Posted on by mwhybark

A rarity

Having just poured myself a gin and tonic, it being hot, I put it aside for a bit. When I remembered it was there, I picked it up and took a big slug, followed by surprised sputterings and profanity at the burning sensation my mouth encountered.

I either forgot to mix the drink as I put it aside or I used a whole lot more gin than I thought I did. The lime slice within the drink is suspended in a state of neutral buoyancy, about an inch above the bottom of the glass. I’m feared! Was I distrait?

Oh, holy cow, the irritating sanctimonials of the GOP thing are on the radio, gotta go turn it off before I blow a gasket. But first, a cautious taste. The verdict: I think I forgot to stir.

Tune in for updates of unknown sobriety!

UPDATE: Viv drank it. She’s non-bloguese (French for “Cuban”), so no drunken posting from me* – sorry!

*yet.

Posted on by mwhybark

Lucy

Ages ago, Viv and I picked up a pair of Lucy chairs to go with our red formica kitchen table. Eventually, we figured out that we should have picked up four, but by the time this happened, Target was no longer carrying the chairs in-store. The topic came up at our party a couple months ago and Sunday night Viv reminded me about it when I was in a Googlin’ mood.

The skinny is, Target carries them online, but the delivered price was abut $220, free shipping notwithstanding. American Chairs offers them as well, but the shipping costs pushed it up over $200 again.

The link I initiated this post with, however, produces a shipping-inclusive price of $197. Now, I’m not necessarily ready to spend $200 on a couple of chairs, but maybe Viv is. So here’s the link.

Posted on by mwhybark

Video

I spent much of today pushing and pulling at the random video sniplets being generated by our two video-capable digital cameras. I’ve blogged before about shortfalls in Apple’s iTools regarding the use-practice of toting these things (essentially, it’s impossible to just dump the video onto an archival DVD mastered via iDVD).

Poking about in semi-familiar software is a fine and relaxing pursuit in some cases, and so it proved today. I’m interested in writing about my workflow and so forth so the next time I take a few years off from video work I can dig this up and get moving, possibly faster than I did this time.

To begin with, it’s necessary to select the movies you want to convert to an iDVD format. I did that by opening the date-named folders I keep all my camera-generated content in, a folder for each day and camera. I used the old-style window view that includes disclosure triangles, set to sort by file type. Therefore, recent folders grouped at the bottom of the view. Within each disclosure-triangle opened folder the movies also grouped.

Command clicking my way through the list to select all of the movie files, I dragged them into an open new iMovie project on my second monitor. I then went and did something else for several hours. iMovie converts motion media into fullscreeen DV files – a half-meg, thirty-second snippet with sound could inflate to about fifty megs, and on my aged gear, it’s not a snappy process.

Once the files have appeared in the clip tray within iMovie, it was necessary to manually reorder them to reflect the chronological order in which they were shot. If this was a commercial project, I would have logged and probably renamed each clip, as well. As it is, I’m still undecided if I’m going to invest the time to try to slap a narrative onto the clips or not. I think I am planning on adding a soundtrack, simply because the videos from the Veo are silent.

There are two common problems that result from using hand-held still cameras as video cameras. One, it’s easy to shoot in very low light circumstances, and there’s really not much to be done on the spot to address the issue. When you shoot, you gotta make do. Two, because we normally shoot still pictures on the cameras without being concerned about vertical or horizontal composition, I find we do the same thing when shooting video.

This results in sideways video, something which should be so trivial to address that I’m still amazed at the way I ended up resolving it. To an extent, I feel that a low-light correction tool should also be available in iMovie (as well as a rotation tool). On the other hand, iPhoto has no good low-light correction tool either, so who knows.

To address both issues, I ended up using Final Cut Express, which I picked up a ways back cheaply as a promotional upgrade from Premiere. The solutions to each are far from intuitive, but at least one’s easy to figure out.

I identified the problem clips in iMovie by name, and then in FCE, selected the menu item “Open.” Navigating to the iMovie project folder containing the media files, I selected each one of the DV clips, one at a time, to open.

With the file open, I then dragged the “Motion” and “Filter” tabs away from the preview window to create a side-by-side layout for the clip. In the case of a sideways clip, using “Motion” I scaled the clip by 75% and rotated it by 90 degrees. I then set the background to “black” in the Background menu item. I then exported the clip to a new QT movie using the same settings at the original DVD clip iMovie had created (same size as the clip being worked on, 29.97 fps, etcetera).

When opened in QuickTime Player the resulting movies played well, and have the additional benefit of not requiring additional processing time from iMovie when reimported.

To correct a low-light asset, I opened the file in FCE as described above. Then I added several filters to the Video Filters tab (sadly, I didn’t take notes and it’s been over an hour since I did this procedure, so details are sketchy). Among the filters enabled were Brightness and Contrast, Color Correction, Unsharp Mask and Desaturate Highs. The conceptual steps are:

  • lighten the overall image
  • center the color contrast so that whites appear white
  • darken the shadows without losing the detail that appears when the brightness is turned up.

These manipulations are likely to cause obvious artifacts in the image. I found Unsharp Mask to be helpful in addressing these problems, as well as adding definition and depth to the transition areas.

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Paper sushi

HyperGami offers this paper sushi kit. There’s also this display page of various models on a different site. The models apparently stem from different sources, such as the tako (octopus) model, this selection of gunkan. Of course, what goes with paper sushi better than a nice, frosty mug of paper beer?

To eat sushi, someone must go down to the sea in ships. Up anchor under that paper moon and set sail over a cardboard sea with these vessels.

A slow-loading, insanely-detailed model of the British galleon HMS Mary Rose, with comprehensive instructions – in Russian! Enjoy. Once you’ve knocked that out, here’s another ship from the same period at the same site.

And finally, in case that sushi was out a bit too long, may I recommend Ed Bertschy’s fabulous nineteenth century hearse? Scroll down to see it in all it’s macabre glory, and note some of the other goodies he’s got on offer, among them a paper cello, a plunger-style “Blasting machine” of great beauty, and of course, a working paper steam engine!

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sore throat

On our way to pick up Spence and roll on to the Daymented Everything Party, I was over come with hunger, so we dropped into the U-District’s Sushi Express (“Drive-By Sushi!”) to nosh.

While there, I saw a blogger I do not know except by sight, Dan’s pal Zannah, come in and sit down, presumably with hubby.

The food was fine, although we learned that the crew was new; the kaiten train was a bit barren for long stretches, and alas, no beer.

I kept calling Mr. Elope to see if he wanted to go to the party but he proved as elusive as Mr. Bob Dobelina.

When we finally adjourned my throat suddenly hurt like crazy and sadly, I had to bow out of the party. So I came home and spent the evening doing detailed financial projections and analyses for a meeting I have in the ayem. I might suggest moving to to a smaller, less packed venue in order to minimize my germic footprint.

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Iphigenia at Aulis

Having managed to view fragments amounting to one half of the final episode of the decidedly average The Spartans, I variously learned or was reminded that:

  • Upon the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, about 7,000 Athenian invaders were imprisoned for a fair period of time in a quarry at Syracuse, exposed to the elements and fading fast. According to the transcript of the show,

    The Athenian prisoners had only one chance to live: the Syracusans had a passion for the verses of the playwright Euripides, and prisoners who could recite them in a style that pleased their tormentors were allowed to leave the quarry to be sold as slaves.

    To clarify: The Syracusans held the prisoners of war in an outdoor prison camp, subject to torture, and would not let them go until they said words which pleased them.

  • Upon the Spartan-led defeat of Athens, the Spartan leader Lysander erected an expansive monument to himself and his allies. The show did not display a reconstructed image, and I wonder if someone has assembled such a thing. I had thin luck Googling for it at all.

  • Following the Spartan defeat of Athens, Sparta was the dominant military power in the region, and “her commanders became known for corruption,” a fact which sourly comforts me.

Interestingly, I came across these class notes for a play by Euripides which appears to directly address these themes.

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Englebart's GUI

I, Cringely hangs out with Doug Englebart and reminds us of who that might be, extending the Cringley streak (he’s been traveling afield a bit since moving East and it seems to have increased the scope of his work).

Computers had no user interfaces in the sense that we know them today. Heck, they had no USERS. Computers were not networked. They didn’t even print. And into this primitive world, Doug Engelbart drove to work the day after he’d proposed to his sweetie, wondering what to do with his life. And by the time he got to work, he had in his mind something not at all unlike our computing experience today. Amazing! It was so amazing, in fact, that Doug had to keep most of his ideas secret simply to avoid ridicule. He shared his vision with colleagues, and they counseled him to keep it quiet so being a kook wouldn’t hurt his career.

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Plum Nelly

We’re back! Didja miss us?

(The last week-plus was an exercise in stealth distance blogging, all done by remote control from fabulous Laguna Beach, California. We saw tiny sharks! Also of interest is the fact that Gmail performed considerably better than my desktop email app.)

This seventeen seconds of Veo-video was shot four blocks from my in-laws’ house, the place my wife grew up. Generally speaking, I like visiting.