Continue reading »]]> I‘m not sure what it is about little girls and ponies but there has to be some unknown cosmic force of attraction at work. As far as I know, Madeline had never seen a pony (or horse for that matter) prior to this ride but within about 20 seconds of pulling up to the carousel, she was hooked. I thought for sure she would be at least a little scared but she didn’t even blink an eye when we walked her in and put her in the saddle. She sat on that darn horse and did great the whole time.

We were in the same area this weekend and sure enough as soon as Madeline saw “Sugar” it was all smiles and excitement again. BTW, the guy who owns the horses only charges $5 and it’s probably a good 10-15 minutes of walking. I can’t recall the last time we spent so little and got so much back. I’m betting we’ll make the hour drive again just to get her on that pony.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Raw download: 360p MOV (26mb), 720p MOV (76mb)

Continue reading »]]> It seems like just yesterday Madeline was learning to walk and now she’s participated in her very first public gymnastics recital. Melissa has been keeping Madeline active over the last 8 months or so with swimming lessons, music and now – gymnastics. The local YMCA offers a 9 week class that introduces young children to the basics. Last Saturday, all the different age groups got together for a public recital so the parents could watch everybody show off their skills. We didn’t know if Madeline would like it or not but she seems pretty excited about all of it. Even more shocking, she’s normally pretty shy around strangers but being in front of the crowd didn’t seem to bother her at all.

We’re both very proud of her accomplishments and I think this might be something she’ll continue participating in as she grows up. A video of her performance is after the break.

For starters, I apologize for the resolution on this video. After 3 separate rips (camera to XP, XP to .WMV, .WMV to .FLV) I can’t blame the final product for looking almost like VHS. In retrospec, I should’ve just used my darn iPhone to record her performance but we’ve been using our 8 year + old Sony Handycam for most of our video shots – old habits (and technology) are hard to break apparently. MiniDVisn’t exactly modern tech these days but that darn handycam has been such a work horse, it’s hard to put down.

I think for Christmas we’ll look at updating our video cam with something like a Flip or similar device so we can get HD digital directly and not have to jump through several tedious hoops to get the content pulled off MiniDV tapes. The cam is so old, drivers are no longer supported on anything but Windows XP so I actually had to rebuild XP on a junker laptop here at work just to pull the shots off the camera.

Anyway, the embedded flash video (FLV) is a quick view but if you have time, download the .WMV file and watch it on your desktop – the quality is slightly better and plays in full 640×480 standard vs. the 320×240 flash ripped for this site. The final format is slightly different because I was forced to use Windows Movie Maker (which is no longer supported outside XP either). I tried getting it all cut up to my iPhone for editing there but that was an epic failure. Converting the WMV to MOV looked (and sounded) even worse so I just left it with WMM.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Raw download: WMV (67mb)

Continue reading »]]> About two weeks ago, I did something I very rarely EVER do. I broke my phone. 3 years – no drops, dings, nicks or bad scratches. Originally, I had planned on upgrading my iPhone 3G at the end of the month but I was shuffling some stuff around on my desk and the phone slid off the edge. Normally, it wouldn’t be a big deal – I’ve got a case for it and it’s only about a 2ft drop. Apparently this time it was enough. Phone fell flat on the front face. I picked it up an when I turned it on – white screen of death.

After a couple hours fiddling with the internals and some Google searching I had two options – hope the internal connection re-seating fixed it or replace the entire LCD screen and digitizer. Breaking it apart and putting it all back together didn’t work and I figured I was so close to swapping it out anyway, I might as well upgrade early. So after about 2 hours in line at the local Apple retail store that night, I walked out with a new iPhone 4.

So. A lot of really cool things with the new hardware platform. One of the best – the on-board 720p HD camera. I had a chance to goof around with it last weekend while we were at Centennial Park. Madeline was at the play ground so I thought I’d give the camera a try.

There are a couple caveats:

• Shake is hard to control when you walk around, over, through stuff. As far as I know, the phone doesn’t support any sort of hardware/software correction. Ultimately, shake contributes to a decrease in video quality when you try to rip or convert one format to another so it’s something I need to work on reducing.
• Lighting – wash out from reflection or glare occasionally interferes with the visual quality in HD.
• Conversion compression. This is the toughest part of all. A raw 90 second .MOV video at 720p from the phone pushing roughly a 10kbs data stream comes out to about 126mb in size. Not much these days file size wise but still too large for most web blogs posting videos without streaming or smart bit-rate streaming (unlike YouTube, Hulu, etc.). Since I’m just linking video directly into my player code, I need a compression that reduces file size but still maintains some of the HD quality in the feed. FLV is usually the most common type and it’s what I’m going to be experimenting with the most. After conversion, I was able to reduce the FLV file to about 24mbs and still maintain a decent frame quality.

Anyway, I think the final cut turned out pretty good considering I created the entire time-line on my iPhone using the onboard camera and the iMovie app to splice two different shots together and add some additional titles/overlay. iMovie isn’t very powerful but it does let you get something patched together with a little creativity and experimentation. It also lets you export your final cut into 360p, 540p or 720p MOV formats.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Raw downloads: 360p (44mb), 720p (130mb)

Continue reading »]]> Not much new to report, just trying to get re-acclimated to the oppressive heat during the Georgia Summer while watching Maddie grow up.

• Madeline has pretty much given up crawling and is now walking almost full time!
• Apple just announced the new iPhone 3G S is set for release on June 17th – looking over the hardware changes … meh, I’ll keep my 3G and not worry about it. I don’t need a better camera, I don’t need more memory, I don’t need a compass and I really don’t care too much about voice control. It’ll be interesting to see what the performance differences are though.
• In conjunction with the new hardware platform, the 3.0 software set launches on the same day. This is what I’ve really been waiting on.
• Melissa’s birthday is coming up fast!
• I really like the Luminox 3000 Navy SEAL dive series but I like the Traser H3 P 6500 Type 6 even better. (Traser happens to license the P 6500 design directly to Luminox)

Continue reading »]]> I finally had a chance to import the last of Madeline’s pictures over from the Gallery2 mod I was previously using to manage my photo albums. Due to the sheer volume of shots we take, I’m going to break up her photos by year. 2008 is up and complete, 2009 has some starter shots.

Madeline 2008

Madeline 2009

Continue reading »]]> After a 3 month paper work battle with the [Social Security Office] and a phone call to our local Congressman’s office, we finally received Madeline’s SS# in the mail. I can’t believe something as routine as this could get so screwed up but then again, it’s just par for the course in Atlanta.

It started at the Hospital – the staff repeatedly told me they would handle all the SS paperwork and we’d have her card in 6 weeks. I guess this is something the hospital does as a courtesy to parents who are wrapped up with their new-borns. I was pretty OK with handling it myself but they insisted so I let it go. 7 weeks later, a quick call to the National Social Security Office revealed that sure enough, they never submitted the paperwork.

Fast forward 3 months and we still hadn’t received a SS# even after Melissa re-submitted the request at our local field office in February. 6 week turn-around my ass. The national office repeatedly told us they couldn’t answer any questions on the paperwork status without a SS# as a reference. I guess the first time I called I talked to the only person in the entire SS bureaucracy that didn’t know they couldn’t give updates without a current SS#. According to the national office, our only recourse was calling our local field office using a reference number from the original paperwork. However, any attempt to call the local field office resulted in getting put on hold for 5 minutes and then disconnected. Every. Single. Time. Over an entire week of phone calls. I kid you not.

At this point, the national office wouldn’t answer questions without a SS# and the local field office wouldn’t answer any questions because they never answered the phone. I couldn’t even make an appointment to prevent a 3+ hour wait because the only way to make an appointment is via a phone call … I thought I could just go down at lunch and sneak in to see one somebody but apparently 200 other people had the same idea every time I tried. Adding to our frustration – I had been sitting on our completed taxes for 2 months – the only thing I was missing was Madeline’s SS# so I could claim her as a dependent for 2007 and April 15th was quickly approaching.

In a last ditch effort to get it resolved before the tax deadline, Melissa put a call into our local Congressman’s office with a threat to pull our voting support if somebody didn’t help us out.  Within 2 minutes Mel had an aid on the phone in direct contact with the local field office manager via cell phone and promised us we would have our card within 10 days. I’m not sure exactly what she told the branch manager (I can only hope it involved the threat of re-assignment to someplace cold and lonely) but she was true to her word. A week later we finally received our daughter’s SS card and I beat the tax deadline by 10 days.

Thanks Uncle Sam.