Tyler's post about going to the "big city" for a potentially life-changing employment opportunity really got me to thinking about those kinds of situations. Kara up and moved to the twin cities for a similarly radical change (though she insists she's not fully made the independent transition). With my own retrospective through ancient e-mail, I realize that I've not taken the same kinds of risks. That's not regret, but rather surprise and revelation.

The fact that being with me, who was rather inflexible at the time, meant that Stephanie couldn't pursue big opportunities is something that caused a certain amount of resentment. It's weird how I, on the other hand, was just content enough to be with someone. That was a big change for me over a few years before that, when I was ready to move to Billings, Montana, if it meant getting a full-time radio job. I don't think either one of us had any idea what we really needed and wanted out of life, but at the same time we weren't really finding the experiences to find out either. I take most of the responsibility for that, though I leave her with the responsibility of not fully communicating her needs as well. The net result is that we didn't allow for the change process until about ten years later, when we split.

I got there the hard way, but now I see how you need a willingness to really take a risk and expect some failures along the way in order to get as much as you can out of life. The challenge in that I think comes from imaginary constraints that we put on ourselves. Tyler is letting it all hang out, letting go of his small town comfort (though it helps having a very willing partner, now wife, who will share the risk). Diana up and moved to New York having never been there to work in theater. Kara moved several states away to work in her industry. These are all examples of letting the physical constraints go. I applaud that.

Today I wonder if I'm still imposing constraints on myself. Between buying a house and getting laid-off, all within a few months from each other, I think I was stunned into thinking the world was too dangerous. But these days, even with a relatively shitty economy, it doesn't seem so impossible to just start something new. Granted, getting married to someone as amazing and supportive as Diana makes that a whole lot easier, but I think I was ready to pursue something next level even before we met. The sweet part now is that I get to share it with someone.

So to all my younger friends... good luck. Persist. March on. Know that your own experiences can influence even someone who has a decade on you.

I was telling someone recently that I had nearly all of my post-college e-mail still. I have all sent messages dating back to September 1996, and all received mail since May 1997 (that's when I stopped "emptying trash"). Up until late 2006, I used Eudora as my mail program at home. I switched to the Mac, and therefore Apple's mail program, at that time, and by sheer coincidence I also stopped hosting my own mail and moved it to Gmail via Google Apps.

When Google enabled IMAP for Gmail, a protocol that basically allows you to mirror mail on the server and on your computer, I realized that I could combine it all. My first attempt was to fire up Eudora on my old PC, and login. There were two problems. First was that ancient Eudora didn't talk to Google very well, second was that it didn't handle the formatting right or associate nicknames with real names or addresses. I couldn't get it to upload more than one message at a time, manually. Not an option for 25,000+ messages.

Then I found that some guy wrote a little app called Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. With a little tweaking of folder and file structures, this little thing could put all the attachments and embedded content, and your contacts, and rebuild it into Apple's Mail program. That was an obvious win since I knew Mail could do IMAP no problem.

The little app breezed through the messages in a couple of minutes, and just before I went to bed, I dragged those messages into the Gmail folders. Off it went! When I logged into the account this morning, I found they were all there and totally searchable. That is sweet. (It totals only 428 MB, in case you're wondering.)

So why would I want all that mail? Well, in some ways it's because I view it as portion of my history. History doesn't define you, I don't think, but experience does. There's a subtle difference. I like having a record of that experience.

Browsing through the mail was a somewhat dark experience at first because of the time frame. Mid-1997 was a pretty rough time for Stephanie and I, and that comes through in some of the messages. On the other hand, if you browse in the 1999 to mid-2001 range, life is really peachy.

It's funny that I went through a phase where I didn't capitalize circa 1997. We were so ridiculously immature back then, and I guess I understand now why friends in their 20's are so fucking neurotic and make silly decisions. I did it too! I can't even imagine how I'll feel when I'm 60.

I was bitching about how I feel there isn't enough time, and to compensate I suppose, I've stayed up really late the last few months. Like, nearly 2 a.m. late. That's not very easy when you're getting up at 7.

But I feel happy and excited when I finally go to bed, spending a couple of hours tinkering with code, video and whatever, and getting something accomplished. And to cap it off, I get to crawl into bed with my sleepy redhead.

Then the morning comes and I feel like shit because I'm tired beyond belief. Today in particular, it has caught up with me and I'm feeling like someone mugged me. Specific work hours suck. I don't think humans were meant to work that way.

Now that Sarah Lacy's Web 2.0 ego stroking book is out, much has been said about what a blowhard she is, and how she's only successful because she's attractive and covers an industry that's largely a sausage party. Lots of haters in the blog-o-sphere.

It's an interesting paradox to the rest of the world, isn't it? Our culture has no issue with making people like Paris Hilton famous for, well, being famous, but for a cutie to write a book, it must only be because she's attractive. The "good" success has a higher standard to live up to. Go figure.

Aside from reading a few Newsweek columns and blog posts from her, and seeing the rude response to her Zuckerberg interview, I have no opinion about her as a writer. As I've said before, there's a strange celebritard fascination with some people in Silicon Valley, and even then it's mostly driven by others who are involved there. I think the book has some potential to look at the other side of that in a way that "regular" people would find interesting. But who knows, because she's been accused of being too much of the story herself. I'm still curious enough to read it.

(Repost from tech blog.)

This is a post I've meant to write for a very long time. Since 1998, my part-time job of sorts has been to maintain a number of community sites. One of those, started ten years ago, was Guide to The Point. "The Point" in this case is Cedar Point, an amusement park an hour west of Cleveland and about two hours from Detroit. It's home to more roller coasters than any other place on earth, and for people how grow up in the region, it's a summer ritual. In 2004, I joined forced with a friend doing another site, and we called it PointBuzz, inspired in name by my woefully neglected general coaster enthusiast site CoasterBuzz. These sites have become a business to a certain degree, since the ad revenue isn't exactly small coin. And if you can make money doing something you enjoy, why not?

Late last year we rebuilt the site. The old version was still running on v1.1 of .NET, and frankly a lot of the code was vintage 2001 stuff built on the beta of .NET. Our goals for rebuilding it were to concentrate on what we were good at: news, forums and photos. Our previous attempt ended up being a huge array of content that, frankly, was just as easily found on the official Cedar Point site and we didn't really have time to maintain it. A secondary goal was to boost performance (the site peaks around a million page views a month, sometimes as much as 100k a day) and get the code base into something maintainable. Let's face it, in 2001 I barely understood what OOP was, and even in 2004, prior to writing my book and having experience in a giant company, I had a lot to learn. The app as a whole was rather fragile when it came time to change something.

Naturally the first priority for me was rewriting POP Forums. The benefit of experience is that I know how many things I did poorly in the previous version from late 2003. I've tried to eliminate much of that legacy, but there are still things I find in my code, often inconsequential, that should be different, like checking for a string to be empty or null instead of String.IsNullOrEmpty(). I spent literally years trying to make it work with Membership and Profile in a way that I liked, and generally it did, but I abandoned that cause. You had to give stuff up too often when making efficient database calls, and that annoyed me. It's not that there aren't logical architectural solutions, it's that I was spending all kinds of time worrying about it, when I was the first and primary user of the app!

What was important to me was using a little AJAX where it made sense, and using the ASP.NET AJAX framework for any client script I had. The version you can download doesn't have it yet, but the version running on PointBuzz does, and I'm very pleased with the way you can encapsulate it and reuse it. The primary use is to load stuff into the page, like user profile data, dynamically. Most forums who you the user's name, number of posts, astrological sign and other useless shit that doesn't advance discussion, and I've always been annoyed by that. (Heck, you've been able to turn off signatures and profiles in my app, also annoying, since 2003.) So I just load that when a user chooses to view it. I also do first post previews this way, but not as tool tips the way vBulletin does (because I find that annoying too). Finally, I refactored the mess that is my rich text control, dating back to 2000 at least, so that it uses the AJAX framework.

The forum app does a whole lot of caching, but not to an extent that it isn't necessary. In old versions, I found that it wasn't holding on to much because the cache collection got enormous and it was always cycling items out. I also didn't cache on a paged basis, so if you viewed a topic with 1,000 posts, it read and cached the whole thing. That was silly. I've found that nearly all of the performance tweaks have to do with the database and caching, which I guess is certainly no surprise.

Custom controls were also a big part of it, using list controllers to handle UI elements based on the data they created. I had mixed success with this, because the thread page still has a lot of code in it because of all the stuff going on. On the other hand, the forum index page is pretty lean in code-behind. Doing custom templated controls also helps, because you can easily drop in an ad, for example, in between forums, topics or posts.

I prototyped a search engine for the forum way, way back in 2004, and after some tweaking I got something I'm pretty happy with. The SQL is incredibly ugly, but the performance isn't bad. Basically, when a post is updated, it's marked for indexing. A background thread on a timer dissects all of the words, throws out the junk and scores them on frequency and appearance in the title. I think the scoring formula needs some work, but most of the time I get pretty relevant results.

Honestly I could probably talk about the forum as a stream of consciousness forever, so I'll move on to photos. The truth is, we have too many. Walt, my partner on the site, went through a document everything phase, and we have over 6,000 photos to prove it. This is honestly not a totally solved problem. We have categories and albums as units of navigation, and we also have tags. The truth is that people generally go to photos of the roller coasters or to albums we link to from news items. We don't know if that's good enough, and we have thousands of photos untagged.

From a code standpoint, we started testing the photo app months before re-launching with live data. Contrary to the advice a lot of people gave me, I decided to store the photos in the database. My reasoning had mostly to do with ease of backing up. HttpHandlers serve the images and the thumbnails, and frankly I've not encountered any performance issues at all. I also kept permissions for editing the photo collection as abstract as possible. There's a simple HttpModule that does the required plumbing to map forum user data into the photo app. I can just as easily wire it up to anything else.

The news management is nothing special, and as such doesn't exist as its own project. The only interesting thing is that it will replace the first post of a special forum topic with a user control that has the news item in it, so essentially there are two views of it, either in the forum or the regular news page.

That's really the bulk of the site. The forum is used for all the member handling junk and e-mail.

Incidentally, I do hope to have another beta of the forum out soon. In addition to the items I listed on the PF site, I've also rewritten the private messaging.

A question I get a lot is, "Why not just use stuff that's already out there?" Aside from being my own code monkey, all of the stuff out there tries to be too many things to too many people. I don't have excessive database tables to deal with, superfluous UI, rigid style elements, etc. The forum is a lot of code, sure, but overall the rest of this stuff isn't hard to roll on your own. If you've got the skills, why not?

I've been having a good time messing around with video this week, even though I haven't been able to commit a lot of time to it. As I mentioned before, it's a little frustrating that I essentially have to relearn Final Cut Pro shortcuts and such over and over since I don't do it enough.

Being a former broadcaster with the salary of an in demand programmer has really allowed me to stay in the loop with video gear and own "real" HD gear. (I have a Panasonic HVX200, for which the major expense is the solid state media.) It's funny how I've thrown a lot of convention out the door with regards to how I edit, since you're not constrained by the "package" mentality of broadcast news. Especially when you're dealing with fanboy type content, you can go with nice long cuts of stuff they just want to see.

In any case, I've been a QuickTime fan for many years. Back in the day, this was because the Sorenson Pro codec was easily the best in terms of quality. Then H.264 came around, and I declared it as the future years ago, back when most computers didn't have the nuts to even play it back.

These days, the action has been in Flash, for the obvious reason that it's so universally available. The recent adoption for Flash to playback H.264 QT movies makes it a total slam dunk for me. The primary benefit is one of work flow. It's easy to export these from Final Cut Pro very quickly.

I've started to play with Flash, the authoring application, to try and hack out a slightly customized video player. As an IDE for writing code, it absolutely sucks. ActionScript is not terrible, but I kept hitting obstacles in trying to get moving. So many articles online are behind subscriptions, and the documentation isn't organized very well. I'd kill for Intellisense.

Silverlight v2 has a lot going for it, though I haven't had any time to mess with it. I've barely touched Silverlight v1.x. Assuming that adoption skyrockets with the Olympics, I can see moving toward it for a lot of different reasons. Aside from being .NET-centric, the server-side of things have a lot of appeal. I remember the demo for the media server at Mix where they showed how you don't have to stream out the entire file too far in advance when there's potential that part of the video may never be watched. That's awesome stuff. The price is right too (free).

The only big negative to Silverlight as a video platform, for me, is the work flow issue. I can't quickly and easily get the video there out of the tools I use, and these are tools that the bulk of people in the field are using.

When I stop to think about it though, I left broadcast about nine years ago, and it's still not quite where I thought it would be with regards to video on the Internet. I mean that in terms of quality, which is no longer a function of CPU power, just bandwidth. Hopefully the US can catch up in that regard.

http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

I like the "Yoga" ad with Judy Greer. Good hair color for her.

Normally, I tend to think in terms of, "Boy, I can't wait for the weekend." Lately though, I feel like one week after another goes racing by and I'm missing something. I look at the calendar and think, wow, it's almost June.

I have things on my short-term agenda that I feel aren't getting attention. I don't feel busy, but those agenda items aren't happening, and not because I'm just lazy and picking my nose. I guess I suddenly need to start paying attention to how I spend my time, and manage it a bit.

Next trip is just three weeks away too... yay!

It seems that for the most part there are creative people and there are technical people. Few people are both. Even fewer are great in both areas, and therefore often fail to achieve a high level of understanding for what it takes to execute on something both creative and technical. That's frustrating.

And by the way, I'm not claiming to position myself anywhere on that curve in particular.

I have the strangest allergy issues. Not as bad as Diana, who I suspect can't even function without her drugs, but still strange.

I crash on the couch to do a little reading, and start to fall asleep. Oliver comes up and crashes on my lap, so I give him some rubs and he goes to sleep to. About a half-hour later, I wake up sneezing and snotty and coughing and just a mess. It all goes down just in time for Diana to get home after a late tennis match, and she heads straight to bed.

While it seems the worst of it is past, I crawled into bed and could hear myself audibly wheezing, to the extent I'm worried I'm going to wake up my exhausted companion. So here I am crashing on the other couch, killing time until I start breathing in a normal fashion.

Sometimes the strangest things set me off. When I was in Washington, the fabric softener or laundry soap that Diana's bro used on the sheets set off the same kind of respiratory chaos. Certain smelly stuff just kills me, and then it's made worse by other smells that would ordinarily be benign.

Hopefully I can sleep this one off quickly. It's cold down here by myself!

I'm trying to cut the video I shot Saturday around Planet Snoopy at Cedar Point and I'm in awe of how quickly I forget all of the keyboard shortcuts and such in Final Cut Pro. Cutting is easy enough (and I have a Shuttle Express controller), but I can't remember how to quickly apply transitions to a range and such. And I'm really lost trying to remember the "right" way to do graphics in Photoshop and get them to key right. I don't use it enough!

Anyway, I realized while shooting that my camera is actually very capable and makes beautiful images. It's obvious why the indie crowd really latched on to it, even with cheaper HDV options that came out around that time. My objections have been that it's a bitch to use handheld and P2 cards are/were a little on the expensive side. Anton/Bauer just released a new support called the Stasis Flex that really turns me on though, especially if I can put one of their batteries on it! The P2 cards have become much cheaper, hard drive space is ridiculously inexpensive, and I feel like there's some good potential there to start shooting more serious HD content.

The other thing that's, well, not an objection, but a weak understanding, is how to get short depth of field with the lens. I received a book from Panasonic that a popular Internet guy who uses this stuff wrote, and it does go into more detail about it. You can do OK if you have subjects that are right up in your grill. There are also 35mm adapters available, which intrigue me. You can create some beautiful photography like this, and once you have that adapter, as Tyler knows, you can get used manual lenses uber cheap.

And that brings me to the short film thing. I woke up with an idea for one a couple of weeks ago after a really strange dream. What makes it weird is that's it's a kind suspense/quasi-horror genre thing, a far cry from the usual coming-of-age ideas that typically come to mind. The idea is fleshed out enough in my head that I honestly think I can start writing it soon. It sounds like 20 to 30 pages in my head, and I could probably shoot it for under two grand. I'll keep you posted.

I'll keep this brief, but here are a few observations from opening day at Cedar Point.

First off, we actually got our season passes processed Wednesday, just before the mini-golf Red Cross thing. It was very fast, and very efficient. I was actually surprised at the number of people they had working there. The system seemed to execute just fine for both parking and entering the park.

Let me get this out of the way. Someone decided it was OK to let those time share assholes do their pitch at the park, between Magnum and Witch's Wheel. I can't stand these guys, and I will not hesitate to be as rude as possible to them. Come on man, this isn't Six Flags. You're already raping me for a soda, don't subject me to this crap too.

We started the day with my video gear in tow, to document the Planet Snoopy ribbon cutting. I hope to get that video posted in a couple of days.

The old Peanuts Playground I always thought was a bad cover up over the old Berenstain Bears area, so ever though it comes at the expense of Geauga Lake, this was a much needed improvement to that part of the park. The rides look great, and it's a nice looking area. It's almost staggering to think about how many kid rides there are in the park now. Hopefully they'll market the hell out of it.

After ditching the camera in the car, we started by walking through the back of the park. Maverick was still nursing an hour line, and appeared to not be running very consistently. I saw some trains go empty, but it didn't seem run much all day. One nice thing to see: The water canons on the turn over the pond were firing, if not at the same strength as last year.

We started the season with the Cedar Creek Mine Ride. This was our first exposure to the strange new policy of ride operators saying "check" when they check a restraint. This is apparently something they're doing throughout the company, and it seems kind of silly to me. Were restraints not getting checked before because people weren't saying check? I don't get it.

One really nice thing was that the ride op who was spieling gave a pep talk to a young kid in the seat behind us who was very nervous about riding. It seems like no big deal, but imagine the difference that could make in that kid's day. I was really happy to see that.

By the time we worked our way up the Frontier Trail and past Millennium Force, it was pretty clear that this was not going to be a light crowd day. We met Pete for lunch at Famous Dave's.

Dave's seems to be running pretty smoothly already, and I recognized a young woman there from last year who I think is a Famous Dave's corporate level trainer. After the chaos of the first two seasons in there, I'm pleased that overall they seem to be on their A-game in terms of service. We've gone there quite a bit without incident since last year.

After lunch, we ran Pete out to the Venetian Marina to pick up his boat after some service, as he was going to drive it back to the CP Marina where he's normally docked. On the way out we saw the reason behind the crowds: A seriously two-thirds filled parking lot, including a whole lot of buses. You never know what opening day will be like, but if the weather cooperates, a big crowd is certainly not unusual.

By this time we also noticed a lot of stuff not open or broken down. maXair is obviously not ready. Even Blue Streak saw some down time. It seemed very unusual to see a ride down every time you looked. I wonder if it's a symptom of the shorter off-season. I'm sure they're happy to have Dragster up and running though. I actually don't recall seeing it down at all.

Once we returned to the park, we started to seek out rides we don't typically ride, given the crowds. First was the Tilt-a-Whirl in Camp Snoopy. It did not tilt or whirl very much. Our car got all the way around only once the entire time. What a disappointment!

Heading back up toward the front, we snagged a ride on Corkscrew, which I think I completely missed last year. I still find the sudden need for seat belts after 30 years without strange, but the retractable belts minimize the pain for the riders. For the ride ops, ouch, that's a long way to bend down. The ride is what it always has been. Love the air time pop.

Next we hopped on Super Himalaya, which as Diana pointed out, has no sign. I wonder what happened to it. They had that stone looking sign that had "Himalaya" on it vertically for the longest time, even making the move from over by Gemini pre-Camp Snoopy. I think it has probably been a decade since I've been on it. It was one of the first rides I really had the balls to ride, since I was kind of a wuss in my early years.

We were pretty shocked to see a nearly full queue for the Matterhorn, so we passed. Instead we landed on Ocean Motion, unfortunately being assigned to a middle seat. It was pretty lame.

The waits for Wicked Twister and Disaster Transport were longer than we were willing to deal with, unfortunately, so we skipped them. I wish more than anything that they'd tear down Disaster Transport. I hate that ride. I hate the way an ugly box blocks the lake.

Finally, Diana got to try shi... I mean... cheese-on-a-stick. She's a cheese lover, so I thought this would be perfect. But you know what? She didn't like it. I feel validated. I don't know how anyone can stand to put that into their bodies.

Walking around the games area, I wanted to check out the shop at near Demon Drop for new stuff in merchandise. Nothing really popped out at me. I used to buy at least a shirt or shot glass or something every year, but it has been awhile. The year before last I got the "I Like 'Em Fast" shirt with the MF and naked-lady-truck-mud-flap silhouette. I think that's the last thing I bought.

We hopped up on Sky Ride, which had a much shorter line down at that end. Again I was surprised at the much friendlier than expected ride operators. In fact, when we got off, Diana noticed the ride op's tag said Brooklyn, which is about where Diana's house is, so she said she was from there. He was very enthusiastic, quickly mentioned where he lived, and it was just a nice interaction from someone not acting like a robot. I hope this continues throughout the season.

We ran into Pete again, who said his boat was running much better. We hit the Space Shot side of Power Tower with almost no wait. The queue times were really heavily loaded on the big rides, and it didn't help that some of them were down a lot. But I do love those S&S towers. I've been on them in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and I always enjoy them.

Next up, the CP&LE Railroad. They added on-board speakers to the trains for music and a bit of narrative during the ride. The first problem is that they're too loud. When they're giving instructions from the station, you can't hear them. When the "conductor" starts to speak, she's talking too close to the mic, and the speakers are being over-driven and you mostly hear distortion. This is a long standing problem at this park. Over-blown speakers, cheap mics and a lack of training on how to speak into them results in noise. That said, it's a good idea, but they need to learn to do it right.

Making our way back, I got a text message from Catherine that she was in the park, and Cosmo (her dog) was in Pet Chek. Cath was 45 minutes away from riding Millennium Force, but we were pretty tired at that point from carrying things, being up early, etc. Plus we were a little frustrated by the crowd size (something conditioned into you by visiting Friday nights in October). To kill a little time, we went up to the place with funnel cakes next to Cedar Downs.

I'll cut to the chase: The service sucked. I just find it mind boggling that Cedar Point can't figure out counter service. They sell four items! The pricing everywhere is out of line (soda is 40% more than at Disney or Universal). I ordered a funnel cake and a soda, and the girl forgot the soda. I ordered two things! The line was out into the midway too. If in this kind of operation there are people not in constant motion, you're not doing it right. Your efficiency sucks.

And by the way, pricing at the new Subway location is eight bucks for a 6" sub, and they for "only" six bucks more you can get a 22oz. soda and a bag of chips. Inviting the direct comparisons for out-of-park location pricing is a recipe for disaster. Mark my words on that. $14 for a sub, drink and chips is insulting. Compare it to whatever you want, people will only perceive this as price gouging. My lunch at Famous Dave's was less, and someone was there to bring food to me.

After visiting with Cath for a little while, we headed out. We stopped at the Pet Chek to see Cosmo. I love that little dog! The attendant in there was very clearly a dog person, and was very nice.

Overall, the park seems on top of things on operations, struggling, at least initially, on maintenance, and outright failing at counter service food. I suppose you could say, well, it's opening day, but if that recent statement in the press is true that 90% of guests are there on a daily admission ticket, that's not the kind of impression you want to leave. I'm sure the maintenance issues will get resolved quickly, but after this many years, I have no reason to believe foods will get any better, and that's unfortunate.

It was good to be "home."

I have a serious sunburn right now, and my epidermis hurts. I used to have sunblock in the car, but I don't, and with cooler temperatures I wasn't even thinking about how I was cooking in the sun all day.

Then, because I'm out of shape, my shoulders and legs are hurt. It's not the walking that got to me, it was carrying around my video gear, and then doing the wacky contortionist poses I do to get "the right shot" and remain relatively stable. This is a pretty good indicator that I need to get my shit together and be more active.

Although right now... I don't want to do much of anything requiring a lot of movement.

Despite having my (at the time) expensive video gear, I haven't used it in awhile. I've had it now for about two years, and I have to say, I love using it. But yikes, the last significant amount of use was for Maverick's media day! I nearly paid it off with some contract work in '06, but that's certainly no reason not to use it more.

I'm going to take it to CP tomorrow and have a little bit of fun with it. I know the kids will love whatever we shoot and post on PointBuzz. Diana is gonna take a shot at being my field reporter, which is super fun.

The thing about the HVX200 that sold me was the P2 format, the solid state, high speed recording media. The thing that keeps me from shooting more with it is the P2 format, because I only have a pair of 4 gig cards for it. That's only 20 minutes of 720p at 24fps, or 16 minutes at 30fps. That makes it a pain in the ass to shoot HD. I shot all of the Maverick stuff in standard def, though it looked pretty amazing because it'll record progressive scan, and the optics and 3 CCD's are pretty kick ass when they downsample to 720x480. But that's still not the HD eye candy.

Two things excite me though. First, Panasonic finally released P2 viewing and copying software for the Mac. That means that using the Cardbus adapter, I can plug in P2 cards directly and pull down more than 4 gigs in under 2 minutes. That is awesome! I can even view the video right off the card, full screen, in HD.

The second thing is that the P2 cards are getting really inexpensive (relatively speaking). The camera actually comes with a 16 gig card these days, and you can buy them for about $800. That's 40 minutes of 720p at 24fps, or 32 at 30fps. In case you're wondering, full blown 1080p is a gig per minute regardless of the frame rate, but man is that beautiful. I think if you wanted to shoot at that rate, it's best to tether to a computer and record directly to hard disk, which is also nice because you have a nice big monitor on the computer you record to.

So the bottom line is that I'd like to go out and shoot more video this year. It's really long overdue, and I want to take advantage of the gear I have. Unfortunately, it's not easy to travel with if I travel by plane. Either I need a big anvil case or I'd need to ship it.

I was listening to This Week in Tech on the way home from work today, and Calacanis was talking about his new Tesla, the electric sports car. He compared it to a religious experience knowing you can drive and have "almost no environmental impact."

He says that a charge for the 250-mile range costs about $4 in electricity, and given the efficiencies even of a coal power plant compared to gas, that's a really big deal. Even better if you get some of your power via nuclear power. Granted, that car is $110,000, but if Tesla is able to follow through with a $50,000 car, then the $30,000, that's a really big deal.

Obviously there's the whole issue about economy of scale as the barrier to bringing down the price, but it's an important first step. Battery tech keeps getting better, and virtually all of the components of the batteries can be reclaimed as well. Again, economy of scale is the issue there.

We're just getting so damn close to making some meaningful progress on this issue! Other exciting things include a report today that a silicon shortage today is causing problems in the solar market, but a huge surplus will drive its cost way down in the next two years.

I feel like things are in a shitty state right now, but it seems like we're getting somewhere at the same time. I just wish Toyota could get that plug-in hybrid to market sooner, but they insist it's just not ready for the '09 Prius.

In other news, just getting my tires inflated correctly has boosted my fuel economy back up to 37 mpg, and thank God at $3.75 a gallon. I've never replaced the spark plugs, so that's next on the list, hopefully to eek out another fraction of a mile per gallon.

Now if only I could telecommute a day or two a week!

Check this out.

That some real life Twister shit. Granted, if you look at how slow the dust is moving when he gets close to it, the funnel is clearly falling apart. If I understood the phenomenon well enough and could be reasonably certain it wouldn't strengthen again, I guess I'd do it too. Still, that's nuts. Watch the video as well.

According to the Canadians, US residents do not need a passport to visit. Hooray! Even though I've been meaning to get one, at least this will make that visit to Canada's Wonderland a lot easier.

Diana and I are pretty much doing everything out of order with regards to the whole getting married thing. There is no ring (yet), we don't have a date, we don't have a location... but we're hell bent on figuring out the honeymoon. Actually, when I say it out loud, that makes sense given our general thing to travel.

Originally, we both assumed without talking about it that Hawaii was off the table since I went there on my first honeymoon. When we started to talk about it though, that decision seemed kind of arbitrary. I mean, knowing who I am, it's not like I'm trying to relive the past, or compare it, or whatever. I just happen to think it's the most amazing location on the planet.

So now we're seriously considering it. I have an idea of the things I'd like to do there, since I know a little more about the islands, but I want to get Diana up to speed as well so we can plan out more stuff. It's funny because the thing that I think turned her on to it was seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and we've even looked up that specific resort in the movie.

I loved Kauai in particular and feel like I didn't get enough. Granted, there are only two hotels there that really meet my standards, so if going to the Sheraton would be too weird, that narrows it down to the Hyatt. I think the room rates are about the same (read: insane for an ocean view), but you know, it's f'ing Hawaii!

I'd like to do the touristy volcano stuff on the Big Island, but I definitely don't want to stay there. Much of that island is just bleak expanses of volcanic rock, though I hear Hilo is a lot greener (I've only seen it from the west side, Kona up to Waikoloa). The middle group of islands I'm not sure about. Maui, Molokai and the two little ones I can't remember don't jump out at me for any reason I can remember. I do want to look around Oahu though and at least do Pearl Harbor, and drive around (or rather through) the island.

I really blame the movie. After seeing all of that tropical lush green goodness, I totally want to go back.

All of the contract work I've taken on was via female recruiters. I hate gender generalizations, but this one seems to ring true. Male recruiters just don't know how to communicate.

I get several e-mail messages every week from recruiters. If it's someone I've never talked to, I tell them, "Hi, I'm not looking, but in the future I need to know the company, the rate and length of the contract so I know which leads are a good match for me." The volume is high enough, even when I was looking, that I'm not going to screw around with mystery blind solicitations only to find out it's crappy work. That's pretty reasonable, right?

So this dude cold e-mails me the usual crap about an "excellent opportunity with a great company," just like every other solicitation. So I reply with the sentence above, and he comes back with this...

Sometimes you need to take a chance. If you want help finding a new opportunity give me a call if you don't that's fine to.

He obviously never went to charm school. But this is typical of the responses from male recruiters. If it had been a female, they'd sell their firm, tell me what I want to know and maybe even kiss up a little (which I could do without, but they stand more to gain than I do).