is the photo btw:

I'm also starting to learn about photoshop actions and getting some sort of process going on. I'm an engineer and I'm a big process guy, coming out of an Agile Development background, that thinks doing things over and over again is dumb. Problem is, I'm pretty dumb in the photoshop world right now, so learning actions is going to take some time. I plan on using it to add some kind of banner to the bottom of the pics. Lots of pics. And hopefully by Friday...

So, obvious by my self imposed time crunch, I would like to sell some of these pictures at some point, and having them as normal pics would be kind of lame, no matter how good the are. Sprucing them up should be good. Which leads to the final thing I've done today, which is sign up for dotphoto.com to see how it works. I'm probably going to end up putting another test photo up there and ordering again, just to see the ordering process and quality that comes out of there. That is, until I get some kind of store going on for the dance studio, and, hopefully, eventually for me.

FAIL - staying current with the blog

Well, I have failed miserably at updating my blog and doing p90x. It sometimes seems that updating a blog can be a full time job! Stay tuned for some good updates involving: One year anniversary of my woman's dance studio , my current stint as a photographer along with some sample pics, house hunting, and my experiences going live with the updated studio website this weekend. I promise it will be coming. And at the very least, this is going to act as my thought library.

And some proof that I actually did take pictures this weekend:

I'm going to be blogging about the whole post editing process that I'll be going through this week. You'll want to check in!