Continue reading »]]> It goes without saying but I obviously don’t update this site very often. Google probably has this site ranked somewhere in the back of the dusty old boxes at the bottom of their darkest basement but it certainly doesn’t prevent the post bots from dumping their little gems into my comments. I’m still getting about 20 or so per day which is probably nothing compared to sites that are actually active but it’s nice to see at least the spam bots are still interested!

99.9% of it is just advertising spam but every once in a while I notice one or two that stand out – obviously the English translations are what make them funny.

A few of my favorites:

I’d title your site the actual dreamland! While Santa claus scrapes from our doorway just once each year, you weblog is open up the whole year C amazing!

Precisely the facts all of us is within search of. Should certainly disrupt my expenses quickly.

It is much like a person read my mind! You gaze to know such a lot related to this, just like you wrote the book in it or something. I do believe that you could do with some pics they are driving your message house a bit, but additionally to that particular, this is excellent blog.

Continue reading »]]> W-L (CONF)
3-0 (1-0)

Notable Players
QB: J. Brantley

WR: C. Rainey, D. Thompson

RB: C. Rainey, J. Demps

TE:

LB:

Team Stats: Florida Gators

Regular Season

(W 41-3) 09/03 Florida Atlantic

(W 39-0) 09/10 UAB

(W 39-0) 09/17 Tennessee

09/24 7:00pm ESPN @ Kentucky

10/01 #3 Alabama

10/08 8:00pm @ #2 LSU

10/15 @ Auburn

10/29 3:30pm CBS @ Georgia (Jacksonville, FL)

11/05 Vanderbilt

11/12 @ #12 South Carolina

11/19 Furman

11/26 #11 FSU

SEC Championship:

#1 SEC EAST vs. #1 SEC WEST

iCal subscription link: http://goo.gl/O35m or download for direct import.

Continue reading »]]> Today is the day. The first day in the countdown to 40. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle this day next year but for now, I’m doing ok. As part of my birthday present, Melissa and I took Madeline down to Orlando to visit the in-laws this past weekend – at Disney World! We figured Madeline was old enough to enjoy the experience and we were right – she had a blast! She gutted it out with the heat, the crowds and the boredom of standing in long lines and never complained once. It had been at least 10 years since Melissa and I visited the Rat so it was a fun experience for the two of us as well.

We can’t wait to go back when she’s a little older and take her on all the really fun stuff like Thunder Mountain, etc.

Today’s best txt msg:

friend: Happy Birthday to you!
me: Thanks! I’m old
friend: Its ok, you’re still immature
me: rofl!

Continue reading »]]> Finally done. Done with all the flying, driving, buying, visiting, gifting, celebrating, weddings, birthday parties and de-icing. It’s been a crazy couple of months here in Atlanta. Oh and on top of all everything else, I’ve been negotiating over the last few weeks with a consulting firm here in Atlanta for a new job. Starting Feb. 14th, I start my new career as an IT consultant. It’s going to be a huge change for me personally – good bye cushy office gig, hello billable hours – but I’ll be back in the tech saddle with a cutting edge group of IT professionals who specialize in small/medium business IT support. 100+ clients and growing.

So unfortunately, the first casualty of this seemingly never ending hustle has been the site. Once again, I find myself having to catch up with updates, etc. It’s not that I don’t have plenty of content to post about, I just say “I’ll update tomorrow when I have time” and then I realize 6 weeks later I still haven’t posted.

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 »]]> Preseason AP and USA Today polls are out and it looks like Alabama will take the #1 spot, followed by Texas at #2, and finally Florida at #4. Not bad considering we lost a decent chunk of senior players (including Tebow). I personally think we might be slightly over-rated this early in the season but with returning talent like Brantley, Demps, Rainey, etc. it won’t take long to find out if we deserve the spot or not.

Chris Low from ESPN talks about potential Florida playmakers for the 2010 season:

Continue reading »]]> I’ve created an iCal compatible calendar for general public use. Basically, any mobile device like an iPhone, iPad, Droid, etc. or software client like iCal for Macs, Outlook Clients, etc. can add my shared iCal formatted calendar to their client.

I’ll keep my master Google calendar updated with game times, Win/Losses, etc as the season progresses and more information becomes available. If you have it set up as a iCal subscription, any updates I make will sync with your client automatically. However, if you import the iCal .ics file directly, it won’t. I’ve included the entire 2010 Fall Gator Football schedule plus the 5 BCS National Title games.

iPhone/iPad Calendar Subscription

1) On your iPhone/iPad navigate to: Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Add Account -> Other -> Add Subscribed Calendar
2) For the server address, type the following (case sensitive): http://goo.gl/O35m
3) Click Next and leave all the other default settings as is.

Once it verifies the link, you’ll be able to view it like any other calendar loaded on your phone/iPad. If you type the short URL incorrectly, you’ll get a generic subscription entry with no additional calendar content.

Outlook

1) Download and save the basic.ics file to your local hard drive
2) Navigate to: File -> Import and Export -> Import an iCalendar or vCalendar file (.vcs)
3) Click Nextand then navigate and select the basic.ics file you downloaded in step 1

Because Outlook imports the calendar directly from a file, it won’t update the entries automatically when I make changes to the my master Google calendar.

9/5/10 ETA: Added the ESPN Game recap link to the individual game event discription for completed games. Link shows up hot on the iPhone calendar!

11/10/10 ETA: Added placeholders for the 2011 regular season. Thanks David!

09/21/11 ETA: Updated entries for the 2011 regular season.