Mike

Falling Brook – Moving In

~ randyaa ~ 20 Comments

Zemanta Related Posts ThumbnailWow! Last weekend was an insanely hectic few days.� Not only was our daughter Delilah born but we also moved into a new house.� We’re finally settling back into normalcy, well… as normal as it can be with a 1week old baby and a new house.

Even though we had to move the closing date due to little miss Lilah’s early arrival we were fortunate enough to get the sellers to agree to an early possession.� 7am last Saturday I left Rachel and her mother at the hospital so I could get the move underway and so we could be all set by discharge time (which I convinced the nurses to do LATE in the day).

I did the final walk-through at 8am, picked up the 26′ U-Haul truck at 9 (no I’ve never driven something that big before) and we had the move under way by 10am.� At the new house a little after noon with the truck and my father’s snowmobile trailer fully loaded.� Completely unloaded by 1:30pm.� Not too shabby.

Couldn’t have possibly done it without all the help.� Thanks George, Dale, Brian, Ryan, Mike,Cory, Bill, Chris, Eric.

During the whole process I made the following time-lapse.� There are big gaps because well… I was busy.

The Cuomos – Mike & Mary Beth

~ randyaa ~ 3 Comments

Mike and Mary Beth CuomoSaturday Mary Beth became a Cuomo.  It was an exciting day for everyone!  Mike and Mary Beth really make a beautiful couple don’t you think?

I ran 3rd string Photographer, after clearing it with them & the hired photographer first, just to get some practice in.  There’s still a lot I didn’t do, but I must say I’m becoming quite comfortable with my equipment and the whole process.

I shot almost 1,400 photos on Saturday and it was my first time shooting an entire day in RAW.  Wow! I finally filled up my memory card… (16gb), I need to get some extras.  Because it was my first time shooting in RAW, it’s taking me a lot longer than usual to process the photos. I didn’t even have any software to do it before yesterday!  Now I’m all setup with Adobe Photoshop CS4 & Adobe CS4 Bridge and holy cow these things are powerhouses!

I’ll be throwing together a slide-show soon, but since I’m not sure how long it’s going to take I wanted to post this last picture of the night.

Congratulations Mike & Mary Beth!

Two Discoveries

~ randyaa ~ 2 Comments

turning-point-boardwalkI made two discoveries today.  Well really, my friend Mike made one discovery yesterday (which I realized today) and I made another one today.  I’m going to use my discovery today to illustrate Mike’s from Yesterday.  If you’re less inclined to a little geekery skip to the map below.

GPS Tracking isn’t all that new, there are many devices to do this, and every mobile GPS unit that I know has the ability.  The iPhone doesn’t, or at least not natively.  Mike and I were exploring an area of Rochester today which I’d never heard of or seen before today.  Because of this I thought it would be neat to track where we were and how far we went etc.  Also because I tend to take a lot of photos I figured I could use the GPS tracking information to geo-tag my pictures.

My criteria for GPS tracking was that it could use my iPhone, that it was free, and that it could track my coordinates over time.  This isn’t a lot, I know, I was trying to be flexible.  I did a little searching in the iTunes app store and came up with InstaMapper.

InstaMapper fit the bill perfectly.  Not only is instamapper free, but it pushes the data direct to a website (which requiers an account that is also free) allowing you to export it in any format you wish.  It also interfaces directly with Google Maps letting you see all your waypoint data on a very nice Google Maps interface.

Overall I’m impressed.  My only complaint is that the the waypoint data is not cached locally to send later if you don’t have a connection.  While this isn’t a problem around Rochester, this will be a problem if I were to try to use this application in a more rural area such as the Adirondacks.  Of course, there is another downfall to the iPhone app version, and that is the app has to be running in the foreground for your waypoints to get tracked.  This is a limitation of the iPhone however; and in my opinion can’t detract from the value of the application itself.  The app is available for iPhone, Blackberry, Android & Motorola iDEN(whatever that is) at this point.

The following is the GPS waypoint map created and embedded using InstaMapper’s tools of our trek today.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

http://www.instamapper.com/trk?key=17792608895854370827&width=500&height=350&type=roadmap

This is all in a park called Turning Point Park.  It’s quite nice and apparently they’ve spent a large chunk of change in the past few years putting in the 4,000ft boardwalk.  I’m awefully happy with whoever spent all the effort to push for the new boardwalk, it made the entire experience vary enjoyable and the park would be all but useless without it.

I will be visiting again.

The Amazing Maize Maze

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The Cool BusYou can always tell its fall again when my department organizes the annual Maize Maze team building exercise. This year is no different and Friday my team (consisting of myself, Mike and Matt) came in 3rd overall and 2nd among those obtaining all pieces to the map.

While we were at the Farm we had to give the coops something to do and we arrive at the ‘Cool Bus’ Ryan and Matt are up front with our coops, Anne, Andrew and Matt taking the backseats.

Definitely beats working for a few hours!

Never go to a doctor with dead office plants

~ randyaa ~ 2 Comments

Mike showed me two sweet websites that help with RSS feeds.

The first is Feed Rinse. Feed Rinse is a free website that will allow you to setup an RSS feed that filters another RSS feed. This means if you subscribe to an RSS feed that has a bunch of subjects that you don’t care about you can filter them out.

The second is Feed 43. Feed 43 (or Feed For Free) is a free website that allows you to convert any website that doesn’t have an RSS feed into an RSS feed. I haven’t had a chance to play with this yet but it looks like you need to write some sort of script to determine what on the site should be considered an article etc. I’ll post about it again after I play with it for a while.