Just imported my first DV tape from the Canon HV30. Quality is amazing.
iPhone just restarted itself while syncing. 😕
Just converted 240 images from CR2 to DNG. First ever use of DNG. Attracted by the 10-20% reduction in file size.
File copy was taking forever and I just noticed I was on my 802.11g network. Flipped to 802.11n, much faster.
Spent the entire evening playing digital librarian. Moving photos and home movies around to their proper spots. Tedious, but necessary.
Would someone come and add metadata to 50,000 photos and home movies?
Surprising number of birthdays at Hickory Park.
Just watched “Run Fatboy Run”. Nice feel good movie.
Local Burger and Miltons
(Lawrence, Kansas) When doing her research for places to check out in Lawrence, Tammy ran across an interesting restaurant called Local Burger. Local Burger is attempting to create an “old school” fast food experience based entirely on local food sourcing and organic products. The menu is grass-fed locally raised free-range beef. The same in bison if you like. Prefer Elk, they have that too. Everything is raised by known ranches and done right.
And let me tell you, you sure can taste it. We only eat grass-fed beef at home and the taste is so different, and better in my opinion. Taking one bite into that grass-fed burger at Local Burger was just delicious. I wish I could have had a few meals there. I applaud everything they are doing and noted only one thing missing, they don’t seem to compost their trash. Every recycling option possible was present, but no composting.
For the morning we hit Milton’s. Milton’s served an incredible breakfast that I have a hard time imagining can be beat in Lawrence. In fact, we are changing our Sunday morning plans so we can have another shot at their menu before leaving town. The french toast was stunning. :-)
Big Smith & Blue Mountain at The Bottleneck
(Lawrence, Kansas) Tammy and I are hanging out in Lawrence, Kansas this weekend. We are here to fulfill her New Year resolution to see Big Smith play again. It’s been about 10 years since she saw them last, and I’ve never seen them. After scouring their tour schedule she saw that the best option for us was a weekend trip bookended with 7 hours on the Interstate to Lawrence. As an added treat, they played with Blue Mountain. I’ve got three Blue Mountain albums and really like their music.
We drove down to Lawrence on Friday going through rain the entire way. We made it with an hour to spare to get checked into our hotel and walk over to The Bottleneck where the show was. The venue was great. Nice sound, big open area for dancing.
Blue Mountain is on a reunion. They split up in 2001 and decided to pack it in. However, in November they reunited and put the band back together! They put on a great show. It was almost entirely comprised of their existing catalog of old songs given the bands recent reformation. That was fine with me, it was a great walk through memory lane.
After Blue Mountain’s hourlong set Big Smith started to pile onto the stage. Pile is the correct word since there are 6 of them in the band. Big Smith is a family band. All the members of the band are 1st cousins. As they highlighted for us, that means they all have the same grandparents. Big Smith then proceeded to absolutely tear the place down for 2 hours and 15 minutes.
I’m pretty sure that we had no choice but to travel this far south to see Big Smith. I think the northern nature of Minnesota would have put some mojo on the foot stomping and clapping.
I had an absolutely great time whooping it up with everyone else. Halfway through Big Smith’s set I couldn’t help but get out on the dance floor and start stomping and clapping with everyone else. Hillbilly music at its finest!
If I only had a pair of overalls! Make sure to read Tammy’s write-up from the night as well!
- Very disappointed that my Mac Pro has the same video problems after they replaced the 2nd card in the shop. despair.
- Anyone know of a good Leopard-happy Mac benchmarking tool? Xbench seems very old.
- At this point my Mac Pro problems seem to HAVE to be the original video card. No other viable explanation. Memtests were clean all night.
- I seriously feel like giving every computer and device in my house a time out. Start behaving better!
- Never even dawned on me to run smcFanControl on my Mac Pro, even though I use it religiously on my MacBook Pro.
- Running memtest on my Mac Pro all night long. See if anything pops up. If not, the old video card is likely culprit.
- Serious debugging of Mac Pro video problem now. Seems that with the other card out it still blows up. Running single user memory tests now.
- Trying smcFanControl to make video stable, probably need to switch do a different card.
- Upped my fans and no artifacts since. So far. Hmmm…
Sonic stop in Missouri on the way to Lawrence, Kansas!
Adding yet another Vista BSOD to the my running count.
Truth Revealed! Fresh dent in MacBook Pro is from wife dropping it!
- Left BlackBerry in NY cab. Contacted cabbie but he got taken to JFK. Ugh! Luckily getting it back in a bit.
- Still waiting for BlackBerry return. iPhone is happily safe with me.
- Reunited with BlackBerry!
I sent this tweet four hours ago. Your getting it now, in the future, from me in the past.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Threat level is still orange. Be afraid!
Just upgraded all my WordPress plugins. So happy to do that in 2.5 now. Wishing there was an “Upgrade All” button.
TED - Podcast You Should Be Watching
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. TED has an annual conference that in recent years has become a pretty amazing event. Getting into TED is not easy. On top of a very expensive entry fee, you actually have to write an essay expanding on your accomplishments and what you expect to achieve in the coming years.
Fortunately for everyone, TED has also opened up in a very big way. The TED website is pretty amazing and has videos of hundreds, if not thousands, of TED presentations. You should add this to your list of sites to watch and check out. The podcast for TED and my iPhone are musts for me.
Here is a collection of three amazing videos released this year from the TED conference. I watched them in this order, in a row, and that is why I wrote this post. I just felt more people should see this great stuff. It makes you think.