End of Silence

I can’t remember if I mentioned it, but I’m single dad this week. The Wife’s on vacation to San Diego. As a consequence, I’ve been downtown around 3:30 the last few days collecting the kids from school/daycare and I’ve seen some interesting things.

Yesterday, as I drove down San Jacinto, I saw local filmmaker Rick Linklater walking with three or four other dudes near Fourth Street.

Today, as I came south on I-35, I noticed two guys standing on the Twelfth Street overpass. They were holding up a large sign that said, “Say no to gay marriage”. Now, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but it’s clearly illegal to do crap like that as it creates the potential for an accident. As we all know, drivers on that stretch of I-35 don’t need any help with accidents, so, being the good citizen that I am, I called 311 and reported them. With any luck, Austin’s Finest took some time out from harassing musicians and actors and made take their opinions elsewhere.

I videotaped The Boy’s game this past Saturday and made a quick attempt at editing it down to his better highlights last night. The results are less than satisfactory.

My camera skills need work. I’m not used to watching everything through the viewfinder and have a tendency to look up from the camera when there’s more action. Of course, this means that the camera stays where I last looked or ends up pointing at the grass or something.

The transfer is crappy as well. I’m not sure why, but there’s a lot of pixel noise and distortion. I don’t think it’s on the original tape, so I might try to use different quality settings. I’m using Windows Moviemaker which comes free with WinXP and I let it choose the settings on this attempt. Also, since Moviemaker only outputs to WMV and AVI files, this is a problem for the non-Windows viewing audience (Jaja). I may spring for Quicktime Pro and try that out.

The cheesy music is an attempt to drown out my lame dad comments during the game. The Wife made fun of me for the music selection. At least I didn’t add titles, yet…

You’ll either need the latest windows media player (windows | mac) or something else that’ll play WMV files. If you’ve got WindowsXP, you’ve already got the media player, but you may need to download the newer version or codec updates if you have problems playing the file (sound with no picture usually means you don’t have the right codec). You can get those through windows update. Also, be warned that it’s a fairly large file at almost 9 MB. Now that I’ve finished with all of the excuses and disclaimers, here it is (he’s number 15).

The Wife just showed me photos of her, The Boy and LaLa that were taken at the end of the Kriya Yoga retreat that she attended in October. The two dudes that they’re with are Paramahamsa Prajnanananda and Swami Brahmananda Giri. The Boy looks a little unsure of what to think of the whole thing.

Some of you may or may not be aware that I take care of most everything for the Casino El Camino bar website (except the design, for which credit goes to Jessica). Those of you that have visited the site may have noticed that it’s been unavailable since just after Christmas. It’s a long story, but the domain registration expired and Casino and I weren’t able to get ourselves together to save it before it went on the open market. It was registered by a company who’s intentions are unclear to me at the moment. I’m currently attempting to get in touch with them.

This is especially bad timing with SXSW hitting this week. As a first step, I’ve registered casinelcamino.net and will be running the site from there for the foreseeable future. If we do manage to re-acquire the .com domain name, I’ll just forward the .net name.

Of course, this little change will cause problems for those trying to find the site from the old address, so I’m asking those that read this blog and have the means to link the new address wherever reasonable. I’m not asking people to go out of their way and overdo it, but a few blog posts here and there should help the new name out.

Thanks for your support.

We don’t get much snow here in Austin, but we got a dusting last night. I took the pictures about 15 minutes ago. What little there is will be gone by 11 as it’s getting into the 50’s today and will be in the 70’s by the end of the week. The Boy has been lamenting his proximity to the equator all winter, so he’s out there now collecting a single, wet snowball to throw. I also updated the picture of the week with shots from this morning.

Cars

Front yard

EDIT: I decided to move the snow pictures to links as they were a little big and causing too much scrolling (well, and because I’m lazy).