Travel
Time lapse video
I just got back a little while ago from a visit to Brian, Dani & Jeffrey’s in Rochester. Great times. Great friends.
We went out to Arigato’s for some yummy hibachi, then went home for cake and gaming. Well, one game that lasted a good long time. Loaded Questions – which got off to a bit of a slow start but ended up being laugh-so-hard-you-cry funny. The game deteriorated into “The Turd Ferguson Game” where every answer became a variation of “Turd Ferguson.” Priceless. And we only had a couple glasses of wine. Really.
Here are some videos I made of the trip out and back. The exported video ended up being terribly low res, so these are here for the time being until I can re-export at a higher quality.
Time lapse details
I used an Xbox Live webcam ($40) taped to my rearview mirror. iStopMotion software, which is super simple to use especially while driving. The 1st video was set at 24 fps and the first 44 seconds are recorded at one frame every second. The rest is one frame every 8 seconds, thus the much faster, jerkier quality.
The second video is a compromise at one frame every 2 seconds. This gave a much smoother motion, but obviously longer video length. I should have switched to one frame every second once I got off the thruway for higher quality on the final leg of the drive.
The soundtracks are a remix of Just Let Go by Fischerspooner and a cover of A Forest by Nouvelle Vague (you should be able to figure out which is which).
Boston trip, or how I “pahked my cah bah the wahtah”
Unfortunately the photos in this slideshow are in REVERSE chronological order. I haven’t figured out how to have Flickr stop doing that.
Some notes about this slideshow:
- Click on any photo to get title and comments.
- Then click on “open photo in new window” to add a comment if you’d like.
- Move the cursor to the top of the slideshow to get pause/play controls.
- Move the cursor to the bottom to get the thumbnails.
- Most of my photos on Flickr also have map information, so you can see where I took them on a map. This set’s map is available here. Go ahead! It’s fun.
Day two of getting up at 3am. Ugh. Day one was the 300km ride. On the road by 3:24. Double-ugh.
I love traveling on the company dime. This day was a $200 mileage check dangling in front of me. (Minus the $50 or so in gas.) Plus it’s a day out of the ordinary. Now, I’m not going to get all “live life to its fullest because you might die tomorrow” but I think it’s good to keep that mentality at least on deck if not at bat. (Look at that! I used a sports metaphor! Will wonders never cease?!)
My company wanted me out there to provide tech support for the big flat screen TV they rented to show a looped presentation in their booth at the Blue show. I was confident they wouldn’t have any trouble, but, whatever. If they want to pay me for a lot of driving, who am I to argue? It was a beautiful day, bright and sunny and warm. A good day for doing something out of the ordinary. (Kelly M., you need fight whatever pull your blog tagline has on your life)
After arriving around 7:30 or 8:00am, I helped my co-workers setup their booth and then headed back to one of their hotel rooms to crash. And crash I did! Four hours later I woke up feeling a little peckish and headed out in search of a sandwich. A sandwich worthy of a great day. If found it in the form of a hot sandwich from the Boston Bean Stock coffee house.
I had the camera with me all day and took lots of pictures. I always figure there may be a few worthwhile gems out of a couple hundred shots. Since it’s essentially free to take a digital picture, I snap away constantly. Even with my camera hand down at my side while walking, I’ll snap a shot at whatever may be behind me and wonder what luck will bring my way.
Sometimes I’ll get home and review the shots, and think, “damn, if I had just moved a little be this way or the other, the shot would have been MUCH better.” For example, this seagull shot. If I could have gotten the little feathered guy from a lower angle, he would have been against the bright blue sky instead of against the visually noisy buildings.
One thing I notice about my collections of photos is that there are few people in them. I’m making a conscious effort to try and get more people into my shots. Candids are interesting. I really like the three I got on this trip. Three more than I would normally get. The despair guy, the taxi hailing guy, and the back of the lunch guy.
A fun day, if not tiring. Two days later my legs were sore from all the walking. Go figure. I can ride 187 miles in relative ease (and I’m using the word ‘relative’ very loosely here) but a couple miles of walking and I’m all, “oh my muscles, oh my calves, oh I don’t want to climb the stairs at work, wah, wah, wah.” Guess I need to be like Heather and cross train more.
Hope you like the photos. Slap me some commenty goodness on the photos themselves if you do.
The Phoenix trip, day 4
Woke up. Stuffed two or three muffins (OK, four of the too-small muffins) and a couple glasses of OJ down the gullet before heading over to work. Spent all the good daylight hours bending the systems to our wills. Got hung up on something stupid… the login scripts.
See, the PC users have mapped drives that automatically mount at bootup. The new server needed the same thing, but the sample scripts (two of ‘em) we retooled off the interweb both failed. After struggling entirely too long with this problem, I gave Brian a call and he quickly pointed us in the right direction and saved the day from dragging into evening and pissing us all off. Thanks Brian! Watch your e-mail for a special thank you from the company.
By the time we finished it was pretty much sundown and I opted to skip a run, plus I was still a might tired from yesterday’s run in ridiculously dry heat. It took me about 20 hours and finally some ibuprofen to kick the dehydration headache that was clinging to me like a facehugger. All the Arizona Green Teas I sucked down did little to refill my tank. (Good thing the company has a cooler filled with drinks for just 25 cents otherwise I would have had to hit the ATM.)
When we left the office we scattered like roaches exposed to light and I thought of getting another delicious philly cheese steak sub from Corleone’s, but alas, they were closed. The nerve. Deprived of a sub. Bastards. So I drove around a little and settled on Chipotle’s for a couple hard shell tacos with chips and salsa. The tacos were good, but the salsa… meh. And the chips… holy schnikes they were salty! It was like dragging my tongue across the Utah salt flats and taking a break every couple feet to have a chip. I could feel my heart rate rising just sitting there reading my book and choking down these sorry triangular chips. I’m sorry, but if I’m going to make my heart rate accelerate, it’s going to be for a better reason than just eating raw salt—like a good morning workout or an afternoon 100 mile ride.
After being inundated by salt, I was craving something sweet. Where was that Cold Stone? Oh yeah, just around the corner. I get some sort of German sounding chocolate concoction in a chocolate dipped waffle bowl. Again… meh. Pretty good, but not good enough for me to get again. Certainly not good enough to get again for nearly eight years… like a certain Roma’s sub. Mmmm, Roma’s…
Here’s another sunset shot…
And a shot I don’t particularly like of myself running (with my monster nose, unshaved face and weak chin), but it’s all I took.
