• i thought packing for a trip was a lot, but packing for a trip with the kid and the dog is just daunting! can't wait to get away, though. #
• hrmmm…vitamins expire? the multi-vitamin pill i took yesterday expired in 2008. #
• Sexy water? That's how we roll in Monterey. http://twitpic.com/14zenw #
• Compagno's Deli is very highly rated on yelp, some calling it the best sandwiches in the area. http://twitpic.com/150ucj #
• Turkey and Reuben "half" sandwiches from Compagno's is the size of regular sandwiches elsewhere. http://twitpic.com/150vec #
• Eating dinner at PortaBella with Christi, Kyden, and Koda. They have a covered heated patio that is dog-friendly. http://twitpic.com/150xlp #
• Our hotel has an outdoor fire pit and is heated by heat lamps!ujuyjhum http://twitpic.com/154gyh #
• Last meal in Carmel is at allegro gourmet pizza. They have pasta too that looked delicious. http://twitpic.com/1554s8 #
• Just saw that Kyden's top teeth have broken through his gums. I thought they weren't supposed to come out for months! #
• I know he's almost 5 months old, but I'm going to follow the advice given to me: sleep when he sleeps. Nap time! http://twitpic.com/15ba28 #
• After crying for an hour in my arms, I put Kyden in the pack n' play & he immediately stopped crying. he's not sleeping, just happy. #
• We've come to an agreement. He'll stop crying if I touch him and I'll feed him pizza when he eats solid foods. http://twitpic.com/15dii1 #
• A recruiter I'm working with wants me to take a PHP compentency test before meeting with them. I can't remember the last time I took a test! #
• just finished taking the PHP competency test. it doesn't really test how good of a coder you are, it tests how well you know the PHP manual. #
• Squeeze for Mac is free at http://macheist.com – it's a tool to manage folders to use HFS+ compression. snow leopard's apps ship this way. #
• does bob costas really speak french or was the translation being fed to him? #

though canon says that the vixia hf200 records in 24fps, what it really does is record 24p in a 60i container. what does that mean? it means that you have to perform a reverse telecine to get rid of the unwanted frames and get true 24fps.

so if i wanted to use the 24fps mode on the camcorder, the Final Cut Pro workflow right now appears to look like this:

1) Final Cut Pro – Log and Transfer
This will convert the AVCHD encoded MTS files into ProRes 422 LT.

2) Compressor – Custom Profile for 1080i60->1080p24
This will perform the reverse telecine, pass through the audio, and give me a final file in ProRes 422 LT that is truly 24fps. Details on the Custom Profile are supplied by apple’s support page.

3) Final Cut Pro – Edit Video

what sucks about this is that there’s a lot of time spent converting the video into a workable format. because final cut pro doesn’t natively edit AVCHD (and even if it did, i’m not sure many computers can handle the workload effectively), converting to ProRes seems to make sense. but having to them run the video through Compressor really makes me unhappy and doubles my video import time.

i’m not really going to be editing video super long clips of video often, but still, this workflow makes shooting in 30fps kind of compelling. plus, youtube prefers their source videos in 30fps, anyway, so that might be it for me.

BEST SHOW EVER. i’m a big fan of shiri appleby and she delivers. the rest of the cast is fantastic as well. brittany robertson (plays lux) pulls off the character remarkably well. i’m a little bummed that kerr smith is left with kind of a one dimensional character, but maybe there’s more in store for him later.

the only drawback about the show is that it airs on the CW. it’s a fantastic show and it is my favorite show of the season. i recommend it to anyone who has a tv or bittorrent client. =P

• kyden now screams bloody murder when he is looking at me while i hold him, but if i face him towards mommy, he is instantly happy. #
• today officially starts my unemployment! how do i celebrate? with a phone interview… #
• still new to this video editing thing: canon's hf200 24p isn't a true 24fps. but this is what you have to do to get 24p: http://bit.ly/4ec2L #
• Mommy left us for the afternoon! Who is going to cry louder? http://twitpic.com/14mnfy #

now that we have a baby in the household, going anywhere has become this enormous hurdle. it feels like there are a million things that we have to do just to get out the door. the checklist used to be:

now it has become:

just getting out of the house is a big ordeal and we start getting ready to leave about half an hour before we are out the door. i’m telling you, i’m trying to be on time, but we still end up being late to most things because something comes up to delay us. such is the life of a parent, it seems.

• i am just realizing how terribly difficult editing video truly is am have a whole new level of appreciation for video production. #
• I uploaded a YouTube video — kyden cannot roll over http://youtu.be/pmSFSJwzJDU?a #
• just authored my first blu-ray with menus. need to find a good source of audio tracks and sounds for future video editing. #
• http://twitpic.com/12cv2d – eeep! working with AVCHD is painful! #
• Been up for the last hour and can't go back to sleep. I can't even score a new high score in bejeweled. Guess it is time to get up. #
• just made my first screencast for work. the mic that i used to record it with? the USB mic that came with rock band. can i write that off? #
• Ed's Teriyaki in Santa Clara serves delicious teriyaki cheesesteaks. http://twitpic.com/12nfjp #
• great use of projectors at the winter olympics opening ceremony. does that mean if i get a bunch more, i can paint my living room w/ light? #

i never really thought about it until today, but the FUSE project is pretty cool. my first real experience with it was actually using MacFUSE so that i can read and write to NTFS partitions with a mac.

but what is REALLY cool are the 3rd party file systems people write on top of FUSE. there are two today that i discovered that, though i’m not sure there’s any practical use yet, seem really cool.

GmailFS is a file system that uses a gmail account as storage. the libgmail project has been abandoned, but there’s a patch that seems to get authentication working. it’s a little buggy (i can cp files in and out of the FS, but i can’t seem to do an ls) i think it used to work at one time, so i might dig a little deeper. but this is the only way i know of to use gmail as storage in linux.

sshfs is a file system that will let you mount a remote host via ssh. very neat. i think that it uses the sftp service to do all the reads and writes and by default i think it caches results locally for 20 seconds or so (but can be overriden), but the concept it very cool. all you need on the remote host is ssh access. no need to setup NFS or anything else. this might come in handy. what does break, though, are absolute symbolic links. can’t win ’em all.

now that i have a working SD card, i’m able to shoot video again. the process of video editing, however, is all new to me. i never really understood just how much time, energy, and nuance went into video editing.

it used to be that the task of processing photos from a photo shoot were daunting, but that doesn’t even begin to compare to the sheer agony that is video processing.

though i watch a lot of tv (A LOT!), it never seemed like it was much effort to shoot some video and share it. just how hard could it be?

it turns out that just shooting video is a lot harder than one would think. learning the mechanics of how to shoot fluid video, or at least learning how to hold your camera steady enough to be acceptable was a feat if and of itself.

once you get good source material comes the excruciating task of editing what you shot. what editing? take, for example, the latest video i shot. christi had said that kyden had rolled over by himself, so i eagerly picked up my video camera to document the momentous occasion…and then he did not roll over.

what’s more, i shot about 3 minutes of video in HD of him not rolling over. this is not what we call exciting stuff by any means. still, i wanted to see if there was anything that i could salvage from these 3 minutes of video.

it turns out that 3 minutes of video is more than 600MB of data. so importing the video, editing it, and trying to do something useful with it takes up a lot of resources. what’s more interesting is that at the end of the day, i trimmed the 3+ minutes of video down to 1 minute and 23 seconds. 3 minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, but if you watched the original footage, it’ll feel like an eternity.

what’s more, kyden isn’t doing anything in the video. watching a baby that isn’t yours do nothing for 3 minutes is about as entertaining as watching paint dry, but i felt like there was still something there worth sharing in those 600MB.

and so i started my journey of snipping away at the video and trying to spruce it up in some way. what i found interesting was that it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to get bored..and that it is possible to get bored several times in as short of a time span as 3 minutes.

throw in a little background music to help keep the pace of the clip going, cut out a lot of nothing, throw in a few transitions between scenes, and you find that an hour has passed. an hour has passed whittling away 3 minutes of video to one and a half minutes. an hour! sure, i was a little slow because i’m still trying to learn the tools, but man! this video editing stuff is no joke.

and so after about an hour and half of work, i’m left with a video where kyden is doing nothing.

• Lunch with Tony decorates their bathroom with framed images of other famous Tonys. http://twitpic.com/11869k #
• http://twitpic.com/11kzb0 – PSA: change your air filters. #
• just started a 7GB rsync…it's going at 81kB/s. this might take a while… #
• rsync backup 5.1GB out of 7GB done after 18 hours. looks like it'll be done tomorrow sometime. #
• kyden now seems to routinely cry in my arms for minutes on end, but as soon as i hand him over to mommy, he stops! #

before and after photos of the air filters that i changed today. man, it really was time to change them.