I am not saying I agree with everything, and this isn’t even in the top ten Ted Talk I have ever seen… it’s just interesting
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
Come to think of it I should probably link more ted talks in here…
anyway, enjoy!
-Jordan
Heather and I went to Chicago last weekend!
We took Friday off, and drove up after work Thursday night. Having three days off was a really nice break! Unfortunately it also meant we didn’t have a weekend at home so we are still trying to catch up on laundry and cleaning around here. I have no idea how two people in a two-bedroom apartment can make so much of a mess so quickly! Maybe we just have high standards.
So, back to Chicago… We had a great time despite the weather being cold and rainy for the majority of the trip. We took a few pictures, and shot some video. Heather and I really had fun with the video, and I have grand plans of cutting the segments into something worth posting. The problem is we are gone again this weekend, and I haven’t ever tried to do that kind of a thing before, so I should probably get a few traditional blog posts up before I forget all the details on the trip.
That isn’t going to happen tonight though… midnight is closing in, and I should wrap this up.
-Jordan
I feel kind of dumb right now. I spent five or so minutes looking, and it appears I never actually posted the pictures of the banana ice cream back when Heather and I first tried making it.
Let me bring you up to speed on the situation:
Because of point one, I spent a lot of time looking around for something I could make. I have had some success with making peanut butter balls. That recipe involved Splenda, and at some point Heather soured on the idea of eating fake sugar too. About that time I read that you could run a frozen banana through a blender / food processor and get an ice cream like result. We tried it shortly thereafter, and the results were a huge hit!
I learned a few things such as, peeling the bananas beforehand is important! I nearly removed my thumb peeling a frozen banana with one of our wonderfully sharp knives. We were in Atlantic at the time, and cleaning the blender without a dishwasher was a huge pain.
jumping back to ‘now’, and we have a food-processor that was given to us for Christmas. What I have discovered is that making this dish in a food processor is about twenty times easier. With a blender I was having to scrape the sides of the dish repeatedly to get all the banana blended. The food processor doesn’t seem to need as much attention. It also doesn’t hurt that we have a dishwasher, so cleanup is more or less “free”.
All of that to introduce the how-to video! Enjoy! 🙂
-Jordan
Heather, for some time now, has been saying that she wanted us to have a simple video camera to record little parts of our lives.
After some quick research I grabbed an older model Vado HD that was cheap, and looked like it would be easy to use.
It has turned out to be really easy to use, and Heather and I have enjoyed getting to play with it. Last night however, I wanted to actually work with a video we had recorded. When I say work with, I mean I wanted to load the video into an editor and you know… edit it. I am not an expert with video editing tools, but that is a post for another day. What I discovered is that the codec (Video Encoding) was some goofy custom thing that none of the editing tools I had access to could work with. To make things worse, none of the variety of video conversion tools I had were able to convert it to a more palatable format.
After a few hours of grief, I think the secret was to install the video editing package that came with the camera, and somehow that dropped a second “edit mode” codec into the registry, letting STOIK open the video to re-sample it. I should not that I still cannot open the native off-the camera video in an editor. Being able to open the video with STOIK means I don’t really care, I just have to convert to an edit-friendly format before starting work.
I would like to be angry at Creative Labs for picking such a weird, unsupported codec for their camera, however I am painfully aware how complicated the job of a codec can be. Complicated means expensive in this case, all the nice easy-to-use codecs are not cheap, and must be licensed. I feel like by buying a cheaper camera I kind of asked to deal with this mess.
On the bright side, I have a workable system to convert video to something I can use. Probably not much chance Heather can do it solo, but she has no problem using the camera. I can live with having to do the imports myself.
-Jordan
Actually, it hasn’t been as cold the past few days, and I have actually seen a little sunlight!!
The past two days have been mostly cloud free, and I am starting to hope spring will someday come.
This post isn’t actually to complain about the weather, it was to share this awesome video:
A little background, if you aren’t familiar with the term, check out the wikipedia article on the Sun dog phenomenon.
You have no idea how much child-like wonder that video evoked in me. I really want to watch a launch someday. I hear it’s kind of hard to catch a NASA launch because of the frequent weather delays. Right now the prospect of hanging out in Florida waiting to see if the rocket goes up today doesn’t sound so bad though 🙂
Another random thing that would be really fun, although perhaps only for me… is this place: Titan Missile Museum
It isn’t really close to anything though. I lost the link to it, but I found that place from a quick article with a bunch of pictures from somebody else going through it. Looked pretty interesting.
-Jordan
I feel bad posing another random video, but there hasn’t been much going on as of late.
anyway, the video: Crazy things done on a bike.
Also, I have been thinking of cataloging books here, it might be interesting to look back on. so I will give it a shot here I guess:
Finished this month:Â “Dauntless” (the lost fleet, book 1) and “Zoe’s Tail”
Started: “Atlas Shrugged”
I am strongly tempted to try and post mini reviews of each finished book, but I think I will skip that for now. I should say that I rather liked Dauntless, and am really looking forward to working my way through the rest of the books in the story sometime soon.
-Jordan
I don’t suppose I will be repeating anything seen in this video, but I found it to be really cool.
🙂
-Jordan
Nelsons 