Five bars on the AT&T 3G MicroCell

Yesterday I happened to stop by the AT&T store near my house, and they had just received a shipment of these bad boys. After a couple of minor setup hiccups, I now have five full bars of signal strength even in the farthest edges of the house (even the basement, which was a “No Service” dead zone until this morning), and all it costs me is a negligible hit on my Verizon FiOS 25/25 broadband connection.

Guess who’s a valuable AT&T customer?!

I am now the proud owner of a piece of paper redeemable for one AT&T 3G MicroCell

Yup, that’s right, I am now the proud owner of a sheet of paper, redeemable for one range-boosting femtocell device. I almost threw out the letter without even opening it—the envelope looks like 99.7% of the rest of the junk mail that clogs my snailbox these days.

Here’s the funny thing, though…

• Yeah, I have shitty cell phone coverage in my house—if I’m not near a window at the front of the building, incoming calls go to voicemail and outgoing calls almost never go through—but I’ve never complained to AT&T about my lousy service…. not once.
• I’m the only person in my household, and my monthly bills only average out to about $100/month.
• I’m only a little over eleven months into my two-year contract with AT&T. The earliest I can bolt is July 2011.

So why the out-of-the-blue corporate largess? Surely there are thousands—hundreds of thousands— of customers more “valuable” than l’il ol’ me… one lonely $1,200/year revenue stream at one location (with only another $1,300 of revenue guaranteed over the next thirteen months). And don’t forget, I never complained about the service, ever. I could understand if AT&T was sending Golden Tickets like these to families in my neighborhood where there are several subscribers, especially if said households were only a couple of months from the end of their indentured servitude to Ma Bell. But one dude suffering in (literal) silence? It just doan add up!

Oh well, who am I to look a gift femtocell in the mouse (wow that’s a strained pun)? If AT&T wants to gift me with more reliable service and all that it costs me is a little leeching off my broadband connection to the intertubes, who am I to complain? I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood where Verizon FiOS is redonkulously fast—I’ll probably never even notice the drain on my bandwidth.

After years of waiting for the right camera (a digital SLR that shoots 1080p / 24 fps video) at the right price (under $1,000), the photography gods heard my prayers and bestowed upon me the Canon EOS Digital Rebel T2i (known mostly outside the United States as the Canon EOS 550D):

Hello, beautiful

I’ll be posting an in-depth review, sample video and stills the coming months, but that’s not what this post is about. Later this summer my partner and I will be heading to Europe for a tour of Italy and Greece, which is one of the reasons I decided to pull the trigger now on the T2i—I wanted a DSLR and HD camcorder for all the places we’d be seeing, but I also wanted to take only one camera, not two. For this trip of a lifetime, I need a good all-around performer telephoto lens that doesn’t weigh a ton and has superior imaging performance.

After doing a ton of research, I’ve pretty much settled on the Canon 70-200mm EF f/4L IS USM, an image-stabilized, ring-type USM autofocus telephoto lens:

Hello, gorgeous!

Only one small problem: this little lovely clocks in at about $1,200 retail… $300 more than the camera body itself! I’m already in the doghouse with the missus for having bought the T2i, so what to do? Simple… rent the lens. That way, I only spend a fraction of the cost of buying a high-quality Canon L-series lens, I get to try it before I buy it, and I’ll won’t be TOTALLY in the doghouse with the better half. Win-win-win!

It’s been almost 30 years since I last bought an SLR camera or lenses—yes, I truly am older than dirt—and online camera equipment rental companies didn’t exist back in the Stone Age when my Canon AE-1 Program was brand-new. Fortunately, we now live in the golden age of the instant-gratification Internet, and there are several online companies that rent high-end photographic lenses and camera equipment. Here are the deals I found as of March 25, 2010 for the Canon 70-200mm EF f/4L IS USM. Unless otherwise noted, all prices shown are for a four-week rental that includes damage waiver insurance and round-trip second day shipping:

• Pro Photo Rental (http://prophotorental.com) – $??? (see comments section below)
• MJ Memories (http://www.mjlensrentals.com) – $250*
• Photo Lens Rental (http://www.photolensrental.com) – $242**
• Rent Photo Stuff (http://www.rentphotostuff.com) – $218
• Lens Pro To Go (http://www.lensprotogo.com) – $200
• Lens Rentals (http://www.lensrentals.com) – $196
• Camera Lens Rentals (http://www.cameralensrentals.com) – $180
• Rent Glass (http://www.rentglass.com) – $171**
• Lens Giant (https://www.lensgiant.com) – $146 (note–updated with corrected shipping cost… see comments section)
• The Lens Pro (http://www.thelenspro.com) – $143
• Borrow Lenses (http://www.borrowlenses.com) – $139

* – This company doesn’t rent the Canon 70-200mm EF f/4L IS USM. The price shown here is for the Godzilla-sized Canon 70-200mm EF f/2.8L IS USM, an even faster (and LARGER) f/2.8 L-series zoom lens that retails for around $1,800.
** – This company only rents lenses for a maximum of three weeks. The price shown here was calculated by pro-rating for a fourth fictitious week.

If any of my readers have any experience (good OR bad—especially bad!) with any of the companies listed above (or know of any companies not shown above that I should check out or avoid), please reply in the comments section below.

(Please note: This post was edited on 03/26/2010 to remove the pro-rated estimated calculation of Pro Photo Rental’s price and to correct the Lens Giant price, which originally didn’t include shipping. Thanks…)

Careful Sulu, you might scorch the paint if you leave that thing on too long

This is an actual frame grab from Decker’s near-suicidal attack on the doomsday machine. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I’m nearing the end of Act II… it just means that I skipped ahead several scenes and have been working on this particular sequence since the beginning of the month. The Enterprise attack on the planet killer is one of the “money shots” in “The Doomsday Machine”, so I’ve been lavishing a LOT of attention on it. Not to give away everything, but one of the things I’ve been spending a lot of time on is extending the soundtrack during this sequence to make the phaser barrage last a little longer. And ooohhhh, it’s a barn burner. I think when you see the finished product you’ll agree it was worth the wait. (Well, I hope you will!)

*yawn* Off to bed… see you soon!

And you thought I wasn’t working on this project. Tsk tsk tsk.

Decker's Revenge

Beyond Apollo—Plans for the Exploration of Space from the Age of Apollo, 1959-1979

I’d always considered myself to be something of a space buff in general and NASA fanboy in particular—my best friend is a former mid-level executive at NASA and I myself used to work for a NASA subcontractor years ago—but I just finished the better part of this evening reading article after fascinating article at David Portree’s website on missions and space vehicles that I had never even heard rumors of before. (Did you know that at one point there were plans to soft-land spent Saturn S-IVB stages on the lunar surface for use as shelters instead of smacking them into the Moon? Or that as late as 1967 NASA was planning manned flyby missions of Venus and Mars after the Moon landings as a logical next step towards a manned Mars landing mission in the early 1980s?)

David Portree’s blog is a must-bookmark site for diehard space geeks and promises endless hours of fascinating (and depressing) reading, and interestingly enough, has helped me put Obama’s NASA budget cuts into stark perspective. When you step back for a second and consider the scope of audacious proposals like the NERVA Electric Mars Ship (see below) and compare those big-thinking plans to the relatively puny ambitions of the anemically underfunded Constellation program, it really makes you stop and realize something: we didn’t lose the Moon today. We lost it over forty years ago.

NERVA Electric Mars Probe (1966)

How did we get to this point? How did our dreams become so small and timid?

Starship Enterprise 1960s studio model at Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

So… I wonder how this picture was taken? I am fairly certain that the image has been edited somewhat to hide the background; here is what appears to be the original. Obviously the Enterprise model is suspended from the ceiling above, but the refurbished model (AFAIK) has never been displayed in public like this. Is this a photo taken right after the restoration at the facility where the work was done? If anyone has any clues about the story behind this photo, please post a comment below. Meanwhile, click the link below to view the original full-size version of this image at the NASM website:

1960’s Starship Enterprise Studio Model at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

By the way (and in case anyone’s wondering), I’ve been taking a couple of weeks off from my “Doomsday Machine” project to recharge my batteries, but I’ve resumed work and hopefully will have more progress to show in February. It’s hard being a one-man show… sometimes ya gotta take a break to get the creative juices flowing again! Thanks for your patience. :)