Tribute to Kosmo

I just recieved an email that my good friend Kim's loyal companion had passed. He got so old and the pain was so great that he had to be put down. He surely will be missed. It's been a while since I've seen him but time will never pass that I will not recall how wonderful and special that this peticular dog was, not only to my friend but to me as well.

 

Kosmo

Fishing will never be the same again. I remember him standing in the river trying to catch trout that would swim near his feet. He would park himself on the passenger seat when we would go anywhere. When I would step out of the car to run into the store or something, I'd come back and find him in the drivers seat. When he was hungry he'd let you know by bringing his bowl to you for a refill.

Somehow, even with long periods of not seeing me, I could tell he remembered me. I'd come over and knock on the door and he'd bark. Usually, he would stop when he heard my voice call his name. Kosmo was a great watch dog. He could spread fear with his size and his bark. One might never guess that he was an extremely loving animal.

When I'd come over for a visit, he'd sit by my feet or try to climb in my lap and constantly poke me to scratch his head or get some type of attention. Coming through the door, I'd usually be greeted with paws on my shoulders and a whine in excitement that I came to visit.

I guess he knew I was a good guy and loved him too.

 

Bye Kosmo

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He's a Travelin Man

Had to drive down to South Lake Tahoe again on Tuesday. Didn't get any work done because of the hour I left and when I got there everybody was closed. Wednesday, of course I ran 9 calls between Tahoe and Reno. Fixed a printer at the Silver Legacy Casino. What a beautiful hotel! Any way while it was nice...it was quite smokiey from all the fires. Finished up and drive home last night and got in at 1:30 AM.

Fortunately, I had a reasonably light day.

The smoke from the fires are on this side of the Sierras also. It just misses us by 5-10 miles at home.

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A Suprise House Guest -EEK!

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Poor thing's gotta come in the house to get food. I guess pickins are bad around here. It looked terrified when I finally saw him. The cook eeked and I heard the catfood go all over. Didn't even have to chase him out. He apparently knew where the door was even in the confusion.

Ok so that makes it a possum, a bald eagle, a salmon and an unknown fish for the day. Still almost 2 hours left. I wonder what's next.

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Fishing in Sacramento River

Decided to take the boat to the river for the first time today to see how it would do...it did great going downstream. Well what can I say. It's only a 6hp Johnson. Actually it did fairly well about half the way coming back and the current was just too strong.

Some guys on jet skis saw me going nowhere fast and offerred me a tow through the rapids. That went well except where we thought the current wasn't as heavy...it still was. He was gone and I was going back down stream.

I managed to head up Cow Creek and tie off. I saw a road going up to one of the farms and I thought the farmer might let me drive my jeep and trailer down to get the boat. I must have walked about a mile and a half to the road and the very last gate was padlocked and nobody ta home.

So I walked back, hopped in the boat and headed down stream. I was about 3 miles from the next boat landing. Most of the way I just left the motor off and used the oars. Took about another hour or so. Right after I got there, I met some nice people that hauled me back to the other boat ramp back in Anderson River Park.

First thing this morning, I had to go buy a new fuel hose because the other one split on me. Then right after putting the boat in the water...I was baling it out...the cork popped out again. But besides being kinda scary, being my first time alone on the river in this boat, It turned out pretty cool.

On my 10 mile river trip, I saw a beautiful Bald Eagle and about a 10-15lb salmon jump out of the water...and I caught this fish...what ever it is.

It was 17" and weight 1.5 pounds after gutted and the head taken off. Really put up a great fight!

 

 

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Anybody know what it is?

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Making your Video Look good on DVD

 TechZilla News

TechZilla News is a free service of BluePlanetPC.com

TechZilla Says: 

The problem is that there are no real set rules to go by to produce consistent high quality videos that will still be "viewed" as high quality down the road. With every change of technology, the rules change. I believe we are not alone on this. Television broadcasters face this same challenge. Not everyone has HDTV or 100% digital capability yet...the smoke will take along time to actually settle.

As a kid, I recall my dad's old super 8 projector. We would pull up the screen and fire off a movie then have to adjust the focus of the lens to find the sweetspot to watch the movie. It's not like a projection room or a theatre of course where the projector is in a fixed location. The only thing constant was the film itself and the size and quality of the projection screen we used. WYSIWYG!

I go into a lot of homes in my business. The vast majority of people have CRT's in the 32" or less range. As these units are being replaced, they look towards the "newer" and "larger" technology. Based on this I would say currently the

 "biggest audience" is the CRT group.

If I were designing a webpage, I know it may not look good on every computer that views it for a couple of reasons. One being the web browser that a user uses to view it and the resolution and quality of the monitor they are using. To combat these variables, a good web designer, tests the webpage using the various available web browsers at several resolutions. Before LCD monitors, you only had CRT's to deal with. The difference being the DPI and resolution capability of the various monitors. LCD's may never achieve the true picture quality of a high-end CRT though...but they are getting very close.

From a practical standpoint, it became quite obvious that setting your own display resolution to 800x600 when designing a webpage is the smartest thing to do. There was a point where absolutly no one had CGA or EGA monitors anymore and everyone had at least a standard VGA monitor that could display at 800x600. This is still a recommended practice I believe even though not all web designers follow this.

Creating a video that will look good on everything from a 4" CRT to 108" LCD or plasma is the challenge. Economically, I cannot afford to buy every imaginable tv set out there to test my video on. I believe there is a work-around for this though.

After shooting and editing a video on the computer, save it back to tape. Besides archiving, this preserves the DVI-AVI in its native format. Then take the camcorder to the local electronics store and pretend to be interested in buying the most expensive highest quality thing on the market. Of course you have to talk the salesmen into letting you plug the camera into several models maybe.

Professional DVD production houses generally request you send them the movie on a DV tape of some type. Some accept movies on a hard drive. But what they really want is the movie in it's "uncompressed" format. That way they only have to deal with the 4:3 or 16:9 ratio, the FPS and the length of your movie in time. They also don't have to deal with the limitations of 4.3 gb blank DVD. This is why you can have a two hour movie with lots of extras on a commercially produced DVD with no noticible quality loss from the origional. This also explains why commercially produced DVD's look better on a wider range of TV sets than homebrew DVD's.

I imagine that in producing commercial quality DVD's they achieve this in part because they work from the origional. Also they likely are able to encode the video using less compression and at higher bitrates.

I think the real bottom line here is the intended audience. If you are producing movies or videos for yourself your job is much easier. It only has to look good to you on the equipment you have now. A portable DVD player hooked up to a high-end tv at the electronics store would also let you see your creation as others may see it should you choose to increase your audience base.

I think the rule here though is that the higher the overall bitrate you are able to achieve when creating your DVD, the better the quality the images will be on the larger screens. The larger screens being capable of processing and displaying more information filling in the spaces so to speak to compensate for the video being stretched to fit. The smaller screens would actually be visually compressing the image and appear to have a higher quality.

The best we can ultimately do though is work within the limits of our imagination, our audience, the time and money we have to invest.

Copyright © TechZilla News 2007


 

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Sponge Bob Baggy Pants

Driving home tonight I heard on the news a couple of towns in Louisianna are considering banning baggy pants. I'm a little old fashion in some ways (well maybe a lot of ways) but this is just another example of government outstepping thier bounds.

To me this is no more than a fashion trend...not that I like it but what right do I have to place judgement on anyone who chooses to do so. I don't have that right and niether does anyone else. If someone wants to come into my house dressed like that I would say no...my house, my rights, my rules.

The year after I graduated HS they dropped the dress code from what I've heard because the dress code was unconstitutional. What is being said about this is that not only is it unconstitutional, it unfairly profiles or targets certain ethnic groups. In Louisianna it is mostly young blacks. But I've seen kids of all races doing this so I can't say that part is totally true.

Hopefully the trend will go away...and likely will as soon as they figure out why no one will hire them. In some industries it would be a hazard.

Anyway they sure look funny walking around town like they have a wad in thier pants and trying to walk in a way that thier pants don't fall down to thier ankles. A 90 year old cripple with a walker might get there faster...LOL. Of course that would be with a belt around his waist and a big belt of JD maybe before he left the house. That's to give the baggy pants person a handicap in the race. I mean fair is fair.

 

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The Gardener has been busy

Probably need to take a picture back a little farther to get the whole effect of this small area I worked on over the weekend. This little area is on the left side of the gate going towards the street. The tree is a cottonwood tree that gets beautiful pink blooms in the spring. It was here when I bought the place.

Basically, I bought some rocks I liked and defined the edge of a future walkway that will lead to the front of the house. I added some cedar bark, a bowl of dark red mums for color and found a small yellow/green bush that I plan on planting for the year-round color. The plan is to devote the area to Irises.

I also picked up a couple of 1/4 wine barrels to do something with for the front of the house. They fit flat against the wall and look pretty good. I'm not really sure what will go in those yet.

To finish it off I added the bear and a butterfly ornament.

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Doctor Who Missing Episodes

As it seems, many of the origional Doctor Who episodes are likely lost forever. Of the first 6 years of the show, 108 of 253 episodes were destroyed or erased due to archive storage problems and the fact the BBC didn't see the economic advantage of doing so. What is available has been because of oversees broadcasters returning thier copies. Then there are the contracts with the actors etc....they only allowed re-runs so long. When the contracts ran out. The economic incentive was lost.

Wikipedia has a fairly complete description of what happened and why.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes#Orphan_episodes

 

I also came up with several websites and forums with people trying to promote the search for the lost episodes. Some of them may still at lest in part be hidden or forgotton somewhere in other countries. "missing doctor who" is the term I used to search with.

Fortunately, all or most of the audio portions of the episodes are available. This is due in part to fans who recorded the tv show and sent in thier recordings. Even though the quality of many are poor, they are suitible to be used for re-mastering. Many are available on audio cd.

Many of the old films I watched as a kid are gone due to age and deterioration of the film in the case. Fortunatley, many of the old films have been restored or are being restored as we speak. Of course all this predates the true digital age. Technology and the average person will now prevent happenings such as this in the future.

Legal or not, Movie and TV and music fans are capturing, storing, and sharing the best of the best. In doing so, some of the  accomlishments of mankind WILL be preserved digitally outside the conrol of the guy with the spreadsheet.

WHO KNEW!

 

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Fishing...Southern Style

Ran across this video on MetaCafe's website and though it was rather an interesting technique. I can see though where it may be illegal to do in some states. The way this gal shows it you have little control over retrieval when you hook one. A secondary line tied to the boat would solve that. I can see that if the fish was huge it could swim away from you for quite awhile before it got tuckered out.

There are some commercial jugging setups available. I would use a white jug so it could easily be seen as opposed to clear 2 liter bottles. For night fishing add some reflective tape so you could find them with a flashlight. I probably wouldn't use no more than 2 hooks. The actual line length and weight strategy would vary depending on the pond or lake depth...heck you could even tie a brick on the end if you wanted. Don't think I would try this in a river unless it was a lazy river. Chasing your jugs down stream might be rather dangerous.

From what I've read so far, jugging is mostly used for catfish. Catfish give off a scent to alert other fish of danger so you have to treat them gentily until you get them landed or you will scare off the other takers.