Row that boat

Row row row the boat
Gently down the stream;

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

Just because I felt like it…

Across the pond

Well, here I am, across the pond. You now the one, they call it the “Atlantic Ocean”?

Anyway, things are great here in NY. It’s been almost a year since I’ve been here last time and since it was in late November things look rather different.
For starters there are no christmas decorations around. Another thing is that there is no snow and the temperature is not even conducing to it.

Which leads to even more walking around. Which leads to really tired legs and feet. Which leads me to be writing this at a nice Barnes&Noble’s café (it’s a Starbucks actually) while Tuxa is out shopping at the Fifth. Nice arrangement if you ask me, I get to stay with the books and my iBook and Tuxa gets to do what every woman likes best! :-)

Not that she hasn’t had reasons to be happy on that department —her birthday is Wednesday and she got to pick out her present(s) earlier today. And some presents she chose: considering this is a rather special birthday she finally caved in and went for the diamond ring and (more or less) matching diamond earrings… This is so not her… But then it is a rather special occasion!

This time around I decided not to bring my camera (well, OK, I brought the point-and-shoot, but mainly for Tuxa’s benefit) and bring the camcorder instead. We spent yesterday walking around town looking for the street fairs and on Central Park and I got some footage which I think is OK, but since I had to re-install the iBook after all the trouble I’ve had with it and I never got to use iMovie after that I imported everything I had into it and then, since I had told it I wanted this movie to have a 16:9 aspect ratio, it started to happily letterbox everything, even if it was captured in native 16:9 format. So I had to forcefully abort the operation. Which aloud me to get the footage in it’s original shape. But all the clips were out of order. All 115 of them!

I wanted to do a small movie (videoblog-style) yesterday about our first day back in NY, but I was just too damn tired and the footage scrambling around was just too aggravating to even try and touch it so lets see if I get something done now…

Oh the books at Barnes&Noble… Already bought a couple of O’Reilly’s I was looking at, but bought them at US prices Yay!
Also bought a wide-angle converter for the camcorder and while I was looking into buying some glass for my EOS 10D I just discovered this morning that B&H is closed starting today and until the 26th. Major bummer!!

Well, back to the movie now.

Last month re-cap

I’ve been very quiet for almost a month. For various reasons I’ve had neither the mood nor the time to blog.

Well, during this time lots of things have happened and so I thought I’d write up a small recap here.

But before that I’m off to New York for a week’s vacation tomorrow so I probably won’t be blogging a lot there also.

Anyway, here are the most relevant (for a given criteria at least) stuff that happened these last weeks:

• Got the PVR up-and-running almost completely. I now use it to record and watch TV shows and to watch videos I ripped from my DVDs or got from other sources. The only thing that is missing is configuring the DVD player which needs some tweaking. Is is actually very cool to be able to download NerdTV’s episodes or any of the Revision 3 stuff (especially TWiT episodes) and watch it on the TV. Oh and of course BitTorrent rocks for getting this stuff in;
• Got to not learn more about Final Cut Pro, although I’m itching to dive into it, especially now that I have a book on it. There just wasn’t enough time;
• Attended a small (4-hour) workshop on Photoshop CS (2) as the hub of the digital workflow. Most of it was pretty basic stuff, but it was interesting to see my workflow validated nonetheless. Could do with something more advanced, though, the meaty stuff such as color management and so on was kind of breezed through. Still, I guess the workshop was geared toward a more uninitiated crowd so it did it’s job there…
• Learned a lot about darcs and conflict resolution. Luckily it is pretty good on that respect, so no horror stories there;
• Got to see the full Firefly show (a whooping whole first season!) and the film serenity. It rocks!
• Got to see the Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie, which was pretty much better than I expected (which is not all that difficult, considering my low expectations);
• Missed the first Lisbon Perl Mongers’ social meetings;
• Consumed a lot of podcasts and not that many video-blogs. While I like video-blogs I don’t usually have the time to devote the kind of attention they deserve. On the podcasting front, I’m gearing more towards music podcasts lately. Of course I still consume almost all of the IT Conversations shows, but I’m starting to get more and more really good music podcasts. I have to start cutting back on some of them soon though, there just aren’t enough hours in the day!

Some other stuff happened, some of it good, some of it bad and sad but this is the more techie stuff. I hope this entry will kick-start me into getting some things up here. I haven’t even created any new videos or photos, although I have been collecting photos and footage for it.

And now back to packing. I’m feeling awfully tired so if I don’t do it soon I’m sure something will get left behind… :-)