To Brians House

This, is trick! I mounted the Cube onto my tripod using the new mount. I then recorded a couple of minutes of fixed raw video of the back forty. The wide angle view of the Cube captured my nephews possible new acquisition off to the right, which you can’t see here.

I then used my video editor to pan the video to the right so you can see the house.

Afterward I whipped up some steak chili.

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Categorized as House

Hay

There’s a lot of hay stacked up around here in the Fall. Today I was coming back from dropping Jake off by the Big Holes and paused to enjoy the majesty of it all. If you look close you can see that the wetlands surrounding the fields are critical to the process, and quite beautiful. Click the photo below for more.

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Categorized as The Valley

Lug Whiskers

Winter driving is right around the corner in our neck of the woods, and sometimes the simplest things can be transformed into art when thrust against the elements.

Here’s my rear wheels at the end of a shift, a couple of winters back…

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Categorized as The Bus

Fall Form

I managed to grab a few shots around the Valley today, in between pickups. I never get tired of the views that Fall has to offer here every year but I guess I do get a bit tired from driving in what follows… Click below for a few photos.

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Categorized as The Valley

Brians Pad

I ran into my nephew Brian and his woman Andrea at the Gateway Chevron this morning. A price has been agreed on and the house next door to us may soon become part of the family. It’s a great place and more photos will most certainly follow…

SlideShow

btw: Those are my shoes by the grate in the first shot since I’m the only one that respects hardwood floors in this family. ;-)

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Categorized as Family

Cube Update

I got an email this morning from a Polaroid technician named Shaquan. Hmm, I thought they had the day off today? The tech was friendly, had read my review of the Cube and thought they could help with my issues. Here’s the portion of the email that made my jaw drop:

We've just received an update from our manufacturers that state some microSD card formats may not be compatible with the CUBE, or other common action line cameras. The reason I bring this up is because people have been having issues with SanDisk Ultra cards and incompatibility.

Why me tech Lord, why me? Regular readers will recall that I was dissatisfied with the class 4 Micro-SD card that came with the Cube so two weeks ago I picked up a high quality class 10 card from Walmart during a trip to Rexburg. Of all the cards I could have picked, I chose a (wait for it… :-) 16GB Class 10 SanDisk Ultra Plus.

So the one second video issue was not with the Cube, but with the card. Shaquan suggested that I format the card, which I just did, a full format not the quick and dirty.

I’ve taken a test video and it came out fine so I’ll run with the SanDisk for a bit and see what happens. As to the other issue in the case of the screaming cube, I’ve put a bug in Polaroids ear for a firmware update.

Update: The one second video bug is still there. Sigh… I guess I should head back to Washington and dig my GoPro out of the ocean and rescue the card from it, or buy another. Come on Polaroid, recommend one!

In the meantime, my Cube tripod mount arrived. I like!

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Categorized as Cameras

Noname

I installed Autodesk Sketchbook on my Nexus 10 and then spent a few hours seconds creating this little guy with my index finger. (btw: his name is Noname).

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Categorized as Paintings

Proud Dad

I’m a man who’s lived a full life, seen a lot of things, made a lot of mistakes and had a few successes along the way. Somehow, I have landed standing tall in a small community surrounded by beautiful mountains and really nice people.

Wow, you never know how your life is going to turn out. I remember in my twenties I never thought I’d make thirty. After that I looked past the year 2000 apocalypse and saw the end of the world with me as a cause, and not in it. (explanation: I was one of the programmers that caused the y2k bug…)

I landed south of Seattle raising a young man named Riley, with rules that involved no spanking and no profanity. He shared a passion for the trumpet and I bought him one paying off a monthly credit charge from a friend over three years.

I told him the story of how I got on my bicycle one Friday night as a junior high kid in a small Southern California town and rode to a big auditorium where I performed a trumpet solo that bounced off the walls and brought the house down. The problem was, my family never bothered to attend that night and I rode my bike home with a heavy broken heart.

I made every one of Riley’s events and never spanked him once. He is now a 27 year old auto body expert in Kent, WA, into his second home, owns a vintage Camero, and has a custom pool stick.

Me, a proud dad and still rocking on!

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Categorized as Family

Bad Cube

Man, I sure miss my GoPro. Sigh… My ongoing saga with the cheap little Polaroid Cube continues. From a delayed delivery, to audio issues on my very sweet and current Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit system, and now it goes crazy on me.

Photojojo is the exclusive distributor for this product. Polaroid invents the thing and then lets them market it in their cutesy little way. The problem is, when issues arise, you’re dealing with the distributor and not the creator.

Tonight I turned the cube on by holding down the button for three seconds. Next, I pressed the button twice to start video recording. After shooting about 10 seconds of video I pressed the button twice to stop it. Oops, maybe I should have just pressed it once! Apparently I started a video recording on top of a video recording and the damn thing went tits up! Are you kidding me?

There is no way to reset it or power it down since there is no access to the battery. It is now emitting a solid obnoxious high pitched sound and sitting out on a window sill in my garage so I don’t have to hear it.

The whole experience is just leaving a bad taste in my mouth and I’m about to bail and send this thing back. If I heard directly from Polaroid support I would re-consider, but I doubt it. Here’s the arrival and some [video], [video].

Update: Steph brought it back in last night when it finally stopped screaming. I just plugged it in this morning and found that it had reset itself back to normal. I also saw a familiar sight in it’s photos folder, a one second 1920×1080 video with a length of 1,304KB, while the video I shot preceding the crash was about 10 seconds. This is not the first time I’ve seen one second videos identical to this occur with this device! The Cube has some major issues.

My buddy Christina from Photojojo, who’s been really nice and very helpful through this whole ordeal wrote me last night after viewing this post:

Hey Jim, That is wild, and we're not sure why the Cubes are beeping like that. I've been in touch with Polaroid. Here is their e-mail CSPolaroid@camarketingusa.com.

She also offered a full refund, but wait! That email implies I’m not the only one with issues. Anyway, I fired off an email to Polaroid support last night, and thankfully they got right back to me, sort of:

Please be advised in observance of the Succos holiday, our office will be closing at 6:00 pm on Wednesday October 8th and will remain closed through Sunday October 12th. We will reopen for normal business hours on Monday October 13th. All emails will be answered when we return.

Really?

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Categorized as Cameras

Epidemic

There’s an epidemic sweeping through our small community, I call it Teton Valley hola, like in hello, you’re sick. A lot of people have caught this bug, including yours truly. It’s an achy painy, snot dripping, chest congested illness.

I can’t prove it but I think Tvhola started with Karla, the convenience store maven at Basin Travel. She’s been hacking and wheezing for two weeks now, all the while tossing currency back and forth among her devoted patrons. I heard a rumor that she ventured out of the valley shortly before that, down to Rexburg!

btw: here’s that Blood Moon setting over Huntsman Springs this morning:

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Categorized as The Valley

Eclipse

The Blood Moon made its appearance high in the Driggs sky this morning and I was up to shoot it. I’d been watching the moons light shine into our bedroom through half-awake eyes and a little after 0400 it started fading.

I went out to the front porch, mounted my camera on the tripod, zoomed in and began recording. I let it run for twelve minutes while I made my coffee then my video editor stripped out the sound of the creek, and speeded it up.

It’s a very cool video and I recommend you give it a watch. There are some dark artifacts passing over the moon which I have no explanation for.

Here’s a higher definition view.

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Categorized as Nature

More Cake

There is a solid possibility that our new next door neighbor could be my nephew Brian, his girlfriend Andrea and her daughter Anika. We walked over there yesterday to celebrate the girls birthdays and encountered cake, bagels and champagne.

Ok, not really cake, more like icing on the cake of my drive to work this morning…

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Categorized as House

Helmet Cake

I stole the image, but it’s alright. This cake was made by Steph’s daughter Melissa for her son’s birthday. You read that correctly, this is a birthday cake!

Pretty impressive I must say. I don’t Facebook but I lurked and grabbed this from Steph’s account. Here’s the link but with FB who knows if you’ll be able to reach it :-)

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Categorized as Family

Dry Farms Drive

I’m still having issues with audio from my new Cube. I’ve installed Divx-10 and it managed to convert a 1920×1080 .mov video straight from the camera into a 1280×720 .mp4, preserving (or should I say “restoring”) the audio.

Here’s the converted 5 minute video showing a segment of our drive back to Teton Valley Idaho from Rexburg yesterday, accompanied by the sweet rumble of my ’88 Mazda B2200 travel truck, cracked window and all. Welcome aboard!

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Categorized as Cameras

Magical Garden

My life is a Magical Garden of technology, nature, family and love. Click the photo below, to explore the thought…

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Categorized as House