Flowers Blooming

I've always been intrigued by those movies that speed up action by taking a lot of pictures over a long time and cram them together. They're usually something like plants growing. So I made one.

Let's go back a bit. I recently agreed to do an interview for a company and provided feedback on their new website design. For a fee, of course. They paid me $200 for my lunch hour in the form of an Amazon credit. This money was burning my pockets (as my dad used to say), so I spent some of it on a wireless camera that you link via WiFi and can control and view over the web.  I bought this one. I'll put in a picture cause the link will quit working some day. It costs $110.  Of course, as soon as I bought it, it went down to $99.

I can't figure out what to do with it exactly. We originally mounted it in the garage and pointed it at my wife's tomatoes to see if we could figure out what was eating them. Turned out it was birds.

It doesn't have the highest quality picture but there are a lot of nifty things you can do with it after spending days reading the instructions which you actually have to go looking for on the web. One thing you can do is have it take a picture at regular intervals and send them by ftp to some server if you have an account. I happen to have a GoDaddy account that I use for all kinds of crap like this. Then I take all the pictures and cram them into a movie.

Recently my wife got these neat flowers from the guy who does our next-door neighbors yard. They're big white flowers that bloom when it gets dark and collapse the next day around 10 in the morning. After making sure that I had an adequate WiFi signal in the yard, I set up the camera near sundown and pointed it at the flowers. I set it to take a picture every minute and then left it alone. This is my first shot at it. You have to look fast.

The flowers are definitely cooler than my movie making.

A Peep in the MicroWave

So, just what happens when you put an Easter Peep in the microwave?  I decided to find out.  And I decided to record it.  It was necessary to do this pretty soon as the Peeps the I bought at Roses were disappearing one at a time.  So here's what happens.

Cool, Huh?

Samuel L. Jackson or Laurence Fishburne

Recently a reporter was interviewing Samuel L. Jackson and asked him about his role in a Super Bowl ad. Unfortunately for the reporter, the ad had Laurence Fishburne in it and not Jackson. So Jackson proceeds to mercilessly pound the reporter for quite some time over his mistake. I felt bad for the reporter because I am always getting those two confused. I understand. And I don't get either of them confused with Morgan Freeman.

Which is which?

Miracles Do Happen

This morning a minor miracle happened. About two thirds of the way into work, I realized that I had not been stopped by a single red light. And the trend continued all the way to the parking deck. I copied a picture of my route and pasted little stoplights on the route where the lights actually are to give you an idea of what a miracle this was.

It wasn't a perfect miracle. I did take a right on red without having to wait onto Erwin and I slipped through the light on Garrett on yellow fading to red as I passed under it. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket on the way home.

The Apple Macintosh is 30 Today

As most people who know me know, I've been an Apple "fanboy" for much of my life.  When people have asked me what computer to buy, I always say "Get a Mac".  Anyhow, on the 30th Anniversary of the Mac's introduction, I thought I would put up a list of the Macs I've had over the Years.

The first one was the original Macintosh.  In September, 1984, wife got some friends to get it for me with their college discount, which made it it about half the cost of retail.  I think it was an anniversary gift.  In 1989 I made my best Apple purchase ever.  I bought 100 shares of AAPL at $35 each.

We got our next Mac, a Mac IIsi, seven years later in 1991.  This was purchased with the Princeton college discount.  We also got the 13 inch color display.

After another seven years, in 1998, we got a new G3 desktop with a new 21 inch display.  No college discount but the college discount had pretty much gone away by then.

Seven years later, in 2005, I decided that the computer and the monitor should be separate, so rather than buy an iMac, I purchased a Mac mini and got a Dell monitor to go with it.  After 2 years, I attempted to upgrade the RAM and damaged it such that the fans ran wide open all the time.  Luckily, after a couple of months of loud fan noise, a lightning strike put it out of it's misery.

And so, in 2007, we bought a new Aluminum 20 inch iMac.  This machine was a disaster because it kept shutting down unannounced. After a lot of complaining and phone calls, I got Apple to replace the motherboard and power supply and all was good in the world.  In 2012, I replaced an increasingly flaky internal hard drive with a new 1T drive.

Rather than wait the full seven years, and still feeling a bit guilty about the indulgence since the old one was working fine, I treated myself to a new 27 inch iMac for Christmas 2013.  I reasoned that the stock was doing good enough and I was getting old and it was time and the new one would be a lot faster and, blah, blah, blah.  So I'm just getting it up to speed.  It's a nice toy for an old boy.

So this picture sort of summarizes my Apple Macintosh journey.

Fortunately, the little Apple stock I bought back in 1989 has appreciated nicely enough to cover these purchases along with all the other Apple do-dads we've bought along the way.