Wonderful Time Lapse – Vancouver

As regular readers know, I enjoy creating time lapse photography. Occasionally though I see work so good that makes me want to quit, as I am obviously not worthy. Reader Yvo Van Doorn posted the link to this video on twitter. It blows me away.

This is professional-grade work. Mine by comparison in child’s play.

I love Vancouver. In the 1990s I spent a LOT of time there, as I was working as a BCAHA on-ice official (Referee & Lineman in ice hockey) and Sue was playing on a Women’s hockey team based in Lynn Valley in North Vancouver. It seemed we drove up every weekend for something. We live equidistant between Sea-Tac & YVR, and I used to prefer flying out of Vancouver, especially to Europe, since there are so many more flights to & from Vancouver compared to Seattle. 9/11 and the massive border crossing hassles put an end to our bi-national lifestyle. Sue still attends many horse-related events in BC, but I rarely drive up except to attend a couple of Jaguar club slalom events each summer.

I ponder what impact the winter games will have on this city I love so much. I hope it doesn’t spoil it too much.

Wall Street Sheep bleat to Steve Jobs’ tune.

I don’t have anything to say about Apple’s new “iPad” device. Unlike technology pundits, I would prefer to get my hands on one before I start spouting opinions about it.

What I would like to point out however is Wall Street’s view of today’s product announcement. I noted that when the name was announced AAPL stock nosedived a bit, then slowly climbed as features were explained. Later when the price was announced (at a bit more than half where the pre-announcement speculation put the price tag) the stock marched right back up again. In my twitter stream it seemed only myself and Kevin van Haaren were commenting on the stock market’s reaction.

There are at least two months to go before the (real, not stock) market can begin to asses what this product can and will do. It will be interesting to observe the stock along the way. I generally have a very dim view of what Wall Street analysts think, as I see them of incapable of real analysis, completely out of touch with the real world, and far more prone to herd mentality than they’re willing to admit. Meanwhile, I wish Apple luck here though, as a customer and shareholder.

Wonderful Noise

Reader Rafe Saber pointed me to this video on YouTube. I’m quite familiar with it, as I own the DVD, but was unaware that Speed/VBD has posted them online. This series of videos has stunning production values and the sound especially is a delight. They’ve lost quite a lot of that quality in the YouTube transmogrifying process (which destroys all video quality!) but even so, the brilliant and wonderful noise of the XK engine still shines through in the first fifty seconds of this clip. I could listen to that sound all day long.

Car Photo of the Day

Name that car.

This might be an easy one, and given the time I’m posting it perhaps it will give folks in the time zone represented by the plate a head start on guessing the make & model.

It was captured at a staging area of a TSD segment at the New England 1000 vintage rally a few years back on the shores of Lake Champlain.

The position of the feet in the frame for some odd reason evoke the cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” album, and no… nothing in-frame was on fire when I took this.

Adventures in Engrish

The pre-Christmas freeze broke a few pipes in our barn (despite me turning off the water, and draining them beforehand!) and also claimed my handy digital scale. I use it for weighing the catalyst for my BioDiesel production, which has to be measured down to the gram. Variations between various recipes based on waste oil acidity are pretty minor so it is important that I use the right amounts, or I could end up making a giant vat of soapy gunk instead of fuel. Been there, done that, don’t want to go back.

Obviously the scale had some water in it, likely condensation, as things froze hard. Since things have thawed I started up fuel production again, only to find my scale inoperable. It just beeped and the display presented me with gibberish. I did what any motivated tinkerer would do:

  • I swapped in new batteries.
  • I took it apart, cleaned and reassembled.
  • And, when it continued to beep and display gibberish I hurled it violently against the wall.

While it was satisfying to watch it disintegrate into component parts and splintered plastic bits, it doesn’t help me get any closer to weighing Potassium Hydroxide 200-some grams at a time.

Last weekend I went into town to try and find a suitable replacement scale at the hardware store and farmers co-op. No such luck. They had an analog ones, and hanging ones, but no table-top digital models. I grabbed an analog one as I had a batch in-process and thankfully the recipe was very simple (80/80 1kg/200g) so the analog one did the trick but rarely do recipes work out to nice even numbers. I hopped on Amazon.com and snagged a digital scale. It arrived this week and so far has worked great. It is of course of Chinese orgin, like so many consumer products today, and the manual inserted in the box is … interesting to say the least.

I’m usually one of those guys that reads the manual of every thing I buy to use. One of the joys of buying a new car is sitting in the front seat and reading the owner’s manual cover to cover. (Good thing I rarely buy a new car!) This “RTFM” thing comes from years of working in Information Technology I guess.

It is a good thing that a scale’s operation is fairly straightforward, because this manual is absolutely no help in understanding the operational procedures!

It will back to zero.

Feel free to call out your favorite parts in the comments!

SIA Flashback “It’s a Car! It’s a Motorcycle! It’s Bi-Autogo!

One of the earliest “Car Photo of the Day” shots I posted here (before I even started calling it that) featured the Scipps-Booth Bi-Autogo, which I had seen stuffed in a corner of the Owls Head Transportation Museum in Maine. This bizarro machine from the early days of the last century amazes me. Photographs do not do it justice.

I noted that Hemmings has it on their blog today with reprints of a Special Interest Autos article from 1981 written by the nephew of the man who built it. Worth a read:

Hemmings Auto Blogs » Blog Archive » SIA Flashback – It’s a Car! It’s a Motorcycle! It’s Bi-Autogo!.