Here’s a video of the fireworks show we operated for the people of Des Moines, Washington this past weekend. It was both Independence Day and the celebration of the city’s 50th anniversary. It took an afternoon plus the better part of a full day to set up, and we shot it off in about 17-18 minutes.

Thanks to everyone who helped out on the crew this year - It was a great team!

The camera angle is a bit of an unusual one. In this video you are looking straight up at the sky, and the camera is fastened to a bench on the pier where we fired the show. The three-inch mortars are just to the left of the camera, so you’ll see smoke and sparks sometimes, as well as glowing materials falling back toward the camera. Enjoy.

July 4th 2009 Fireworks - Des Moines, WA from Greg Hughes on Vimeo.

I’m going to file this one here for my own use, and hopefully someone else will benefit in the process. I bought two new batteries for my late-90’s Yamaha WaveRunners because the old ones were dead. I got the batteries all prepped, charged them per the instructions, and went to install them in the watercraft.

I hooked them up and tried to get the Wave Runners to start, but both were dead as a doornail. I checked fuses and electrical connections and all was good. Hmmm. But something seemed familiar about this, like I’d dealt with this problem once before. It really struck me that was the case about the time I pulled one of the fuses out. Hadn’t I done something like that before and didn’t it require me to do some freaky WaveRunner mojo in order to get things started again?

As usual, the Internet was my friend. I did some searching and discovered the same thing my dealer had told me some times ago: When you disconnect power, the WaveRunner goes into an anti-theft mode and won’t run until you do a few things.

Here are the steps that I followed in order to get them to turn on:

1. Install the battery
2. Hold down the MODE button on the console until the display flashes the word CODE
3. Enter A A A A
4. Now you can start the watercraft

And that’s it. As I recall, you can set your own code, too – But I’m not doing that in my case. I’d just forget it anyhow!