It’s an inevitable truth – once you find what you are looking for, you stop looking. So it is true that you find what you’re looking for in the last place you look. I just wish it were not at the very bottom of the very last box!

I’ve been looking for an important piece of paper. I knew I had not thrown it out. Based on the date on the document, I also knew where “it should be”. But I could not find it. I finally admitted defeat and contacted someone about getting a replacement copy.

During the conversation, the representative told me the date of the transaction. It was six months sooner than I had remembered. It also meant that the paper should be in the “before the new home office” pile rather than the “after”. Unfortunately, the “before” boxes were many and all in storage in the shop.

I pulled down the boxes and started eliminating as many as I could. I finally was down to one BIG box than was 100% papers. Time to start digging.

Magically, the dates on the papers were converging on the target. I was starting to gain hope of success. Then it happened … with the bottom in site and only a handful of papers remaining, I found the document! Woohoo !

… now to clean up …

It's finally starting to feel like summer so I decided it was time to work up a few new ice cream recipes for the season.

I've made an ice cream I called “you got your dark chocolate in my peanut butter ice cream”. It is made but integrating about 3/4 cup of peanut butter into my ice cream base while it is still churning. Then, right at the end, I toss in about 5 ounces of dark chocolate, chunked into bits. It's tasty but never seemed quite right.

This year I wanted both the chocolate and the peanut butter to be flavor chunks in a rich vanilla base.

I finally found an easy way to get peanut butter in little bits. I spread a thick layer of peanut butter on parchment and freeze it. I can then cut it with a chef's knife and it breaks into little pieces. I then place them back in the freezer along with the chopped dark chocolate. Once the vanilla ice cream is nearly ready, I quickly fold in the chocolate and peanut butter chunks.

The finished ice cream needs to be hardened in the freezer for at least 4 hours before serving.

Yeah, it's pretty good

This should really be titled, “So far out of your comfort zone, you'll need a road trip to get back”!

Four years ago, I wrote about installing spacers to run the Dually with single rear wheels. It's now four years later and I wanted to convert the truck back and sell it. Given the very low mileage, someone would get a good truck – 2005 diesel with only 42,000 miles.

Well, it turned out those aluminum spacers were a bad idea … a very bad idea. Four years of galvanic corrosion from the aluminum spacer being compressed to the iron steel hubs had made then a single, inseparable part. I received lots of “seasoned recommendations” but nothing – not even cutting the pieces apart – would solve my dilemma.

After three weekends of frustrating effort, I caved and ordered new hubs. It turns out hubs for the F350 DRW are hard to find because they never fail so no one needs them.

I also discovered along the way that I needed a couple specialized tools, new seals, and metric impact wrench sockets. … the project cost was really adding up.

All tolled it took me about 3 hours to remove the flare fenders, reinstall the wide rear fenders, and add back the extra lights. It then took me three weekends to replace the first hub and one hour forty-five minutes to replace the second. Knowing what you're doing, having the right tools, and having the parts at hand make things how much smoother!

Nick goes for a run on the runway

There are times when you know there is going to be a Kodak Moment and you’ve left the Hawkeye at home.

I’ve written many times of the quality of modern smartphone cameras. While they are not going to capture a great telephoto image, they can definitely capture some great moments of your life.

I can understand why a recent tweet from a professional photographer proclaimed the Lumina 920 was his new favorite phone. It has, by far, the best camera available today in a smart phone.

So, my advice is – if you are going to get a smart phone and you know you will use it for most of your photos, get one with a good camera!

While I take a lot of photographs, I do not always take good ones. Typically, I am either capturing something that “looks interesting” or I plan ahead and am taking pictures of a particular subject matter. More often than not, the iPhone is the camera for the first category while my 2nd hand Nikon D700 (and a 20 yr old lens) is my camera of choice for the second.

If there is a good photograph somewhere in the many frames I've shot, I want to post it to this blog. That requires some form of workflow to get the picture from the camera, make any adjustments, compose the supporting narration, and then upload it to the blog.

For iPhone pictures, that all takes place within the phone. For shots with the Nikon, there are a few more steps.

I've previously written on using an Eye-Fi card with the D700. I have configured the eye-fi to selectively transfer images (uses the 'lock' or 'protect' feature on the camera). This gives me a level of filtering since I often take several pictures of the same subject, knowing some will have better composition than others.

Once the pictures are on my iPad, I use the built in camera roll App to pick the ones I will be using in the blog post or email. Those get a little more consideration. I'm currently using the Snapspeed App for most of my processing, including cropping, color balance, dodging & burning, and emphasis.

When I will be using more than one image, I decide if they will be used individually or as a photo set. I use Strip Design for making photo sets. One feature of Strip Design I am using more often is the ability to create a specific layout rather than use one of the predefined layouts. The above photo set is an example. I looked at the images I had processed with Snapspeed and from their relative sizes – tall, wide, square,etc. – I 'cut' a page into my desired layout. After adding the photos to he layout, I decide if I want any type of treatment, bordrs, etc. then I save the finished image back to the camera roll.

On the iPad in using the Blogsy App. While the app is pretty good, it does have one annoying limitation – it uploads your images and then uses CSS to scale the image to the page. I would prefer it to upload the image and then let me choose one of the optimised images which WordPress has generated.

WordPress automatically generates up to four scaled images for each upload – thumbnail, small, medium, and large. The blog administrator defines what actual sizes correspond to these descriptions.

My solution is to complete my work in Blogsy and have it load the finished article to the blog as a draft. Then I can just reload the draft and switch from Blogsy's CSS scaled image to one of WordPress's generated images. This makes the blog more efficient to load for readers.

Feel free to post any questions !

multi-row planting rig

Commercial farming has become very mechanized, even labor intensive crops such as tomatoes.

This tractor tows a special built trailer which covers six rows at a time. The trailer has six seats. In front of each seat is a spoked wheel which is designed to poke holes in the poly that covers a planting bed row every 24 inches.

Above the spoked wheel, is a large sloped rack which is loaded with partitioned crates containing tomato seedlings. A worker sits in each of the seats, takes a seedling, and plants it in the hole made by the spoked wheel.

All of this happens as the tractor rolls down the rows. The workers can not waste any movement or they will fall behind and miss a planting.

Rows are 300 feet long and there are often 100 or more rows in a field.

Anyone looking for work?