Interests

Shades of Green

snap of green screen project

snap of green screen projectLike many of you the topic of my daily life has become – it is HOT! Ok, we have not hit the 100’s yet but probably will do so today according to our local weather peeps.  Until our insulation situation is handled I am living in the one room with the portable A/C venturing out only when necessary. I spent too long up here and the heat crept up on me. All of a sudden I was turning green. I am sure I looked red but I felt green . …

I did get some green and red bell peppers planted and a few flowers working late in the evening. It finally cooled down enough so at 10p.m. porch light on I got them into their pots. Yesterday it was surprise HOT – well outside was only 97 and upstairs here averaged 86 during the afternoon so I ended up turning the computers off before they too melted down and oozed some sort of bubbling green goo that is often seen in sci-fi movies.

Once again I became bored with reading so I located some green screen shots where the lighting was off causing me to take on a green skin tone – I could have added some Vulcan ears and hit the deck of the Enterprise!  When too much green bounces back off the screen or the subject is too close to the screen it is hard if not sometimes impossible chroma key out (fancy name for getting all the green screen out of the pic and leave just the subject).  I get very frustrated sometimes because it is hard to stay 10 feet away from the screen in a 10×11 room.  The lighting has to be ever so spot on.

After it cooled down I played around with some bad green screen video.  Some of the process and short end result of my playing around are here:

Our Graduate – Never Give Up

He never quit

He never quit Thursday was one of those days. Full of excitement and reflective thought, happiness with a tinge of sadness thrown in best describing our mood as Chuck, KRP, and I loaded up and headed off for Nevada. Three people that physically might make one and half if melded together!

You Never Know

Our friend Chuck and Brandon hit it off when Brandon was visiting us one summer.  The two of them formed a friendship:  mentor and student, comrades, and fishing buddies they became. I must admit they are an odd compo. Brandon with his youthful angst and Chuck a retired justice dept. special agent. Who would have thought?

Brandon has worked hard to achieve his goals. You see Brandon has learning disabilities and I hope he does not mind that I share this here. He never said never, never quit, he never gave up. Blessed with some special educators, real teachers that never quit, never said never, and never gave up on him he learned. Parents and extended family that never quit him, never gave up, and fought the battles to raise a child to become a good heart-ed, honest and ethical, confident young man.

When testing time rolled around he could have accepted extra help but he decided to take the tests without it and he scored! No adjusted or special diploma for him. That took courage IMHO. Not only did he achieve a High School Diploma but also he bettered that, received an advanced one, 9th in his class, and became a scholarship recipient to boot.

So off we go excited to attend his graduation and yet well, feeling old. He has so much potential but we worry about the state of the world. Please God that you watch over him and never quit him.

A few bits of the trip and ceremony.

I am gonna miss my little fishing buddy. Sometime when I was not looking he grew up!

Time to tell your past self about multiple sclerosis?

Minkowski diagram time travel

Minkowski diagram time travel

The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent. Time is not all what it seems. It does not flow in one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with the past.

Albert Einstein

Some bloggers have been on the topic – what if I could go back in time and warn my past self about multiple sclerosis? It is an interesting proposition – time travel.

Time and Space

Assume we have an essence, something that makes us each unique that will move on, we may call it a soul, a spirit, a mass of electrons, whatever it may or may not be it could exist everywhere or anywhere. Biblical interpretation of a world without end perhaps? If this is so then neither space nor time really exist. We would be in one space (where we are) and there would be that before where we are and that after where we are and all the infinite points between.

The weather has been doing some atypical stuff lately. Nothing unheard of but still a rare pattern none the less. Here in Calif. we have another bad batch of bad weather. The Sierras are experiencing snow storms of a Winter type, north of here there has been a tornadotornado warning up and two touch downs confirmed.

I started thinking (yeah I know) are we not headed back into an ice age. I am not talking movie drama stuff just over the billions of years of geologic history’s patterns. Ice Ages come and go. We are due. The start of a glacier is snow that accumulates, pressure compacts it after time snow crystals become very dense and and glacial ice is formed. It will begin to flow outward or down slope under the influence of gravity. If the rate of snow accumulation is more than the rate of melting (ablation), the glacier will grow. It is the snow accumulation thing that got me thinking about the ice age deal.

Ok time will tell LOL

What am I thinking about going back in time and maybe talking to my past self? Is it possible?

 

Future Present Time- A kmilyun Video

Grape, Video and Photo

photo holding hands

photo holding handsOne of those mornings where I might just ramble . … about a grape, where my photo is, and well . …

Spent I bit of time figuring out Skype.  Yeah, OK, OK, it is a simple thing to do. Download and install the program. Click on the new icon and – well if your brain foggy like me – augh stare at the screen and wonder what the heck am I suppose to do! I finally found a few names I recognized and sent out an invite – well, I think I sent out invites? My friend Tim and I managed to get it working with me on video and him just voice. That worked until Tim decided to try and hook up his old  webcam. ha! I tweeted me that he has located the missing driver disc and maybe today we will get to try it out videovideo camera to video.

I was surfing the net and came across an blog entry where someone discussed making plasma with a grape. Well you know I am there! My little experiment – yeah I had to see if it really worked – came out OK and I did video  tape it.

Spent hours messing around with the video program, read a bit,  switched video graphic cards in the computer (Mike wanted the ones in it because they can be hooked up in triple configuration), and I chopped the remaining bark off a large tree branch the came crashing down at 4:15 am. Now you know why I am up typing at 5 am. The dang thing was (and still is) blocking the drive in a way that if a drunk or dumb driver (we have a lot of those here) came around the corner in the dark and swerved to miss it they would end up in the side of my truck.  Managed to get it more at an angle so hop everyone misses it till someone stronger than I can move it.

If you want to see where one of my photos ended up,

what happened to the little  grape,

or some of my attempts with the video stuff it is all right here:

Video