Last week I reserved us a spot on Half Moon Bay State Beach for six nights during our upcoming Bay Area blast in April. I went to great lengths to get a site that offers me a windshield view of the mighty Pacific. For some reason it’s important to me.

Six nights came in at exactly $157.50, or $25/ night + a small reservation fee. Darlene commented that this was pretty expensive. (?!) I should point out that the Ritz Carlton a few hundred yards up the Bay from us is $300 per night. Obviously, we forgo the heated towels, mud baths, chocolate on the pillows, et al for moonlit strolls on the beach, seagulls and roaring breakers lulling us to sleep, and pretentious-free solitude. Check out the video below for our beachside digs:

The image of HMB SB used for the above video is courtesy of Ken Adelman’s amazing California Coastal Records projects.

While we’re at it, let’s see some past “windshield views” from our travels…

OK, that last pic makes it look like I have this pressing desire to turn the bus into a boat!

Caden went to his second basketball game last Saturday. Being his first year playing, he’s still learning the ball skills. He’s not doing too bad with passing and dribbling, but still could use some work on his shooting. Unfortunately, his old man never played the game… like, ever. So, I’m not much help.

The boys are in the basketball program and Bria’s in cheerleading this season (she can play b-ball next year). Our church where they play just adopted the Upward program, and it’s pretty cool. Very structured, organized, and well led by the LifeBridge staff and volunteers. Our kids will likely be playing it for a long time now. And their old man will have to get out on the court one of these days… and throw down the glove to pick up the big orange ball sometime.

Naturally, I’ve been shooting video courtside with my new camera. I’m still a bit jerky with some of the controls, esp. the manual focusing… which is the only way to follow the action when 30 people an hour come walking in front of the camera. I’m rigged up with the Tiffen Steady Stick support system that keeps me from having to lug “the sticks” (my mongo tripod) around. It’s basically a body-mounted tripod and shoulder rest… and makes it a breeze during extended shoots.

Anyways, I edited a little snippet of Caden’s game last Saturday. I took a bunch of footage, but just focused on him for this little piece. Below is the very down-rezzed and compressed Flash version. I also made a high-def version… well, higher-def version. It’s a 1280×720 size WMV, so it’s still down-rezzed quite a bit, and has a healthy bit of compression tokeep the file size manageable. For those that know (and/or care), this was shot at 30f (Canon’s 30fps progressive mode)… so there’s a decent amount of motion blur compared to the “video look” of 60i. For those of you crossing your eyes about now, enjoy watching the video!

Of course, Logan’s anxious to see his “music video” now from Saturday’s game. An editor’s job is never done! Yawn.

Egyptian blogger and student Abdelkareem Soliman was sentenced today to four years in prison for expressing views, opinions, and bravely “whistle blowing” of religious intolerance and human rights violations within his home country on his personal blog. According to the court documents, he was sentenced to “three years for contempting religion, and one year for defaming the president.”

Free and freedom-loving people everywhere should speak out and spread the word. For the latest information, and to find out what you can do, please go to:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

-Pastor Martin Niemöller

Here’s a little vlog clip with my new mic and preamp/ audio interface. The mic is a Rode NT3 hypercardioid. The preamp/audio interface is the ART Tube MP Project Series w/ USB.

Notice how I’m so “green” with this audio stuff that I mispronounce hypercardioid. Hey… it’s a BIG word! *grin*

I purposefully left the audio track alone (other than the MP3 compression from Flash). I’d usually “fatten-up” any VO track with dynamics, as well as silence out the noise floor with gating or the noise reduction filter in Adobe Audition. But I wanted to see how the mic and preamp preform in my untreated office space with the PC running nearby… and overall I’m impressed!

I’m still learning the vagaries of the preamp, but seems like a very nice deal for $99 shipped. It has a limiter, phantom power, balanced output, phase invert, and a high-pass filter. Not a true “field mixer” by any means, but at a fraction of the cost I can’t complain.

Once I use it more I’ll be able to A/B it vs. the onboard preamps on my XH-A1 camera.

OK, here I am today planning our upcoming bus trip to the Bay Area for the first two weeks in April. Like usual, I’m using the most amazing time-waster ever conceived, Google Earth. If you’ve somehow lived under a rock for the past two years, it’s this FREE software you load on your computer and allows you to zoom from space to anywhere on the planet.

It utilizes satellite imagery and sophisticated hardware acceleration (coupled with a broadband connection) to seamlessly pan and zoom across the globe, and even pull down “into the weeds” for a bird-eye view of your world. From your house… to Barbra Streisand’s (careful… she might sue you!)… all of the way to The Forbidden City.

There… not so “forbidden” anymore, eh? How about Area 51, The Neverland Ranch, and other places you’ll never get to step foot on? Fly on in with Google Earth!

Like with many things Google… it didn’t invent the software, it just used its leverage as The 800 Pound Gorilla of all things Information (and billions and billions of stockholder equity) to buy some of the best software out there… and then promptly turn around and give it away to the individual user. So Google Earth used to be Keyhole Corp. My favorite 3D sketching program for (when I used to do) architecture was 3D Sketch Up, conceived here in Boulder, CO… and bought by Google last year. And now the basic version is free. Gotta love Google.

Anyways so back to my trip… Google Earth lets me see the places we’re going, what we’ll see… and most importantly, whether The Bus will fit in the parking lot! As I’m ticking off the usual suspects of things to see/ places to go/ beaches to camp… Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf, Half Moon Bay… I also have a wild hare. I want to tour the Googleplex! That’s the Google Campus in the epicenter of all things geek, Mountain View, CA.

And the weird thing… Darlene and the kids thought it was a great idea. They use Google every day. And in conversation, they use it as a verb, “I Googled for ‘green sea urchin’ and came up with this cool looking one, Dad!”.

To be fair, I also said I want to visit Adobe’s World HQ, Intel, ILM, and Pixar. But I said Googleplex first!

Click on the pic above for the Google Earth map with our “pushpin”places to go & things to see.

OK, so now you do Google Earth. Once you finally have your life back, try Google Sightseeing for some really cool findings here on Our Planet. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

After over four years with my ‘87 GMC full-size conversion van, and almost literally “driving the wheels off of it”, we bought me a minivan today. Yes… a minivan. It’s an ‘01 Chrysler Town & Country (stupid name, IMHO), and really pretty nice. Nicer than I’m used to, anyways. It can seat 7, is all-wheel drive, and even has one of those cool electric doors on the pax/curbside. Most importantly, it has a radio! And doors that fully shut. And cupholders. It doesn’t leak antifreeze every time I drive it. And… you get the picture. Big upgrade.

I told Dar, that with this purchase, my transformation is now complete. Case in point: I volunteered at Caden’s school today, babysat several rowdy homeschoolers at a theater class on Tuesday, did my first scrapbooking earlier this week, washed several loads of laundry yesterday… and now I have the prototypical “soccer mom” vehicle.

So it’s official… Brian now has a uterus! Oh… I gotta go now. Supper’s on the stove…

As an early Valentine’s Day gift to Bria, I spent a few hours tonight assembling some pics we took this week of her and Clifford (THE Big Red Dog, of course!). He’s actually not so big in his present incarnation… a stuffed animal from her kindergarten class at Longmont Christian. Every kid in her class gets a chance to take Clifford home for a week and do things with him… then journal or scrapbook about the experience for that week’s “show n’ tell”.

Well, I don’t “journal”… I blog. And I’ve never scrapbooked in my life (my Mom does all of ours *yeah!*), so I decide to try to scrapbook with Photoshop… e-scrappin’ I guess you’d call it. And who knew it would be fun! I Googled “Photoshop scrapbook backgrounds” and you should see the hits it came up with. There’s a lot of scrapbookin’ being done in PS out there. Who knew?! Anyways, I bought a little “girlie” page pack for $2.99 (yes, just three bucks!) that had a bunch of nice hi-rez papers, cutouts, and objects… some in JPG some in PNG from this place. They have a ton of papers, themes, and do-dads out there on the Net. Impressive!

A little drag-and-drop with their artwork, then I made some paper frames myself with the noise filter, quick mask a few brush stroke selections to “tear” the edges, stroke some rounded edge frames on the other page… and I made two pages in two hours. Not bad for an e-scrapbook newbie. Check ‘em out…

The secret to the “look” of most e-scrapbook pages I’ve seen, just like with much of the “grunge” look vector work that’s trendy in motion graphics right now: use a lot of non-orthogonal layers, create some separation between them with drop shadows and bevels, and make everything as organic as possible. Plan to look un-planned.

Tomorrow I’m going to e-mail these to the Walgreens photo lab down the street and get some nice glossy 8×10’s to insert into the notebook full of other kids’ experiences. And Bria will take Clifford and these pages back to school on Valentine’s Day. Scrap on!

OK, so you got a brand-new HDV camera… and no way (yet) to deliver all of those glorious hi-rez pixels. Blu-Ray, HD DVD, WM9… bah! Who has any of those players?? And the Internet? Unless you’re talking about projects in terms of seconds, rather than minutes or even hours, file sizes and bandwidth will kill ‘ya. So even if someone has sprung big buck$ on a 720p or 1080i HDTV, usually the only way they watch hi-def content is through the cable box or satillite feed. So what’s a shooter to do??

Deliver in SD. “What!”, you exclaim. “Why did I spend all of this money on an HDV camera if I can only deliver SD?!” Here’s why… pixels are your friend. Just because you edit in SD, doesn’t mean that all of that HDV content has to go to waste. Shoot in HDV, capture the HDV files and then edit in your deliverable resolution.

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Col. Dan E. Straight, a retired Air Force pilot and veteran of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam died yesterday. Col Straight was the Grand Marshall of 2005’s Longmont Veteran’s Day Parade.

I shot this photo above of Col. Straight in that parade. Dar’s dad, a Vietnam vet, was visiting us, so we pulled the kids out of school and took them downtown for the parade. It’s a shame to me that kids have to go to school on Vet’s day (mine never will!), when they should be out honoring vets.

And here’s a video I put together of the parade that year…

I never met Col. Straight, unfortunately, but he sounds like a very colorful man, involved in many local charities and causes. Our WWII vets are dying off at an alarming rate. Never pass up an opportunity to thank a Vet (of any war). There are heroes all around us.

Here’s today’s article on the passing of Col. Straight.