Monthly Archives: October 2009

Don’t forget to set your clocks back

In the United States Daylight Savings Time (DST) ends today. DST around the world (Picture from wikipedia)So at 2 AM on Sunday November 1st, 2009 set your clocks back one hour in the US (if you’re in the EU, you should have done it last week).

I hate them messing with the clocks, but more importantly, I hate them messing with my internal clock…

But I won’t complain about the extra hour sleep :)

Image courtesy of WikiPedia…

Beautiful colors on Hines Drive today

Great day outside on Hines Drive today. Lots of great colors as fall approaches. Here’s a panorama I took with my iPhone (and stitched it on my iPhone with the AutoStitch Panorama app on the phone too!).


fall-colors-hines-drive-thumb.jpg

I think it took eight or nine images to build the whole thing and it came out to 4000×506 pixels. This program works quick: I took the photos with the camera app, ran the AutoStich program, clicked the photos, it built a tiny thumbnail, I clicked the stitch button and few minutes later I’ve got the panorama on the screen!

Click to enlarge panoramic image, if it doesn’t load correctly, here’s a 1024 wide image.

ReelDirector is video editing for the iPhone !!!

I shot, edited (titles and transitions) and uploaded this video from my iPhone. I used ReelDirector for the editing. This is my first attempt but it was way easy to use. reeldirectorvideoThe video was shot on the iPhone, edited on the iPhone and e-mailed to YouTube for uploading. It’s five short stiched-together videos (which I was able to trim when I imported them) with some text at the beginning and end. I used the same transition (blur) for all the transitions since it was easy to use (you can customize this per transition). You can rearrange the videos once they are in there, but I pretty much picked them in the order that I wanted them in.

This is from the balloon festival from a few months ago. The first speaker is me talking as I shot it. The rest is whatever voiceover was going on at the time. Nothing fancy at all.



Direct link to the video is here.

I didn’t time it, but I’d guess it was about three or four minutes (on the iPhone 3gs 3.01 OS) to stitch and build the one minute video. My biggest complaint is I couldn’t extend the time for the titles and credits and the time is too short). I also wish I could have inserted some photos too (but then there wouldn’t have been audio behind it). The strangest thing was that it didn’t save the video back to the phone, I didn’t see any way to get it out of the program other than e-mailing it to myself (or YouTube) but that worked fine (the iTunes page says this works in 3.1). it’s very cool software but it’s a little pricy at $7.99 for $3.99 (since iMovie came out); I used an iTunes gift card that I got last month for my birthday which made the (old $7.99 price) a bit more digestible…

Aaron Sorkin and Brad Pitt are doing MoneyBall?

I really liked Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. It’s the story of how Billy Beane turned the Oakland A’s Baseball team around by picking players with statistics.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Michael Lewis

The story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget, by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.

Plot synopsis at IMDB.com

It’s a great read if you like baseball or numbers, I’m not a big sports fan, but I’d recommend the book if you’re interested in either. But the numbers part was really interested. I originally read it because my dentist talked me into reading it.

So it turns out that they’ve decided to turn it into a movie. They’ve got Aaron Sorkin (West Wing) to rewrite it into a movie and they’ve got Brad Pitt to play the team’s general manager. And it looks like they’ve got some of the baseball players to play themselves.

Oops, not to get you all interested in it, but it doesn’t come out until 2011. So read the book in the mean time and you’ll enjoy it again in another two years when the movie comes out…

And looking up Michael Lewis at Amazon.com I see that he also wrote Next: The Future Just Happened, I’m pretty sure I’ve got that on my shelf (unread), now I know why I got that book!

It was the best night ever

One of the best parts of How I Met Your Mother is when they mention a web site in the show, such as
It was the best night ever dot com“, they’ve actually gone and got the site ItWasTheBestNightEver.com

How I Met Your Mother: Season Four Michael Shea, Pamela Fryman, Rob GreenbergAnd the site actually has some photos and a video of Marshall singing the song with Nuno Bettencourt.

It’s just one of those silly things that I enjoy when TV shows go the extra mile.

(Although, I thought the episode was a little slow otherwise)

Are you Facebook friends with co-workers? (Friday Question #83)

Are you friends with your coworkers on Facebook? Have you found this to be beneficial (fun) or detrimental (annoying)? From Friday Question #83 at ilaxSTUDIO.

I think that generally when someone at work has friended me on social networks that I have accepted. I don’t really blog/complain about work, so this isn’t too much of a problem for me; I try not to put things that future employers would find unappealing; it’s not perfect, but I think the acceptable stuff vs. (what might be) unacceptable is so overwhelming, it’d be irrelevant. Those co-workers have chosen to be a part of my social network and need to behave properly; if they reveal something of me, they’ve probably put more inappropriate stuff on-line. And keep in mind, on-line I stay pretty mellow.

facebook-dummies-51Xc1yYSzDL._SL160_.jpgIn the end it hasn’t been beneficial or a problem. I guess if I do something cool or fun they might share it with someone else, but since I don’t post too much stuff I would care about, it’s not really detrimental.

When I travel I’ll post blog posts but things on-line for coworkers to see. But I’ll post it separate from my blog. For example, while for my trip I sent this link to co-workers for my Costa Rica 2007 trip, it’s virtually the same as my blog category of the same name. The co-worker link doesn’t include links back to my blog or (sadly) allow comments (couldn’t get it to work without the rest of the blog). The stories are all the same, but if I would have has something no so work safe, partying at a bar or pictures of a something like a bikini contest (but you get the idea), I’d not have added them to the “work category” and you’d only have seen them if you went to the main blog and not on the page for co-workers. Actually, I don’t really post it separate (it just shows up separate), the blog software does it for me; I haven’t figured this special category out for WordPress yet, not sure how to generate a category page without all the other junk, in MovableType I knew how (any tips?).

I know co-workers have found my blog, but it’s not what I gave them as an address, so it’s not what I shared with them, it’s what they found on their own. Since they found it and I didn’t invite them, it’s more like them running into them at the bar or on vacation or something.

I’m rethinking what get’s reposted to my Facebook page automatically though. I think I have a few co-workers and a few college students that I’ve taught. But the Facebook page and my blog intermingles so much, it’s hard to separate it…

LCROSS spacecraft hits the moon on it’s quest for water

I was excited to watch but the results were boring…
Click for a larger version of the CNN moon crash Video.

Here’s the animation, which was much more interesting.
Click for a larger version of the CNN moon crash Animation.

I hope the animation is pretty much what happened, we just couldn’t see it. I hope the data that they get is good data. I’d prefer that it shows there is water;ut if there isn’t, I hope the results show there isn’t. No data / bad data means failed mission…

The LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) spacecraft was also passing by a little bit later (90 seconds?) so that should have have some additional data.

LATER: A little more info on this at CNN. They said this was the fifth most watched webcast ever.

Happy Birthday Bar code!

It’s the 57th anniversary of the barcode. I only know this because Google changed their logo today. So then I checked out the barcode entry on Wikipedia.

garysaid.com.barcode.rad59A9F.gif

Actually, this is just the anniversary of the original patent. When most people think of the barcode, they’re thinking of the UPC (Universal Product Code) on food and other purchased goods. Which started being used in the mid-1970s (1974 was when the first store scanned an item for purchase).

Free Barcode Generator - Barcoding Inc.I’ve always thought bar codes were kind of cool: cheap, simple, easy to use and duplicate. We use them on food, shipping packages, mail, ID cards of all types and all sorts of places. We print them on the back of Michigan Driver’s Licenses, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen them used.

FYI, I used the Free Barcode Generator to generate my above barcode.