The members are as follows:

• Brendan Tominey – Guitar
• Giovanni Codignotto – Guitar <—- that’s my kid!
• Max DeGeorge – Bass
• Samantha Coppola – Vocals
• Vincent Tenaglia – Drums

Brendan is Giovanni’s friend from school. They are led by a veteran musician Artie Blaurock. Arty has been playing in bands and teaching music for decades. If you google him you’ll see he’s got a lot of experience under his belt. In fact, he was Giovanni’s music teacher at his pre-school.

There were a lot of bands playing that day and Infinity² were the closers. They rocked the house. Here is a shot of a bunch of Giovanni and Brendan’s friends from school, with Serafina as a bonus:

Here is a picture of the band after one of their practices:

Here are youtube links to each song. I got them all on video. At the end I have a link to Giovanni’s awesome solos.

Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey

Wanted Dead or Alive – Bon Jovi

Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin

Before He Cheats – Carrie Underwood

Unfortunately, the audio was cut off on this one. I guess it was good enough to trigger the DMCA hornets? However, I uploaded a copy of it to my website: http://primordia.com/upload/beforeHeCheats.mp4. It’s best to download this link, streaming is not optimized.

Beat It – Michael Jackson

And here is a special video I made that has all of Giovanni’s solos:

The band is working on their next gig. I think the experience is awesome and I’m so very proud of all the kids who played in the band. They are all so very talented. For Giovanni, I’m especially proud of his effort over the past year and how he pulled off some of those difficult solos.

Antonio’s project was called “Is this connected to  that” and it was about an electrical circuit and conductive materials. Antonio build a tester himself from instructions on the intertubes. We got a little buzzer, some alligator clips, some wire, a battery holder and a few batteries. Here is a diagram of what he made:

Antonio generated a chart of materials that conducted electricity. We also tried a few light bulbs and saw if we could make them glow. We couldn’t make the household ones glow cause those require a lot more voltage. We had a few small 3V tiny light bulbs that lit up fine. When it came time for an Ikea 12V bulb, we had to use 8 batteries in series. Here is a picture of that bulb all glowy:

That’s our unit with 8 batteries, here is the finished 3V tester with buzzer:

We also experimented with a lamp, seeing that the switch broke the circuit and removing the light bulb also broke the circuit. The cool thing was that all of this was new to Antonio so he learned a ton. I also learned that 8 batteries put together in series can create quite the sparkle show if you don’t pay attention.

Giovanni’s project saw the construction of the world’s simplest motor. Here are  the components:

This was a pretty fun project. We used neodymium magnets, which are always a lot of fun. They are also a pain in the ass cause they draw things from quite a distance and it’s not uncommon to get pinched in a sudden and painful manner. The laser tachometer was very cool. It’s rated at measuring speeds up to 100k rpm. We were able to get this motor spinning at 4900 rpm, which is pretty damn fast. We spent a lot of time eliminating friction and making sure the motor was balanced. WD-40 was our friend. Giovanni and I had a little contest to see who could get the thing spinning the fastest. We did a bunch of trials with different number of batteries.

Here was some of our raw data:

We massaged the data and were able to see these trends:

We would have ran a lot more trials to get a better statistical distribution, but getting the thing up to speed was not easy. Sometimes we could not get friction eliminated. Sometimes we expecte the batteries were getting drained. It really wasn’t easy. If I were more handy, I would have tried to build some kind of rigging that would keep things more stable, but I’m not that handy.

Until next year!

These RAW images take up a lot of space, a lot more than a standard JPEG. Images are from 10MB – 20-MB for my 16Mp camera. So, getting rid of crappy shots, the sad majority for me, is crucial to making sure I don’t chew up valuable hard drive space on sub-par photos.

I use iPhotos star ratings to manage this. All photos that are targeted for long-term savings are rated. Unrated photos are collected in a Smart Album with a simple rule, “Show all unrated photos”. I quickly go through this smart album and use the Apple keys Command-N, where N is 1 through 5. Typically, for a large number of photos, I’ll either mark photos as 2 or 3 stars in this pass. 2 basically means, “probably delete” and 3 means “probably keep.” Since I’m in a smart album, it begins to empty as I rate photos. When I’m done, the album is empty,

In a second pass, I’ll go through the most recent events and create a smart album with all photos with 3 stars and pick the photos I actually like. I’ll rate these with 4 or 5 stars.

I also try and delete bracketed or mulit-shot photos which are simply redundant. That can take more time.

Phone and iPad Synchronization

I have a few standard “Smart Albums”  that are used for synchronizing with my phone. These are albums for 4+ star photos, 5-star photos and for last 90 days. I also exported “best” photos from 2010, 2011, and 2012 and include just those photos in my 2013 album. These are synchronized on my phone too. This way, my phone has photos I thought were best from 2010 to now in addition to any photo I haven’t deleted in the past 90 days.

Deleting Photos

When it comes time to delete photos, iPhoto gets a little  finicky. I can’t move photos from the 1-2 star smart album directly to the trash. For  some reason, iPhoto thinks that’s not a valid thing to do. I can’t flag all of these photos and delete them from the Flagged folder, either. I can go through each photo individually, reveal it in the event, and delete them one by one this way. That would take too much time.

The only way I found to do this is to search for all photos and sort this view by rating. I can then select all of the 1-2 star photos from the search results view and move them to the trash.

I recently got a Sony α NEX-6 and this camera has only made things worse. It’s a small compact mirrorless camera that has a reasonably-sized APS-C sensor.

That’s short of a full-frame 35mm sensor and it lacks the fast-focus you get from a good DSLR, but mirrorless cameras are one of those disruptive technologies that I feel are likely to displace cameras that contain a mirror mechanism for exposure and focus. The camera also takes HD video, like your iPhone. But unlike your iPhone, it takes progressive 1080p video at 60 frames per second, at a decent bitrate and with low noise. The bitrate is pretty good, 28Mbps… but videophiles say  the bitrate should be a bit higher, say 35Mbps or more. From what I can see, the bitrate is fine for my needs as I don’t notice any low-bitrate artifacts. But then again, I’m not an expert. It must suck to be one of those experts cause they are always criticizing products. They seem like a really unhappy bunch.

So, I have this camera that can take decent stills and good video. I shoot in RAW, which yields rather large proprietary files. All good cameras shoot in RAW, which is just the camera’s native data for an image with no JPEG compression. I wind up converting these  RAW files into Adobe Digital Negative (DNG), which offers some lossless compression and halves the size of the files. DNG’s also work well in Photoshop, which is my primary tool for messing with the images. The video taken by the NEX-6 is in AVCHD format, which the Mac doesn’t like too much. It’s a good format in terms of file size to quality. It seems to be natively understood by the Blue-Ray spec, so you can basically copy AVCHD files onto a DVD-ROM and play them like a Blu-Ray disk. I haven’t tried it yet.

The problem with dealing with these files is there are so many of them. Particularly when you’re so obsessive like I am. The import tools are pretty primitive. I wind up copying the files by hand with little assistance by software. Unfortunately, the filesystem time differs from the shoot time. This is not a big deal until you start to get tens of thousands of files. iPhoto does a good job  on import and it organizes files by the shoot time contained in the EXIF tags. I never used iPhoto for RAW files (or DNG’s) but I tested it this weekend and it seems to work reasonably well. I may start using it. Here is how one of my DNG files appears in iPhoto:

There is no analogous media manager for AVCHD files, which are not supported by iPhoto. I would not really want the files in iPhoto anyway. iPhoto hides the photos in a special package file. The package file looks like an ordinary file, but it’s actually an elaborate directory structure where the original media exists, thumbnails exist, modified copies exist, etc. In case you didn’t know, all OS X Apps are package files. They have tons of files hidden within. The Finder abstracts this from you and presents .app files as a unique  icon that looks like a single file. I guess most of you knew this already.

Getting back to iMovie, iMovie sees all moves in an iPhoto libray as a single “event” called “iPhoto Movies”. If you have years of video clippage, clicking on that folder in iMovie means you want 10 minutes for the thumbnails to load. Ick. No, I need the video files separate in the file system. In fact, editing programs that I currently use like Adobe Premier, write a lot of extra files to the directory where the video clips reside. Imports in Premiere link to files, rather than make a copy. I am not sure how iPhoto would react to these extra files.

But remember I basically copy my AVCHD files onto my computer manually. To make matters worse, my camera starts movie filenames back at 00000.MTS each time I clear the directory. This is unlike the photo files, which maintain an increasing image count. I believe the reason for this is the directory structure maintained by the camera fits some insane spec for AVCHD/Blu-Ray file structures. It seems if you have 5 video files in this dir structure, the first one must be 00000.MTS. That’s my theory.

So I find I’m perplexed as to how I can effectively manage the video imports. I started to just manually create directories but that was so arbitrary and prone to typos. I was not happy about that. I was sent into fits of depression. I didn’t talk to anyone. I really had a hard time residing to the fact that I’d need to manually create folders like 2013/January/Massapequa Wrestling Match. To make matters worse, the file datatime stamps were wrong. They reflected the time I imported the video and not when the video was taken.

So I hacked some bash, dawg, and created a little tool called exiforg. You can find the source code on the GitHubs. This script reads the EXIF tags from the file, figures out the date the media was recorded and does two things:

• Touch the media files with the datetime stamp of recording
• Optionally moves the file into a date directory, e.g.  2013.01.14

This yields a nice structure like so:

.
├── 2012.11.29
├── 2012.12.02
├── 2012.12.07
├── 2012.12.11
├── 2012.12.13
├── 2012.12.14
├── 2012.12.20
├── 2012.12.21
├── 2012.12.22
├── 2012.12.23
├── 2012.12.24
├── 2012.12.25
├── 2012.12.29
├── 2012.12.30
├── 2012.12.31
├── 2013.01.01
├── 2013.01.05
├── 2013.01.06
├── 2013.01.09
├── 2013.01.12
└── 2013.01.13

In each directory, I have AVCHD files. If I used those files in an Adobe Premiere project, then I also have a lot of temp files. One recent addition I made was to introduce README.md files, in markdown format, which allow me to journal the story behind the  videos in that directory.

That is all I have to say about this.

Check it out!

When I got it, it was full of booze. Now it’s half-full of booze. The bottles were all very old. I  imagine each was 20-30 years old. Since Pan Am went out of business in the early 90′s, the youngest these bottles could be is 20 years. All of the whiskeys are gone now. I enjoyed them one by one and I took a picture of each. You can see these in the gallery. At some point, I plan to repopulate this with some of my favorites… like Ardbeg, Oban, Laphroaig, and others.

Sandy caused us to do a lot of things we’d rather not do and one of those was to take emergency photos of physical photographs that got wet. I know that photographs used to be born out of wetness, in a darkroom, developed in pools of chemicals. Today, I’m not so sure how those machines in CVS work but I’m sure Google can tell me if I asked. Thankfully, all of the photos were resilient to moisture. The paper was mostly waterproof. Even so, the box of photos we had smalled horrible and we needed to scan them before they dried because we feared they would stick together and be unrecoverable. A portable scanner didn’t work. Even when we tried to dry each photo, they were simply too moist to wait to dry. We had over 2000 photos to scan.

What I did was mount my digital camera on my tripod and point it directly down on the photos. You can see that here:

I had to take out one of the lights in the dining room because it was causing an intense glare in my test exposures. I used manual focus to speed up the picture taking, and I used a high aperture to give me the best chance of getting good focus. The only other adjustment I made was the exposure. I used the zebra effect to do this right as you can see in these two photos. You can also see the histogram, which is another method to help tune your exposure.

All in all, we scanned over 2000 photos this way. It was a lot of work, taking maybe 6 hours to complete. It was a lot faster than placing these on a flatbed scanner. Too bad I could not use the portable scanner, cause that would have been pretty fast, too. With the portable scanner, you just feed in photos and it draws them through.

You can see some of the photos I took in the following gallery:

There is lots of cropping and rotation work to do, but I don’t think any of that is necessary. In actuality, having a slideshow where my table-top is showing would be fine. I’d only need to crop if I was doing something special with the photo, like making a video or a print for a collage.

I would hardly call this origami. I mean, look, I had to draw eyes before you can tell I was trying to make some kind of animal. If you want to do some real origami, you can buy my friend John’s e-book.

I spent a few hours over my neighbors house last night fixing one of the more difficult problems that I’ve ever encountered. Somehow, some way, my neighbor had associated every .exe file extension with Internet Explorer. This meant that launching any program would simply open up the file download dialog and refuse to actually run the program. This was so insidious that even when I selected “run” and not “download” from the dialog, the dialog came  up recursively!

There were a small percentage of administrative/control panel apps that worked. System restore was not one of them. cmd.exe was not one of them In the end I found that I could create a new user. I made them admin, logged in, and I was in a proper environment again. I issued a system restore to a week prior and that fixed the problem.

When I got back to my house it was 1 1:15pm. My son Giovanni waited all day to watch a science show on TV with me, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. I had promised him the night before and he was very excited. But it was too late to watch the show at that point. We both had to be up early in the AM. He was really sad. And so was I.

Damn Microsoft to Hell.

I recently somehow stumbled upon this thing called a Guinea Worm… it’s this crazy parasite that people get when they drink water infected with the larvae of the worm. The good news is that our old friend Jimmy Carter has helped nearly eradicate this scourge form the Earth.

Like an idiot, I went and googled pictures of this worm. Man! Then, like a train wreck I went and googled videos. My god. Watch this documentary for a pretty complete picture. It’s not pretty.

Youtube recommend that I watch videos on human bot fly removal. What can be worse than a guinea worm? Well, nothing really, but a motherfucking bot fly is a close second.

This video opens up, “In 2009, I went on an 8 day hike with a couple of friends in the Bolivian Amazon.” With an opening like that you know how this ends. After you watch the video you’ll agree that he should have stayed home sucking down macchiatos at Starbucks. This video where people try and take it out themselves is even worse. Oh, and this one where they remove it from a little boy (warning: vertical video). It’s huge, and horrible. And here’s another one removed from a young boy. Nate had one removed. And this one is the mother of all bot fly removal videos: three huge mothers.

My friends, it gets worse. If you want more, you’re a sick and need help. But ok:

• Check out this video of an exploding chin. I warned you.
• Want to see liters of puss coming out of some guys back?
• Want to see someone popping an MRSA (staph infection boil)? This video is for you.
• Popping cysts? Bam!
• Parasite grub in the leg? I guarantee you jump.
• Worm in woman’s brain? Ewww.
• Always wanted to see a June Bug removed from someone’s ear? This is your lucky day!
• Cockroach emergency!

Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.

I have three WiFi access points in my house. One is an older AirPort express I use for the AirPlay/outdoor speakers. The other is a Time Capsule/AirPort Extreme. The AirPort Extreme one also sports a 5Ghz/N network. Finally, I have my Verizon home router which has a wireless feature.

I always figured things were not configured optimally and only recently did I do something about it.

I did three things:

• Physically reposition my AirPort Express from a floor socket where there was probably a lot of electrical interference and moved it to place on my cork board about chest level.
• Manually configured the channels both of my routers are on to make sure they were distinct and non-interfering and tried to also navigate away from neighboring networks in the vicinity of my house.
• I completely wiped away my Verizon routers config to eliminate any crazy routing rules, DNS settings, or DHCP madness I may have tweaked over  the years.

To help me see what’s going on, I searched for an iOS or Mac app which would help figure out what the situation was. I found a Mac app called WiFi Explorer I think it’s $3.99 on the Apple Mac Store. Here are some of the near graphs it produces.

You can also view signal strength, noise, and signal-to-noise ratio… but not all networks on one graph, for some reason.

And here is some tabular info that’s pretty interesting:

After all of this tuning, my WiFi signals are very strong and I have no issues maintaining a stable connection from my backyard.

This kind of activity is just up my alley, and while I complain that I can’t move, I’m really glad I did it. It was a whole lot of fun. It was made easier since we were in a group of 8 and we helped each other and stayed together. I had a lot of opportunities to rest as a result. That said, by the last few obstacles, I was dogging it. My ankles were sore since I rolled on them three times, and I had numerous bleeding wounds from barbed wire and landing wrong on balancing posts.

There were only two challenges of the 19 that I failed. One was a horizontal climb across a 30 ft. wall with only small cuts of wood to keep you up. It was like a sideways rock climb. I got to the second-to-last block before I lost my grip and fell. When you fail challenges you need to do 30 burpies. Burpies are that exercise where you start upright, go down into push-up position, and then stand back up. Sometimes you jump at the end, but we weren’t required to do that so fuck that shit. The second obstacle I failed was the javelin throw. I had perfect form, but my javelin missed it’s mark by a few feet. No second try and another 30 burpies. I was mad at myself for missing that one.

Lisa said her proudest moment was climbing up the rope to ring the bell. It was about 30 feet up and she did this like a champ. Lisa was by far the most fit among us, making most obstacles look easy. She did all the wall challenges, too. She totally rocked the Spartan.

My proudest moment was during some of the wall obstacles. The wall obstacles are sheer walls. They started at 4 feet and went up to about 8 or 9 feet. I scaled all of them and without using hand-holds or climbing up the sides. Even for the tallest ones, I just lept up and pulled myself over. I had this technique of walking up the wall so that my hands were over the top edge and my feet were right by my hands, with my butt sticking out. Then I just put a lot of pressure on my right leg as I worked my left leg over. There were a group of actual Marines doing this one with us and only 2 out of 6 were able to do what I did. Not bad for an overweight 42-year old. Hoo hoo hoo!

The most grueling obstacle for just about everyone was the barbed wire crawl. This was a 150-yard up-hill (repeat: up-hill) crawl over wet rocks and mud all under the threat real barbed wire. I can’t describe just how far this is when you have no knee protection. As I am writing this and look at my knees, all I can say is that they are a bloody mess.

As for injuries, my ankles are not so bad today. My forearms are shot. I can barely grip things. I have a 5 inch gash on my back from the barbed wife. I have a nasty scrape on my inner thigh from slipping on a post I was balancing on. Lisa and I were so banged  up we collapsed in bed at midnight. What made the evening perfect was the 2am call from one of the sleepovers. Marco was throwing up and I had to go get him.

Of all the obstacles I endured during the race, getting up and out the door to pick him up was by far  the most difficult.

What do you see in these pictures? You see a delicious single-malt scotch known as Laphroaig. I had that in London where you can find a number of other pictures of The Metropolis. The streetside paella and the random happenchance on a Spanish Tapas restaurant were extremely fortunate. You’ll find a decanter of delicious scotch at the desk of my good friend and father of the Legendary Asshole Meme. You’ll find a late-night shot of the Tribeca tavern, a place where we retired after enjoying a delicious burger at Nancy’s Whiskey Pub in Tribeca. You’ll see a bottle of my new favorite scotch known as Ardbeg. This Islay aqua vitae has a strong peaty character that I fell in love with in April at Whiskey Live. Moving from whiskey, you’ll find a few shots of the Empire Hotel, where my company held their most recent launch anniversary. Bad things happened that night. You’ll find a few photos from the Secret Science Club in Brooklyn, where one can enjoy good beer and hear a real live scientist talk about their research. We have  few pictures of a biergarten named Loreley, named after the Brauhaus in Cologne. There is a church in Cologne that the allied forces could not—or perhaps would not—bring down despite a massive bombardment of the city in the latter part of WWII. The Empire State Building stands proud in one photo and the honorable Briggs is captured holding a magical green ball before we delve into the wonderful world of crawfish at the Brooklyn Brewery.

Besides the wonderful times recorded above, this spring saw the launch of The Boondogglers Club (of America). Everything else above I beg you to google the sources, but here I give you the link on a silver platter. Myself and my esteemed boondoggler colleagues have started a Podcast where we explore midtown Manhattan in search of unique lunchtime experiences. You have to listen. It’s simply awesome. Check out the podcast and honor me with your subscription.

I already told you how Lisa and I did yardwork yesterday.That was so much fun that I figure I’d let you in on today’s adventures. Well, just one for now. The others will need to wait.

Today saw Giovanni, Marco, and I going to a local Guitar Expo. Marco was complaining a lot. Giovanni was somewhat listless. Marco was irritating me and I found it hard to describe the awesomeness of what we were seeing to Giovanni with Marco ranting about how there was nothing to do. god help me. The expo was very loud and there was a lot of stuff going on. Giovanni had no idea where to begin. I needed a solution. It was lunchtime. I took them outside to get food.A truck was parked outside the expo and they had a big sign describing how awesome there pulled pork sandwiches, lobster rolls, and clam chowder were. You had me at pulled pork sandwich. Marco got that very sandwich. I initially told him he had to share it with his brother (me) because it was way too big but then he snarfed it down before you can say Jiminy Cricket. Giovanni got some fries and fried chicken. They had beer at the expo, which was driving me nuts, but Lisa wasn’t around so I got a bottle of water. Once I verified that the wild beasts were tamed, we headed back into the expo.

Giovanni trying out distortion pedals

Giovanni has been wanting distortion effects for a while so I started talking to one vendor who had an amazing array of effects neatly arrayed at his booth. There must have been 60 different units. I explained to the guy that my son was just starting out. He asked what kind of music Giovani liked and my son replied: AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen. I swear to god light started streaming from the windows. I glowed with pride as he didn’t reply Travis McCoy or Bruno Mars. I was amazed when he went through almost all of the models and not only explained what they were about, but how he personally felt about each of them. Anyway, we could not decide on  a M78 Custom Badass ’78 Distortion, a relatively cheap intro-model for $75, or a more expensive hand-made model in the $150 price range. Obviously there were other models costing hundreds of dollars but we didn’t come expecting to buy anything. The guy offered to have us hear the difference. As the man turned to set things up, I asked Giovanni if he wanted to play. He said, “No, no, that’s ok.” We both expected the guy to play for him. When it was all set up the guy handed his Epitome / Les Paul to Giovanni and told him to go ahead. Giovanni has the same Guitar. When handed the instrument, Giovanni didn’t bat an eye. He sat down and started playing and going through each filter with the man running the booth. Eventually he settled on the Custom Badass ’78. I was super proud of my son. Giovanni payed the man with his own money. When we got home we had to install a battery since the unit didn’t come with a DC cord it could use. Instead of installing the battery for him, I handed him a screwdriver and told him to figure it out. He opened it up, installed the battery, and went downstairs to play. He was down there for hours.

We opened the pool  last week and this weekend I tested the water and added a few chemicals to get it all back in shape. I opened up our big filter and cleaned it thoroughly with a hose. I skimmed out tons of leaves that had settled at the bottom and set our robot on automatic suck-it-up for the rest. I cut away one of our trees in the back so our fig tree would get more sun. It looks like a really bad hack job and Lisa is kind of mad at me. Hopefully it won’t look so bad when that fig tree fills in that space.

My BBQ was very dirty so I took it all apart and wet/dry-vac’d the insides. I even took the burners apart, cleaned them, and replaced the cross-bars with new ones from the BBQ store. I was pretty careful to put it all back together but somehow I was left with 4 parts I can’t figure out a home for. I tested and didn’t smell gas so I think it’s good.

We found a mouse in the pool and I fished it out. Sera grabbed the tail and ran around the yard scaring her brothers with it. She’s such a brave little girl.

Sera's Mouse

Tonight, I’m catching up on e-mail and enjoying a beer brewed in NJ called Tripel Horse. It’s a decent Belgian-inspired tripel that’s bringing a nice calm to the evening.

Yesterday, all four of my kids had flag football games and the weather was miserable. Sera’s game was first and she toughed it out like a champ. All of the kids were cold but she ran with the ball and grabbed flags and seemed to have a great time. Marco, with all his superpowers, was no more than a puddle of tears. He hates being cold. He gets miserable and was useless to play. I comforted him as much as I could. It’s amazing how he can deteriorate like that when his little sister practically danced in the rain. The older two boys also played in the cold, less rain, but more wind. They lost and brought their season to 3-1, I think. Today, all of the kids had games again but the weather was glorious. Marco was on top of his game and did wonderfully. Antonio and Giovanni played really well too and won their game. I was proud of them all. At the end of the game the coaches started arguing over the final play of the game and things got ugly. I think the game was actually stricken from the record as a result. Crazy town.

Lisa and I signed up for some kind of obstacle course race in June so I started to train. I’ve been running for the past two weeks, about 5 days a week running about 1.5 miles. Easy. My pace is as slow as it ever was, about 12 minutes per mile. I bumped up my run to 3 miles today and I felt good. Kids are off the week after Easter so I’m looking forward to taking a day or two off work and spending some time with them.

Can’t wait for summer, opening the pool, grilling food and drinking some good summer beer.

Mr. Beer Fermenter

That same night we also made root beer which shares the same basic process as making beer. You create a sugary concoction and then add yeast. There are a few differences which make the end-products different. First, the yeast is different. For root beer we used champagne/wine yeast and in real beer we used top-fermenting ale yeast. Second, fermentation has two by-products, carbon dioxide and ethanol. For the root beer, we added a yeast solution to the main mixture and then bottled right away allowing only a few days at room temperature for fermentation before we put the bottles in the fridge. Carbon dioxide will be produced in the bottle which will carbonate the root beer. For the real beer, we allowed a lot more time for ferment at room temperature (2 weeks) which is where the main ethanol component will come from. Carbon dioxide is produced here as well, but the fermenter breathes so this is vented out.

When we bottled  the beer, we added a little added sugar to wake up the yeast and have them produce a bit more ethanol and cabon-dioxide. As mentioned before, the closed environment is what carbonates the beer.

Yesterday morning, I took one bottle from the basement and put it in the fridge so I could try it  out. I should really let another week or two of conditioning but I was impatient and curious. Plus, my cousin was coming over and he was excited about it too. Here is a picture of our ale, named by my friend Tom Becker who came over last week to help me bottle. It’s called The Andromeda Strain Pale Ale and it had a wonderful head:

The Andromeda Strain Pale Ale

The beer was good. It wasn’t sweet and it was well carbonated. It had a clean taste and a complex head (as opposed to a uniform soda-foam). The style itself wasn’t my ideal style. It tasted like a good MGD or maybe a Heineken. It’s been a while since I had a non-hoppy bear or a non Belgium beer so I had trouble identifying something it tasted like. The malt extract I used had the label “California Pale Ale” but I must have done something wrong since it didn’t taste like an Anchor Steam or Sierra Nevada. LOL.

I went and ordered the IPA kit ’cause although the extract I used had hops in the ingredients, I could not detect them in the flavor. The IPA kit comes with two cans of the malt extract and will make 4 gallons in two batches. With shipping, it cost me $27. 4 gallons is about two cases of beer so doing it in this way is a bit of a bargain and a bit more fun than a trip to the beverage store.

Of course, at some point I want to make beer from scratch. This is where I perform the mashing myself from dry grains and create wort, the sugary substance that I pour into my fermenter. Mashing is where you steep the grains in warm water and convert their latent starches into sugars which is the food for the yeast. Otherwise the process is identical to the simpler process I used to create The Andromeda Strain.

Right now, I have a second batch of Andromeda fermenting. Next weekend I’ll bottle and hopefully by that time I’ll get the IPA kit and can try that. It seems like just about every one of my friends is curious about this and making beer is a great excuse to have friends over. I can’t wait to be drinking homebrew the next time I’m making homebrew.

I guess I’m just biding time until the Walking Dead on AMC comes back online. Brian at work sent me a link today to the first three minutes of the first episode of the winter/spring season.

I have this idea for a story in my head and while it’stewing, I figure I’ll make sure I’m at least well read on the topic.

I took that picture, but I found a video with some good video footage of the game boy up close. The kids had a nice time in the city. Here is a shot of them sitting in front of the tree:

We also spent some time in Bryant Park on the way back and checked out the outdoor village they have. They have a pretty large ice rink there, but we were short for time as the day was drawing to a close so no-one put skates on.

Sports still dominates our time. Wrestling started but Marco go a bit burned out so we pulled him cause he was getting pretty stressed out about it. Giovanni joined wrestling and is learning it all from scratch. Giovanni hopes to wrestle in one tournament at the end of the season so we hope he does that. Antonio and Marco are doing basketball, which they  love. Antonio is getting really good, regularly scoring each game. Marco has been  in the clinic since first grade and now that he’s in 3rd grade they are starting to play games. He loves basketball as well and is quite the dribbler.

Lisa and I got Giovanni guitar lessons for Christmas and he’s been at 4 lessons so far. The instructor is really great and Giovanni is learning the fourth string right now. He’s doing great and practicing all of the time for fun. When I was his age I took lessons at the same place, it’s been there that long. Only after the 2nd or 3rd lesson, the teacher saw I wasn’t practicing and called me out. I quit right after that.

So, good for Giovanni.

Yesterday, I installed a foosball table in the basement. We’ve played a ton of games and loving the table. My cousin literally gave it to me and we’re so grateful. It came with some extra pieces, which was a good thing since one of the foosmen was broken. Here is a shot of the table in action:

Outlook Archive 2000.pst – 11,921 KB
Outlook Archive 2001.pst – 532,721 KB
Outlook Archive 2002.pst – 1,218,193 KB
Outlook Archive 2003.pst – 631,921 KB
Outlook Archive 2004.pst – 799,817 KB
Outlook Archive 2005.pst – 889,345 KB
Outlook Archive 2006.pst – 1,017,065 KB
Outlook Archive 2007.pst – 1,412,129 KB
Outlook Archive 2008.pst – 1,904,657 KB
Outlook Archive 2009.pst – 3,220,297 KB
Outlook Archive 2010.pst – 5,073,353 KB
Outlook Archive 2011.pst – 3,666,449 KB

I also have a 2010 Alerts folder… mostly automated e-mails I had on for a while, weighing in at 2,694,289.

How’s that for New Year Minutiae!

Football has taken the majority of our time. With two kids on two teams, we had 2 practices a week and 2 games a weekend. Our schedule more or less revolved around whether we had a game that day. Marco’s team had a very good record, 7-2 and made it into Tier 2 playoffs. Playoffs are divided into divisions based on your record and run through 2 rounds + a superbowl final. The top division, Tier 1, has the best 8 teams in it. Tier 2 has the second 8, etc. Marco’s team lost their first playoff game and his season is over. Today, Antonio plays in his Round 2 game. His team’s record as not as good, 3-5-1, and his team made it into Tier 4 playoffs. I feel they had a rough schedule and should have been in Tier 3. We’ll see if I’m right if they crush today’s team like they crushed Glen Cove 31-0 last week and they go on to win the Super Bowl.

Tailgating during the games has been a good time. Often there will be a string of home games so the parents will stay and watch other games and eat BBQ and have coffee or beer. Antonio and Marco always get together with a group of friends and play football off the sidelines while the other brother is playing. Most of the games have been on beautiful days, but the Sunday after our October winter storm was brutally cold and Marco had to stop playing because he complained he couldn’t move his fingers.

Our friends Tom and Gigi had a great BBQ in October, sporting a fantastic selection of beer and food. I brought over a 6-pack of Founders Red’s Rye and Tom had the Breakfast Stout for me to try (and love). A bunch of the kids and I went to the local schoolyard and played football for an hour to burn off the turkey deep fried in peanut oil. Desserts were out of this world.

I attended Whiskey Fest in New York with one of my friends and The Long Island Beer Festival in Nassau Coliseum with my cousin. Both events saw us having a very good time. Whiskey Fest had an amazing selection of whiskey and other spirits and top-grade food and canapés. Beer fest had hundreds of beers on tap by local, regional, and national brewers and bratwurst and pretzels. Beer fest is held every 6 months and I vow to get a larger crew together in the Spring. The more the merrier.

Lisa has been doing 5k runs almost every weekend this fall. One of the more interesting runs was the Merrell Down and Dirty run. You could better describe this run as an obstacle course with mud. It’s a 5k “mud” run where they have you jumping over walls, climbing ropes and surfaces, and swimming through an actual mud pit. She had a great time. This was on Marco’s Birthday and Marco had a football game so I wasn’t there to take any pictures. Damn!

I’ll save my adventures in recording and editing hours and hours of video related to football for another post. Needless to say, I’m running low on drive space again!

Check it out:

by Nick

Hers are still drying so I’ll post those when I can safely scan them without mucking up the scanner.

iMovie has a green screen feature which wasn’t working out so well against our semi-green walls. So, Antonio ordered a green screen and paid for it with his own money. It took about a week and finally arrived the other day. I didn’t expect such great results. I mean, the lighting was crude and the sheet came terribly folded. It seemed like the video would look simply terrible. Below is a video of his first test using the wonderful sheet of green. And by wonderful, I mean holy shit it works so well!

NO BE CHICKEN

CHICKEN LIVE IN CAGE. NO CAN HAVE PERSONALITY INSIDE CAGE.

LAST STEP IS SMASH CAGE, LIGHT BARN ON FIRE.

DO THAT, YOU WIN.

Via http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/09/minimum-viable-personality.html

Marco and Antonio are doing the Long Island Broncos again this year and each are having a ball. Last year they were rookies but this year they are both stronger and more confident. Each has been having pretty good game time and both are playing running back this year. They’re both on the small side, but both very quick so that position is a good fit for them.

And my oldest is starting to work his way into athletics which I’m thrilled about. Giovanni was never much into sports. But this year, things have changed. This past Spring he did track and field and this fall he’s doing flag football. He’s on a team with all his friends from school and he’s having a great time. Lisa and I are so happy for him.

And on the tech side of things…

I’m video taping every game and am starting to run out of disk and backup space again. Tonight, I’m spending some time going through some old footage and compressing it from 1080i/25Mbps to a more modest 720p/123Kbps. That’s a 200x space savings and the quality difference is minimal for every day viewing. If I want to use the footage in a second video, quality will degrade further but this is a sacrifice I need to make right now.

I maintain 2TB of drive space and 2TB of backup space. At some point, I’ll need to double this to 4TB/4TB but to do this, I need to start thinking about RAID devices like a Drobo or Cisco array. My budget can’t handle that right now so I’ll just need to compress things for now.

I hope you find this post useful for helping to manage your growing iPhoto and iMovie libraries. If you have your own techniques, I’d love to hear them.

iPhoto and iMovie take a long time to load

For some reason, iPhoto and iMovie are very sensitive to how big your library is. Very sensitive.

iMovie in particular has a nasty habit of looking through all of your events and making sure they are all “optimized” when it starts up. Having a big library makes this very slow, particularly for certain kinds of videos like 3g phone videos iMovie doesn’t like to deal with. The solution here is to remove the content from the UI so it’s not scanned.

One way to accomplish this is to simply delete the event. Create a project, make a movie, export it to iTunes, and delete the event. If you delete the clips, though, you may as well delete the project that used the footage because it’s useless. If you’re like me, you like to keep around the original clips so you can make multiple movies from a single event. I wish I could purge like this, my data would be a lot easier to manage.

What I did to solve this problem without losing the original clips was to move all of my events to a “special” folder. By “special” I mean a folder not managed by iMovie. Then, I created symlinks into the standard ~/Movies/iMovie Events folder and iMovie Events folders at the root of each hard drive. These folders is where iMovie looks for events. This allows me to instantly filter what iMovie can see without moving gigs and gigs around my hard drive.

lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    58 Jun  5 18:06 Antonio Math Bee Grade 5 -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/Antonio Math Bee Grade 5
drwxr-xr-x  157 nic  staff  5338 Sep 11 23:03 Broncos 2011 Week 1
drwxr-xr-x   44 nic  staff  1496 Jul 23 09:57 July 2011
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    44 Jun 21 16:22 June 2011 -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/June 2011a
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    44 Jun 21 08:55 March 2011 -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/March 2011
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    41 Jun  5 18:06 Ohio TC -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/Ohio TC
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    45 Jun 21 08:54 Shananigans -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/Shananigans
drwxr-xr-x   24 nic  staff   816 Sep 11 23:03 The Fight
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    44 Jun 21 16:25 Track 2011 -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/Track 2011

The entries with -> after them are symlinks and the path to the right is the actual location of the clip directories. iMovie doesn’t know the difference so it just works. Notice how some events are not symlinked. This is because iMovie by default writes real directories. It would be great if iMovie used symlinks, more on this soon.

To create symlinks, move to the directory where you want the symlink and type this at the Terminal:

ln -s /path/to/original/file

Time Machine backups are a bit of a problem, though. By default, the movies are imported into ~/Movies/iMovie Events and iMovie Events folders at the root of each hard drive. These obviously aren’t symlinked as I mentioned. So, when I have accumulated enough Events that I want to start hiding some, I’ll need to physically move these to my special folder. Not such a big deal, but this kind of move prompts Time Machine to backup the files in the new location again. This was a big problem since my backup drive is not much larger than my regular storage. I had to wipe the backup and backup clean to avoid out of backup space warnings.

As I mentioned earlier, this whole mess of managing movies would be best solved by a future version of iMovie and not by hacking the file system. For instance, it would be nice for iMovie to facilitate hiding events and projects from the main UI so the main UI doesn’t spend so much time accessing these older events.

Clicking around iMovie cases a lot of access, so the UI is largely unresponsive in many cases

This is a ridiculous feature, IMHO. The point of the feature is you can click on a project name in the browser and play the project without actually opening the project. The problem is that to move a project into a folder, you need to first click on it. This is an EPIC FAIL in UI as clicking causes enormous delays while the preview feature is launched.

The “iPhoto Videos” event just gets bigger and bigger and takes longer and longer to load

Most cameras can take pictures and video. iPhoto allows you to import videos taken on your camera and places them in events. This is not such a bad thing. What’s bad is that the videos all funnel into a single event in iMovie called “iPhoto Videos”. Clicking on “iPhoto Videos” causes iMovie to load previews of every video in your entire iPhoto library and as your library grows, so does your wait time.

It would be better, IMHO, to have the iPhoto Videos folder expand and show you the events where your movies lay. This would make things much faster. Since this isn’t the way it works, I have banned myself from importing videos into iPhoto. This is kind of a pain as I need to introduce a second step when grabbing content off my camera. I use the Image Capture application to grab the videos as a first step and drop them onto my hard drive. Then, I drag the videos into iMovie. Finally, I import the rest of the pictures into iPhoto.

Meh.

Moving clips from event to event takes forever, a lot longer than manually moving the underlying files

It’s possible that this problem is specific to my system. At least the crashing part. Yes, in many cases moves never finish and eventually result in a crash. Your milage may vary. Moving clips is generally a complex operation since I believe all projects referencing the clips are scanned and updated with the new location if necessary. The net effect is that moving clips from event to event is massively time consuming. Again, this is a basic problem that can probably be solved behind the scenes with symlinks or pointers to clips somehow. Moving clips on the same hard drive should be more or less instantaneous.

Still, I try to move clips often to make sure Events aren’t too large and clicking on a event doesn’t need to scan too many clips.

Projects can easily lose access to the clips they use if you go mucking around with moving events

In the original iMovie HD, clips were stored internally in the movie project file (a package) and things were very reliable. The advantage to the new UI, of course, is more flexibility. You can use event footage in more than one project. If you use the symlink technique I spoke about earlier, you may start getting these kinds of errors when referencing clips that have no symlinks from projects. All you need to do is create new symlinks as described above.

iPhoto slows to a crawl

iPhoto performance began to get intolerable when my library started to exceed 50GB or so. At my library’s peak, it was almost 90GB, over 30k photos, and 10 years of events. I am sure this is not large by professional standards, but it’s plenty too large for iPhoto to deal with.

The easiest way to bring sanity to performance is to simply create a second iPhoto library: divide and conquer. This is easy as all you need to do is to a) close iPhoto, b) rename the default library, and c) restart iPhoto. When you do this, a new library will be created automatically for you. You can get the old library back by clicking on it in the finder. Once you do that, the library you clicked on will be the default o ne. So, to get the new library back, you need to exit iPhoto and double-clic on the new library.

One caveat to this is that you lose your Faces database. But I do not use that feature.

There are some good iPhoto library managers out there but IMHO, this is the kind of thing that should be built into iPhoto. Or, better yet, Apple could spend time optimizing iPhoto and make this whole technique unnecessary. After all, Google does fine with Picasa.

Conclusion

I’ll conclude with a bunch of tips and links you may find useful:

• Other than creating symlinks, don’t muck with event or project folders in the finder or the terminal. The names of the event and project folders is essential to keeping projects properly linked to the underlying clips.
• You can rebuild your iPhoto library, thumbnail caches, etc., by holding down the Command and Option keys on the keyboard after launching iPhoto before the main window shows up. IMHO, this is stupid. These features should be available via preferences. Perhaps they can fuck things up for the user so Apple would rather they be hidden. Meh.

Well, I was right as the actor playing the drill seargent was Clancy Brown and he played all of those voice roles and a ton more… in addition to countless TV and movie roles. Recall he was the Kurgan in the original Highlander movie?

If you haven’t seen Phineas and Pherb, I highly recommend you introduce your kids to it.

The basic technique involves two things: encoding your image in base64 format and inlining the resulting string into your img tag. Here is an example:

<img src="data:image/png;base64,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">

The tag’s src=”data:…” bit is called the Data URI scheme and has been around for a while and is now implemented in most browsers.

The encoding bit is easy and can be done in most frameworks. I spend a lot of time in grails so to do this in groovy you just do this:

f = new File("tcsmall.png")
b = f.readBytes()
b.encodeBase64().toString()

This approach has some overhead. Base64 encoding only uses 62 or 64 characters of a possible 256 in a byte so overall bytes going over the wire will be more. You would normally only use this for very small images.

For the life of me, I don’t know why browsers don’t use this technique when you save web pages locally. My gut says loading the base64 encoded versions from disk is negligible. If browsers used this, they could save an entire image-rich web page into a single html page. Instead, what browsers do is they write a single html file and all image /css resources in a directory alongside the html. References to images are all then re-pointed to the files in this directory. Yuck. Maybe browsers do this specifically so you can have the images as files for easy access. Who knows.

Anyway, I see some browsers (like Chrome) use this feature for things like “file/folder” icons when viewing ftp sites. Unless the browser is using OS native calls to render these directly, it needs to do something if it renders html to display this kind of interface. In the case of Chrome, it uses data uri’s and plain html to show a ftp user interface. I suppose a browser could reference files on your local hard drive, but seeing links in “view source” like: file:///C:/Users/ncodignotto/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/Application/icons/folder.png, well, that shit just seems wrong.

Moving all possible projectiles into my garage was just the start. I emptied my pool a few inches and left the evacuation hose out. If the pool floods, I may be able to have someone turn on the pump to empty it a bit more. I secured my BBQ to our jungle gym. I might even secure the jungle gym to the trees in my backyard. I have a special pump that activates every 60 seconds and turns off after a few seconds if it detects no water. It wasn’t set up right so I set it up properly and ran the hose away from my house. If a tree falls on my house or we lose power then there is not much I can do. Flooding from the excessive rain is my main concern and with the pump set up, there is little more I can do.

The goods news is my mom is going to ride out the storm in my house while I’m away. Her house is more or less in the flood zone so it’s smart to be out of there so you don’t have to evacuate during the storm.

I wish all my NY friends luck this weekend.

In the meantime, I figured I’d try something new. While on a boat trip with my brothers and a few friends, my brother Tom’s friend Ken was talking about Judo. He said it would be an excellent martial art for Marco since if can compliment wrestling rather well. I was intrigued as well so I figure I’d take a couple classes myself and bring Marco in once I’d gotten familiar with the school. As it turns out, Marco has a very busy calendar since Football is keeping him pretty busy, and I’ve only been able to get him to one class. Sera and Antonio also took a class. Everyone liked it and I’m sure I’ll have them al-l going once a week once school starts.

As for me, I’m pretty hooked. Judo is taught on some days and Brazillian Jiu Jitsu on other days. The classes are far more brutal than I’m used to. I’ve been choked, stretched, and contorted in ways I didn’t know were possible. The classes are all over an hour and a half  and I typically stay for almost two hours for open mat. All of the technique is totally new and foreign to me. Its harder. It hurts. The other students are all strong and experienced and I’m basically getting my ass kicked ten times over.

But it’s a lot of fun and I’ve been feeling my flexibility come back and feeling my strength come back. For the past two years, I’ve been doing these crazy triathlons and while the training definitely helped improve my stamina, the training is not something I love to do. It’s not something I look forward to. Right now, I look forward to these classes and  they seem like the right thing for me to be doing right now.

To relieve ourselves, we peed in a canister about the size of a plastic pretzel barrel. The canister was, by the way, actually a plastic pretzel barrel. We had to do this because the boats that were parked around us were rather close. So we basically got down low, did what we needed to do into the plastic pretzel barrel, and dumped the yellow contents overboard. To be nice, we would wash out the canister (you remember, the plastic pretzel barrel) with sea water. When we did that, we noticed a wonderful glow that happened when we disturbed the water.

What was this?

We were fascinated. So, we went to the back of the boat and began to stir up the water by hand. What we found was a billion billion jelly creatures that glowed when you disturbed them. It was amazing. I thought at first they were jellyfish, but then we caught one in our hands and it didn’t sting. Recall why we were all peeing and you can imagine how we were seeing double rainbows in the water with these little fucking jellies.

Soon after, a group of sea birds (maybe swans) came by to greet us. They waddled along and just started at our boat, floating and waiting patiently. Now, I know you’re not supposed to feed these cute guys (they are actually kind of big and scary-looking) but I wanted to do it anyway. My cousin was like, NO DUDE DON’T DO THAT. I was like, LETS SEE WHAT HAPPENS MAN?! Then he went onto say how the goose would come on board and wreak havok. I can remember wanting to feed them more than ever after hearing that. In the end, it was toward the end of the night and we had EATEN EVERY BIT OF FOOD ON THE BOAT. So there was none left for the geese.

When we got back to Tom’s dock, we ordered a pizza and hung out for a while. We had a lot of laughs that night.