Some new things
So for my birthday I decided to cash in a couple gift cards I had received over the years to pickup a Wacom Table. I got the Bamboo Fun tablet which I must say was a nice upgrade in size. It’s especially nice when running dual monitors as each monitor is 1/2 of the tablet.
I’ve been using this table with a program called Pixelmator as it’s an alternative to photoshop for performing some touchup work. Lately I have been into creating black and white photos and then painting in only part of the color. I have an app do to this on my iPhone called Colorsplash. But using Pixelmator with the tablet is a bit more fun.
Since it is essentially a digital piece of paper I thought it would be cool to create a digital signature that I could put into an e-mail so my name actually looks like it was written by a real person. But I have really crappy handwriting. I am not really sure I should be doing something like that.
Here are 3 drafts I created on my tablet.
My handwriting looks like chicken scratch. But it could be the fact that I am still getting used to the tablet. I think this will requite a bit more trial and error. But so far I am loving this tablet.
Life has been treating me pretty well the past few months. I haven’t had much of a chance to update the blog. I did update the wordpress blogging software. Added a plugin that will grab all of my tweets and post them on the site.
But I hope everyone has a great 4th of July weekend. Would anyone want to read a review on the iPhone 4 or any other piece of technology that I own.
Viva the Digital Overlords
I was sitting here at my desk working on building an HTML version of a digital scoreboard to show who is awesome at Air Hockey. I used to play with my coworker Greg and we both just got extremely busy at work. So we are going to start it back up again. When we left off I was ahead like 131 games to 126 I believe. We would play 3-5 games a day.
But the title of this blog post doesn’t really mean anything. I was listening to iTunes and had it on Random and Octopuses Garden came up on iTunes. For some reason it inspired me to open up MarsEdit and write a click little blurb.
I have been working on converting all of my families home video tapes to a digital format. I must say it has been a rather intensive process. A bit more expensive then I imagined.
The first expense was the Elgato Video Capture device. Scored that for $84 off Amazon with the free 2 day shipping ala Amazon Prime. Another expense was actually getting a VCR. My girlfriends mom had one to lend me. It works pretty well. It has some tracking issues so I ordered another VCR off ebay and now have two VCR’s on my desk.
I remember being a kid and thinking VCR’s could possibly be the coolest thing ever. Now they are just large annoying black boxes on my desk. I picked up the other VCR for $30 from eBay. The lady that was selling lied to me on its condition. But it works as expected.
Also I needed a place to save all of this video as most videos come up after compression to be 2-3GB of data. Then a DVD version ends up being another 4GB or so. Then I make 2 different formats m4v and Divx AVI. Not really sure how my family is taking this. But oh well I am happy to have digital copies of all the tapes. But this all takes up space so I now have 2 1TB Firewire 800 HDD. I have 2.5TB of data hooked up to my laptop for all of these home movies.
Good times. Well I better get back to work. Just thought I would blog some random thoughts.
Where the Hell is Rachel (2009)
Hey Everyone! If you follow my twitter you probably saw me make notes about the “Secret Christmas Project” well I thought I would show it to you now.
Some Tech Specs : We captured this on December 14th 2009 at various locations around my hometown of Kitsap County, WA. I used a Flip Ultra HD camera for all of the video and we went to various locations and I would capture my sister dancing from 15-30 seconds depending on the location. The video was inspired by the “Where the Hell is Matt” video which you can see here.
The music is Praan and you can grab it off iTunes at the following location : http://bit.ly/91XPu4
I edited the movie on my MacBook Pro using iMovie 2009. Which made it incredibly easy to do. I captured about 58 minutes of video in various locations and had to cut it down to 4 minutes and 29 seconds to match the other video. If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them leave them in a comment below. I am not sure if we will do this again next year but who knows what the future holds.
Remember Remember the 5th of November
So here we are in another glorious month. I haven’t updated the blog in a while and I usually get reminded by my lovely girlfriend Raleigh. “You need to update the blog!”
November is usually the month where the world is winding down. Getting ready to bundle up for the holidays. I am really excited for Thanksgiving. I was listening to this podcast called No Agenda and they were discussing Turkey. They were talking about this thing called Heritage Turkey’s so I decided to order one of those for the family thanksgiving. They are the “original” style of Turkey and they are supposed to taste amazing. So looking forward to that.
Today I had the carpets in the Pipo Palace shampooed. It had been a while since it had been done and it really brought some new life back into the place. Taking a little longer to try then I expected. So having a rather chill Friday night lounging around the bedroom updating the world via laptops.
The household has 2 Mac Laptops a Mac Mini and Raleigh uses some old 2003 Dell. I can’t say I understand why she keeps that thing. But I bought a new laptop last June to replace my old Powerbook G4 that I bought in September 2004.
Other then that work has been rather insane. Everyone is drinking from the fire hose lately and it seems like patience is wearing a bit thin and we are hoping the holiday lock downs mean we get a little break for a short while.
Raleigh and I are heading to Hawaii in December so look forward to tweets and facebook pics of that while we are away. If you don’t already follow me on twitter you can check me out at http://www.twitter.com/tristanpipo
But I wish everyone a great weekend and I will work on getting back into this blogging thing and lay some social commentary on the line soon. Next weekend I will be heading back to Poulsbo, WA to go to my mothers art gallery. If you would like to grab lunch or something let me know.
Tristan Out.
Welcome to October
Hey Everyone!
We have arrived at October. It has been a rather interesting month so far. My schedule changed at work which has been nice. I got moved to 10-7 last October and was told I would only be on that work schedule for 3 months. Here it is next October and finally getting it changed back. Which is awesome on my end.
Coming up this weekend the girlfriend and I have a fall party to attend. With one of my girlfriends coworkers which should be a good time. I always dig carving pumpkins getting drunk and making scarecrows. I will be posting pictures to Facebook most likely or perhaps my tumblelog. Which if you care to find it’s located at tristan.tumblr.com it’s also a nice aggregation of everything I do online.
But anyways it’s getting a bit late. I think I will hit up a little Beatles Rock Band before I go to bed.
Hopefully everyone has a great week. Send me an e-mail or text message let me know what you are up too.
Holy Crud!
It’s June and been a crazy busy month at that. Now that summer is here every weekend has been planned and full of events. I purchased a new MacBook Pro the ones they announced last Monday. It’s a screaming 2.8ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and all kinds of awesomeness. iPhone OS 3.0 comes out on Wednesday which will be all kinds of awesome because I will finally be able to Copy and Paste.
I picked up a Flip Ultra HD video camera so that I can record all kinds of awesome videos in HD. You can check out my adventure the the grocery store here.
http://gallery.me.com/tristan.pipo#100087
But other then doing the life thing. Started going back to the gym. Nice to get back in the groove after a few years of vacation from it. I haven’t lost that much strength and the belly is slowly going away.
But next week I am on vacation and I won’t have any cell phone or internet access so hopefully the world doesn’t blow up while I am gone. It will be odd turning on that vacation auto responder I haven’t used that ever since I got gMail back in 2004.
Well hope to here from everyone soon drop me a line.
500 Internal Server Errrors
This issue should now be fixed as well with some helpful guidance from the Ramblings of a Bored Geek.
All that’s left on the TristanPipo.com website is to change the font’s around a bit and I will do that when I get home with my trusty CSS editor.
I would like to thank Raleigh and Junniper for being my unoffical blog Quality Assurance Team.
500 Internal Server Errors
Update: Looks like the changes that I was recommended to do didn’t resolve the issue. We shall see what GoDaddy support can do.
Well looks like the fun doesn’t stop around here. I have been getting reports of users getting “500 Internal Server Errors” this seemed to be happening for Firefox, IE, Safari. I did some googling and found out that the error is an issue with the hosting provider I use running out of memory allocated to PHP which is running WordPress. I have made the changes that the other sites have recommended and next time that the services are restarted for this server that should resolve the issue. So hopefully the GoDaddy Support team gets an easy close for the support ticket I opened.
RSS Downtime
To those that get to read blog posts from this via RSS. I wanted to let you know that RSS will be down for approx 72hrs while all the feeds get moved from Feedburner to Google that has not purchased Feedburner. On a side not that means if you are reading this via RSS this doesn’t really apply as the move has worked as expected. To those reading on the site that are going “RSS? HUH? Did you insult my mama?” Well then it doesn’t really apply to you either. I guess what I am saying is that I have nothing to say. But I am working on updating the look of the site yet again. So stay tuned as this is a work in progress in realtime. So changes could come every day or every couple of days to the design. So not really much to see or say.
Cheers!