No I’m not referring to the naked cyclists in the Freemont Parade…
I had taken my new tripod and camera up to Sunset hill to photograph the sun setting at its furthest point to the north. From now on it will start setting further and further to the south and the days will start getting shorter and shorter (sigh).
Well Karen was supposed to meet me up there after getting off the phone, but she never made it. As I was walking back I found her walking towards the park. She implied that I should take my camera to the front of the house and start taking pictures.
Needless to say we are NEVER ever going to park our car on the street again like our neighbors have to do (they have no driveway for their house). I think our neighbors may now be thinking they need to put in a driveway.
It’s is kinda weird that a friend at work was just talking about how a car had wrapped around a telephone pole just in front of his house. I am not sure if a car flip trumps a pole-wrap, but we are glad that the driver was able to walk away from the car. The real excitement occurred when the wrecker used cables to flip the car back over.
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GEEK ALERT!
The Unisys patent on the LZW compression scheme expires in about 15 minutes from this time of this posting. So I might as well have a pointer to a nice article describing the algorithm.
This software patent was one of the first that changed the software world as we know it. Folks had started using GIF, TIFF and ‘compress’ quite a bit to get their work done and to publish these new things called “web-pages”. Then all of the sudden Unisys realized that they actually owned a patent for the technique (originally developed to compress modem communications for British Telecom). So they started asking money from every developer who ever put LZW into their software. It even contributed to the birth of the new idea of basing business models on intellectual property. Some people got upset, accused them of extracting GIF-taxes, other folks paid up and others refused… leading to the endorsement of the PNG format, but it never really was as successful or popular as GIF.
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We had our first “diagnostic” ultrasound today. I must admit I was a little spooked by the whole experience. The ultrasound tech was very nice, (she was expecting her second in July) and answered most of Karen’s highly technical “doctor speak” questions.
However she was concentrating very hard. I guess our new baby girl was not in a very good position for the tech to take all the diagnostic pictures she needed to take. It took much longer than I thought and I kept thinking, “Is that normal? Gosh seeing the spine, skeleton, kidneys, brain, etc, etc, etc seems awfully spooky. Wait… why is the tech concentrating on the heart?!?” Anyway my fears were allayed when the ultrasound doctor came in to discuss the results. He said the baby looked healthy, Karen was about 18 weeks along, and we are going to have a baby girl. (I am so excitied, I wanted a girl quite badly). As a bonus we have a video tape of the whole thing, so I can digitize it and share the whole spooky thing as a Quicktime movie once I can find the time to encode it.
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We went hiking to Boulder River Falls this weekend. The falls were quite nice. I had just purchased a polarizer and a Neutral Density filter, so I was able to try out some tripod pictures with the camera. It was also my first real attempt at taking “RAW” mode pictures. I am glad I did these in RAW mode because I was able to perform some nice color correction and exposure compensation when I got the pictures back home to the Mac. The weather was great and the hike was nice. The results are below.
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What a wonderful experience. Everyone seems to love this movie. Obviously noone read my luke-warm review from the premier. Of course seeing it with a theater full on kids on a Sunday morning makes the movie seem a whole lot better.
And even though the movie is a wee bit scary, none of the wee laddies seemed to be upset beyond reconciliation. The best part of it all; it made $70.6 million on opening weekend! That is hard to fathom. That makes it the best opening of an animated film ever, and also has the best box office on a Saturday of any animated film. (One could go on and on with fun statistics with this one). But the bottom line is that Pixar done did good. (AGAIN!)
The movie was also much needed by my family with the passing of my Grandmother this week. Vera Miller was a conerstone of our family, and was loved by many in her community and the church. We will all miss her very much, especially since my other grandparents died when I was younger and she was the one I grew up knowing the longest and the best.
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