Bob 
Sr. had surgery this week to replace his aging defibrillator implant, and it went without complications for which we are all grateful. Except for the fact it was delayed 1 day because he inadvertently consumed a cup of coffee prior to going to the hospital. doh!
He should be discharged this morning.
Pete enlisted one of his companies (he’s in venture capital activities), and they raided our website and came up with these nifty business cards.
UCF student government candidate Anthony Furbush immediately complied with a request from Lockheed Martin to discontinue using a campaign logo that Lockheed claims constituted trademark infringement. [The Furbush campaign site is cleaned up now, but I found the original logo on the campaign's facebook page.]
Furbush cried “it was a mistake, we did not intentionally go out and copy the logo.”
right.
Lockheed will not pursue the matter. Furbush lost the student government election this past wednesday, but I bet he’ll make a great republican candidate for public office sooner or later.
Gina’s WPHS chorus is attending Florida District Music Performance Assessments (MPA’s) today. Last week, all the WPHS choruses presented their performance pieces in concert, and I had a front row seat. The freshman women did two numbers and their musical quality has definitely improved since the start of the year. I took along my new digital camera to shoot some video and see how it performs.
Nicely; the Lumix did really well with the low stage lights, and the image stabilization works quite well…all of this is handheld, and only at the end of the 8 minutes of shooting did some shakyness get significant enough to show up. The zoom control is a tiny little lever which is difficult to finesse, but it is quiet. These youtube uploads are downsampled, so they don’t show all the detail of the VGA level 640X480 resolution captured by the camera. (9 minutes of video nearly filled up my 1GB SD card).
I only wish I could have gotten on my feet and added some camera movement — the girls are not very animated in these two clips.
I also used these clips to finally start digging into the Adobe Premiere Elements editing software I acquired over a year ago. That learning curve is steep, and I’ve only cracked the surface of its capabilities. All I did with these was to add some fades and a title, and in one I interjected a “ken burns” still image pan. The adobe software natively handles the Panasonic’s video format which is quicktime .mov. This program seems a lot more stable than the Studio DV consumer software I’ve been using up till now.
I also tested Premiere’s exporting modes, and tried a couple different video formats to evaluated encoding times and resultant quality. I found that I don’t have the codec’s needed to export mpeg4, which youtube recommends for uploading. Some details are in the clip descriptions on my youtube site.
Just realized, this posting hits a majority of my blog categories.
This is rich. At slate.com is a celebration of Sting’s reunion with The Police, but also a wicked deconstruction of his high-minded self regard as a solo artist. And a dig at his Derek Zoolander album cover poses.
This brand new clip on youtube has caught fire in the blogosphere. And for good reason. It’s from a show called Øystein & Meg (Øystein & I) produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting television channel (NRK) in 2001. The spoken language is Norwegian, the subs in Danish and English. It’s written by Knut Nærum and performed by Øystein Bache and Rune Gokstad. (no, I didn’t type all that out, I just copied and pasted from the youtube page.)
Here’s a cool set of illustrations I received by email…. I couldn’t verify its legitimacy on the web, but I’ll assume the scaling is accurate.
Update: here’s the source reference for these images.
