As a followup to this post I calculated the gas mileage for my most recent tank of gas on my motorcycle. It was 41.2 mpg this time. A little better than the 39.7 before, but still way below what I was hoping to get from a motorcycle. And this is a relatively small bike, with a 550 cc engine. I could get almost this good of gas mileage from a used Honda Civic, and carry 3 passengers or groceries with me. Hmm….
As my long time readers know, I occasionally play silly games with Nigerian scammers. Here’s a brief IM conversation that just happened this morning out of the blue:
[08:32] shiraj28: hi
[08:32] shiraj28: asl pls
[08:32] Todd404: 95/M/Lagos
[08:33] shiraj28: ela
[08:33] shiraj28: bye
[08:33] Todd404: bye
Didn’t take long to shut shiraj28 up! Someday if I’m really, really bored, maybe I’ll make a fake website for my fake personality as the 95 year old male swimsuit model currently on location in Lagos, Nigeria.
Speedtastic: Intel Launches Cheaper Intel Quad-core While AMD Still Looks Dumbfounded – Gizmodo
In case you can’t tell from the photos above, I’m thinking the next MacPro should have one or two of the new Intel Core2Extreme processors in it. That would be cool.
Here’s the press release for what I’ve been working on the past 3 years:
Here’s a photo of Beth and me, volunteering with WRV. It’s a group we belong to that does outdoors projects related to restoring wildlands. This photo was taken during a project a couple months ago. Beth was a crew leader, and I was a cook. That meant she walked around pulling invasive weeds and showing others how to find them, and I prepared and delivered food and drinks to the work crews in the field.
I like to call this our “American Gothic” photo:
Here’s where I’ll be on August 11. You should be there, too. Recognize the guy standing in the middle of the poster?
I forgot I had this album on my iPod, but I just dialed in “Loved Like a Milkshake” which is the tribute album to Wesley Willis. I’m not sure I’ve even listened to this thing before, but I’m having a really hard time concentrating on work because I’m laughing so hard. I highly recommend you download this thing (it’s free) and give it a listen. Especially if you’re a fan of Wesley Willis, but even if you’re not.
This is just hilariously ironic – and disgusting. A senior official in the US is found to be corrupt and he gets his sentence commuted by his buddy the President, paying a $250,400 fine and being forced to live out his life as a high paid lobbyist. A senior official in China is found to be corrupt and he gets the death sentence, living out his short life in Chinese prison awaiting a trip to the firing squad. All in the same week!
China Sentences Official to Death for Corruption – New York Times
I had an idea the other day – something I’ve never heard of, but figure someone else must have thought about before me. I was watching a video blog (from National Geographic, I think) about Yellowstone National Park. I’ve been wishing for the past couple years that we had time and money to take a vacation to Yellowstone, but we haven’t.
As I was watching the video online, I got to thinking that it would be nice if someone would just take a video camera and decent microphone and go videotape a bunch of the attractions, and then release it to the public. This would be sort of a documentary film, but wouldn’t include a bunch of voice-over and edits to compact it into a short period of time. Instead, what I was imagining was a DVD you could pop in and have the TV just show the sights and sounds of being in another place for an hour at a time.
Given the short attention span of most audiences, I’m sure many videographers would be tempted to put this sort of thing together with flashy titles, background music, a narrator, and so on. But what I’m imagining would be very raw – just audio and video of being in this other particular place at a particular time.
Has anyone heard of such a thing? If so, what’s it called? And how do I find videographers who are doing this? It seems like it would be cool to have a website with a map and a whole collection of this sort of videos, so people could download them and be transported to wherever they want to go. In my case, Yellowstone. For others, maybe my back yard in Broomfield or a restaurant kitchen in Bangladesh or walking along a canal in Amsterdam.
Please post a comment with your thoughts on this concept. And maybe I’ll post a video of my own to show what I’m thinking of.
I got an email from a long time friend of mine, Chad Johnson. He saw my note announcing the upload of my short film “Cranium”. And he had some questions about the production of the film. This film is different enough from my other stuff that I thought it was worth writing a blog article about.
Here’s what Chad said:
That’s great Todd!
Short, sweet, funny. Perfect for youtube. Nice lighting – it looks
professional. Good sound – of course. Watch your eyes – I can see you
reading. Maybe raise the text you are reading, or remember the lines
in short spurts.Is that Beth as a kid? Did you do this with your new camera?
I didn’t originally intend to make this into a video clip for world wide distribution. You see, a few months ago I signed up for a class called “Ready, Set, On Air!” through Boulder Digital Arts. For the 2nd class, they had someone set up lights and a camera for people to practice being “on air”. I didn’t really have anything I wanted to recite, but I had recently bought some software for my Mac laptop which makes it work like a teleprompter.
So I decided I wanted to experiment with the teleprompter to see how well it worked. I didn’t have a script, so I sat down for 5 minutes and wrote a stream of consciousness story and then loaded it into the teleprompter software. The core of this video was me reciting from that.
To answer Chad’s feedback, then:
The lighting was professional, in fact. There was a pro videographer who was doing the technical stuff that night. I wasn’t involved in the camera or the lighting, and it was before I bought my new camera.
Remembering the lines in short spurts would have defeated the purpose of the experiment, since I wanted to see how it looked to use this teleprompter software.
And no, it’s not Beth as a kid. All the other images in the video were things I found online. Same with the music. So, I’m probably violating copyright left and right with this one. That’s why I only put it on YouTube and don’t plan to do any public screenings of it.
Oh, and the “good sound” wasn’t my doing, either. The class provided the lav mic that everyone used. So I can’t even take credit for that!