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Bird Technology

Monday, October 30, 2006

Animal Planet :: Spy on the Wild :: Bird Technology

I've been reading a bit about Flash Video today and found this page on discovery.com featuring an Eagle that flies with 2 miniature cameras attached to it.

Click on "Mini-cam in action" to see. The videos are a bit short and choppy (i hate made-for-cable documentaries), but it's pretty awesome nonetheless.

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New Design

If you're reading this you can obviously see that i've been working on the design of the site. It's the beginning of an effort to re-organize things a bit and repurpose the site. I have some ideas that I plan on pursuing in the near future that will be reflected in the structure of the site, but I figured I would start the rollout of the new design with the blog since that's not going to require re-writing any of the copy.

I got rid of the fluid layout, which is kind of unfortunate, but fluid layouts don't really support mast-head images well and i wanted to work some of my nola pictures into the design. I also thought that having left navigation was an utter waste of space, so I'm moving the navigation up top to make the content area wide, which will support larger images. I'm all for larger images. Up until now, though, my images have all been cropped to 300px wide, so I decided to float all of the images to the right. My assumption is that this is going to make for some awkwardness in some of my older posts, especially where there will now be extraneous line breaks and things like that creating gaps between images and surrounding text. Small potatoes, though.

I should go through the site and revise the "noteworthy" list. I've also been meaning to do a few more artist profiles, which perhaps i will get to soon as well.

More to come...

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nola porch painting is done!

Monday, October 23, 2006

I finally finished my painting:

It doesn't seem like such a long time now, but it's been a month since i posted the picture of all of the colors being done. Of course, with my crappy digital camera it's impossible to get a good picture of it. The larger version is pieced together from two semi-close-ups so the detail is ok, but the colors are a little off. But it's close.

My wife is of the opinion that the door is a little boring -- though i don't know if she used the word boring. I can kinda see her point in that there's not a whole lot going on in that "column" of the painting, so to speak. My immediate defense is "that's what it looks like in reality." It's a white door! But i suppose that reality isn't always seeking to be aesthetically balanced.

I'm still kinda disappointed with a few of the colors, the greens and the yellow in particular. I wanted the yellow of the house to be a bit more subdued. It doesn't look aged at all being so bright. I also wanted the green of the plants to be a darker green, but i did the shutters first and they came out darker and less yellow than I wanted, to i had to alter the color of the foliage to counter that. Everyone seems to like the gray of the roof a lot, for some reason. I'm pretty pleased with how the blue came out, personally. It's really the only color that i chose with any kind of symbolic weight to it. I wanted it to have the look of a storm coming in the early evening, with a sky that looks like water.

I'd like to continue with the New Orleans paintings, but i'm sure i'll be hesitant to do something with so many small lines anytime soon. I kinda do regret now that i didn't do it a bit bigger, just because the thinnest lines would have been much easier to do larger-scale with a larger brush.


I'm actually pretty eager to start my next painting, which will be another Kim portrait -- one that i've wanted to do for a while now. It's going to have to be pretty big, and i'm thinking i need to do it on canvas, not on wood. Fortunately, last time i went to the art store the canvases were on sale. Unfortunately i can't afford to get one anytime soon. Either way, i have a few finishing touches to do in Illustrator anyway. I'll post a pic once i get some colors done.

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flickrd

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

I finally decided to get a flickr account, mostly because the domain i've been using for my kids' photo site, elisejeannette.com, was allowed to expire by the kind people i worked with at my previous job. thanks for the heads up!

it's for the best, though, really. it just wasn't right having a website for my kids with only elise's name in the url, was it? besides that, managing new posts was easier once i started doing it with blogger, but it still wasn't ideal, really. I don't know that flickr will be ideal, but i have to say that i'm very impressed with flickr. I mean, i've been looking at other people's pictures on flickr for a long time now and sure, it's a nice site. But apparently where flickr really shines is all of the admin tools. The UI is really phenominal.

So no more elisejeannette.com. It's kinda sad, really. I backed up the entire website to my hard-drive the other day and plan on uploading it all to this site soon. I'm sure when i do things will break all over the place and i'll have to go through it and clean stuff up. Which will probably never be done, really.

But it's a new day! (Quite literally, as it's 12:03am) Flickr it is, from here on out.

www.flickr.com/photos/jvanpelt

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Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Google Docs


This is a test post to try using Google Docs & Spreadsheets to publish to my blog. I will also insert an image!



It seems to work pretty well, though the first run of the test didn't have a title for the post. I'm going to try setting a style as a header and see if that does it. There is also a "rename" function in the File menu, although i didn't get the option to name it in the first place. We'll see where this goes.

A friend and I tried out the online collaboration, which worked pretty well, though it doesn't reflect changes in real-time. The page saves/refreshes every 60 seconds, give or take, at which time the changes are reflected. I don't know, i've been pretty skeptical about using online collaboration tools lately, just because it seems like, really, who's going to use a web-whiteboard? I mean, I know who, but it really just doesn't seem that practical. Whatever, that's a tangent.

For what it's worth, this does seem like a much better interface for posting to blogger. Blogger being a google company, i kinda hope that they adopt this interface and drop that stupid little window that they give you for creating posts.

Something else i just found... if you publish a document to your blog, then delete it within blogger, you can not republish the document to your blog, you get an error. I saved a copy of the doc and am going to post this one, assuming it'll work.

We'll see.

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Red Bean Recipe

Monday, October 09, 2006



Kim's sister asked for my red beans recipe today so I wrote it down. If you're interested, here's my "New Orleans Red Beans & Rice Recipe" as a PDF. Though I suppose technically this is just the red beans part of it. The rice recipe is on the bag, foo'. It's not particularly ingredient heavy, but that's kinda the beauty of it. Using enough Tony's usually takes care of the spiciness , but if you want it hotter just add more cayenne & black pepper. (I for one think the taste of black pepper is underrated, but I don't really think red beans should be particularly hot anyway.) And don't wait too long to add the ham--it really adds a lot to the flavor.

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Motion Tablet PC

Saturday, October 07, 2006

I got a new toy from work on Friday.



We do a lot of work for tablet PCs,
so when this one came along it went
to me. It had been dropped and the
screen broke. When it came back from
being repaired... it went to me! Yay!
It's crazy to work on. It can be a little tedious
I think, to do typical things. It's
such a different means of input--writing directly
on the screen-- that to some extent it's
almost counter-intuitive. You can't just write
into a google search box, you know. But, there
is a little writing box that pops up that you use.
It works kinda like my drawing tablet that I
got recently, where you kind of have to hover
over the screen to move the cursor. Actually
touching the pen to the screen is like clicking
with your left Mouse button. It's kind of
odd to get used to in the sense of using it as
a mouse, but it is quite intuitive for writing.

The handwriting recognition built into
the windows journal program is surprisingly
good. Granted, I gave up on writing in
script sometime around the age of 16. (It
almost seems like a bit of a colloquialism to
me.) But even my printing tends to get
a bit free-form at times. I need to
get One Note installed on here. I don't know
how One Note does with converting hand -
writing to text, but its got some nice
features that Journal is lacking.


One aggravating thing I've found is that the handwriting that I converted to text maintains the hard line breaks from the end of the "looseleaf" page. You'd think it could be smart enough to remove the line breaks on its own. Perhaps it's just a matter of finding the right settings.

Alright, I know I have to clean up this post a bit, but I think I'll go ahead and publish it for now anyway. I'll come back to it in a bit.

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