animated
Behold, CSS animation!
Eh?
Eh?
Unless you're running Internets Explorer. Then you can't see this.
prouty 2012 begins
This year it's on and poppin'!
Ain't no stoppin'...
Us from rockin'...
Okay, we're done with the 50 mile waltz in the park. 2012 marks the year of the 100 miler, oh yes. Some say it can't be done, and those people are wrong. Time to get serious and focused.
I believe that Amy is upping the ante this year in the fundraising game, and I'd like to wipe that smug look off her face, but I'm shell shocked after the beating I took these short six months ago. You can spend your hard earned cash in my corner, or her's. I'll link her page up when she finally gets around to registering. Talk about lazy.... hasn't even registered yet. 
Yeah, so it's July 14th this summer. We're excited, it's a good time, it's a great cause. Last year was a pretty phenomenal day and I happened to be wearing my camera for the whole ride. It was tough to condense it down, and it's still a bit windy, but this is kinda what it's like to ride along.
day one
Kicked things off at the Big D today! Ben's first day;
At my father-in-law's suggestion I had meant to pick up an apple for teacher but I just didn't have time this morning. I left early but people were driving slowly in the 'bad weather'. Today was your usual stuff - got my office, ID, parking, laptop, logins. Still some setup to do before I dig into training on the systems but that will come soon.
It felt great, despite a sense of being overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I don't know. Should keep me occupied though!
wrc 2012
WRC 2012 is about to begin this weekend. The teams have been testing in the Alpine hills near Monte Carlo and I was watching some videos this evening. Here's some test footage from perennial champion, Sebastien Loeb. Each team seemed to have a stretch of road they hammered all day to iron out the kinks. This isn't full on racing.
This is my favorite kind of auto racing, bar none. Autocross is great for amateurs, but there's nothing more exciting than this. The only potential downfall is the part where you can only realistically spectate a 100' long piece of the course. In my one experience at a less impressive race in Tennessee, there was a lot of down time sitting around in the damp woods. Should have brought more stuff to keep ourselves occupied. Which is perhaps a reason to better enjoy it on TV where you can get all shades of coverage. Too bad no one in the States airs it. Speed used to but then Fox, or some equally vapid corporation, purchased the network and now it's wall-to-wall dudebro talking head grease monkeys working on X-treme 4x4s and Hotrods, airhead chick hosts, and occasional breaks to bring us yet another Barrett Jackson Auction LIVE!!!!11!!one! Oh, and sometimes Pinks. :rollieyes:
Fortunately we don't have TV!
So as per usual I'm not really sure how much of the season I'm going to catch. I can normally be relied on to acquire a race or two from the deepest, darkest internets every year. We'll see.
sail
Amy can attest to the brooding I engage in when I don't have my window seat. Having a 180° view of everything in front of the plane would be a dream come true. I wish they had cameras on the plane exterior that would allow passengers to see more stuff. I'd fly that airline exclusively, regardless of cost.
I always did want to be a pilot. I think it goes hand in hand with my desire to operate machines. Cars, boats, bulldozers. I love it all. Staring out at the cloud cover for 14 hours might get old quickly though. It's not like with a car where you're constantly making corrections and dealing with traffic. There didn't seem to be extended footage of the plane flying itself for hours over the ocean in this video as I suspect it does most of the time.
Sounds like people hate the song on the video. Can't say I've heard it before but it might get annoying if I heard it everywhere.
Also, I thought the use of electronics during take-off and landing was prohibited. Especially in the cockpit where all the equipment is located. Must be an antique film camera....
accepted
Whew.
It's been killing me to keep mum about this, but it's finally become official.
I haven't been terribly open about work in this space. As much as this is sort of a private space, in the sense that 99% of the people I know don't actively or even passively read this, it's also unwise to put anything on the web that you absolutely don't want to come back and bite you in the ass. Or look bad during a job background check, let's say. It's been hard not to use this as almost a diary and share some pretty personal thoughts. By nature I think I like to be open with people. The heading for this blog does reference narcissism after all. So far I think I've been pretty good at not posting pictures of myself ripping bong loads, or sex tapes (although given what's happened to the bank accounts of these people, maybe....). There has been a lot of news to report regarding work in the last few years but none of it was good, nor did I have any good things to say about it. So I thought it was better to leave it out. If you don't have anything nice to say, and all.
For those who don't know, the last three years have been fairly miserable on the professional front. I mean, yeah they've not been great for most people, but they've been getting progressively worse for me in that time. We lost people at work, then we went to reduced hours, and finally we were all let go and then some rehired as hourly workers in a virtual configuration back in November. Despite being one of those rehired, that last bit would have been particularly difficult to deal with if I hadn't already applied for a position at Dartmouth College back in October. I've been lying in wait as that process has unfolded and tonight I accepted that position!
I'm incredibly excited and relieved that everything has come together as it has. Not only has it come about at the right time, but it's also something that I'm genuinely interested in. The position is in the Web Services, and even though it's not what I went to school for, it's something I've been doing for years on the side at my current job.
I kept my mouth shut for a while, but the straw finally broke my back. I couldn't stand watching my co-workers fumble with the VGA cable on the projector at the start of one more goddamned staff meeting. Since then I've been keeping our office hardware and software running as well as training and supporting my fellow employees when they have questions about how something works. Things have been particularly interesting and challenging since we went to a virtual office model, but I've muddled through. I've also done a little consulting on the side for SketchUp. So I've got a bit of a street style education in the supporting arts, as it were.
People thought I was being taken advantage of (and I was), but I was also learning quite a bit at the same time. For that I am thankful, because it's made this new job more possible. Not that I anticipated this turn of events, but people always suggested I could do 'something with computers' if Architecture didn't work out. Turns out they were right. 
Speaking of;
This new position will focus mainly on supporting faculty and staff interact with, and manage, their departmental websites. My plan is to soak up the more technical end of things and perhaps move into a developmental position at some point. Part of starting this blog was an excuse to get some exposure to PHP but that hasn't exactly worked out according to plan. Sure, I've modified some things very slightly but it's not been educational. I won't be deep in it as part of my job proper, but there will be people around me practicing these magics. I feel like the skills are there should I choose to take advantage. Now I'll be getting paid to learn the stuff I was just going to goof around with before.
So with that, things get under way on January 23rd. Can't wait! 2012 is starting with a bang!
not so fluid yet
The money train continues! My folks were kind enough to pick me up a more stable tripod this Christmas. The first tripod I purchased was aimed at lightness of weight and fleetness of foot as we planned our trip to Alaska and beyond. Of course I immediately threw on the heaviest geared head you can find, but at least the legs themselves are light!
God, this ancient keyboard is dying.
Anyway, the tripod was light but that also means it's not especially stable for anything other than static shots. I can sort of weigh it down by hanging things from the hook they built into it but it's more to keep it from toppling over. It's very apparent though when I'm taking video with it that I've touched anything anywhere during the filming process. The geared head isn't great at following subjects either. In fact, it's terrible at that. Most of the video I've taken so far has either been wobbly hand held or static on the tripod. My Lupin video is a good example of static tripod shots, although I did try to move it around a little to poor effect. You can see the camera wobble every time I interacted with it.
So I planned eventually to get a fluid video head but I didn't really have the platform for it. This new tripod isn't even technically a video tripod, but I thought it would do nicely based on some things I read. Typically video tripods start to get the webbing at the bottom to connect the legs, and the legs themselves starts to get more elaborate. Like this;
While this new tripod isn't that, I still went ahead and purchased myself the fluid head that I rambled about last year - happy to find out that it was reduced in price with an additional rebate.
In my first ever test this afternoon it seems like the tripod legs themselves are quite stable. It's hard to judge these things online and I haven't got any place I can go test this stuff out in person. Relying on reviews can be difficult. Here's a short bit of terrible film from the test;
I've got at least this camera and lens combination fairly well balanced, meaning when my hands are off the controls it will sit there where I left it even without everything clamped down. With the 70-200mm lens I'll have to do some more adjustments to find the same sweet spot. It will take some practice to learn how to make my movements less jerky. They way the head works is by providing resistance to your movements via friction, which you can adjust. The resistance allows for smoother motion but as I've never tried it before I'm not very good at it.
As per usual, I need to get out more with my ever growing cavalcade of equipment. I feel like I'm nearing completion on what is a pretty well rounded piece of kit though. I would like a more effective way of keeping the camera steady when it's off tripods, and the 2x extender to increase my focal range would also be nice. It's a little embarrassing to have all this stuff and not use it as much as I can, although it does make the times when I do go out more enjoyable for me. As some might point out, you can have fun with almost nothing and improvise ways of doing things without the proper equipment, but part of it for me is the gear.
powerful decisions
Many of you know that I've been doing my typical fence sitting vis-a-vis the generator debate. Well, I done decided.
Behold, the B&S 5500 Storm Responder!
That Home Depot link isn't exactly the model that I picked up. It's not on the site for some reason, but the specs seem to be mostly the same with the exception of the gas tank being a little bit larger on mine and slightly more expensive. And anyway, it's got the words Storm and Responder on it so it must be good at responding to storms, which is when I'll need it most, dagnabbit! Also when the sun is shining and birds are chirping, because alcoholics will drive their cars into poles any time! And lord knows people like to have a pop and drive around here. If I picked up every beer can on the side of the road and traded it in I'd still be poor, but I'd also waste a lot of time and energy doing it too!
Why do rednecks insist on trashing their beautiful countryside, by the way? I don't get it. We can talk more about this later.
Yeah, so Stormy is all gassed up and ready to roll, although naturally I have now insured that we will never loose power ever again. So I'm sure it will gather dust and rust out in a corner. Mission accomplished!!
However, in the very unlikely event that we do loose power, she came with a heavy duty four banger extension cord which I could bring into the house in the immediate future. Phase two is getting it hard wired into the house, or at least rigged in a way that we don't have extension cords running through open windows in the dead of winter. I've blown a call into our local electrician for an estimate.
I also plan to build a little lean-to for it in the spring so it will have a place to live that's not in the garage, but keep it protected in bad weather and hopefully dampen sound a bit. And it can safely burn that down instead of my garage. Security will be a concern I guess. We got word that a few houses have been robbed up the road a piece. Might take the wheels off and chain it to something solid if I do put it in a lean-to permanently.
So, what I liked about this unit was the 5500 watts seems like it will keep all of our critical items online at the same time, and it's got the peak output of 8250 watts for when everything kicks on at once. I can prevent that a little by controlling things with breakers in the house, but I appreciate the extra headroom. Do I wish I had the inverted 8kw propane powered beast? Yes. But as I always say, it's nice to want things.