Carson Blog

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To celebrate the past three wonderful months of marriage Celeste made this video. Hope you enjoy!

I am not a vegan, but my girlfriend showed me a book called “Original Fast Foods” that contains a reasonable approach to moving to a largely plant based diet.  For flesh eaters, it recommends scaling back significantly on meat – probably a good recommendation for most Americans (since they, on average, get about 50% of their calories from animal sources).

My goal is to live off entirely plant based foods for three weeks.  I am currently on week 2.  After week three I hope to reintroduce a small amount of meat (mainly fish) into my diet.   So far, I have prepared salsas, smoothies, pancakes, shepherd’s pie, lasagna (my favorite to date), and chile.

I have edited many hours of video for fun and for school. I did one or two projects with windows Movie Maker, but ever since I got my Mac two years ago, life has been good and I use Final Cut Express for my primary compositing tool. Invariably, however, I use a lot of tools besides final cut to get the job done.

Here’s a typical situation: We want to make a music video. We’d like to have some shots where we are on the moon or in some exotic place – hence, we need a green screen. On the background we want some videos which happen to reside on YouTube. So the tasks will involve:

- Taking our video and laying it out in the desired order
- Importing movies from disparate sources in a variety of formats (flv, mp4, mov, avi)
- Add titles
- Get some music from iTunes
- Export our movie to YouTube

Here’s the tools used:

- Compositing is done entirely in Final Cut express. It has a chroma keyer that does very good green screening.
- I use either ffmpegX (ffmpeg for OS X) or FLVs Streaming Export Wizard to take a file from youtube and turn it into an mp4. 50% of the time ffmpeg doesnt work, and flv does, but one of them always comes to the rescue when the other fails.
- After most of the content layout, i can go to LiveType and do titling.
- Got iTunes music thats DRM protected? Owners of macs have it easy. Just import the music into iMovie HD, put a single photo in it, and export full quality. you can then ffmpeg that to strip out just the mp3, or just pop it directly into Final Cut Express. No wasted CDs!
- I find the following pipelines to be fairly descent for youtube export: 1) Export DV using quicktime conversion in final cut express. 2) Transcode the DV to FLV using ffmpeg. I should say, this is to render to flash video, not necessarily YouTube. I use this flash video along with SWFObject to host videos on my own server. This lets me choose whatever video size and quality i want.

When things get sticky, I also pull out the following tools:
– Audacity
– OpenCV (just program it yourself!)
– Gimp (you can do per-frame editing, and I have done so)

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I recorded this video during the 2006 Nasville Nights performance at BYU-Idaho. Ok, so I missed the first 15 seconds of the song – sorry.

This song was originally written by Martina McBride and is called concrete angel. Besides being rather sad (given its message about child abuse), this gal performed it well. I gotta say, too, whoever she is, she is a babe.

I just bought an Acomdata PureDrive USB 2.0+esata.   Since the drive was so cheap, and since it supported eSata, I decided to get a esata card for my heretofore unused expresscard port on my macbook pro.  The combo works wonderfully!  I get over 400 mbits sustained reading and writing.  Not bad!

There is one trick.  The drive comes formatted with an MSDOS partition.  When I tried to format it to OS X extended, I got this error “File system formatter failed.”  Looking on the internet, I found this post which described a “multiple partition” method.  In truth, the only needed action is as follows:

1. Go to Disk Utility
2. Click on the external drive
3. Click on Partition
4. Pick “1″ under “volume scheme”
5. Select “Options”
6. The selected partition scheme is likely “Master Boot Record.”  You want GUID.  Select this and click “Apply”
7. When the previous step finishes, go to “Erase” and select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and click erase.

I keep a list of some of the books I have read over the years on my wiki.  Recently I just concluded a book on Washington and was bothered enough about the author’s areligious slant on Washington’s life that I did a little digging and found sufficient fodder for my viewpoint: that Washington was indeed a religious man.  Although I confess that this is my viewpoint, I also assert there is no historical backing for any other conclusion.  Biographers, such as the one who wrote the book I just read, have of late been putting this areligious spin on famous Americans such as Washington and Lincoln – a spin I don’t think these individuals would appreciate if they were still living.  In many of the books the authors support their views in a manner  of reasoning that boils down to this: “There were no ministers at his death, so what do you think that says about what that man thought about religion?”  Implying I suppose that they were not religious?  That is a far cry from a reasonable argument – not because it differs from my viewpoint, but because historical documents do not support it.  To be religious does not mean one must join a religion – especially in light of what we know about the restoration.  The true church was not restored until most of these men had long since passed.  Their faith in God was still evident.  This quote on the secularization of Washington sums up what I want to express; that, in light of the vast amounts of now easily accessible documents, it is no longer scholarly or acceptable to just assert that people like Lincoln or Washington were not religious:

Historians ought no longer be permitted to do the legerdemain of turning Washington into a Deist even if they found it necessary and acceptable to do so in the past. Simply put, it is time to let the words and writings of Washington’s faith speak for themselves.

This was a nerd get together. The only rules: eat a couple dogs before going on to lesser things (E.g. smores). The other rule: bring your wife and kids, unless your Carson. Carson was exempt.

Here we have an assortment of pictures of the Hot Dog BBQ: http://www.oakenweld.com/coppermine/thumbnails.php?album=35

As someone who grew up mainly in the 90s, many of the societal norms I learned can be attributed to one of two main sources: Cool (e.g., Saved by the Bell and The Fresh Prince) and Uncool (e.g., Full House) TV shows. Although many positive social changes have been introduced over the last half century, as taught by mother TV, I think there are some supposed proscriptions that attempt to redefine what the dictionary already defines clearly. 

For example, one might conclude that it is sexist to use the word “he” to refer to an individual of unknown gender.  I have had english teachers attempt to codify a style rule for this situation, so that you use “they” to refer to such an individual; others have suggested using the more prolix “an individual” or “the person.”  The problem with using “they” is that “they” is plural, where “he” is attempting to address something in the singular.  The other suggestions violate the law of syllabic conservation.

“He” or “she” can certainly be used as anaphora.  Why not as a generic reference?  The truth is, you don’t have to reason about it: Webster already defines “he” as “used to refer to a person of unspecified sex.” By the way, “she” also includes the same definition allowing for gender-neutral references.  

PS, I got the definition while reading DeGroot “Probability and Statistics”, 2nd ed.  

I have been wanting to write a bit about my experience as a computer scientist who switched to Mac about 2 years ago.  I bought a MacBook Pro after  talking with a coworker at the INL.  As most people, I had a bunch of misconceptions about the Macs shortcomings.  Most of all, I knew macs used PowerPCs – and although these seemed like cool chips from a nerd standpoint, I saw no compelling reason to switch.  But when Apple released its first iteration of the MacBook Pro, with the Intel Core Duo, I was thouroughly impressed with the whole package.  It was attractive – and had a whopping two cores (I am sure when my kids have 64 cores in their laptops two cores will seem a paltry amount). When I ordered one in August, 2006, I watched it ship from China – it felt like I was having a supercomputer delivered to my doorstep.  On top of that, I knew it was a good looking, quite laptop – all aesthetical parameters that have meant much more to me as I have grown older (I hate loud fans with a passion).

First some background.  I grew up as a nerd.  I tackled the most inane nerd tasks at an early age – even doing database applications in middle school (boooring).  That said, by the time I had decided to get a Mac I was not the same breed of nerd.  Fans drive me crazy – and I don’t care how powerful a computer is, I want it to have a bright screen, be quiet, powerful, and capable.  I like programming and Unix, but there are certain tasks, as a long time linux user, that I find repugnant – namely, rebuilding your kernel.  That’s a fun excercise once or twice, but when it becomes a useful skill for daily computer use in a particular OS, as it seems to be in Linux, I question whether that OS is ready for mainstream use.

How has the Mac measured up?  Truth is, it has meet my high hopes for it.  Here’s a list of Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• It IS Unix.  It has the full suite of Unix tools, most of them open source.  It uses GCC.  It has a great Terminal and comes with Bash.  Its POSIX, BSD, and has done everything that I have ever expected a UNIX to do.  For many open source apps, if there are slight tweaks that need to be made to the source, one can easily download mac ports, and install apps in much the same way as with apt-get.  Bottom line: flawless unix environment.
• It IS beautiful.  Or, as steve Jobs would say, “gorgeous.”  The keyboard lights up in the dark.  The screen is bright – even after 1.8 years. It is about noticeably  quieter than most laptops Ive put it next to.  The windowing environment makes Microsoft Windows look like a bad dream. Everything scrolls smoothly, looks slick, and works well together.  
• It IS capable.  Lets face it, its Intel Inside.  It uses a standard intel chipset with some Apple BIOS.  But while the processor is standard Intel, the layout is definitely Apple – all laid out in the cleanest, cleverst, thinnest package.  As for the OS, the kernel OS X sports works wonders. I regularly have a dozen browser windows, the XCode development environment, NeoOffice (Open Office variant for OS X), iTunes, Mail, iPhoto, Gimp, and Final CutExpress all open at once – and it all runs smooth as butter.  Whatever they are doing to make it seem so smooth, they have me fooled. 
• It IS upgradeable.  Even in a laptop!  I have doubled the ram, and just yesterday, using no “extra” tools, cloned my harddrive onto a new one that is 3x as big – all went flawlessly (even though I voided the warranty by opening the box myself.  Hey, Im not gonna let someone else do it if I can do it myself)
• It IS different.  Apple does things differently.  They follow an 80% rule – they show the features that 80% of users want. Some people, even Mac Users, have complained, e.g., about the lack of resize handles around all sides of an application window.  I simply do not care about that.  Some people complain about a lack of games on the Mac.  In my opinion, computer games are a total waste of time (though I am sooo grateful to all the parents who buy their goober kids the latest video cards and drive down the price on fast graphics hardware for me to develop cool visualization applications)

This is my version of Cristofori’s Dream by David Lanz.  I created this using garage band, making each note individually.  Conclusion: the real version, played by a human (such as David Lanz) has much more emotion and character to it.  

 

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