More Irish Motorcycle Road Racing

"On this page you can watch UTV's coverage of the NW200. (Broadband users only)"

Incase you didn't get enough the first time . . .

Irish Motorcycle Road Racing

http://www.u.tv/nw200/asx/liveaction-x_2.asx

wow. serious wow. Windows Media 9 or newer, or FlipMac QT plugin for Mac.

Motivational Posters from games

Some I thought were funny, from the RPG.net forums

Curiousity:



More to follow . . .

Motivator: Inspire! Motivate! Mock!

Motivator: Inspire! Motivate! Mock!: "you now have the power to turn a simple photograph into an inspirational message that will burn forever in the hearts and minds of dozens."

Make your own (de-) motivational posters. Some examples above...

Compress For The Web With 3ivx

I've been using 3ivx to compress videos for this blog - the last few have been big because I was using 1600kbits/sec, 29.97 FPS etc.

However, a (poorly indexed by google) video blog has suggested to use the following settings:

800 kbit/sec
32kbit/sec AAC audio
15FPS

I'll try that in the future; see what happens.

Cat vs. Pizza

Peridot may not be quite right in the head. But she did win the battle! Click for the 2:15 video (15 meg)




PS - an hour after I taped that she's *still* going after that pizza crust!

(download this video from google videos)

First Time in 8 Years

8 years I've been using Macintosh computers, starting with the Rev 'A' iMac. For the very first time I have had a hard crash (kernel panic for those UNIX geeks out there):


Click for an enlargement.

Wow.

Johhny Playing T-Ball (video)

Clip from Johnnies t-ball game last night. (1:36, 18 meg QT6)




(copyright 2006 w. england)

Side note - all that was shot hand-held. The zoom at the end was 10x to 4x! The optical image stabilization on the camera works really well!

First video from new Camcorder

New camcorder, new videos. First pass - works as designed. Captured 'widescreen', imported to iMovie and exported as QT .mov file with the letterbox bars as designed. Click the photo to look at the 43 second clip. (2.4 meg)



(No, I wasn't at my best when I taped that clip...)

Update: OMFG I need a *faster* mac. I imported 16 minutes of 16:9 anamorphic video. Before iMovie can do anything with it, it has to letterbox it. So far, 20 minutes later, it's less than 1/2 done with letterboxing the imported video. Argh! 866mhz just doesn't cut it anymore for DV editing...

A Picture Share!

Alec fishing at Fox Lake

A Picture Share!

Emptier living room. Now there is room to play!

A Picture Share!

A Picture Share!

A Picture Share!

Alec shooting fireworks

Fixing the Basement Floor

OK - house is emptying out, just Alec and I. So, time for that 30 year old stained nasty carpet to go and something better to be put in. Not that I have the immediate cash flow, but here's a few notes for my own reference on concrete basement subfloors and so on.

The two problems:

1) The basement floor is concrete and gets slightly damp.
2) The basement ceiling is only 7'. No room for a true framed subfloor

Solutions? Engineered basement subfloors.

The original product, Dri-Core is a waferboard with waterproof backing and air flow spacers underneath. Basically, you just toss it on the floor, and put your carpet, engineered wood or tile on top.

A few user installation notes:

• Mark Rushton's site
  
• Another install
  
• Video showing install of DriCore
  

Another new competing product is 'SubFlor' - looks interesting, although I don't find much on Google about it.

Seems like the major difference is DriCore is sold through Home Depot, and SubFlor through Loews. :-)

Next Steps: Carpet (safe) or engineered hardwood (bit riskier) over the subfloor?

Stay tuned . . .