Entries from May 2006
Trip Lapse #2: Huron, SD to Rapid City,SD
This is my second attempt of a creating a “Trip Lapse.” It spans across most of the state of South Dakota starting in the East (Huron), and ending in the west (Rapid City). I set the camera to record an image every 3 seconds which helped the overall flow of the movie, but I ran into problems with mounting and windshield reflection that need to be addressed in the future. To address the problems I plan on building a magnetic enclosure and mount for the top of my car which should eliminate the glare. The video is running at 30 fps and is 10.1 MB.
City of Industry
A few of my friends and I had this great idea to form a band one night, record an EP, then break up all within a 24 hour period. So we gathered up an accordion, some small electric toy keyboards, a guitar, and of course my drums and put something together. The result is “City of Industry” and what we call the “Iceburgs! Iceburgs!” EP. We find the songs to be hilarious, even without lyrics, and we already have almost 400 plays after 2 days.
Trip Lapse #1: Vermillion, SD to Huron, SD
Eastern South Dakota scenery isn’t all that great, maybe that’s one of the reasons why our interstate speed limits are set at 75mph. At any rate, today on my way back home from college I set my hooked my webcam up to my laptop and recorded what I’m calling a trip lapse. The camera took a photo every 10 seconds for the ‘scenic’ three hour journey and in all recorded 969 images. The movie is running at 12fps and the result is a little rough, but I look forward to experimenting with the technique further. I think one photo every 5 seconds will make it more fluid, but i don’t want to increase the length too much. The two towns you see in the video are Sioux Falls and Mitchell respectively.
Google Trends
I highly recommend playing with Google Trends, one of Google Labs latest projects. Simply type in a word and it will show you a graph of that particular search term over time. You can even do comparisons between subjects to compare search traffic; this is where the fun begins. Here are some that I checked out.
Comparison Searches
- War vs. Peace vs. War and Peace – Take a guess at this result.
- RIAA vs. Grandmas – No one is safe, not even those that don’t own computers .
- South Dakota vs. North Dakota – or maybe it should read “South Dakota vs. Dakota“…
- Katrina vs. Tsunami – I actually expected the opposite from this one.
- Apples vs. Oranges – I guess you really can’t compare..
- George Bush vs Iraq – No comment.
- Intelligent Design vs. Flying Spaghetti Monster – Watch out for the noodly appendage.
- Emo vs. Emu – It’s good to see that the emu’s are still standing strong.
Single Searches
- Solar Eclipse – This one is interesting, the same thing works for holidays and other events.
- Snowboarding – Just look at those slopes.
Recent Design Work
I recently did the design and photo work for a friends graduation announcements. I tried to do something a bit different than a traditional announcement, and I think they turned out well. Taking the photos was a lot of fun and they got a good response from those that received them. Click the image for a larger version.
