Perez Studios

Cotton picking is still big here in the Central Valley but it has died down quite a bit compared to the way it used to be.  They actually closed down the plant that is close to my house that used to take in tons and tons of cotton modules.  They sold the factory and have been taking it apart piece by piece.  Soon you wont be able to see this or if you do then I am sure the kids will be like, “Wow Dad, what is that big scary looking thing driving in the road?”  I recall when I used to be a tractor parts salesman they sent me to a workshop on the 8 row cotton picker that was huge.  Rumor had it that a very wealthy farmer bought about 12 of the 6 row machines and paid to send them overseas to his farm in Europe.  Those 6 rows went for about $500,000 back then.  I am not even sure what the shipping costs but I hope he made some money on that deal.

If you have any photos of the cotton picker let me know or post a link to them when you leave your comment.

Thanks for reading!

Semper Fidelis,

Manuel Perez

Breaking news: Demand Progress has obtained documents that reveal a radical shift in how law enforcement is policing the Internet.

Brian McCarthy ran a website that linked to various sites where you could watch online streams of TV shows and sports networks. A couple months ago, the government seized his domain name and on Friday they arrested him and charged him with criminal copyright infringement — punishable by five years in prison.  We just dug up the complaint, and you can view it here.

Click here to tell the government that there’s nothing illegal about linking to another website — and that they need to drop the charges right away!

The complaint reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) don’t even allege that McCarthy made a copy of anything! Just that his site linked to various sites with copyrighted material. Under that sort of thinking, everyone who’s sent around a link to a copyrighted YouTube video is a criminal.

This is another shocking overreach by DHS and ICE — a steamship-era department that’s proving once again that it doesn’t understand the Internet.

We need to push back — and fast — before they try to lock up more Americans.  Will you click here to tell DHS and ICE to back off?

Thanks for fighting back.

– The Demand Progress team

P.S. This is a critical fight with huge ramifications for Internet freedom.  Will you forward this petition to your friends and help us make sure that DHS and ICE know we’re disgusted with their abusive behavior?

Paid for by Demand Progress (DemandProgress.org) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Contributions are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.

–

Today, I have to go out to Oro Loma again on my way to work.  I have to bring in a server that should have been decommissioned a while back but is still alive and happens to house some files on it that are needed.  The photo above is from when we went out last time to bring in some HP Thin Clients.  Look at the server on the bottom of the cart.

Thanks for reading!

Semper Fidelis,

Manuel Perez

Recently, my wife purchased an XBOX360 for the house and it was great while we had the XBOX Live Gold Subscription.

Read more…

I noticed a huge pole in the neighborhood yesterday when I got home from work.  I had to get a closer look.  Looks like someone is putting in some networks.  It looks like the poles went in pretty fast because I don’t recall seeing them there on Sunday and all of a sudden they were there.

That is all for today because it seems the whole family is home sick with some kind of bug that is going around.  I think it is only a matter of time before I start feeling the symptoms. 

Semper Fidelis,

Manuel Perez

I have been looking everywhere on the net trying to find a way to lock certain apps and or folders in the iPhone so that when I lend my phone to someone, they don’t have access to all my personal info. 

I keep finding all these websites that have ways to lock the folders but it requires that you Jailbreak your iPhone.  I am not ready for that just yet but plan to see how much longer I can deal with this issue. 

You would think that someone would have had this problem before and has come up with a solution already. 

If you know any app or anyone with the knowledge to come up with an app that can do this please let me know.  I am sure along with myself and all the other iPhone users that don’t like passing their personal information around, we would appreciate it.

If you have already Jailbroke your iPhone then you can just visit this website and install Locktopus on in and it will give you what you want.

That is all for today!

Thanks for reading!

Semper Fidelis,

Manuel Perez

These 34 brand new Acer Desktops/Monitor Combos were delivered on Friday and today I get to begin cloning them using Storage Craft.  

I came across an article today when I was getting caught up on some RSS feeds and one that got my attention was from the Digital Photography School.  It mentions the fact that today, photographers cant just be photographers.  They have to master so many different areas in order to stay in the game and keep up with the rest of the competition.  I, myself try to keep up with things and it seems to overwhelm me with my full-time job and my part-time life. 

I thought this article was a great read and I recommend you all read it as well.

Here is the link to the article.

Thanks for reading!

Semper Fidelis,

Manuel Perez

I finally finished ordering all the photos for Cal Ripken Baseball Saturday.  They should be here soon.  Once they arrive we will sort through them and put them together according to who ordered what and put them into envelopes.  We plan on delivering them on the day of the awards ceremony for the program.  We will be having a booth setup with all the envelopes and photos and we will also have some other items to display. 

Now that the photos are done we still have a couple of projects planned.   I got to join the Firebaugh Police Department Saturday for a barbeque and watching them qualify on the pistol range.  It was interesting and I plan on posting some of the photos on here tomorrow.  We also have a wedding planned for later on in May which is going to be great and I cant wait to see the happy couple at the altar. 

Now that all the photos are backed up I am now ready to make use of those 4 Seagate 1.5TB drives to configure them as a RAID 5.  The problem was that the motherboard I bought didn’t support a RAID 5 and Vista doesn’t support a RAID 5 without a separate controller so I went out and bought one.  It cost me about $112 on eBay but its worth it if you plan on having a lot of storage and redundancy.  The whole purpose of the RAID 5 is to have three or more hard drives act as one big drive giving you speed and redundancy.  If one drive fails then you quickly swap that drive out with another and it rebuilds itself keeping your data safe and secure.  I started the RAID 5 initialization on Sunday and it said it was going to take about 33 hours to initialize all the drives and give me a total of 4.5TB.  Now, my C drive or my OS drive is on a Seagate 1.0TB drive which I plan on using the RAID for keeping backups of the C drive along with my photos and downloads. 

That’s all for today.  Thanks for reading.

Manuel Perez

I am working on building a new PC and I must say it gets pricey when you want to add things like redundancy.  I have been purchasing most of the parts from New Egg which is really great with the prices.  In fact I think just about all of the parts came from New Egg except for the processor which I got from my friend.  Nothing fancy on the cpu but my friend is going to over clock it for me.  Here is what we have in it so far.

This does not count all the taxes and shipping for all the different times I had to buy this and then realized I needed this.  That is always a pain.  I plan on installing Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit on the OS.  I also have a 120GB SATA drive that I plan on hosting my OS on and using the 4 – 1.5TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration and use it to store my music, photos and documents on.  I will have another 1.5TB drive that I plan on using for Backups which I know I will have to upgrade that soon to keep all the backups on.  Thankfully I use Storage Craft to do all my backups and I must say it is the coolest way for backups. 

If anyone has any feedback I would appreciate it.  I am hoping to have this system up and running by next Friday since I have a Photography Gig coming up.  Wish me luck folks!