Caffeine

Day three of no caffeine. You can call me grumpy. I'm sporting a dull headache but otherwise not too bad.

The Princess Academy

Last night the kids and I finished off Shannon Hale's The Princess Academy. This time my oldest daughter was the one who enjoyed the story the most. She started Kindergarten this year, so a book about going off to school and having a series of adventures was absolutely perfect. Over the past few weeks they even started drawing wintery scenes and snow princesses. And while it was fun for me to read a book I hadn't already read it wasn't quite as much fun as The Hobbit, but overall still a fun read.

My favorite Dad moment was when we started the story and the girls peppered me with question after question. Who's Miri? What's Linder? Goats? On and on. I think we made it through only a couple pages that first night, they were so curious about the new story.

Panic on CoreImage

As a follow up to a note I wrote about CoreImage back in March, it was funny to hear Panic's take on CoreImage in their interview on Cocoa Radio. CoreImage is Apple's new image manipulation framework shipping with Tiger for developers. I tried to capture the jist of the conversation off of the interview:

Panic: I keep expecting to see a really awesome Cocoa alternative to Photoshop and I'm surprised something like that hasn't happened yet ya know, on the Windows plantform you have PaintShopPro and all these viable alternatives to Photoshop. Nothing really exists on the Mac.
Anyway, I'm getting off on a different topic.

Blake Burris: Well, that's a really good point because of CoreImage ...

Panic: It's totally true. Then again it comes back to sort of we sort of occasionally suffer from Apple new technology paranoia. Which is you see something like CoreImage, that's totally awesome! You could totally make a totally awesome Photoshop.

But why is that there?

Why did they add that?

Maybe they're [Apple] making a totally awesome alternative to Photoshop.

The interview was before Aperture shipped, so they did indeed read the development landscape correctly. Not that Aperture was a totally awesome alternative to Photoshop, but that perhaps it really wasn't the best time to start working on a new product in the photo space.

Links:

1. Panic on Cocoa Radio.
2. Panic website.
3. CoreImage my first blush impression.
4. Aperture, Apple's pro post-production tool for photographers.

San Francisco Grand Prix No More

I wonder if we're seeing still more effects of Lance Armstrong's retirement on cycling here in the US. The San Francisco Grand Prix was originally created as a victory lap for Lance. While they don't mention his retirement as a cause for the 2006 cancelation in this article, certainly landing sponsorships for the race must have become a lot harder without him. Couple that with the Board of Supervisors trouble and it must have become nearly impossible. It's really too bad because that race did a lot of good things for cycling in Northern California. Small local teams like Jelly Belly and Webcor could point to televised race coverage and say with a straight face to their sponsors, here is a return on your dollar.

Links

1. Chauner pulls plug on `06 SFGP, VeloNews.
2. San Francisco Grand Prix, my other Lance effect note.
3. Jelly Belly Pro Cycling Team.
4. Webcor Pro Cycling Team.

Drunk Starfish

Is that, or is that not a drunk starfish on my kid's shampoo bottle?!? And is it drinking a martini?

Blended vs. Unblended Wine

Photo by Gerson Goldberg.

Recently I had the chance to drink a couple glasses of a really excellent 2001 Merlot that my friend Gerson poured with dinner. It was a bottle his boss Bob Riccomini had hand made. Wine making is apparently a "hobby" of Bob's if you can call acquiring a grape crusher a hobby and still keep a straight face, then a hobby it is.

But the reason I mention this, those couple glasses really drove home for me the meaning of "blend". My admittedly limited winery tour education did manage to barely register with me that most wines are really a blend of grapes. But what does that mean exactly? Turns out, I had to drink unblended wine to really get it. It was fun. If you get the chance to try an unblended wine, definitely do.

My thanks to G and Bob.

Video Message Board

Originally uploaded by Velo Steve.

My friend Steve and I have been bouncing around the idea for doing a Hellyer Velodrome video podcast for next year's Friday night series. For those that don't know, a velodrome is a track for bicycle racing. At the turn of the century, track racing was one of this country's most popular sports! And there's all this great bike racing going on in South San Jose every Friday night during the summer, and only a few people get to enjoy it.

The concept is basic, run around with a couple digital camcorders, pull it together in iMovie and post. The hard part, and the part that would really make the project is a good commentator(s) for the action. Who could do it week in, week out? That got us thinking. Wouldn't it be neat if anyone could contribute a "track" to the video. So say, a couple junior racers (under 18) could sit down and record an audio track and upload it, and we would somehow make that an option you could select on the site, while watching the video. Sort of along the lines of having different tracks on a DVD. You can watch Star Wars, and listen to the usual sounds. Or you can watch Star Wars and listen to George Lucas tell you about every scene.

Which I think is a really cool idea. The only problem, almost no one records audio.

So then we started thinking about message boards and, well, pop-up video. Remember pop-up video? It was MTV, or VH1, one of those. While showing a music video and these pretty darn funny factoid balloons would pop up (and make a pop sound while doing it) containing some factoid about the scene in the video being viewed.

So what if we had a message board, and anyone could post a message and tag it to some offset in the video. So I could post, "That's Jim jumping off the front there" and tag it to, 10:30.2 and then our (I'm using the royal our) software would cause the message to pop 10 min 30.2 sec in. In other words, a video message board.

How would you build a video message board?

Links:

1. Hellyer Velodrome
2. Junior Velo, Steve's junior track racing blog.

The Hobbit

Last night I finished reading J.R.R. Tolkien's, The Hobbit to my two older daughters, one five and one almost three. We did a few pages each night as a bed-time story. My personal favorite Dad moment, no big surprise, was the part when Bilbo found the ring and was riddling with Gollum down in the bowels of the goblin caves. As I was reading the girls were rapt with attention (something that almost never happens), and two sets of eyes peeked out at me from under blankets they had pulled up, so they almost completely covered them. Until finally Bilbo jumped over Gollum and escaped, and the two girls drifted off to sleep.

Now all I have to say is "What's in my pocket?" and the two girls will shout back at me, "THE RING!" And if I then ask, "And what happens if I put on the ring?" I'll get back, "You'll turn INVISIBLE!" Such a fun book.

Deer In Headlights, No Really!

I've been playing around with the Yahoo! Maps Beta a bit. This live traffic report cracked me up ... would that deer be acting like a deer caught in headlights?

Links:
1. Yahoo! Maps Beta