WalkerPad

Gallery2 update broke stuff, working on it.

Wow what a mess, the gallery2 upgrade completely hosed it’s self and I had to setup a whole new install. This should ’should’ have been trivial. It’s coming back on line now and it looks like the data will be intact but restoring the data seems to ha e tossed some of the structure so not sure old embedded images will work right.

feh, data base is going nuts. Not sure if it’s gallery or the host at this point but pictures are offline and not showing in the blog.

woo happy new year

Christmas v2 s.cal

I picked up a Kid Tough Digital Camera for kaily as one of her main presents this year.

She always has a bit of fun trying to take over my dSLR, and is always a good sport for posing for pictures (but only for that .5 second you have her attention). I thought it might be fun to giver her a bit more time on the other side of the lens with something a little less fragile. To be fair, aside from leaving it on the floor for me to trip on, she has actually been pretty careful with the Kid tough camera (just going to say KTC from here on out) so far, so a more breakable one might not have been the end of the world. Still, time and running might tell a different story.
The Fisher Price KTC camera gets a couple things really right and a lot of things really wrong. The bad things are mostly from what I can see, Fisher Price just totally cutting every corner possible on the guts, I guess they don’t think kids should get a good quality indoor shot.

I put it into high res mode (such as it is) and slapped in a 128 SD card I had lying around for Kaily to get going.

I shot the bellow one just to measure the KTC against a slightly steadier hand, and get a feel for the write delay (minimal but it’s so low res even at high res that is not a huge surprise).

I touched up all the pictures slightly in aperture, and discarded about thirty or so totally unusable ones (hey her average is already better then mine ).

What’s good about the KTC:

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Busy Christmas morning. Kaily got us up before 8 for presents.

Thank you one and all for a most bountiful haul of Kaily loot.

It’s now about 1:45AM Christmas morning. I feel a bit like we must have mugged Santa given the insane amount of stuff under our tree, mostly for kaily. I just got through putting out the last of Charis’s stuff and filling her stocking witch junk food, and taking a couple final snaps.
Tonight, well last night really, which is to say Christmas Eve, we went up to my Mom’s house. Where santa arrived promptly at 5:30pm to hand out presents to three very exited and shy kids age 2, 3 and 4. Who new my Mom had that kind of pull with anyone in red satan, but I digress.
We also managed to stop by the Walker/clearly/shaw party at Aunt Pam’s house. Sadly we managed to stay barely half an hour before we had to rush to SF. Where we managed to only be ten minutes late, which I maintain must have been a bit of a Christmas miracle in and of it’s self. That and I drive a bit like Santa must to make all those stops… ;).

Pictures abound, I’m still trimming but I dumped a good amount into the gallery for posterity. My connection has been pretty pokey all day (Comcast is probable broken again *sigh*) so it’s taking forever for the pics to upload.

So Amazon had a deal going, pick a HD-DVD player and get 12 movies with it. I picked us up the Toshiba A30 HD-DVD player. It was a bit of compromise, I wanted the slightly more expensive unit that supported 7.1 audio but figured this would be good enough.

I like the quality of of the output from the A30 but not the hardware it’s self. The audio and picture quality are quite good, so is the DVD upscaling (only tried out the 1080P over HDMI and 5.1 surround).

The hardware has a few seriously irritating flaws (I have the most current firmware).

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Some pictures from the Kaily’s last Gymnastics class of 2007. I liked her teacher for this last one (seemed to have a good sense of humor with the kids).

We have had a iRobot Roomba discovery for a few years now. It has has worked reasonable well, although ours is currently broken. Either the battery won’t hold a charge or something more serious is wrong. Just dies after a few seconds, and the process in the faq for fixing the battery doesn’t work for me.
The discovery is a bit like a lazy husband (takes one to know one), and unless you poke and prod it it dose at best a average vacuum job… but that is just barely good enough for how we used it, and some times have it is a great connivence.
Anyway, I liked the discovery enough despite it’s foibles that when Woot! had a sale on the Scooba for $99 I couldn’t resist. I should have.

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Kaily’s last day of ballet pictures. The girls where amazingly sweet but way more interested in whispering and playing then paying any attention to the teacher. Charise mentioned later to me that apparently it was a sub and there was some departure from their normal routines so that probable contributed to the disorder. I showed up a bit late with gear in tow, and Kaily spent several moments pointing to anyone who would make eye contact that “That my Dad!” :). Always nice to be noticed. I was having a tuff time with lighting and my 70-200 lens is a POS that makes a very soft imagine particularly at 1600 iso.

A lot of folks ask me if I use photoshop on my Photo’s. I don’t, I don’t care for the overhead though I have heard very good things about the current version of bridge. I preferrer the specialty applications targeted at Photographers, they seem to encourage adjusting what ‘is’ rather then creating something new, which is more what I associated with Photoshop (not that the power to both is not there).

This weekend I spent some time trying out Adobe Light Room and contrasting it to Apples Aperture which I have enjoyed for some time.
As all reviews are relative in their comparative nature this one should be taking  as such. I’m by no means a expert with either product or at photography. I will probable add some illustrative  screen caps and comparative shots at some point when I have some time. Right noW this is just a text overview of the experience.

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I have the picks up from Dad’s 70th birthday party. I didn’t take many and well… most where with my iPhone which just takes awful pictures. I got a couple at the beach house rental with the SLR but there was so much going on I didn’t really feel like shooting ( and at sunset the 50mm just completely lost it’s ability to auto focus). There are a couple fun picks of kaily trying to dance Flamenco with Mariana. I didn’t really bother to go through and cherry pick the iphone shots so my apologies in advance if anyone goes blind :).

The current plan is to head to S. Cal on the 27th and stay through new years. Grandma Schultz called and graciously offered the use of their beach house to us for the stay. That should be great and really make for a fun stay. Kaily, who recently rediscovered the beach at my Dad’s 70th birthday, has been asking to go play a the sand a lot.

Charise was off with a friend and it was supper cold saturday. I was fishing around for some where warm and fun to go with kaily after being cooped up all morning.

After bouncing a few ideas off Kaily, who always gets tremendously excited no matter what it is so they all sound brilliant, we decided to take the train down to the Children’s discovery museum in San Jose.  It’s been a while since I had been their and they had changed some stuff around but mostly it was the same.

All and all we had a lot of fund for quite a few hours. Kaily really enjoys going on Caltrain so she was all worked up just about that (could have been the whole adventure and she would have been fine). Anyway we got down there and realized the station was a lot further from the museum then I had reckoned with, we grabbed a cab and headed on over.

Kaily spent a long time at the water works and got throughly soaked despite her smock. Loved it. She also really enjoyed the sand chemist area upstairs. She didn’t attache to any other kids which is odd usually she starts building out a mini social network as quick as she can, but kept busy just the same.

I thought the Clifford exhibit was a total let down. Kaily had fun running the little mail slips around to the different prop buildings but there was really not much there to interact with or much to do for a 3+ set. It’s not that it was bad it just could have been a lot more.
Charise declined to come get us, so I put her on my shoulders and we death speed marched back to the caltrain station (couldn’t get a cab and it was an hour wait if we missed our ride).

Good to get out and have some fun.

I finally got the walker family thanks giving day pictures up. Such as they are… I don’t know the lighting was odd and I distracted so there are not to many keepers. I also really need to get a fast 2.8 lens that  that can focus better in low light. Cannon 50 2.8 is a great studio portrait type lens but totally sucks if there is any light variation.

I’ve promised myself next year I will do something in way of a site redesign for walkerpad.  This word press theme and bugs with the gallery are wearing a bit thin with me.

Happy T day folks! We are off to my sister Connie’s for the walker clan gathering. Christmass eve will be at my moms house, then a day or three later we are going to head down to S.cal through the new year.

So it only took a million years but I finally got around to uploading some pictures today.

From today, Ciennas 3rd bday

From May, Sams Bday

The kids have really grown and changed in just a few months.

Full galleries http://walkerpad.com/wp-gallery2.php?g2_itemId=7765

Quick upodate. Charise is out of surgery, with her wonderfully remodeled elbow. Or at least less horrible scared, depending on your point of view. She is tired and home now but doing pretty good over all. The incision area was bother her while we where still at the clinic, so I had the doc shoot her arm up with all kinds of local that should last for the next 6-12 hours and keep the location specific pain from being to annoying. She is on some general pain killers and is till woogy from the general she was under with but all and all this seems to be going ok so far. Got go get more ice on it though.

So I have had my Go Motor board for a while now (maybe 3 months) but don’t use it as much as I had planed because the performance (range/speed) are just not there, not reasonable close to the advertised specks. So Go has announced a new board revision with dual motors and some general speck bumps. So I asked what I thought was a reasonable question over on their blog, it’s sitting in moderation now will see if it actually shows up.

“So, any chance of a upgrade program? I
like my early 2007 well enough I guess (24 pound), and it certainly gets lots of looks on cal train, but as a bigger guy (215 + back pack) I get maybe 7 miles an hour and only about 3 miles range, which in my case is just barely enough for there and back, speed drops again when the battery is low ( maybe 5-6). Maybe I have a battery problem, not sure but the performance over all seems like it really could be better.
This tends to make me a little shy about giving it the standing ovation that the looks would suggest it should get when I get questions, and I get a lot of them back and forth on cal train all the time. I certainly wouldn’t mind paying a reasonable model upgrade fee, usage is usage after all.

Gizmag has article on a UK Boom Borda that has a 400watt engine and is claiming speeds up to (love that up to stuff) of 25 miles an hour with a 10-15 mile an hour rang.
Course this is really an electric skate board making it pretty much useless in CA, given that they are restricted to parks, unlike a scooter. Still… I would call that competition knocking if true or even true to the same percentage that Go board performance window claims .”

Oh man, sorry folks, I mugged the url (I’ll blame iPhone and the lack of cut and past right now).

Vacation pictures are up at flicker

I will have some very cool shots of the Louou and the Dolphin park including kaily shaking hands with a dolphin (to scared to the the kiss) in a day or so.

Going to be a crazy week, work is nuts, and Charise is gone down to a conference all week so I’m doing the solo dad thing.

I’ll see if I can get a few shots up from the chopper ride tonight.