Wired Sage

My first Christmas. I’m not even a year old. I’m guessing my Dad is behind the camera, and my Mother in the frame with me must be about six months pregnant. I’m not sure who owns the hand that makes a guest appearance in the left of frame.

Watching this I can’t help but think toy design has come a long way in forty years. That toy would never have made it to market with safety standards today. Did you see how a little child’s hand could get stuck in the ball cage at the far end?

Taken with a fixed lens point and shoot digital camera.

Last Wednesday, February 20th, there was a full lunar eclipse that was visible from my back yard. There was speculation in the local media that we might miss it because of cloud cover; but, luckily the weather-persons had it wrong. It was a beautiful evening for sky watching.

I took my new JVC HDD camera outside on a tripod and started filming just after the eclipse started. The beauty of this camera is that I didn’t have to replace tapes twice during the event. All I had to do was reposition the moon in the video frame to compensate for the rotation of the earth and during the total eclipse where the moon was completely in the umbra I switched my camera to a 1/2 shutter speed to capture the orange-red glow I saw with my unaided eye.

I took three hours of video, transfered it (faster than real time!) onto my hard drive, edited out the parts where I was moving the tripod, time lapsed it (5136.63%) to make the video two minutes and twenty two seconds (well, it had to match the music length), and published it here on the web for your viewing pleasure.

I could have had all that done the next day, if I didn’t have a job or a life.

While looking for information on this lunar eclipse, I stumbled across… OK, I didn’t stumble across anything; I was systematically searching through each and every solar eclipse that was going to happen in my lifetime. I really want to see (and capture on video) a full solar eclipse. Lo and behold, on August 21st, 2017 (a mere nine years from now) there will be a full and complete solar eclipse (of the sun even) close to my home. I was thinking we would have to cruise or fly some where to see one. But I only have to wait nine years for it to happen here where I live.

Below is the 4.8MB FLV video made for web streaming. If you’d like to download the 29.4MB quicktime mov file, feel free. I’m not offering the 49GB of DV footage I have for download, but if you really want it, I’ll burn it to disk and ship it to you for a reasonable licensing fee plus my time and materials (or perhaps a trade: an external Firewire Blue Ray burner and discs would be practical — I could then ship you one disk with all the footage on it).

Oh, come on… maybe someone other than my friends or family will read this page — it is in google after all. If you’re not a friend or family member please drop me email at my yahoo account, my username is on my About Me page, I’m sure I’m going to need it as proof to stop the laughter over that last side note in the parenthesis above.

Enjoy.

‘Great Uncle’ Dennis gave me some great inspiration for new video content. Speed Freak and Basketball Girls are inspired from our email correspondence. If he weren’t so manly I’d probably call him a muse; but, the flannel, bearded image of him in my mind’s eye won’t allow that. Sorry, G.U.D. you’re no Sharon Stone.

In this video clip, first Tweedle-A gets equal time to show off her other-worldly skills in her bid for the WNBA. Then while Tweedle-A works on her mad dribbling skills, Tweedle-L shows off her ability to make baskets on a regulation height goal.

Maybe they’ll be the “Williams Sisters” of Basketball? Or maybe it’ll just be a fun thing they like to do to stay in shape.

Tweedle-L has just finished her latest round of genetic enhancement treatments at the Yakamoto Laboratories in Japan. There they recently spliced in genes from the chetah. This video was taken just days after her treatment. You can see the noticeable improvements in her speed in this video.

Captured from my JVC HDD Everio Camera to iMovie 8.0. Edited and exported with Quicktime in DV format. Imported into Final Cut where the speed was increased 200%, rendered and exported using Quicktime again as a quicktime movie. Uploaded to my hosting service and modified from the 7.6MB .mov file to a 1MB .flv file.

This was done just for fun. I wanted to put together something fast and easy and share it in low-res on my blog, and it was Mac-easy!

After doing this exercise I’m personally convinced iMovie 8.0 should have been branded iVideo; Apple would have avoided a lot of irate customers and bad press. It definitely is designed for web publishing.

Anyway, let me know what you think of my little athlete.