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.

so as a long-time everydns.com user, i’ve been relatively happy with the service that i’ve received from them. i think that i have experienced two major outages that i can recall, the most recent one occurring a few weeks ago shortly after dyn.com announced that they had acquired everydns.

recently, i was emailed an announcement about what’s next for everydns users. to be fair, i have never donated to everydns and so i really shouldn’t have such high expectations from a service provider that is giving me something for free.

Leeching Using their services has been great for me, and sure, it wouldn’t have hurt me to donate some money to the cause. but there’s a reason why i didn’t donate: i could have gotten the same free service through my registrar.

so why use everydns anyway, then? i wanted the freedom to be able to move my DNS seamlessly if i decided to change registrars. that luxury seemed nice, though i haven’t switched from godaddy.com since i have gotten there.

the latest announcement from dyn.com says that anyone who has donated to the everydns will get grandfathered into free lifetime subscriptions of the custom dns product. but that statement begs the question: what about people who haven’t donated to everydns?

i get that dyn.com is a company (one with terrific customer support, by the way) and they need to make money, but acquiring a service provider of free DNS and then charging people for service just feels wrong to me. i was trying to figure out how dyn.com would generate revenue from this acquisition, but i always assumed that they would just upsell services.

they haven’t explicitly said that if you haven’t donated in the past, you’re going to be out of luck, but reading between the lines, that’s the sense that i get. and if that is the way that it is moving, i gotta say, it was great while everydns lasted, but i guess it’s really time to move on.

my DNS is already hosted at my registrar, so i’m not really impacted terribly by this, but it’s a sad state of affairs to see the spirit of such a great free service die.

• i haven't watched smallville in a long time, but saw kristin kreuk on chuck tonight. it's been too long since she's been on tv. #
• Krispy Kreme is getting into the valentine spirit. http://twitpic.com/zwa09 #
• Just had Mongolian beef at chef lee, but it tasted more like Mongolian onion with a beef garnish. #
• Bed bath and beyond sells everything! http://twitpic.com/10kmrb #

• i think i am hallucinating. i keep seeing a bug flying around in the corner of my eye, but whenever i turn my head to look, it's not there. #
• after 3 failed H1N1 shot attempts, i'm finally getting mine tomorrow. too little too late? maybe, but better safe than sorry? #
• Bbbbbbbbbb #
• V #
• lesson of the day: do not leave your twitter client open on your phone in your pocket…with your hand in your pocket. #
• The kids in front of me got an H1N1 "shot", but it was administered through a nasal spray instead. I don't think adults have that option. #
• man, they did not give me the option to get the H1N1 shot via nasal spray and now, i'm sure it's just my imagination, but my arm tingles! #
• camera gear #
• tired of looking at code. how to break the monotony? laundry. exciting weekend, eh? #
• still writing code, but the football game is about to start! ugh. #
• The antenna I'm using to watch HDTV OTA is 2" tall and 9" wide fully extended. http://twitpic.com/zljhl #
• nice option pass by brad smith out of the wildcat to jerricho cotchery. NYJ are all about big plays. #
• adrian peterson is willing his team to lose. it's time to stop giving him the ball. he's fumbled 3 times already? favre, all the way! #
• live and die by the favre, man. at least this game is exciting. #

ugh, i just spent more time than i care to admit debugging a problem. the issue is that i had the wrong understanding of what the empty() function does in PHP. i always wondered where there are empty() and isset() functions in PHP, but never bothered to look up the differences.

it turns out:

$var=0;
if (empty($var)) {
print "this is empty";
}


will print “this is empty”.

why? because empty() considers many things like an empty string, 0 (as an integer or string), NULL, FALSE, array(), and a declared variable as empty. the cases that i have a beef with is 0. if i set something to 0, it isn’t empty, it’s value is 0! i guess that’s why i should have used isset() instead. lesson learned.