“What a child doesn’t receive he can seldom later give.” – P.D. James, Time to Be in Earnest
Friday, December 29, 2006
Final Post of the Year
I’m sure glad that Lynne posts to her blog almost every day so people can stay up-to-date on what is going on with us. The downside is that I don’t feel as compelled to write. But, before 2006 leaves us behind, here is one more post for the year.
It has been a year of upheaval and change for us. Late in 2005, I learned I would be losing my job at Agilent Technologies in Colorado. At least we advance notice and time to prepare. The plan of record was to sell the house in Fort Collins and move to the cabin where we can live very frugally. I’d do some consulting and work from there—we even put in a satellite Internet connection. We planned to build a garage, extend the cabin and settle in there for several years.
Then came an offer to join a small, privately-owned company in New Jersey as their Marketing Director. We jumped on it. Within a few months we had bought a home in New Jersey, moved the entire household including 7 dogs and 3 cats, and put our house up for sale in Colorado.
It was a good move. We enjoy New Jersey a lot. We are closer to Lynne’s mom. We have a great house in a great location. My job is fun and challenging.
But, we’ve faced some problems too. Most notable is the loss of 2 dogs within the past couple of months. And, Bart is declining, too and we’ll probably lose him within a few weeks. Losing 3 of 7 dogs in a matter of months has been very difficult for us. On top of that, our house in Fort Collins has not sold. We are making two house payments each month—one out of the severance I got from Agilent which will continue to get us by for a while. But, the stress would be a lot less if we could just get that behind us.
The weather in New Jersey has been warm and dry this fall and winter—not what we expected. And, it has been wet and snowy in Colorado—not what we expected. Lynne insists that her presence influences the weather.
We are hopeful for a good 2007. We certainly wish all of our friends and the readers of this blog the very best.
Posted under: Stuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 12/29/2006 at 08:11 AM
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Friday, September 22, 2006
Finally, I Write
I listed some topics in my last post that I planned to treat with detailed entries and I recommitted myself to more frequent postings on this web site. Then, nothing happened. So, here are the long promised entries in abbreviated format:
Ellis Island Observations: I thought Ellis Island would be boring. Especially since I can’t track my ancestry to someone who came over on a boat in the lat 1800s or early 1900s. However, I found Ellis Island to be fascinating and prefer a visit there to the Statue of Liberty.
Sopranos: Many people seem to get their impression of New Jersey from watching the Sopranos. We’d never watched it until we moved here, and then bought the first season on DVD. It took us a while to get into it, but find it entertaining now. Is it reflective of real life in NJ? Maybe.
The show is often filmed in the area around our house and I was unable to get home by my normal route a month or so ago because the road was closed while they filmed for an upcoming episode.
Cicadas: The song of the cicadas started when the weather heated up this Summer. They are the indicators of summer, where the fireflies are the indicators of Spring. In mid-summer they were very loud. Now, as Summer wraps down and it gets cooler, they are fading, replaced by the crickets.
The bird: It was a broadwing hawk, not a perrigrin falcon.
Yes we get lots of weird mushrooms. After all, it is much wetter and more humid than Colorado. However, most are unfamiliar to me and I have not gotten into identification yet. Some are downright strange.
Pool maintenance: Take it slow. Don’t add too much of any thing at once 
That’s it for now.
Posted under: Stuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 09/22/2006 at 06:11 AM
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Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Dogs Drinking Slowly
If you read my previous post, you know that I brought a high-speed camera home with me this weekend. This morning, I took some movies of the dogs drinking from their water bowl. It is pretty fascinating to see how they roll their tongue back to create a large surface area on the water, dip it into the water, pull it up slowly, then gulp the water they’ve pulled up from the bowl. Here are three movies of three of the dogs.
All movies were shot with a Vision Research Phantom V7.1 color high-speed digital camera. I was using a Sigma 24-70mm F-mount lens. All movies were shot at f/4. I used two 250W Northstar lights. The movie of Sailor is in super slow-motion, at least compared to the other two. It was shot at 1000 frames-per-second with a 100 microsecond exposure time. You’ll notice that it is a little washed-out. That is because it was dark, so I tried to lighten it up some by adjusting the brightness and contrast after the fact. I’m not very good at this stuff yet, so the pictures aren’t as good as a pro could get them, but you can sure see the act of drinking!
Update: I uploaded a new movie of Sailor that is exactly 1000 frames long. This means that everything you see in this movie occured in 1 second in “real life”. I count three full slurps of water in 1 second!
For the movies of Daisy and Bode, I changed the frame rate to 500 frames-per-second (so they move along a little faster). And, the exposure to 200 microseconds, giving me a little more light to work with. Now, you can see that I have some parts of the scene (the white on the dog, for example) that are overexposed. I could have fixed this in the camera if I had been paying more attention. (A feature called Extreme Dynamic Range). But, they are what they are from a quality perspective. I’m learning and will get better!
The movies are in Quicktime format using the h.264 codec. If you can’t view the movies, download and install the latest version of Quicktime from www.apple.com/quicktime. And, they are about 32MB in size, so give them some time to load.
Hope you enjoy!
Posted under: Dog Stuff • Stuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 07/04/2006 at 08:13 AM
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Monday, July 03, 2006
Ever Seen Popcorn Pop?
It is the long Independence Day weekend, so I brought home a camera from my new job and spent an hour or so on Saturday shooting movies of popcorn popping. It is one of those things you “seen” a thousand times but never really seen. Anyway, in the two movies that I link to below, you can see popcorn popping.
Both shots were made with a Vision Research Phantom v7.1 color high-speed digital camera. I used a Nikon 105mm AF Micro Nikkon lens. Both were shot at 3000 pictures-per-second with a per-picture exposure time of 50 microseconds. The popcorn was lit with two Northstar 250W lights. The first picture was shot an at aperature setting of 5.6 the second at 8 for a slightly greater depth-of-field. Both images are 512 X 512 pixels.
The movies are in Quicktime format and range from about 3.5MB to 3.9MB, so allow time for a download. You’ll need the h.264 codec available in Quicktime version 7. Let me know if you have any trouble viewing the movies and I can encode them differently (I was going to the greatest quality at the smallest file size.)
This one ends up a little out of focus, but pops very fast and I love the droplets of hot oil flying through the air.
This one has better focus and the kernel of popcorn stays in the frame! Which is pretty amazing. Notice the swirl of steam toward the end of the shot.
Posted under: Stuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 07/03/2006 at 01:50 PM
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Saturday, June 24, 2006
Life’s a Bear
Check out Lynne’s blog site. There is now a slideshow available about our recent bear visit. As well as Lynne’s blog entry describing the whole experience!
Posted under: New Jersey • Stuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 06/24/2006 at 06:22 PM
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