a life less interesting

Since it was such a lovely day for driving today, I decided to go take care of a customer in New Haven. Initially I didn't want to go, but they were having problems with their router since yesterday afternoon and were rather anxious to get online - a feeling I know all too well.

Traffic was pretty light, considering Tropical Depression Hanna was on the way to destroy life as we know it. I had also just had the struts in the car replaced to alleviate a very expensive sound coming from their general vicinity, so I felt that I should do what I could to pay them off somehow.

About half way through West Haven - ironically near the location of the "Vagina" billboard * - I was passed by an SUV.

As you can see, it's a Hummer H3, one of the more fuel efficient vehicles in the Hummer line. Normally, the black ones don't look to bad, but there was something different about this one. I don't know if it was the brush guards, the "lived in" look that it had (like it had actually been driven off-road), or the vague sense that whoever was driving it had actually served their country and had spent more than a few months behind the wheel of a military Hummer. What I do know is that it stood out - more than a vehicle that gets approx. 14 mpg doing 70+ down the highway does. What you can see in the photo is an arrow pointing to where their lone bumper sticker is.

What does the bumper sticker say?

Now, I shouldn't have been surprised that the person driving the fuel-inefficient vehicle on the road was a Republican, but somehow, I still was. From what I understand, a rather large percentage of the people serving in the armed forces are Republican, despite the fact that their Commander In Chief keeps putting them in harms way. Guess I still hold out hope for some people out there to have a decent head on their shoulders.....

Andy Ihnatko recently posted a photo on flickr of his attempts to test several HD formatted digital camcorders. The photo itself is interesting in that he's got three of these things to play with - that's pretty cool.

What I'm curious about is: are they worth the money? And the effort? We have a newish mini-DV type camcorder that works pretty well. I plug a firewire cable in and can edit things in iMovie and turn the tapes into movies to share with the family - and that's fun and everything, but I basically have to watch the footage before I can do anything with it. I usually use this time to review what I want to keep and get rid of, so it's useful, but as anyone who's done any editing of home movies, or any kind of editing of movies, knows, you usually have a lot more footage than you need.

What it comes down to is... do these cameras speed up the editing process at all? Does it make importing faster? Is there a conversion process to deal with to get the footage into iMovie?

One of the reasons I loathe making the family movies is all the time it takes to import the footage - and as you might imagine, with 4 kids, there's a lot of footage. Since the newer camcorder we have can only fit about an hour on a tape (and we've only tried it a few times so far, just making sure it works ok), that means I'll have a lot of work ahead of me, and a lot of footage to log - and quite a bit of tape swapping to do. Again, it is usually worth the trouble and effort in the end, but it's a lot of work to do - so is there a way to avoid some of it?

I need some real world feedback - which camera's are worth it? Which ones are dogs? And which ones work with the Mac OS X (which seems like a silly question these days, with Apples ever increasing market share....

I just made a change to the site - I'm now including my posts to flickr and twitter to the home page. I'm sill trying to figure out if I can include them in the archives (should be possible, right?) but in the meantime, this will do the trick. I'm posting this partially to share the news - now it won't look like I never post - and also to test it out and make sure all the loose bits have been tightened up properly.