So there's a lot of drama surrounding the IMVU buyout, and for once, I feel it's sort of justified. Firstly the way it all went down behind closed doors and took them months to tell us about it is just flat out shady, there is no getting around that, but that's not my reason for concern. Dragoneer claims that nothing is going to change, that we are only going to see a couple of banner ads for IMVU periodically. While I genuinely believe that this is what Dragoneer wants, he is a user of this site just as much as we are, he no longer gets the final say in that, and what's going to stop IMVU from kicking him to the curb if he doesn't do what they want? Furthermore, no one buys an entire website just to put up a few banner ads. No one buys an entire website and pays to upgrade and replace the back-end hardware of that website just to put up a few banner ads. No one buys an entire website and upgrades and replaces the websites back-end hardware AND gives the former owner of that website a salary just for a few banner ads some of the time.

I deal with corporate drones on a daily basis, this sale has a bottom line and we aren't seeing it. Corporate business revolves around money, if IMVU can't monetize this site, the content on it, or the people on it, they would not have bought it. Period. This does not mean they're going to steal your artwork or uploads, if I had to guess they are most likely going to aggregate the user data on here in order to use targeted ads on the site as well as sell any email addresses on the site to other ad companies to make a quick buck. Yeah, they claim they aren't, but how would you prove it if they did? That sounds scarier than it actually is, I can almost guarantee other websites you use have already done the exact same thing, your spam folder might collect a few extra emails but other than that you won't be seeing any real difference in the FA experience. Again, that's just speculation.

Then there's the fact that IMVU is a colossal steaming pile of shit. I gave it a try a long time ago, I'm sure things have changed a lot since I tried it, so I looked into the company a bit, Consumer Affairs give them a 1.9 out of 5 stars based on customer reviews. Common Sense Media gave them a 3/5. By far the most interesting to me though was Glassdoor, for those that aren't familiar with it, Glassdoor is a company review website that only takes reviews from employees of the company. Glassdoor gives them a rating of 3.1. McDonald's has a rating of 3 from Glassdoor. That should be pretty telling by itself, but it gets better, while there aren't a ton of reviews for IMVU there are a lot of consistent complaints, namely no clear long term vision or goals for the company, terrible management, an obsession with short term profits, and a shrinking user base. Red flags anyone? Oh wait, there's more, if you look under the interviews section you'll find this gem "According to management they want to grow via acquisition with the final goal being to sell the company to whoever ponies up the cash they want."

Link to the Glassdoor page; http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/IM.....ws-E215077.htm

I haven't decided what I want to do yet, but quite frankly, I want nothing to do with IMVU. For the time being I won't be uploading new content here (not that I was particularly active lately anyway), and I'll be taking a mostly wait and see approach however I doubt I'll start uploading here again solely because of my distaste for IMVU, and should things take a turn for the worse I will take down my gallery here all together. I'll still be around watching my account here, but I plan on branching out to other sites such as weasyl and sofurry and possibly resurrecting my defunct deviant art profile. For now, here is a link to my Weasyl; https://www.weasyl.com/~rhet

Recently went to the Saint Louis Auto Show. The lighting was crap and it was painfully over-crowded to the point of almost not being able to get shots of many of the cars, but I managed to snag a few. I'll post a few of them here over the next few days as I get time to edit them :)

I live about 30 minutes away from where the Ferguson riots initially broke out. Nothing happened here before, but there have been talks about demonstrations all over the city, and I kind of work all over the city. Just a few minutes ago the grand jury announced that officer Darren Wilson will not be facing charges. Some of my neighbors just left with a bunch of suitcases and their dog. The general mood around here is incredibly tense, I think everybody is expecting the worst. There's something so surreal about it all, my city could be breaking out in riots as I type this up, and I'm going to be going into work the graveyard shift in a little while.

Was watching a live feed from a helicopter over the Ferguson PD and the protesters have already started throwing rocks at the police officers. So much for this staying as peaceful protests... Here's for hoping it doesn't get too serious...

I've just been ridiculously busy with work, putting in 55-65+ hours a week... I'm up for another promotion too, second in about 6 months, gotta be doing something right :P SO because of all my work crap I'm probably going to continue being a bit silent, I'll still be checking back every few days to keep up with my messages and whatnot, but I'm realistically not going to have the time to dedicate to photography for a while. Things should slow down a bit again in January, hopefully I'll be able to start being more active around then.

Lot's, apologize in advance for spamming your notifications. This is just the beginning, will be more tomorrow, hopefully I can finish editing the rest tomorrow or some will have to wait til I come back from Arizona...

Things have been very busy for me the last few weeks, haven't hardly had the chance to get out and shoot. Things are only going to get busier then next couple of weeks for me too.

This upcoming weekend I'll be attending Gateway Fur Meet, my first [furry] convention. I'm super excited, looks like the convention is going to be a ton of fun. This will be the conventions first year so I'm sure it's going to be on the small side, and there may not be as much stuff to do as there would be at some of the larger more established conventions, but I'm sure it's still going to be a blast. I'll be taking plenty of photos, and I might even try my hand at video too, but since I've never messed around with that I might not...

On April 24th I fly down to Arizona for a business trip. This is a big deal, largely in part because a promotion is now depending on the outcome of this trip. Lets back up for a minute, I've have been getting jerked around on getting this promotion for over 2 years now. I've been passed up for someone else once, my boss got fired once (which meant basically starting from square 1 proving that I deserve a promotion from my new boss), and my company "re-aligned" our teams and I wound up on a different team with a new boss once too. I've been told that I'll be getting the promotion so many times I've lost count, I've heard every excuse for me not getting the promotion that there could possibly be. It's to the point that I told my boss point blank that he either needs to just give me the title and the raise and keep me doing what I'm doing now until it's convenient for him to change up my responsibilities or I'll transfer to a different part of the company or seek employment elsewhere. I do carry a lot of weight on my team, and I've pretty much got my boss by the balls, cause he doesn't know shit about my job and he knows it too. So that brings us up to this business trip, a person in my position would not be eligible for this under normal circumstances, generally they wouldn't even let people in the position I'm trying to get promoted to go either, they would under normal circumstances only take the people one rank above that or higher. My boss told me he pulled a lot of strings to get me in down there and that he's going to use this to get me certified for my promotion, if all goes well... I'm more than a little stressed out about this, partially because I really don't want to go out of town for this crap, I'm only doing it because I can't say no to an opportunity to demonstrate my skill and ambition... Then there's the other reason, while I'm down there I have to train someone new to the company, and I have to do it in 10 days. Allow me to add some perspective, the normal training program for my company is 7 weeks. 35 business days. Sometimes if a person shows promise and they can't pass the demos at the end of the training period they can get up to 2 extra weeks to complete their training. In very rare cases some people (such as myself, and only 3 other individuals that I know of) complete the training at the end of week 5. So, I have to somehow teach somebody 7 weeks worth of stuff in only 10 days. I don't even think my ability to teach somebody is going to matter, I think the limiting factor is going to be that persons ability to learn, and to be quite honest, they're going to have to be a god damn savant to learn everything about my job in that amount of time. On one hand I feel like I'm being set up to fail, on the other I realize that I'm going to be surrounded by high ranking people in my company the entire time and I'll have a lot of opportunity to prove my worth with them directly.

This business trip is a major double edged sword... I sincerely feel this will be my sink or swim moment with this company. Win lose or draw, I'm going to do everything in my power to make this my time to shine

I don't know if anyone else here is aware of it but, here is a free online tool that I've used to calibrate my monitors in the past; http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Earlier today I discovered my monitor is in dire need of calibration, and I've been messing with that calibration website for a good 45 minutes now. No matter what I do I can't seem to get gamma and green saturation/rendering right. I've been able to get it looking pretty damn good in the past but, I can't even seem to get it close now... I guess my monitor is just getting old (even though it's only ~3 years old...). It's starting to look like a new monitor is going to be on my list of things I need. It's gonna have to wait a bit though, for now all my money is getting set aside for GFM in April (gonna be my first con woohoo! :D).

RE-edited the file from Jared Polin that I submitted earlier today, hopefully it looks a lot better than it did earlier. Even with my monitor still being noticeably off I can tell that at least a few of my other photos look like they're in serious need of being re-worked >.>

So last week I got a new camera, and a new lens! I opted for the Nikon D7100. I was debating between the D7100 and the D600, but I decided the D7100 just made more sense for me and left me with enough money to spring for an ultra-wide lens which I've been wanting to get for a while. The lens I got is the Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 version II. I took a trip to the zoo the other day to give the new gear a work out and I'll be slowly trickling some of those shots onto here over the next week or two. So far I'm very happy with the new camera. Editing the RAW files is going to take some getting used too, as they are ~4x the resolution of the files out of my old D70. With the files from my D70 any adjustments or changes I made to the images showed instantly with no delay whatsoever, but the files out of the D7100 have a bit of lag/delay when applying some changes.

An interesting facet of the new camera is that it out-resolves some of my lenses. What I mean by that is that like my kit lens for example, looks reasonably sharp on my D70 at 1:1, at 1:1 on the D7100 it's pretty damn soft. That's pretty much entirely because 1:1 on the D7100 is getting so much closer in than on the D70, if I were to take a crop from the D7100 that matched the D70's 1:1 the results would probably be very similar, maybe a tad sharper on the D7100 because of the lack of an AA filter.

A side note on the actual usage of the D7100, I noticed a lot of my photo's from the zoo were very over-exposed. I'm fairly certain this is because the light meter in the D7100 by default works opposite of the one in my D70, so I'd glance at it really quick think I'm slightly over-exposing and adjust my shutter speed really quick without checking to see if I nailed it. That's just kinda how I shoot, I've got a pretty good handle on how my much my shutter speed effects the meter in the camera, at least I did with the D70. I think I'm going to have to slow down a bit until I've really gotten used to the new camera.

So I've been having a pretty rough time the last week or so. A little over a month ago I had surgery to correct a blood vein problem. After the surgery I developed a blood clot so they put me on an aspirin regimen. So far the clot has not gotten better, and I had to be taken off the aspirin regimen because it was causing me nose bleeds, gum bleeding and I have some piercings in the cartilage of my ears that started bleeding as well. About a week ago the I split open the incision from my surgery. Just a small opening but enough to send me back to the surgeon to get checked out. Apparently the dissolvable sutures used on the inner tissues aren't agreeing with my body and my body is rejecting them, which caused the incision to split. Because of that, they didn't want to close the incision, because it will likely get split open again. So I've been walking around with a hole in my abdomen for a little over a week now, it's kind of disturbing, I can see my insides...

About 5 days ago I went to start my car to head home from work and it sounded like ass. Shut it back off and found that it had almost no oil in it, so I put in what I had, but it's pretty apparent that I've got a serious oil leak. I was adding oil every time I drove for a couple days, then the dipstick broke off in the engine. So I couldn't even check the oil level. Took it to get it looked at 2 days ago, still haven't heard back...

To top it all off, I'm afraid to spend too much money to fix my car because I still haven't received all of my bills from having surgery last month. I've also been putting off seeing a dentist since December, specifically so I could afford to have the surgery. Even with my tax return I'm super paranoid that if I do go ahead and go to the dentist and spend whatever I need to to get my car fixed that I'm not going to have enough to cover what I still owe for the surgery...

Oh, and my birthday is in two days. Yay.

Just felt the need to vent. Hopefully things turn around soon.

Over the next few days I'll be going through my archive and uploading some of the photo's I've taken over the last few years.