Einstuerzende Altbauten

Wenn in Kalifornien eine Autobahn einstuerzt, ist auch der Spiegel zur Stelle. Soviel schlimmer war der Verkehr heute gar nicht, weil viele Leute aus Angst erst gar nicht gefahren sind. Aber in den naechsten Monaten werden wir die Auswirkungen wohl doch zu spueren bekommen. Nicht, weil wir die Strecke oft benutzen – aber alle Fahrer, die sie benutzen werden halt ausweichen muessen.

Victoria und ich wohnen gluecklicherweise weiter im Norden und werden uns vor allem mit verstaerktem Verkehr auf der 37 rumschlagen muessen. Und spektakulaer unterhaltsam sieht der Schaden ja schon aus.

How about that local sports team?

So how about that local sports team? Them “Fighters” or “Warriors” or sumthin. Them’s gettin pretty good, don’t they?

Jamie is a big basketball fan, and he kept saying that we should all go to a game every once in a while. Because even if the team kinda sucks, there’s good teams visiting all the time to make it worth your while. Well, the Warriors do everything but suck this year. With baseball and NASCAR to keep up with I’m usually too “sported out” to care about the basketball playoffs, but I watched game 4 vs the Mavs last night and was wildly entertained. Way to go, Warriors!

Finch feeders…

Still attract finches! This is me trying out the zoom lens I bought for the camera and a few wild birds outside the house. The lens weighs over 300 gram, about as much as the HV20 itself! So the camcorder gets a bit front-heavy, and holding it steady to get a good picture is tough. A tripod will certainly help with that!

Here’s a 720p clip. The finches are somewhat blurry, the…uhm, the bigger bird looks better. Background noises courtesy of NASCAR and our five birds, which can talk up quite a storm!

25 budgies with beer on the perch, 25 budgies with beer…

I had considered buying a digital camcorder several times last year (the closest I came was a Sony HDR-SR1), but in the end I always shied away from it because the HD quality didn’t seem quite good enough yet, and a better camera is released every 2 months. The cameras could only do interlaced HD footage, HDV tapes are only MPEG-2, AVCHD doesn’t have good editing support and fills up your harddrive…etc. pp.

But in the end you can wait forever and never buy anything, and true 1080p support in a consumer camera is still a few years away. So when the Canon HV20 was announced, I decided to order one. The HV20 is using HDV tapes and is still bound by the HDV specs, so it can’t do true 1080p. But it can do anamorphic 24p as well as anamorphic 1080i@60hz, and the CMOS sensor manages the picture at true 1920×1080. That’s pretty damn neat for 1100 bucks. Now I can document whatever I want to document. It’s fun

I wanted to do some 24p tests to see how well the motion blur works and how much light I’d need to shoot this kind of footage (Hint: more than I used in that clip). So I aimed the camera at my birds and waited. Here’s a small clip of Jerry and Cloud at full resolution. That’s glorious 1920×1080, progressive scan…and then downsampled into a wmv file I didn’t have enough light in the room, so the image is kind of dark and flat. Still very neat, though. You can also download the clip here (Save As), it’s 8.5mb.

Lame

I started losing interest in American Idol last week after Sanjaya got eliminated. It just isn’t the same when the guy who so obviously doesn’t deserve to be there actually has to leave! After today’s forced “surprise” non-elimination I’ll probably stop watching altogether. I realized that I just don’t care who stays and who goes.
Ah well, it’s not like AI needs me. This was the first season I followed in the first place, because it was fun to watch with Victoria. But I’m not exactly the kinda guy who keeps the show alive. So I guess we’ll watch America’s Next Top Model and Hell’s Kitchen when it returns. Guilty pleasures are fun

It’s not beer!

I think everybody has one or two Pavlovian responses. You know, where somebody utters a certain phrase and you automatically, without conscious thought, reply with the same premeditated phrase. Back in Virginia, there was a waitress that would, without fail, say “You’re welcome!” when you acknowledged a soda refill or whatever with a simple “Thanks.” Grant had himself some fun with that if I remember correctly, testing the conditioning at the most unlikely places. I remember her collecting everybody’s menus one day and six instances of “Than…”"You’re welcome!”
Good times

I catch myself saying “It’s not beer!” every time a Budweiser commercial comes on on TV and ends with statements like “The king of beers”. I can’t help it. People usually think I’m being facetious, a roundabout way of saying that Budweiser is a beer of low quality. But that ain’t it, I literally mean that it’s not beer. Because by the Reihnheitsgebot, Budweiser is not beer. Budweiser is made with rice, and the German purity law mandates that beer is made from water, barley, hops – and nothing else.

If you suspect that that attitude is elitist, clings to semantics and is…well, German, you’re 100% right. But it’s fun, isn’t it?

P.S.: I’ve been known to drink Budweiser with various people when it’s been offered to me. Just don’t tell anybody!

Dear Google Searcher

I am glad that the question about “Formula 1 where they changed the rules until Michael Schuhmacher couldn’t win” brought you to my page. I am sorry that I probably couldn’t help you on your quest for knowledge.

Ted Nugent, Idiot

So Ted Nugent is saying that “Gun-free zones [in schools] are recipe for disaster“. Because you know what? If more people had guns in schools they could take down the shooter instead of running away defenseless. Nugent then starts a long list of examples where guns prevented additional(!) bloodshed because somebody with a gun took down the initial shooter. Wow. Am I the only one who thinks that this is so incredibly backwards that it hurts to think about? Here’s a quote from the article:

“At an eighth-grade school dance in Pennsylvania, a boy fatally shot a teacher and wounded two students before the owner of the dance hall brought the killing to a halt with his own gun.”

Uhm, HELLO? How did an eight-grade boy get hold of a gun in the first place?! And is nobody noticing a trend in these stories? Almost every one of Mr Nugent’s examples start with “Somebody killed X number of people - and then a hero took down the gunman with his own gun.” So people died because somebody had easy access to guns – but that isn’t bad. No, easy access to guns is good because it prevented additional killings!

This is madnass. It’s as if somebody was saying “Okay people, we’re living a very dry forrest, and the danger of wildfires is extremely high! But we will let you all carry flamethrowers because it’s your constitutional right. Just don’t use them! Please don’t use the flamethrowers! (Pause) Everybody having flamethrowers is a great idea, though – because when some psycho does start torching a tree everybody around him can use their own flamethrowers to burn down the madman!”

I don’t know about you, but the above sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. The entire forrest would be burning in no time. Here’s a thought: how about we don’t allow flamethrowers in the first place?

“Everybody who really wants to get guns will get them anyway”, I hear people say. “Tough gun control laws wouldn’t have prevented VT or Columbine, because if a criminal wants a gun, he’ll find a gun.” And my response to that is simple: Bullshit. People who commit killing sprees at schools are not criminals. They are sick. Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter, has been revealed as psychotic, depressed coward. Does anybody honestly think that that guy would have gone into the illegal underground to obtain his weapons? His crime was one of convenience – he was depressed, had a huge inferiority complex – and he had easy access to guns. Boom – that’s when the mix became potent. Cho Seung-Hui living in a world of tough gun control laws – he would probably have gone to jail for stalking later on his life, or committed suicide. But he wouldn’t have shot 32 people, because a person like him doesn’t go out of his way to obtain weapons illegally. He wouldn’t have known how to! I wouldn’t know how to!

There, my hat is now in the political ring. I know that the right to bear arms is deeply rooted in American history, and taking that right away would have far-reaching implications. If the government can strip that right, what other rights are fair game? But arguments like Ted Nugent’s are ridiculously backwards. If that’s the official NRA line we’re in deeper trouble than I would ever have thought. And somebody ought to get that into America’s head.

VT

I wasn’t going to say much about the Virginia Tech shootings. What happens sucks big time. And all the victims should be in our thoughts. But after seeing the news coverage for two days, I feel like getting this off my chest:

Hello media outlets? Would you please stop showing the asshole on your main page? You’re giving him much more power than he deserves, and you’re only going to encourage other sick minds to do the same thing.

“Wow, the guy never got any attention and then his face was on the CNN front page for three days! Maybe I can do the same and people will notice me! I’ll pose with guns and stuff!”
But then again CNN et all are having a field day right now, aren’t they? Probably more people watching in a day than in a whole week of “normal” news. Of course they’re gonna milk it for all that it’s worth, and will claim that it’s only in the name of providing information. Which is bullshit, of course. I can wait a few days until all facts are actually in and get a perfect summery in 5 minuters. But by doing their ongoing “Breaking News!” stuff the news are saying more about our society than the shooter alone ever would have been able to

Lair Media Blowout

You can find all sorts of flashy new Lair media on the web if just look around a bit. The two videos I’d like to point to are the guided developer tour that Gametrailers posted. I think they show off the polished game in the best light and give you a good idea of the finished product. Enjoy!