The story behind your nickname...

Well obviously my nick here (fenijs) is my real name Frans E. Nijs. My nick has been Viper for a long while the biggest problem with it is that it's not so unique so I stopped using it for "serious" forums.

I came up with the nick Viper When I realized I wanted to be a fighter pilot. A lot of things in my life at that time where all geared towards reaching that goal and when I got my draft notice I had all the credentials to actually become one. Of course meeting my current wife and getting married some what changed my idea on how "great" it would be to become a fighter pilot since the life expectancy of a fighter pilot is below average ;). Anyways a few things that inspired me to go for this name was the dodge viper and the snake itself.

thats about it!

Welcome to dyxum Lionel.

I hope you will find our site worth spending some time.

Happy shooting

Thank you for the Welcome, I am excited that I had been told about this site, and have since signed up. Now I can say that I have Pen-pals in Croatia, Sweden and all over the world. Cool!! :) I find the discussions here very informative, and I learn a lot from here too, since I'm pretty new to the KM 7D world. Look forward to posting more here.

Worked a variety of 'official' jobs from wildlife tech to trail guide to auto mechanic to IT, and a wider variety of freelance stuff including horse training, computer repair and woodworking.

I always say that I'd rather be able to do a dozen things well than be perfect at one.

Jack-of-All kind of evolved into jakoval or jaquoval (have used both - on different forums). Less awkward to type than "masterofnone", anyway...

Well, as a rule I never use the same name twice on the internet. But I
decided to keep it the same going from DPR to here. Cause it's the same
people.

I basically had to come up with a new one, and decided to go clear and
simple.

Since I moved to California from Pennsylvania a bit over a year ago, I
became a big explorer (always have been, but this is just more so). I also
was finally able to get into photography more. College was in the way so
much, and lack of money.

So now If it's a 3 day weekend you can be sure I'm traveling around
california with my cameras. I've hit 3 National Parks in 2 states in one day
before. Put 10,000 miles on my car just doing that this year. And I didn't
do nearly as much as I wanted. So PhotoTraveler fit. Which came in after
the first few ideas were already taken.

Getting my 7D was a fall out after a spring death valley trip. I had my
x700 and my Canon S500. Wanted to take a ton of film shots but was
rather limited, and only had limited space on the canon. So i didn't take
as many shots as I wanted. I had it stuffed and shot 10 rolls of film (in
about 1.5 days). If I hadn't held back it would have been many times
more.   Well after putting down 100 bucks just to develop the film. The
idea of a DSLR got more interesting. I hadn't paid attention to them since
I just remember them being, Expensive, Low res, Big Point And shoots,
without the ability of film, and had to switch the AF lenses. Well, they had
come a long way, so I went for it. Lack of ability is still there in DSLRs,
(Really hate not being able to take long shots).

So got the 7D, ended up here and at DPR. 6000 shots later I'm still
spending money on the thing. Ugh. Need more travel and photo money.

I'd been using just my first name on some forums, then first/last name on some. I do some old west (the US version of "old") living history and the group I got into that from has a tradition/policy of using aliases, I had thought of several and settled on Chino Hills. That also happens to be where I live in California but has a rather western sound to it, there having been some movies or other characters named Chino and Hills isn't an unused last name. It allows my daughters to use names like Rose Hills - which in SoCal is a play on words as a rather well know cemetery is called Rose Hills as well. I'd picked up on another forum and there were already some Craigs so added the location/alias.

Chino Hills is east of Los Angeles just into San Bernardino County, a fairly new city, but adjacent to an older farming (dairies, corn and prisons) community of Chino, with roots in the early Spanish colonial ranchos - Rancho Santa Ana del Chino (which may mean Saint Ann of the curly hair??). We're basically right were Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Orange and Riverside counties come together.

X-R-M.
The name comes from Ricoh XR-M manual camera I got in 1990.
Ricoh made very good cameras which accepted Pentax mount.
Ricoh did not survive AF revolution and stopped making SLR cameras and withdrew from the US market (I see some Ricoh digital P/S , but not available in the US).
I was very close to buy one of Minolta cameras, but decided to get Ricoh because it used AA batteries
(I came to the US from country where I could not use my camera because I could not get one specific battery).
My Ricoh came with Kiron 28-210/4.0-5.6 ,long, heavy zoom lens,brand I never heard of then.Now I know that they were very innovative and produced good quality lenses.
As far as I know Kiron is now out of business.
One day my Ricoh fell on the floor and did not give me correct exposure since then.Even after repair did not work correctly.
After that I was limited to my Minolta 105 EX P/S which still works fine after 11 years!!!
I came back to SLR since 2 years with Minolta 5 + 7 trying to get some good lenses and 7D or 5D.
But I still have sentment to my old broken Ricoh XR-M, which I still keep.