The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard – Page 61

Watching All The Gulls Go By

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Contrast

Bokeh

Under The Radar

Ruffled

Wingspan

Galveston Oh Galveston

The weather for the last few days has been spectacular. Lows in the 50’s and highs in the 60’s and 70’s. I had Friday off and wanted to take advantage of it so I invited my friend Jim Henkel to head off on a road trip to post-Ike Galveston to have a look around.

The Flagship Hotel

Galveston is still very tattered. Lots of debris and devastation but signs of life and reconstruction were plainly visible. I wasn’t all that interested in documenting the destruction, but the sight of the Flagship Hotel was pretty compelling.

The Flagship Hotel

We checked out Seawall Blvd and then headed to The Strand (Galveston’s historic district) where they were making preparations for the Galveston Mardi Gras. And by preparations I mean people were busy stocking the storefronts with booze.

We found some lunch and then headed off to catch the ferry over to Bolivar Peninsula to have a look around. That was way more depressing. We took a quick look around and then made our way back to Houston.

The road to recovery is a long one for poor Galveston.

I Got A Basketball Jones

I was commenting to some friends at one of the recent Geek Gatherings how it had been awhile since I’d been to a basketball game. I’m not a huge huge fan, but Cynthia is. I enjoy it well enough but the real joy is watching Cynthia watch the game.

Turns out the person I was talking to was a season ticket holder and he said that he could hook me up sometime as he didn’t go to every game. I didn’t think too much of it until a few weeks later when he contacted me and offered tickets to the Rockets VS. Mavericks game.

The tickets are at the Red and White Wine Bistro, an upscale all you can eat restaurant and wine bar. Food was included with the ticket but you paid for the wine. And the seats are right on the balcony with a great view of the court.

The Toyota Center has a 4 inch limit on lenses so there was no bringing my long zooms. I settled on my 11-18mm with the idea of capturing some wide angle shots like this one:

Rockets VS. Mavericks

Click to see the larger version and check out the detail.

And although I know it is getting more and more passe and trite, I took the opportunity to create a fake tilt-shift miniature:

Rockets VS. Mavericks

Again, the larger version is much more enjoyable.

The food was excellent, the seats were great and we had a blast! The Rockets even won!

Thanks for the use of your tickets, Alan!

Raiders

It’s like they know when we put the bread out for the birds. They show up almost immediately.

Interloper

Loving the SAL-70300G!

Urban Development

The folks who brought you The Continental Club, Sig’s Lagoon, Tacos-A-Go-Go and Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge are at it again. This time right next door @ 3600 Main.

The derelict building that sits next to The Continental club has been vacant for years and was recently acquired by the same folks that own the property @ 3700 Main and innovation is well under way. I was asked by Pete Gordon (manager of The Continental Club) if I could swing by and snap some “before” photos or what promises to be a very cool space in the not too distant future.

As they are working to demo the building they are finding that a very interesting art deco style facade was simply covered with stucco by the previous owners.

Pete tells me that the intention is to try and preserve as much of the original exterior as is possible which is very commendable.

If you squint just right and imagine it with some paint to bring out the original design you can just make out what a wonderful space this is going to be. There’s already plans for a coffee shop and a pizza/burger joint and if Pete has his way, a new club called “Wallpaper”…

In these interesting economic times it’s heartening to see the hustle and bustle of new development. As I was taking pictures numerous people stopped to see what was going on and one woman waiting on the train was misty-eyed as she spoke of her own personal joy at seeing something being done not only to restore this old building, but also of her optimism in seeing something that demonstrates growth in this city while the news outlets continue to issue their dire warning doom and despair.

Implementing Video

I just got a Flip Mino HD to play with and am thinking of doing some video on the upcoming trip to Spain like I did in Belgium over Christmas. My first thought was to simply host the videos on my web site and embed them. I had this working more or less with the Podpress plugin but for some reason it’s gone all wonky on me.

In my search for options I found a variety of plug-ins for self hosting video, but they are convoluted and not one offers what I really need.

The other option was to upload to one of the video sharing sights and snag the embed code for publication here at baldheretic.com. Youtube doesn’t allow you to embed the HD version of your video into your own blog so that’s a waste. I was turned on to Vimeo by John Winters (aka @obscura) and it is impressive. The problem is that you are only allowed to upload 500mb a week, which is fine but they only allow ONE HD upload a week which is not so great. You can upgrade to Vimeo Plus for a fee of $59.95 a year. This account allows for 5 gigs of uploads in a week and unlimited HD uploads are included in that.

Kind of overkill for my purposes and too pricey.

I also checked out Flickr Video which is available to Pro account holders like myself, but they limit your videos to 90 seconds with no option to go longer. The call it “a long photograph.”

In my quest I stumble upon a post by WordPress founder Matthew Mullenweg where he was showing off a movie made from tilt-shift photos he had taken.

Doing a little digging I found out that if you have a pemium account at wordpress.com you can upload videos of many different formats and the site will crunch and convert and allow you to embed them rather seamlessly. The premium account is only $20 a year for 5 gig of storage. The cool thing is that once you upload the video you can then grab the embed code and place it in the blog of your choice making this a reasonable alternative to Vimeo for me personally.

It irks me that this functionality is not available for those of us who self host our own WordPress blogs. I suspect it has do with whatever is needed on the back end to process the videos, but still. I bet it could be implemented without much fuss. We’ll see what comes down the pike in the future.

In the mean time I have paid Mr. Mullenweg his thirty pieces of silver and acquired the upgrade. I do like the quality of the video.

If Matt reads this I would like him to know that donated wordpress.com account to Technology Bytes would be a tax write-off. Just wanted to put that out there.

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of ***

As a Sony user, I find this particularly amusing…

LANGUAGE WARNING! NOT SAFE FOR WORK!
If you play this video, put on on headphones or turn it WAY down.

WASPS!

Readers of this blog may recall the bat “incident” here at the office last may…

This ticket just came in this afternoon

It’s from an employee in our Raleigh office. Check out the last line.

Afraid this one falls outside my personal skill matrix. Time to outsource!