Life

General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.

2010 Wish List

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Dad asked me (through Mom, via Facebook chat) about my current wish list. I hadn’t been paying much attention to wanting “stuff” lately. Prairie and I do most of our book shopping through second-hand outlets, and my (mostly complete) camera upgrade has done a masterful job of taking care of the majority of my technolust — a good thing, too, as that counts as my Christmas, birthday, and graduation presents combined!

But, as I’d hate to let my parents down, I took a little time to go through my Amazon wishlists to see what was sitting in there. After a bit of editing (removed some, added one or two items), here’s what I’ve ended up with, in rough order from most realistic (less expensive) to least realistic (but hey, that’s the “wish” part of wish lists…and who knows, maybe someone else will go for a major combination über-gift, you never know).

Wishlist #1: Print Media

Books and a few graphic novels. As usual for me, tilts heavily towards science fiction, though I do deviate from time to time.

Wishlist #2: Movies and Music

While I’m collecting far less physical media, there’s still a fair amount of good audio and video that’s not available digitally just yet.

Wishlist #3: Electronic Gadgets and Gizmos

Only two things on this list. The first is the Vestax Spin DJ Controller. While it’s been years since I’ve done much of anything related to DJing, it’s still a bug in my system, and I occasionally get the urge to dink around. Unfortunately, as I sold off my equipment a few years back, its not an itch that’s terribly easy to scratch. This would basically be an expensive toy…but a fun toy to be able to play with from time to time.

The second is the iPad 2. I’ve been lusting after an iPad since they were first released, and the recent upgrade just made them look even sweeter. I’m not terribly concerned about the capacity, wouldn’t mind the 3G option (though you definitely pay a premium for that), but given the choice, black is definitely the way to go. The white one just looks like a toy to me.

Wishlist #3: Photography Bits

And here’s where things are definitely slipping into the realm of “not very likely, but it’s fun to dream.” One accessory for the D7000, and eight lenses that I’d love to add to my stable.

  • Nikon MB-D11 Battery Pack: This is a combination battery pack and portrait grip for the D7000. In addition to allowing the D7000 to hold two batteries at a time, drastically increasing the time before a recharge is necessary, this also makes it more comfortable to hold the camera rotated 90° for portrait-orientation shots.

  • Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye: Not really an everyday walkaround use-all-the-time lens, this is more of a special-purpose lens for dramatic effect shots. Manual focus only, but fisheye lenses tend to have a very deep depth of field, so that’s not a major concern, and omitting a focusing motor keeps the lens lighter and a little less expensive.

  • Nikkor 85mm f/1.8D: Considered by many to be the “perfect” portrait lens (well, perhaps the 85mm f/1.4 should get that designation) due to the medium-range focal length and low aperture.

  • Sigma 30mm f/1.4: A highly reviewed fast lens (good for low-light shooting) that, on an APS-C DSLR like my current D70s or the D7000, is very close to the old standard 50mm f/1.4 “normal” lens that many old film cameras came with.

  • Nikkor 70-300 f/4.5-5.6G: This is kind of a whim. While most of my shooting is more suited for primes (indoors, close to the subjects, often in lower light), there are times when having a decent zoom lens would come in handy. I have an acceptable midrange zoom (the Quantaray 55-200 f/4-5.6), but this lens has higher quality optics, a longer reach, and vibration reduction. Not at the top of my lust list, but wouldn’t mind having it available.

  • Nikkor 20mm f/2.8D: Not quite as wide of an aperture as the 30mm f/1.4 listed above, but a little bit wider. Again, not at the top of my lust list, as I already have a 24mm f/2.8, and this is only a little bit wider than that, but when shooting indoors, sometimes you can’t back up enough to get what you want in the frame, and even a little bit wider can come in handy.

  • Tamron 70-200 f/2.8: A lower-priced, worthy competitor to Nikon’s 70-200 f/2.8 fast zoom. The combination of a decent zoom range with the low f/2.8 aperture makes for a very capable distance portrait lens that’s able to use low depth of field to isolate subjects from a distance.

  • Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 Micro: While this is a nice length for a portrait lens, and I’ve seen it used as such, it’s real strength is in its macro capabilities. Perhaps more of a play lens than an everyday lens.

  • Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8: The higher-quality, and much higher-priced, version of the Tamron 70-200 f/2.8 listed earlier.

HTML5 Audio Safari Extension

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From HTML5 Audio Safari Extension // ShaunInman.com:

HTML5 Audio Safari extension currently replaces the default Tumblr audio player (with or without Flash) and WordPress Audio Player (without Flash).

Comes in very handy when combined with John Gruber’s suggestions for running your Mac Flash-free.

(Also, and somewhat unrelated: I’ve finally gotten tired of the many errors the Delicious-to-weblog plugin was throwing, so I’m going to experiment with moving away from using Delicious as a link aggregator, and just post when I find something interesting. Old-school blogging. Imagine that!)

21st Century Television (Part One)

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A few days ago, I was finally able to follow through on something that Prairie and I had been discussing of and on for a few weeks — I called Comcast and disconnected our cable account. As we live in the Kent valley and are too blocked by mountains to get effective digital broadcast reception, this effectively bans broadcast television.

We’ve been working our way towards this for some time now, for two major reasons: one, sitting around and watching too much TV just isn’t healthy, and two, though there are a few shows that we enjoy watching, the commercials were just driving us up the wall. We had started by developing a number of “rules” — all in place before disconnecting the cable, but still in place — governing our TV consumption:

  1. No reruns. Not even if we haven’t seen that particular episode before. If it’s not a first-broadcast show, we’re not watching it. It’ll be out on DVD or made available for online streaming eventually, and we’ll watch it then, at our convenience, without commercials.

  2. The TV does not get turned on before 7:30 or 8 p.m. On any given “normal” night (that is, those that don’t have me at school until late in the evening) we tend to eat dinner at right around 6 p.m. In the “old days,” it wasn’t uncommon for us to grab our food, plop down in front of the TV, and zone out until 10 or 11 when we went to bed. Now, we’re eating at the table, finishing dinner, doing the dishes, and spending an hour or so playing games (our current obsessions are Set and Monopoly Deal) before the TV even gets turned on.

  3. The TV does not get turned on unless we exercise. We have a non-motorized treadmill and a reclining stationary exercise bike in the living room, and we have to put in at least half an hour each on either the treadmill or the bike if we want to watch TV.

  4. We watch only what we’re actually interested in. No more just turning the TV on just to see what’s on, or to flip channels, or for background noise (admittedly, not something we were in the habit of anyway), or anything similar. Unless we know we want to see something, we’re not bothering.

All of this was a great start, but over the course of the summer, one more piece of the puzzle fell into place when I added a Roku player to our entertainment system. I rambled on about our love affair with this little box a few months ago, but here’s the Reader’s Digest Condensed Cliff’s Notes Executive Summary: inexpensive, dead-simple, on-demand access to Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, and a whole lot more.

Thanks to the Roku and Netflix’s library of streaming titles (plus the DVDs we get through the mail), there was never a question of whether there was something we were interested in watching — just a question of what we felt like that night. After a few weeks, it became clear that the only reason we were holding on to our cable subscription was because there were still shows that we wanted to keep up with. We toyed with the idea of ditching cable, as we knew that more and more TV was being offered online either through legal channels such as Hulu and Amazon VoD or through the quasi-legal Bittorrent network, but watching shows on my computer in my office just wasn’t as comfortable or convenient as sitting in the living room in front of the TV.

A few weeks ago, however, I discovered Roksbox, an add-on channel for the Roku that allows me to stream media from my computer to the Roku in the living room. Bingo! That was the last piece we needed.

So, cable and broadcast TV are no more for us. Instead, we have our personal DVD library, DVDs we order from Netflix, the entire Netflix on-demand library, and, for the current-run TV shows we want to keep up with, I simply download them and toss them into the Roksbox library for us to watch commerical-free at our leisure.

It’s a great setup. We’re spending less time watching TV, and when we do watch something, it’s hassle-free, commerical-free, and at our convenience. As far as we’re concerned, this is definitely the way to go.

So that’s the general, non-techie overview. In part two of this, I’ll get into the geeky fiddly bits of how I’ve automated the process of finding, downloading, and prepping the TV shows we pay attention to.

I love my Roku

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Readers Digest condensed Cliff’s Notes executive summary version: Do you have a Netflix account and a reasonable (1.5 MB/s or better) broadband connection? Then you should have a Roku player. That’s it.

So a couple months ago, I had a birthday, and with that birthday came some a little bit of spending money (courtesy of Prairie’s mom) that I wasn’t sure what to do with. As I’m in school, not making money, and existing solely on financial aid and Prairie’s good graces, I’ve gotten very used to spending money only on what’s necessary, and not on toys or frivolities. Because of this, I didn’t have much of a “wish list,” and the things I’m generally likely to spend money on — used books and vinyl — I currently have stacks of, waiting for me to find time to either read or import into the computer, so adding to the stacks (as enjoyable as that is) didn’t seem like the best way to go.

I let the money sit for a while as I played with various ideas, and eventually decided to go for something I’d been eyeballing for a while, but which had always fallen into the realm of “neat toy that could be fun, but isn’t really necessary right now”: a Roku digital video player.

Roughly two months in, I can easily say that this was one of the best impulse buys I’ve made in a long, long time.

First off, the basics, in case you haven’t heard of the Roku before. Originally developed at and for Netflix, and later spun off into its own company and opened to more content providers, the Roku is a tiny little set-top box that plugs into your TV, giving you access to the Netflix library of streaming “Watch Instantly” titles. Prairie and I had just recently started discovering the joys of Netflix’s streaming library (with the addition of my new iMac, as before that, none of our computers were new enough to support Netflix’s streaming service), but camping out in my office to watch shows on my computer wasn’t nearly as comfortable as our living room, so the Roku sounded like a nice addition to the house.

Setup is dead simple. The box is small, and if you have a WiFi network at home, requires the bare minimum of cables: power, and the connection to the television (if you don’t have WiFi, you’ll need to run an ethernet cable to the box). It has the three primary video connection methods (composite video, for old-school TVs like ours; component video, for higher-quality video on TVs that support progressive scan input; and HDMI for High Definition TVs) and both standard stereo and optical audio output.

Getting started took just a couple minutes: I plugged it in, told it which WiFi network to use and put in the password, and after a brief moment to let the box download and install new firmware and reboot, it was up and running. I popped into the Netflix channel, chose something in my Instant Watch queue, and was watching a show no more (and probably much less than) ten minutes after opening the box. Impressive!

The Netflix interface is slick and simple, and — thanks to a recent software update that actually came out just before I got the Roku — allows for searching and browsing the Netflix streaming library, and shows off all the recommendations of things that Netflix thinks we’ll enjoy watching.

There’s a lot more than just Netflix available, though. Roku’s channel store has an ever-growing library of options, with lots of internet-based shows and podcasts, sports channels, Pandora radio, and — our personal favorite after Netflix — Amazon Video on Demand. Last weekend after seeing Inception, Prairie and I were still in the movie mood, decided to see what new releases Amazon had available, and ended up renting, watching, and thoroughly enjoying Whip It!.

Our feelings at this point: Blockbuster is doomed. Outside of needing something rare enough that it’s not available to stream from Amazon or Netflix and soon enough that we can’t put in our physical Netflix queue, we have absolutely no reason to physically rent a video anymore. Movie theaters aren’t in much better shape, either — the entire experience of watching something at home is so much nicer, more comfortable, more convenient, and cheaper than going to the movies that we’ll be doing that far less than we already do (and we haven’t been going terribly often as it is).

The video quality of the Roku is great, as well. Admittedly, ours is helped somewhat by my television (geekery: though it’s an older, standard-ratio TV, this model Sony Wega offers an “anamorphic compression” mode that squeezes the picture down to a 16:9 ratio from the standard 4:3 ratio, increasing the resolution as it does so; this allows me to tell the Roku that it’s connected to a widescreen TV, at which point it outputs an anamorphic signal that results in a higher resolution and better quality image than if it were outputting the standard 4:3 640×480 TV signal), but the image quality easily matches (or at least comes very, very close to) what we see out of our DVD player. One of the very few disappointments I’ve had with the Roku (and a very minor one at that) is that while my TV can accept component video, the Roku apparently will only output component video as progressive scan output, which my TV doesn’t support, so I’ve had to resort to the lowest-quality composite video connection. Still, the quality we get is good enough that I can’t really complain — and when we finally get around to upgrading to an HDMI-capable HDTV, the quality will only get better!

There are a few relatively minor caveats to the Roku. Most importantly, you do need a reasonable (1.5 MB/s) broadband connection, and for HD video (not an issue for me at the moment), it requires at least a 5 MB/s connection (which, even if I had the hardware to display HD video, isn’t available from Qwest at my address yet). A WiFi network, while not necessary, as the box does have ethernet input, is highly recommended, as it keeps you from having to string more cabling around your house. And, of course, with any online-based service, there is the potential for network or server issues to occasionally get in the way, though we’ve had very few times where this was an issue (and when it was, Roku and Netflix were both good about communicating with their customers, and we even got a bit of a refund from Netflix to make up for the service interruption).

In short, we love this box. We’ve been using it nightly, bouncing among a number of shows that catch our eye (recently: Bones, Futurama, Law and Order, Red Dwarf, and 30 Rock), and saving movies for when we have the time and interest to invest in a movie. This has increased our usage of the streaming service to the point where we’re considering dropping our Netflix subscription from our current 3-at-a-time down to the basic 1-at-a-time service, as Netflix (so far, and I hope this continues) is kind enough to offer their streaming service without limitation at all subscription levels. Good deal!

Once again: if you have Netflix and broadband, you really should have a Roku.

Thoughts on Inception

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Prairie and I went to see Inception last week, and as I tweeted afterwards, I ended up really enjoying it, while Prairie didn’t like it as much. As she’s not as much of a sci-fi buff as I am, and has a lower tolerance for violence, that’s not a very surprising result.

As good as it is, I don’t find Inception to be a perfect film. Some of the things that bothered Prairie bothered me as well as I was watching it. Interestingly, some of these very things end up making more sense — or, at the very least, become less troubling — when viewed in the light of one of the more interesting interpretations of the film.

As Inception is still in its opening weeks, I’m going to go ahead and put the rest of my ramblings under the cut, for those who’d prefer to avoid spoilers…

Read more

In Memoriam, Don Brown

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Lon, Prairie and Grandpa Don

Prairie’s grandfather passed away this morning. He’d gone into the hospice last week (necessitating our trip down to Vancouver last weekend), and held on long enough to let all of the immediate family come by to say goodbye. We’ll be heading down to Vancouver again for the funeral this next week sometime once all the arrangements have been finalized.

Adventures in Holiday Weekend Driving

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As mentioned briefly in the post about my fireworks video, family matters required an unexpected trip south to Vancouver over this past Fourth of July weekend. As we were returning home yesterday, fighting our way northward through last-day-of-a-holiday-weekend traffic, Prairie and I witnessed one of the most frightening near-accidents I’ve ever seen.

We’d left I-5 to take a brief lunch break in Longview, and after filling ourselves with pizza and the car with gas, were getting back on the highway. As we started to merge into traffic, which at this point was heavy but still keeping to the 70 MPH speed limit, a big dump truck towing a flatbed trailer with a huge tank on it passed by on our left, making an incredibly horrendous scraping noise that didn’t sound at all right. As I pulled onto the highway proper, directly behind the truck, I saw what was making the noise.

My best guess is that the tank on the flatbed was an underground septic tank, and the inflow pipe had been strapped to the bed of the trailer on the right side of the tank. At some point on the drive, however, the front of the pipe had jostled loose and bounced off the bed, letting the pipe drag along the road. Because it was the front of the pipe that had come loose, the rear of the pipe was still tied to the bed, so the pipe was being pushed forward against the asphalt, throwing up sparks, and it was immediately obvious that it could go swinging to the side at any moment, very likely snapping free of the remaining ties and flying loose into traffic.

pipe-1.png

“Wow, that doesn’t sound healthy,” said Prairie. As I quickly started changing lanes to get out from directly behind the truck and as far to the left as I could, I asked, “Didn’t you see the pipe?” “What pipe?” I briefly told her what I’d seen, and sure enough, just at that moment, we saw the front of the pipe swing out to the right, barely miss clipping the rear left tire of a small blue SUV as the pipe swung out until the straps that were still hanging on stopped it, leaving it sticking out to the right, still dragging along the road, and still frighteningly close to the tire of the SUV.

pipe-2.png

As soon as the pipe had started to swing wide, I’d started to brake as quickly as I could safely do so, as had a number of other cars who could see what was happening. A few of us had started to honk to warn both the dump truck driver and the driver of the SUV of the impending catastrophe. The dump truck driver didn’t seem to notice anything, but the SUV suddenly sped up and pulled away from the dragging pipe without getting hit. While many of us were slowing down, however, the people behind us couldn’t see what was happening, and just as the pipe started to swing further around to drag behind the trailer, making it even more likely that the straps would finally give and throw it loose, a little car full of teens whipped around our car and sped straight towards the truck.

More braking, more wild honking, and then we saw that car’s brake lights flare up as the driver finally saw what was happening and realized that there was a reason why we’d suddenly slowed down so much. He changed lanes to the left and pulled up beside the truck, and one of the passengers started waving at the truck, trying to get the driver’s attention; at the same time, a big pickup with a lightbar, either from WSDOT or from one of the construction crews scattered along I-5 sped up the right hand side of the road to pull along the other side of the truck, and also tried to get him to pull over.

pipe-3.png

Thankfully, one or both of those two people were successful, and the driver, still apparently clueless as to just why people were hollering at him, finally started to slow down and pull off to the side of the highway. Miracle of miracles, those last straps had managed to hang on, and the pipe had stayed attached to the flatbed trailer, though probably through more sheer luck than anything else. We passed by, and the last I saw of the incident was the truck pulling onto the shoulder right behind the official-looking pickup that had flown up the right side of the highway.

Really, really freaky — there were a few moments when I was sure that the straps were about to break, and I’d have to do my best to dodge a 20-foot length of steel pipe flying along I-5 at 60-some miles per hour in the middle of holiday traffic. Not at all a pleasant mental picture, and I’m very glad it never came to that.

Vancouver, WA Fireworks

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While Prairie and I were planning on doing our usual hide-from-the-crazies-at-home approach to the Fourth of July, due to circumstances beyond our control, we ended up visiting Prairie’s family in Vancouver, WA this past weekend. It turns out that Vancouver is one of those weird places where fireworks are actually legal to set off within the city limits on July Fourth, and nearly every house in Prairie’s mom’s neighborhood was getting in on the action. Since this was something I’d never experienced, Prairie and I took a short walk around the neighborhood to see some of the local explosive entertainment.

The Blue Box

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I’ve been buried in musical nostalgia for the past few days, and it’s been wonderful.

My family is a very musical family — all of my immediate family, and the majority of my closer relatives, have at one time or another in our lives played at least one instrument and sung in choirs — and my parents have a huge vinyl collection. While the majority of my mom’s side of the collection focused on classical and choral music, my dad’s albums, and those that they collected together, skewed more towards the pop music of the time, mostly folk, country, blues, and rock and roll. Understandably, this collection had a huge influence on my and my brother’s musical tastes.

When we got old enough, we had free reign over the music collection and dad’s record player on the family stereo, and we were encouraged to discover which albums grabbed our attention. Music was meant to be appreciated, not just as noise in the background that nobody pays attention to, but as a soundtrack to whatever was going on. I can remember many housecleaning days when mom would head off somewhere, leaving the boys to take care of the house, and dad would tell us to pick something to listen to and put it on, telling us to “turn it up to the threshold of pain” as we worked.

The musical education went both ways, as well, as Kevin and I grew older and started exploring and diversifying our own tastes. Sometimes mom and dad would enjoy what we brought home (a few years ago, I got a kick out of introducing dad to the country-blues-acid house fusion of Alabama 3‘s “Welcome to Coldharbour Lane” album), sometimes our choices fell flat. Even when they didn’t “get it,” though — and this is one of those not-so-little things that I will always be grateful for — they never condemned what we listened to or told us we shouldn’t listen to it, but they’d ask us about it, and we occasionally had some interesting discussions investigating why something worked or didn’t work for us.

One winter day, Mom and I were driving out of Anchorage to Eagle River, and I put Pink Floyd‘s “The Wall” cassette into the car stereo. As we drove along, listening to such lyrically cheerful songs as “The Happiest Days of our Lives” and “Young Lust,” Mom expressed her distaste at the content of the songs, and wondered how in the world I could be interested in such depressing music. The rest of the drive turned into a long discussion of the story and themes present in “The Wall,” what Roger Waters was expressing, how the music and lyrics worked together, the imagery in the film, and why I enjoyed the album. While I don’t think Mom is ever going to be a big fan of “The Wall,” I love that her response was a discussion and examination of why I was listening to such a dark work, rather than simply declaring it “off limits.”

But I digress.

When Kevin and I were younger, and too small to work dad’s record player, we had our own: the classic Fisher-Price phonograph. Not the glorified music box, with brightly colored plastic ‘records’ that tripped music-box teeth in the arm, but a real, working record player. To go with this, Dad gave us a small blue box (well, blue, white, and green, but I’ve always thought of it as blue) with a bunch of old 45s that he and his brother Doug had collected when they were younger.

These 45s were some of the earliest pop music education that we got, and it was an eclectic one indeed. The Beatles, Merv Griffin, The Animals, The Partridge Family, Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Four Tops, Fats Domino, and quite a few others. As we grew older, Kevin and I occasionally contributed to the box, adding 45s for AC/DC, Cyndi Lauper, Ozzy Osbourne, and a few other more modern artists. I credit a lot of my current all-over-the-place musical tastes to the eclecticism of this little blue box, and the hours spent playing the treasures inside it on that little old Fisher-Price player (which, as of a few years ago, was still in working order and in Kevin’s possession, though I don’t know its current disposition).

I’d worried for the last few years that the box had disappeared, but I really should have known better (I do, after all, come from a family of pack rats). Earlier this week I got a couple boxes of goodies from my parents, and in one of those boxes was the fabled blue box.

This week’s “when I’m taking a break from schoolwork” project has been reacquainting myself with the blue box and the music of my youth. I’ve scanned the labels for all the discs and added them to my vinyl photoset, I’m almost done recording all the music to my computer, and after a bit longer, will have it all edited, cleaned up, and imported into iTunes. Once I have all the audio archived, I’ll be packing this up and passing the blue box on to Kevin to share his boys, my nephews.

For those who are curious here’s a list of everything that the box contains. To the best of my knowledge, anything pre-1980 comes from mom, dad, and my uncle Doug; anything from 1980 on was added by me or Kevin.