The year 2011 has been a year of strings for me. It started with the Section Quartet, via Pandora, and a whole slew of others (such as the Vitamin String Quartet) on Pandora stations. More recently, I’ve been playing the Break of Reality album “Spectrum of the Sky” a lot. A blog I follow pointed me to Zoe Keating’s amazing cello layering using a loop recorder. Finally, this week I saw these guys on The Colbert Report, went and bought The Goat Rodeo Sessions, and have been playing it since.
Not just strings either. But instrumental music in general has been on the rise in my playlist. Explosions in The Sky is the first to come to mind.
On the day we left Zion, we drove through the tunnel and out the east entrance. On the other side of the tunnel, we stopped to explore a frozen riverbed, and spotted a herd of a dozen or so Big-Horned Sheep.
I had read on an internet forum that Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park was worth a visit. It’s fun to climb sand dunes, and they often make for nice scenes, so we figured we would head out of the park, stop by the sand dunes, and continue home from there. I wouldn’t say I regret going, but the dunes were not exactly spectacular, either. Kelso Dunes in Mojave, or the Mesquite Flat dunes in Death Valley are both a lot cooler places. For one thing, the dunes here were not very extensive. There were really only two peaks worthy of mention. Secondly, they were inhabited by off-road vehicles, with accompanying tracks and noise. When you walk in from the parking lot, there is a small section of sand fenced off, with a few openings. At the openings, there is a sign which doesn’t forbid walking around the dunes; it just says it may be dangerous, and suggests maybe you shouldn’t, or at least be careful. We decided to trust the kids on ATVs not to run us over and walked out to climb up the tallest dune. We climbed it. We watched the ATVs ride around, took some photos, then headed back towards the picnic area to make some lunch before heading to Vegas for the night.
After we left the park, we crossed over into Arizona. As soon as we did, the pavement ended. My first thought was, “Maybe we’re on the wrong track here?” But, no worries. The dirt was smooth, and 5 miles later the pavement re-appeared.
I spent Thanksgiving with Mary and her family at Zion National Park in Southern Utah. It was quite cold while we were there, and we had a really good time. It snowed the day before Mary and I arrived, so everything was still covered in a dusting of snow, and it was cold enough that wherever there was water to freeze, there was ice!
On Friday, Mary, her father, and I hiked up to Angel’s Landing. This is probably a really awesome hike any time of year (although I bet it is ridiculously crowded at peak season). With the snow and ice when we were there, it was the most fun I’ve had on a trail in a while. First the trail goes through a canyon, and then up two sets of steep switchbacks. Then you double back on the ridgeline above. This is where it gets awesome. It is a fairly technical trail with a lot of scrambling along a sometimes narrow ridge. However, there is a chain installed along all of the sketchy parts, so it really isn’t that bad. With the ice, it was still a bit of a challenge in spots even with the chain (just enough to be a lot of fun, as long as you are in reasonable shape, and not terribly scared of the heights).
The first really interesting part of the hike was at “Walter’s Wiggles”. This is the second, and the steepest, set of switchbacks, which take you up to the ridgeline. For us, they were completely covered over with snow and ice. The best part though was actually on the way down. On the way up, it was passable. By the time we had come down, it had re-frozen, and was super slick. The whole canyon was filled with hilarity. I thought it would make great inspiration for a mario kart track. The canyon echoed with people laughing, owws!, and general chatter. A group of kids was having a great time sliding down each segment. One of them was a strong supporter of the “penguin style” belly slidel. Adults were falling constantly, some stoically insisting on getting back up and walking again (until they fell again), and others just giving in and sliding down. It was all out comical.
After getting up the wiggles, there is a bit of up and down along the ridge line, out to the landing. There are some flat part, some steep parts, and a lot of good views!.
This is taken while climbing of the last bit of ridge, looking back along where we came:
Now I will leave you with a quick video clip of the wiggles:
I get about zero actual comments here, but about one spam posting a day. None of these see the light of day, but I see them, and recently I’ve noticed a trend toward flattery in blog spamming. For example, I’ve recently received these friendly comments:
“Incredible, that’s definitely what I was scanning for! This article just spared me alot of work. I’ll make certain to put this in good use!”
“congrats on having a successfull amazing lookin blog.. I wish I could write like you man.. seriously”
“Hello this post is nice and good. Can you tell me any related articles?”
“Very entertaining post – Might be aged news, but it was news to me.”
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Or, there are these gems:
“Good day in your opinion are north korea and south korea going to be at war”
“Thanks to the author for taking his clock time on this one.”
I’m really not sure what that last one is supposed to mean. I guess it is computer generated. Oh how I miss the good ‘ol days of “Want to make her happy? Click here to grow your member in just 2 weeks!”.
While surfing the interwebs tonight, I came across a silly stop-motion video about, well, stop-motion. My first thought was, “That must take freakin’ forever!”. Or does it? How hard is it really? Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to try my own stop motion animation. I really didn’t want to mess with clay characters, or a plot, or a little set. I just wanted to try moving some letters around. So, here it is below (or view it on flickr):
The first thing I did was start cutting paper letters. Actually, I cut one letter. Then I said to hell with this, and set off trying to find a quicker path to forming words. Scrabble! Perfect. I have a letter set right here.
So I put up the camera, a flash, and pointed it at a black foam board. First lesson: Don’t use a flash, if you can help it. The flash can only cycle so fast, and this limits the rate you can take pictures. I could move things faster than the camera could take photos.
Second lesson: Check your exposure, ON A COMPUTER SCREEN, before you capture the entire scene. I got fooled by the camera LCD into dramatically underexposing. This just meant I had to correct all the shots later.
Third lesson: Set the camera resolution to something lower. You don’t need 12MP images to create a 640×480 video. Everything goes slower with the larger file, so just shrink it down from the beginning.
Fourth lesson: You really do need small movements. My video is jerky as hell. Downright amateurish. I guess I wasn’t patient enough, but I didn’t really have a good feel for how small motions needed to be. Also, I guess I could have made the text a little straighter. And, all of the “letter flying in” frames for the top row failed miserably, because the letters were off the top of the screen.
I cannot imagine doing a full-length stop-motion film, but a few minutes really isn’t that bad. It is strangely satisfying. In fact, I spent a lot more time and got a lot more frustrated with the editing of this clip than I did with the shooting. A lot of that frustration was just figuring out how to do it though, and would go a lot faster on the second try.
iMovie is crap. A pain to use, and it would not let an image in a slideshow have a duration less than 0.3seconds. Further evidence that there is just no reason to use MacOS. I ended up using two things: VirtualDub to piece the still frames together, and Windows Movie Maker for the final editing, adding the end credits, and overlaying audio. It was a somewhat tedious process getting the still images all ready, but virtual dub will quickly take a sequence of numbered JPEGs and combine them to a movie. Irfanview came in very handy for generating these numbered sequence. For example, if I wanted to repeat a frame, say IMG_0527.jpg, I would create copies named IMG_0527_2.jpg, IMG_0527_3.jpg, etc, and then use irfranview to batch rename these into take2_1, take2_2, etc. so that VirtualDub would read them correctly.
The next problem I hit was the sound effects. I used my Blackberry to record the scrabble pieces splashing across a table, and the file was a .amr file format. wtfmate? A little googling, and I found the Moble AMR Converter on free-codecs.com. OK, so now I have a wav file. BUT, Windows Movie Maker won’t allow multiple audio tracks, and I’ve already used the audio track for the music. For this, I had to encode the movie without sound effects (just music), then open that video and add the sound effects in a new project and re-encode the final cut. Easy enough.
Total camera time: ~80 minutes.
Total editing time: ~150 minutes.
Total animation length: ~90 seconds (and the second half isn’t really stop-motion at all, so really ~40 seconds)
Production minutes per animation minute: ~350
That was fun! Now it is quite late, and I should probably get some sleep.
Tonight consisted of a trip to Valley Produce after work, followed by a a good time blazing new culinary frontiers with Mary. We made these zucchini fritters and tzatziki sauce to go along with mac and cheese with kielbasa, which Mary frequently cooks. Finished it out with some pita and a couple bottles of Peroni. The fritters (and the Tzatziki!) were great; my only complaint being that we made them a little too thick so they had a too much soft inside. Next time I’d flatten them a bit more before frying.
Mary and I spent an awesome Fourth of July weekend camping and hiking at the Tuolumne Meadows area of Yosemite. I love this place; especially at this time of year. Green meadows, babbling brooks, snow streaked mountains, waterfalls, and the occasional remnant snow patch. Also, it was not nearly as crowded as Yosemite Valley was, I’m sure. The valley in the summer, especially on a holiday weekend, is a traffic jam. Here, people are much more manageable; and once we got a mile into the wilderness, there’s hardly anybody at all. The meadows were teaming with wildlife, especially deer and marmots. Lots of marmots.
We spent Friday night at the Tuolumne Meadows Campground. It was full when we got there, but fortunately they have a backpackers section where you can spend the night before/night after you hit the trail. Saturday morning we took off south down Rafferty Creek trail, heading for the Vogalsang lake area. We ended up camping next to Fletcher Lake at 10,160ft, in a little grove of trees next to an open meadow, next to a cliff overlooking the valley we had just climbed up. There is something very relaxing about setting up a tent by yourself in a perfect alpine meadow and cooking a mountain house for dinner.
As long as I’m in California I think a trip to Tuolumne after the snow melts and Tioga Pass opens is going to be an annual tradition.
As planned after the first trip a couple weeks prior, I went back down to Leo Carrillo beach on the night of the last full moon. I was able to convince Mary to come as well, so we took off after work and got there just before sunset. The sun went down, the moon came up, and we climbed out onto a rocky outcropping. It was clear from the start that we should be concerned about the incoming waves. Mary certainly told me as much. But…the rock was dry. At first, I was all worried, and would be ready to run or cover the camera every time a wave came in. But they kept coming, and nothing ever made it up onto the rock for at least 20 minutes. I got comfortable; unconcerned. Then the big one came, doused both of us, doused the camera on the tripod, and practically filled the camera bag containing lenses and other assorted gear with salt water. We dried the gear off as best we could right there on the rock, in the dark. Then we went back to the car to continue with paper towels. Then we finally got home and I cleaned everything as best I could with Kim wipes, cotton swaps, and IPA. It’s been over a week now, and so far no signs of problems. It’s not as much of an adventure if you come home dry, I suppose.
It was not a complete failure, though most shots did not come out as great as I’d hoped.
Moonrise:
Mary, shortly before the ocean sent us scurrying away:
I’ve been on a bit of a Swedish mystery kick recently. Just finished “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”, after waiting months for its (English) release since finishing the second book. I got completely sucked into all three of these books. They’re very good! There’s also a movie just released in the US of the first.
While I was waiting for the final in the Stieg Larsson series, I figured I would try some other Swedish fiction – since I’m in kind of a “Scandinavia (and Greenland!) is cool phase – and read a couple of the Inspector Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. I had previously read Depths by the same author quite by coincidence, but I didn’t find it at all interesting and never finished it. However, The Wallander books seemed highly recommended on the interwebs, so I thought I’d give them a chance. I’ve read the first two, and they’re OK; certainly interesting enough to finish (and maybe even buy the next in the series). But not great. They don’t keep me up nights, by any means.
A few weeks ago, I and nine other adventurous souls headed back to Death Valley for the weekend. Our primary objective for the trip was to make it out to the Racetrack Playa. The playa is a large, flat surface of hardened mud, cracked into a rather appealing texture. During the winter, it often gets flooded and stays wet and muddy, but in the spring it quickly dries.
Prior to leaving, and right up to the moment at Scotty’s Castle where we decided to go for it, we questioned whether driving all the way out there in our not-so-rugged, low-clearance vehicles was a wise idea. Although I don’t usually picture myself as the conservative one, I in particular was very hesitant to drive the Prius out there, fearing vehicle damage, major hassles, or expensive towing fees when something broke. The big concern, from everything I’ve read, is that the rocks on the 27 mile long unmaintained road puncture tires; often more than one. The lady working at Scotty’s Castle, when asked, said “No way, don’t go. About once a week someone gets stranded out there and it can be $1500 to get towed out.” And I didn’t even have a full-size spare. If I had been alone, I would almost certainly not have gone; but since we had three vehicles, I figured our chances of being stranded were low, and..what the hell. So we drove nice and slow for two hours or so until we made it! Along the way we passed teakettle junction: A fork in the road where people decorate the sign with old teakettles.
Here is the view approaching the Playa from the north:
One of the cool features of the playa is the rocks that slide across it, leaving tracks in the mud that zig zag in all sorts of directions, and last for years. I’ve not heard a conclusive explanation for how they move, and as far as I know no-one has seen or recorded them moving, but I think it is some combination of wind and water pushing them across a slick, muddy surface. After it rains, a lot of water from the surrounding mountains runs down onto the playa, and I believe the winds through there can get very fast. When were first arrived, we parked up by the grandstand and ran out onto the playa. I had read that the best sliding rocks were at the southern end, so I set off walking that direction. I quickly learned that the playa is a LOT bigger than it looks. I kept walking, running, walking. When I looked back, the grandstand had gotten a lot further, but the south end did not look any closer. In the end, we gave up walking and returned to the grandstand for a bit. We then drove down to the south end, but by the time we found the good rock tracks, it was already getting very dark.
In the end, we made it in and out with no problems. I’m not quite as confident about it as Kendall is, but it was a calculated risk. I’m sure many people do have problems, and the fact that our three cars were fine does not say much about the actual odds of getting stuck with two flats. Definitely, if you are going, bring supplies (food, water, sleeping bag) to spend a couple of days/nights comfortably. I’m not sure I would do it in the middle of summer when it is deadly hot. And finally, be prepared to accept that there is some risk of a major hassle and financial costs if you are unlucky. I don’t know about other seasons, but when were out there in April, we saw at least 8 other vehicles along the way. Also, I regret that we tried to drive in and out on the same day. I would much preferred to have camped out there for the night. There is a primitive campground a couple miles south of the Playa.
