This is a riveting, heartbreaking bit of photojournalism: The Julie Project by Darcy Padilla follows a homeless 18-year-old with a newborn baby all the way from 1993 to the present day in pictures and words. I will go home and hug my daughter very tightly tonight.
This forum post about a 102 year old lens on a modern Canon 5D is cool for several reasons. The first is that the idea and execution are amazing, as are the resulting photos. The second is in the 4th picture down… notice a familiar sign?
So Cisco bought Flip back in March (makers of our awesome little video camera) and recently decided to completely fuck up the bundled editing software. In short, FlipShare 5.0 strongly encourages forces users to use their editing software exclusively and hides any videos you the user have edited—from what I can tell, they’re probably just writing some kind of XML file to indicate where you’ve made edits, and don’t actually save a new file anywhere that I can find, which is unacceptable to me. How do I back up those edited files? They pretty much force users to use their software to upload edited files to a list of popular sharing sites—what happens if I use a different service? Worse, there’s no way to step the software backwards to a previous version once you’ve “upgraded” the original software. Cisco, you lose.
Jen’s recently gotten some fantastic footage of Finn beginning to walk, and wanted to post it to her Vimeo account. After struggling to understand the new FlipShare software, I did some sleuthing to find a better way of encoding video out of Quicktime and found this tutorial called Flip Video: Codecs and you!. I followed the instructions there (using the H264 codec) and exported a beautiful edit to her hard drive, and she uploaded it to Vimeo with no loss in quality. Score!
After about four months of suffering through a faulty email setup, I got tired of manually marking and deleting junk mail every half an hour. So today at lunch I finally nuked my main account and set it up from scratch. The way mail.app handles IMAP accounts is confusing, to say the least, and Apple’s explanation of how it interacts is pretty thin on details. (Most searches, predictably, focus on setting up Gmail for IMAP on mail.app). I’m still having some hiccups here and there but all seems to be better in my email world now.
Finding a decent video encoding scheme for Flickr has been a huge nightmare. I’ve found that the default encoding from our Canon SD900 (AVI format) works flawlessly, while almost every encoding schema for Flip video footage processed through Quicktime Pro looks like garbage. I’ve got a ton of footage that gets pixellated and blocky as soon as it hits Flickr (or, alternately, bonks out with a yellow “This video cannot be processed” message). I’m going to keep working on this and hopefully find a solution I like.
The heat has returned to Baltimore, and with it, our peculiar pattern of hot, muggy sunshine in the morning, cloudy afternoons, short, violent thunderstorms towards the evening commute, and unbearably humid evenings. I may have to put the full soft top back on the Scout in order to drive it to work once a week; nothing sucks more than driving home in the rain.
This next clip is sheer genius. I was confused, at first; I hadn’t realized Sarah Palin’s “Speech” was so disjointed and illogical until I read the actual transcript.
Improbably, there is a field of bright red poppies next to the beltway offramp to my street.
The holiday season is up on us, and we’re getting prepared for it as best we can. The neighbors have supplied more than enough cheer for us after installing their neon manger scene.
I finally got around to sending our older Canon PowerShot off to the company’s customer service center a few weeks ago. To recap the story quickly, earlier this year our PowerShot SD110 started malfunctioning, taking shots with a magenta cast and horizontal lines through each frame. Research revealed that Canon had an out-of-warranty replacement program for the problem, and a quick phone call confirmed our camera was eligible.
I had dawdled in sending our camera in not because I was waiting on the company for anything, but because I never got around to the UPS store to drop the package off (new baby and all). I should also mention that Canon’s customer service has been nothing but stellar from the beginning. Each call I made was handled by someone obviously well-trained and motivated, and they sent me a pre-paid UPS label promptly via email after my first contact. When our camera arrived at their shop, I got an email notification. And when they emailed me about a return package en route, I expected it to take a week or so to arrive.
Imagine my surprise when we got a FedEx delivery this week, with a small but curiously heavy box inside. Accompanying the box was a dry, matter-of-fact letter which informed me they had, in fact, tested out camera and found it was defective, and because parts weren’t available anymore, they shipped us a replacement PowerShot SD900 instead. I think you could have knocked me over with a feather.
It’s a refurbished model, which means it had been returned to Canon for repair/replacement; there are a few small nicks on the corner where it had been dropped somewhere. Otherwise, it’s a clean unit with a huge LCD display and 10MP resolution. (The physical condition of our old 110 was embarrassing). The battery is charging on the wall as I write this, and I can’t wait to try it out.
My first serious digital camera was a Canon G3, which I loved, and when it came time to go to DSLRs, I went with Nikon over Canon for various reasons I don’t recall even though it seemed like everyone I read was doing the opposite. I’ve got nothing but good words for our Nikons, and I still plan to upgrade to a D90 when I can afford one (I have already made a sizeable investment in Nikon glass), but I still praise Canon to the heavens whenever I’m asked for an opinion. This customer service experience almost makes me regret going with Nikon, because I do vote with my pocketbook, and I’d like to reward this company for going above and beyond the call of duty. They could simply have told me there was nothing they could do, and shipped back our brick; they could have discontinued the program years ago. Instead, they have further cemented my brand loyalty, and made an evangelist out of me. Nice work, Canon.
I wish there was a better way to link images from a weblog. Hmm.
I found Ice Cube's "Good Day.".
Monologue: I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.
Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ website? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherfucking spring.
Hmm. I think I might install this and use it on Wednesday (when other, larger and well-know sites will be down in protest): SOPA Blackout Plugin.
Wes Anderson's new movie is called Moonrise Kingdom, and it looks great.
User Hippybear put together an exhaustive, and I mean exhaustive history of the Art of Noise on Metafilter, full of links and info: Don't Be Afraid Of The Art Of Noise.
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