Lessons Learned in Big Sky Country (not to be confused with NAU)

Posted on July 5, 2008 by Booyor

Bison Photos to Date: 4
Exhibit 1
Exhibit 2
Exhibit 3
Exhibit 4

I have been called many things on this trip: Tall Drink of Water, Slim, “Mom, look at how huge that guy is!”, BWDCAB (much props to my FBWDCAB).

I have also learned many things on this trip.

Tall = Stares
Homemade Motorcycle = Claps
Tall Man on a Homemade Motorcycle = I’m My Own Flippin’ Fourth of July Parade

This thing is made of car mufflers, armchairs, and awesomeness. My cousin-in-law is a genius. He gets swarmed with people asking him for Ace of Cakes autographs.
No one messes with Lucy
Concert by the river? Beautiful

Concert Worse than Karaoke in a Cage Downtown? Not Beautiful
Fighting Bison? Cup of Gravy!
There can be only 3 Scions in the town of Laurel at any given time. Town ordinance.
Trains do entrap Laurel, even if you’re late.

(Two trains in this photo.)
This is the plate du jour in Montana.
This is the hottest garage in Montana.
This is the quintessential sportscar of Montana.
No matter how cute, daughters-of-cousins-in-law need to still have driving instruction. Especially in the Scion.
Family, no matter where they live, are great.

(More family photos to come.)
And my daughter can turn any placemat into a work of art.

Now to tackle the open road once again. Here’s hoping that the kids do just as well returning home. Tomorrow’s stop? SLC. After that? Vegas. Imagine the irony.

To appease the AppleTV users, all of the photos uploaded today are on Flickr. Search for photostream booyor (comin’ out of nowhere).

Hunting

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Booyor

I have killed lots of things on this trip.

I should correct that statement.

My Scion xB has killed many things on this trip. Awesome handling, powerful air conditioner, lots of technology, and a style that has had many people stop and stare in the windows/check my tires without realizing that I was sitting there watching them.

But the cool box shape?
Death. Lots of death.

I have hit every single bug from Arizona to Montana. I have washed my windshield five times. There’s different manner of wings, antennae, and whatever is inside bugs all over my grill.
It is an Exoskeletal Holocaust.

The bugs are like, “Scion? Who makes tha…?” [slam]

Ends, Beginnings, and all that Goofiness in the Middle

Posted on June 27, 2008 by Booyor

The Final (Official) Haiku
I would like to thank
All the encouraging friends
and a patient wife

Fanfares and all that.

As we are on the last leg of the trip to Montana (aside from the actual being in Montana and then getting home), we come to the last haiku. I have definitely kept my writing sharpened since college. The daily writings and postings were helpful when it came time to do a technical guidebook for my district and I was basically tech blogging.

I think I will miss the daily challenge. I have a couple of other concepts bouncing around. But first we have today’s adventure:

Yellowstone – I hear there’s bears. Or was that Jellystone?
Another full day in the Scion. I busted the entire 6 hour drive yesterday and was ready to keep going. I am a new convert to cruise control.
A potential foray into…dial-up…where we’ll be staying for a week. You may find me huddling in the parking lot of a local hotel. If the locals have “WHS” (hotel-speak, I guess, for wi-fi. Much shorter/clearer abbreviation than what the rest of the world uses).

There will be an automated post coming up. I will be on the road by then, but I still found the haiku fun. As The Robot promises, there’s a fun treat in post I’m writing (blogging on the road leads to some space-time thingys).

an-open-letter

Enjoy this most recent to the ultimate album, Ultimate Karate.

Thanks for the adventure!

A Scion XB and a Fix for iDVD Widescreen

Posted on June 8, 2008 by Booyor

Sorry about the delay in updates. Dinosaur attack. Happens to the best of us.

A lot less awesome than when Devinistan’s Led Zeppelin Armada participated in a coup by Lord Beverage.

Since last we met our fair heroes, a new car had been introduced into the mix. Firefly transports being a little fuel inefficient for my taste, I had another option. A 2009 Scion XB. (Yes, I added a new category but I won’t rant too much. But I will be tracking some stats. (Like any good testing coordinator.))

I just finished making labeled DVD boxes and stuffing them with stickered DVDs, enough for 19 ballet parents to enjoy. (Thus the hour of my post. Woo, summer! Anything is possible!)

While working on the DVD project I learned a lot of stuff.
(Some of this pertains to even non-Mac users, but if you don’t want to read about DVD technology, you can scroll down.)

(You’ll know it’s time to turn the page when you see Mittens dance like this:
Did we need this? )

Let’s begin:

DVDs have uniform digital codes in them that give clues to a player on how to interpret the signal.
There’s a code that allows newer-ish DVD players to do what’s called “Pan and Scan”.
Pan and Scan is where instead of letterboxing a widescreen film on a 4:3 TV, the DVD player tries to guess where the camera motion is going and zooms in on that part, cutting off a huge chunk of both sides of the picture rectangle. I guess this was invented for those old guys who would come in and argue with Jeremy about how widescreen cuts off the picture. (It doesn’t. Just watch the end credits of A New Hope. (By the way…now I know why watching the podrace scene in Episode I hurt so bad. My copy did pan and scan. (Second reason it hurt, I guess. The first was the two-headed announcer’s,”Oh, that’s going to leave a mark.” [shudder]))
Jeremy is officially the man when it comes to DVDs. I had spent some time trying to figure out why my iDVD-produced ballet project was zoomed in in a weird spot. He walks into the room. “Oh, hey, it’s a pan and scan DVD.”
I found a mini-program that takes a DVD disc image and tweaks it how you’d like.
iDVD doesn’t just do pan and scan by default, it doesn’t let you turn that off when you burn discs. Still boggled by that. I watched Fever Pitch and wondered why I could only see the guy’s mouth and it was all pixely.
Here’s the program by Daniel Rogers that lets you tweak the IFOs automatically on your disc images. (Without having to edit in hexadecimal. It has been nine years since I’ve had to do that.) Put the two utility Perl programs in your usr/local/bin. (Yeah, I know. Me, too. How I found that folder was Finder->Go->Go to Folder and then typed in usr/local/bin.) Now you can type “idvd-ws-fix” and your option codes (check the README) in Terminal and it will start tweaking your disc image.
I like seeing crazy decimal percentages scrolling by to tell me my progress. I think it said David Lightman was ready to play.
Another issue is that QuickTime will display a video in 720×480 even if the aspect is, say, 854×480. Simple fix (Thank you, Peter the Futile Ohm, especially since my crazy schedule postponed you from Tuesday to Wednesday to Thursday.). In QuickTime, go to Window->Show Movie Properties and click on Video Track. Uncheck Preserve Aspect Ratio and change the dimensions to what you need. Make sure that you save.
Here’s another cool trick for iDVD (Thanks again, Peter!). You can only do automatic chapters every few minutes, right? Not limited anymore! If you add chapter markers in Final Cut (or even iMovie), iDVD will honor those. Now I have unleashed Ultimate Ken Burns Power XIII!!!

Go, Mr. Mittens!
Thanks for indulging in that little DVD geek session. It’s mainly for my own reference later, but I know that I could have used an article like this…Now, to work on the district technology handbook…ballet is done!

As promised in days of yore…yore being Wednesday…here are some pictures!

Here I celebrate two of my favorite things from Japan. Auron was not present for comment.

My wife took this picture of my first hundred miles. I’ve never had a new car (Frankly, I only had the ’88 Reliant K. This is kindof a jump.).

We then went with a friend to RA to get some official sushi.