Asus ee Pad Transformer - 32g - Android 10.1 Tablet

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

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Night Bike

Ok, So I think my Schwinn Traveler has become my night time bike.

  

The lamps are just way too cool for the daytime. 

The Mechanic

The Nearly New Bicycle Shop found me a vintage B&W Schwinn saddle.  Nice. Just what I was looking for.

So as I'm dealing with the guys on the saddle, I start looking at a bike up in the front. Turns out it's the mechanic's. It's a green Typhoon, with new composite wheels and a racing saddle. I'm like, "Oh no you don't have a Schwinn generator on the rear wheel." I've got one for my bike. But I'm looking at it and I'm like, "Where's the headlamp?"

The mechanic comes over and say's "Check this out." He picks up the rear end and gives the wheel a spin. On comes this blue neon light under the top tube. I'm like, "Oh no you don't have a blue neon light under your top tube." He's like, "Oh yes I do!" 

Too freakin cool. 

So out I go and I come back with both of my bikes. 

Here's the list I gave to the mechanic: 

Mount new saddle

Mount brake levers

Wrap bars

Remove chain guard

Remove rear rack

Remove toe clips

Remove reflectors

Mount generator

Mount front and rear lamp

Mount blue LED

Tune 

Dude!

Schwinn Traveler - Bike Project

I'm shooting for a 70's retro 10 speed. I was at Haven Jr High up in Evanston back in like 1972. One day Eric Gant showed up with his Schwinn Varsity's handle bars turned up. The next day everybody turned up their handle bars just like Eric.  I'm going for the same look now.

Last night I went over to the Nearly New Bike Store on Broadway with my old seat and basket.

 

Ron gave me $10 cash money.  He said to give him a call back tomorrow afternoon. He's got to check his storage unit for the vintage Schwinn seat. He thinks he's got one in black, if not he'll find me one in red.

See next post for a photo of the seat I'm talking about:

Bike Project

It's been a little over three weeks since my nasal surgery. The bleeding has completely stopped. I've been on the wagon for a week, which probably has helped. I'm starting to feel strong. I've been poking around with my bike project and wanting to complete it so I can go for a ride. Tonight I am going to the used bike shop to see if I can barter for a vintage seat. 

This is the seat I am looking for:

Two steps forward, one step back

Well my nose has kicked my ass recently.  What started as a slow drip nose bleed turned into a raging torrent.  The day after thanksgiving I swallowed allot of my own blood.  I don't know what the medical term for this is but it can't be good to ingest you own blood.  I started feeling week. Heart racing. That kind of thing.

It was probably the booze I drank on Thanksgiving day that thinned out my blood and caused the bleeding.  Those two whiskys I had when I got home Thanksgiving evening were the nails in the coffin. Friday when I got home from work I poured the remaining whiskey down the drain.

So that's it.  I am officially on the wagon through the holidays.  And beyond.

New Glasses

          Ray Ban                                     Perry Ellis  

The plan is coming together.

I haven't worn glasses all of these years cause my nose was too crooked. So I got my nose fixed which has the double benefit of allowing my to breath and allowing me to see.

I went to Target to get my glasses. Gotta say that it was a pretty good experience. They did the exam, honored my insurance, applied the discounts and cut the lenses very quickly.

Chris the guy behind the counter was great. For some reason or another my Target card was regected.  I called the Target credit center and they were unable to help, which meant I would have to pay on a credit card rather than with the Target debit card.  Which sucked cause I was going to lose the Target cards 5% discount. Chris came through for me.  He put it on my credit card and took 5% off of the top.

Michigan Avenue Morning Lights

This morning I had a strong desire to pedal downtown and shoot video of the Michigan Avenue Xmas lights before the traffic arrived. Well as it turns out the municipal Xmas lights are off in the morning. Fucking obvious right? Yeah, well I didn't find out till I rode down.  Here and there, there were some lights on, which I got.


I like hitting Mich Ave in the early morning cause I can pedal around without pedestrians stepping out in front of me or taxi's trying to run me over. Some kind of festival was being set up at the Tribune plaza around the Marilyn. Millennium Park has no security in the morning so I was able to ride my bike up to the ice rink which has ice on it, and around the Crown Fountain on the south end of the park. Can't do that later in the day. My final shots were at the Art Institute.




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A City Needs a Car Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

Yesterday morning I got up early. At around five. It was one of the last nice days of the year, so I hopped on the bike and headed south.  A roundtrip ride to the Chicago Museum Campus is around 18 miles. That's a nice way to start the day. Kicks up my matabolism.

It was about 6:30 am when I took off south on the Chicago Lake Shore Bike Path. Turns out there's a fair amount of people on the path at that time of the day. Joggers, dog walkers and commuters heading down to work. Must be nice to ride the bike to work. Sure beats sitting in a traffic jam.

At the museum campus, I set up a camera mount on my bicycle's handlebars. Rather than shooting video I shot a series of stills. My editing software allows me to string them along into video. I started shooting at the Shedd Aquarium. As it turned out the photos I shot at the beginging got pushed to the end of the video.

Originally I was only going to put a bicycle pedal sound track on with the animated photos, but the video was too long and too dry. I tried something new here. I broke the sequence into smaller segments. For each segment I layed on a voice over track. I then edited down the segments around the narative. Finally I found I could lay on the bike pedal sound track and  push it back in the mix.

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Morning Yoga

The Good News:
I feel fully recovered from nasal surgery.

The Bad News:    
Downward Dog gave me a nose bleed.

Millennium Park - Pritzker Pavilion

First off I want to acknowledge the creator of the sound recording.


I found the Wav file on the Audio Cookbook website.The specific file I used was http://audiocookbook.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/orchestra_tuning.mp3. The artist listed on the file is John Keston.


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Cloud Gate Train - Chicago's Millennium Park - The Bean

When I was a child on the family road trip I would stare at trees as they spun past the car window. Walking, the trees didn't spin. It was only the speed of the family car that showed me the rotation. So I got to thinking about walking around an object while taking a series of photos. With each step, the snap of a new photo. In sequence, a turning motion would be revealed.


Then there was the matter of sound. The sound needed to be mechanical.  I couldn't record a car going by. Car tires are to high pitched. Tires whine on the pavement. What I needed was a rumble.


I needed the sound of a train. I took my sound recorder over to the CTA El Tracks to get that sound.  I thought about going up to the station but that wasn't the sound. Down below the tracks in between stations, that was the sound. The sound started in the distance. It built as the train approached, thundered with the train over head, then diminished to silent.




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Big Blue Sculpture - Idiot Yuppie Neighbors are Upset

I read on Yahoo about a new sculpture by John Henry in the neighborhood.  Typical of any public art installation it was frowned upon by the local residents and the idiot media.  The local press sticks a microphone in front of Joanne Public and next thing you know the reporters are repeating the exact same idiotic negative language about a significant piece of semi-public art. 

Nobody liked the Picasso in Daley plaza.  Now it is part of Chicago's iconography.  The Oldenburg, the Chagall, the Miro, and the Calder all met with similar fates. We live in Chicago, not Bumfuck. Chicago is world class.  World class means world class art, and in the case of the new sculpture up in Lincoln Park, it means the Artist John Henry.  

So next time a piece of artwork shows up, shut your trap, google the artist, and try to understand what the fuck you are talking about. Or, just move out to the suburbs where you belong. 

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Sound

A couple of years ago I went to the premiere of Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) by Micheal Moore at the AMC. After the movie there was a question and answer session with Micheal Moore who was in attendance. A film student asked the question, "What should I pay attention to?" Mr Moore thought for a moment and said, sound.  He explained that it is easy to get wrapped up in the visual aspect of film making, when often the narrative is told more by the audio track than by the visual track.

When I shot my Sunrise video the other morning I came back and found I was lacking for a sound track. So this morning I have been shopping audio recorders on the internet. I settled on the RCA $29.99 unit to the left. There are many more expensive units on the market, but I'm not a pro audio guy.  I just need a few leaves rustling & birds chirping.

The first video I ever edited was The El Camino Diaries, back in 1999. It was shot on Hi-8 tape. That's analog. Back then I had to bump off the video to digital with a special PCI video card. It was not a standard setup and everything took forever. Nowadays just about anybody can shoot and edit video using their home  computer and a smartphone.

The first edit of "The El Camino Diaries" had to be shit canned.  I was trying to edit around the visual track.  It didn't work.  So I set up my camera and sat down and recorded the narrative by just telling a story. The rest was easy.  Once I had that audio track down the rest just fell into place.

North Halsted Halloween Parade - Chicago 2011

Man did I have a blast last night. I headed out early before the Halloween parade. There was a queue for the parade participants at Halsted and Belmont.  With my YouTube hat and credential packet I was able to walk into the queue like I owned the place.  Several people asked me if I worked for YouTube. I said, No they work for me.


A Chicago cop moved a barricade for me.  When the parade started they wouldn't let the general public onto the parade route, but they gladly let me through.  I think I've stumbled onto something here.  I'm now a part of the Third Estate!






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Halloween

Tonight is the north Halsted Halloween parade.  This is my Halloween thing.  I haven't been to a single party or other cellebration as of yet.  Been chillin it a little bit.  

Anyways I plan to break out my YouTube gear and head over and capture some video of the goings on. I was considering wearing my pirate costume but I'm think I'll just be myself.

The YouTube Guy.

Chicago's Lakefront Bicycle Trail

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race - H. G. Wells.


After I did the time lapse on the Sunrise video I had the idea of mounting the camera on my bicycle and snapping photos while I rode. So that's what I did for this video.  I'm pretty pleased with the video although the tilt bothers me a little bit. I'll have to watch that on the next one.  


For the bicycle sound I flipped I used the bicycle that I have up in my apartment. I flipped it over and put a microphone by the rear hub.  I tried several versions of the sound track. In my first attempts I tried to simulate the sounds of footsteps and I had a bike bell.  All of that was too much, so I simplified things and just recorded the sound of the chain and the occasional coasting hub.


Also, I tried different timings for the still photo. I started with one photo a second, but that was too slow.  At half a second per photo it was kind of like a bike riding kind of fast.  But the total video length was upwards of three minutes.  Way too long for a YouTube video.  So I cut it down to 0.01 seconds per frame, which was a low as I could go. It's kind of a fast ride, but it keeps your attention.






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Sunrise

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one - Vladimir Nabokov.

I love Russians. It's all about death.

I kind of slept in. Till like 6am. I was up till like 10:30 last night, working on that ShutterLog video.  I swear to god that thing kicked my ass. I can't tell you how many shots were out of focus. Either because I was shooting a long shot on macro, or a close up without the macro. Then there all the shots that had no sound cause I didn't turn on the microphone. 

But in the end I re-shot all of the narrative in my apartment from a high angle. I had a pink gel over the lamp, with an orange shirt, and it turned out fucking great.  

So I was up at six. When I pulled up the blinds I couldn't tell if it was cloudy or not. Only one way to find out. I got dressed, grabbed my bag and tripod and headed out the door. 

I walked over to the park and set up my tripod. I was encourage by the orange poking through on the horizon, but still wasn't sure about the cloud cover. I couldn't see any stars.

 I pointed the camera toward the dawn and started snapping, not video, but stills. I recorded a couple of clips of video but mostly it was stills.  I snapped about one every ten seconds. Doing in in exact time lapse sort of thing. When people or animals entered the frame I started snapping faster. As the minutes passed I realized there was a gap between the clouds and the horizon.  The sun would be poking through.

The time lapse worked.  I'm pretty happy with the video.

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Done With Film

I created a  video for submission to the YouTube ShutterLog channel.  Basically ShutterLog is a collection of short videos of people handling their vintage analog cameras. So I decided I needed some film to load into my camera. I went over to Wolf Camera and explained I need a cheap roll of film.  Maybe something out of date.  The guy goes over to the box and hands me a throw away camera. I'm like this is not a roll of film.  The guy say's, break it open and there's a roll of film inside.  I'm like cool.


So the next day I'm talking with this fella at work.  He says now that was a great video. Probably cause I wasn't yapping away the whole time.  He says it would be great to compare photos from the cheap camera and from the good camera. I'm like bingo!  Great concept.  So I go back over to the camera store and get a couple of Fuji throwaways with good film.  That night I start shooting a new video, breaking open the camera, close ups, long shots, the whole deal.  I check the light meter and see I need a new battery, also a few of the close ups are out of focus so I need to redo those. Plus I need a new sync cable for the Minolta.


The next day I'm back at the camera store buying more throwaways and a lens cap. They don't have a sync cable, maybe I'll pick one up later.  Then it's off to the Radio Shack for a battery for the Minolta.  I get the battery, go outside, and then it hit's me.  Freaking light meter still doesn't work. Oh, and the mirror for the viewfinder is stuck.  And I have no freaking sync cable. Done. Quit.


Now I remember why I love digital cameras. None of the above. And all just shooting and posting.



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