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My little girl is getting not so little anymore. K is growing up fast, and she's developing several skills and talents. Among them is an eye for a solid picture, as well as editing digital images to pull out complex colors, shading and texture. Here are a few of my favorites. Enjoy.
The two most amazing places to see the culture and the people of the true south have to be Graceland and Gatlinburg.
We came up here to the mountains this weekend to escape the Nashville/Franklin heat. A balmy 88-90 degrees instead of 100+.
As always, we were amazed at the number of motorcycles, tattoos, mullets, tank-top tees, big hairdos, cigarette packs in tee shirts, cut-off jeans, skull caps, air-brushed art, pancake houses, wedding chapels, souvenir shops, old tyme photo places, taffy machines, Ty and Webkinz stuffed animals and Daisy Dukes.
We gave in and let the girls get an Old Tyme Photo. We fit right in. Scary.
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I have a Sony Mavica digital camera that shoots fairly decent photos, and then burns them right to a CD-R build into the camera. Plenty of storage, easy to use (pop the CD-R out of the camera, pop it straight into a computer- voila).
The only downside is the delay between pushing the button to take a picture, and the actual picture being taken. Many digital cameras have a bit of a delay. My Sony Mavica’s delay is ridiculous. When I took pictures of the girls playing snow-softball I had to push down the button when the snowball was still flying through the air half-way to the girls to get a chance of snapping them in mid-swing. To use my camera, one has to be able to see into the future to get the shot exactly right.
That’s what makes this next photo so amazing to me. On a recent trip to the ocean we stopped by Gulfarium (a cross between an aquarium and seedy carnival). I took this photo of a dolphin taking a fish out of the mouth of a trainer. I had to push the button down while the dolphin was still underwater on its way to make the jump.
I need a better/newer camera. For every one of these I get right, I take 100 wrong.
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As I write this it is just after midnight and I arrived home about ten minutes ago. This will be a brief post, and a shameless plug for a band I manage named the koo.
Tonight the guys played their third show in as many nights, and did a killer job playing a full 45min set at The Pond. The venue is a hole in the wall bar in Franklin, TN, but the place was packed out- SRO.
So far, they have had over 23,000 plays of their music from the site, plus a bunch more off their Purevolume.com page. You can also check out some pictures of the band from a recent show here:
http://public.fotki.com/cscottphoto/shows/thekoo/
The only remarkable event of the evening besides the great show was when one girl sitting at my table was so into “Assbeater” (the last song of the koo’s set) that she knocked her drink into her lap. I got her napkins.
A couple of things I forgot to mention in my previous post (DigitalHome):
MagicDVDRipper.
Here’s a tip for using MagicDVDRipper. The free trial included with the download allows for 5 free uses. I thought this meant 5 ripped DVDs, but I soon learned it was 5 uses- literally. As long as I didn’t close the program or turn off my computer, I could rip away- I ripped many, many DVDs over a weeks time.
Accessing it all.
How do you access all this great media in your home?
Here are three models of players to check out:
I am moving closer to my ultimate digital goal: Being able to consume the media I want, when I want it, where I want it.
Music
All 10,000 or so of our CDs are now digitized- not once, or twice, but three times. Each time I got a better digital music player, and increased the volume the music played on external speakers, I could hear more of the hiss present at the lower rip rates- so after moving from 128kbs to 256kbs, I then made the ultimate leap to Windows Media Lossless (essentially, the same quality as a CD). Each time requiring me to open up and re-rip each CD. Insane. I store it all on an external drive/media server connected to our wireless router. By the way, you can set your WindowsMedia Player to rip at this level by clicking Tools/Options/Rip Music.
Now, almost all of our family photos are also available on our home network, accessible anywhere in the house (via laptop/desktop, tv). All that is left is to get our old photos converted from negatives to digital files (about 75 cents a strip at Wolf/Ritz Camera).
Video
The final frontier (at least as I can see for the time being) is to get our video content digitized. The goal is to move the cases in our family room that currently hold good old-fashioned plastic discs with movies on them to a final resting place in storage next to the dusty cases of CDs.
I have been able to get our home movies onto the network- the ones from the last couple of years were recorded on a Sony Handycam DVD recorder. The older ones were a bit harder. $30 a pop at Wolf/Ritz to convert our old Sony Handycam 8mm tapes to DVD. It only took a couple days, but with about 20 to convert, was not cheap.
Our DVD collection is next on the list. I have found a simple tool (and free as well if you use it right) to rip all our DVDs called MagicDVDRipper, so the only issue I can see is storage. Each DVD when ripped will take up about 4.7-15.93 Gig (depending on if the disc is single or double layered, has extra content, etc)- so I will be able to place about 30-60 movies per 300GB external drive (the size I use now).
I will likely wait a bit longer before ripping the full collection- maybe until something in the 5-10 Terabyte storage range if affordable so that I will be able to get all of our films on one drive- important as the new formats coming out (HD DVD, Blu-Ray) have much larger capacity for content.
File size will only get bigger- One hour of uncompressed Ultra High Definition Video (UHDV) consumes approximately 11½ terabytes of data. Can't wait.
