Good morning everybody,

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas! To all my friends who don’t celebrate Christmas, I wish you all Happy Holidays!

I hope everybody has a safe and enjoyable holiday season spent with those closest to them. Eat, drink (but don’t drive), and be merry!

Good morning!

Last night going through the footage taken from the snow day at Frost Fire, I decided to put together a very brief snippet of my spectacular fall. Looking at it now on camera, it doesn’t look that spectacular, but it trust me - it was! I still feel like I got hit by a bus even today. Rolling into and out of a fall is easy - I learned that in Kung Fu. The hard part is getting the snowboard (which extends a good distance past you on either side of your feet) to roll along with you.

Anyway, here it is. It’s okay to laugh - I still laugh every time I see it! If you click on the HD button in the video, you’ll be presented with an option to watch the video on Vimeo’s site in HD; they don’t allow HD embedding with the free account.



Stay tuned for the full video. There’s almost an hour of footage to go through! I’ve never had to go through that much raw film before - this will be great.

Helloooooo!

I’m very pleased to say that our inaugural snow outing was a complete success. Ryan and I went down to Frost Fire in Walhalla, North Dakota for a great day of skiing and snowboarding. I only took one video and no still pictures. Ryan, however, made a nice little acquisition this week. He picked up an HD helmet cam! I haven’t seen the footage on it yet, but apparently it’s really good. I look forward to seeing it. It’s very convenient to have the camera filming all the way down the hill instead of somebody having to go ahead and park somewhere to catch everyone going by. Halfway through the day we mounted the camera on my head for some variety. Nobody wants to see video of me all day long. Although, Ryan did catch me making a spectacular fall that I can’t wait to see!

Stay tuned for the video.

Good evening,

Now, you’re probably thinking “Why on Earth would I want to watch you learn the guitar?” — and that’s certainly a great question! I’m not sure why you would want to watch me learn the guitar either, but that’s okay. I’m not doing this for you; I’m doing this for me.

Hmmm... thinking about that last line, you may *still* be getting the wrong idea. I am certainly not one to think that everything I do is interesting to everybody else, and I’m not doing it because I want my 15 minutes of fame on the Internet. No, I’m doing it for the same reason that I am posting my workout goals and progress.

You see, for many years I had been working out off and on, mostly off. When I started posting it on my blog December 31, 2008, though, I all of a sudden became accountable to somebody other than myself. It’s much easier to give up on something when you’re the only one who knows about it. Well, 2009 was the best year I’ve ever had in terms of workout consistency. I’m hoping to have the same effect on my guitar playing.

I really want to learn to play, I just often don’t think to take the time to sit down and practice. It’s also much harder because I am teaching myself with video instruction. If I had a real instructor, then I’d have somebody checking on me and making sure that I’m practicing. Well, now I have you to do that for me, and the best part is you guys are free!

I’ve just started studying using the lessons included in Garage Band ’09, included with iLife ’09 on my new MacBook Pro. The lessons look quite good for a beginner, and it’s nice because Garage Band has a backing band. At the end of the lesson, you get to play along with the instructor. You can also turn on or off individual tracks, like the instructor’s voice, his guitar, or the backing band. What I can do for these videos is have only the backing track play, and then I play along with it. This will help me to keep a tempo as well as make it more interesting than just banging out chords all by myself.

Also, in cutting this first video, I saw that recording myself and then watching it again is a fantastic way to see where I can improve. Boy, is there an awful lot of room for improvement! I always thought that I could keep a decent rhythm. When I was in band class in high school, I certainly could. Apparently, it’s gotten much worse in the 13 years since band class. I also have issues with consistent volume. I think it’s because I feel myself getting rather self conscious. I also don’t want to be too loud because I’m a very quiet person in general, so playing at a clear solid volume feels uncomfortable.

I never would have picked up on these growth points without watching myself play - this is fantastic!

There are nine Garage Band lessons:

1. Intro to Guitar (and E chord)
2. Chords: G, C
3. Chords: A, D
4. Minor Chords
5. Single Note Melodies
6. Power Chords
7. Major Barre Chords
8. Minor Barre Chords
9. Blues Lead

After that, we’ll see how far I’ve progressed, and where I should go next. I don’t have a schedule defined yet, nor do I have goals of where I want to be at a given point in time. That was also key in my workout plan, and so I should make firm goals here too. For the time being, though, I’ll aim to complete and be comfortable with one lesson per week. At the end of the week, I’ll take a video of myself and post it here again.

Hi!

Here are the pictures I took from the Standard Aero 2009 Christmas party. Click the link below for the Flickr slideshow. Enjoy!

Standard Aero 2009 Christmas Party

Good news is that I truly out did myself this year with my Christmas decorations. The bad news is that I had to take him down after 2 days. I had more people come screaming up to my house than ever.Great stories. But two things made me take it down.

First, the cops advised me that it would cause traffic accidents as they almost wrecked when they drove by.

Second, a 55 year old lady grabbed the 75 pound ladder almost killed herself putting it against my house and didn't realize it was fake until she climbed to the top (she was not happy). By the way, she was one of many people who attempted to do that. My yard couldn't take it either. I have more than a few tire tracks where people literally drove up my yard.

Good evening!

Tonight, I completed the next Blender tutorial. It is a very timely project, since it is a snowman and we’ve finally got snow on the ground!

Here is another newsletter from Mike Geary. This one covers a couple of topics. First, it talks about two very healthy vegetables - bok choy and mustard greens. Bok choy is great, but I’ve never had mustard greens before. I’ll have to try it out.

Next, it talks about the hormone leptin and how it impacts fat burning.

Mike’s article is very long, so I don’t want to clog the main page with it. Just click the link below to view the article in its entirety.

Read More...

Good evening,

Not being totally decided on my video hosting choice, I leave it to you. Below are the same video, one in QuickTime format, and the other the same QuickTime file uploaded to Vimeo. Actually, I should really upload another higher quality video to Vimeo to let it work with the highest quality possible (within my 500MB weekly limit, of course). Unfortunately, I don’t have access to my video editing software right now. I’m holding out for Final Cut Express 5 which should hopefully be released any day now!!!

Actually, looking at the recommended settings for Vimeo, the video file wasn’t created in the optimal settings. Vimeo likes 30fps, but it is 29.97fps (the NTSC standard). I also don’t have the keyframes set in their preferred method, and the bit rate is half of what they recommend for an SD source video.

QuickTime:

Vimeo from same source:

What do you think?