Video Capture

We reached a momentous milestone today.  One that I would liken to the moonlanding.  Lolz


We got Skype going.

As the techspert in the house, I kinda have final say in all things technological and I've been avoiding webcams for years because I think of them as gimmicky.


But after months of nagging (from other Skype users) I finally caved in and bought a web cam.


I was pleasantly surprised when we got our first video call streaming clearly to my brother in Albany, about 600km's away.  


Its like watching YouTube, only that it's live and interactive and doesn't have Jessica Chobot.


My parents and I were very amused by LifeCam Dashboard effects like making our heads big and wearing hats :P


My bro took his laptop around the house and gave us a virtual tour of his place.  
He even showed us his pots of baby corns.  


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I was busy last week putting together my Dad's birthday video presentation.  


Thank you Windows Movie Maker for once again saving my life. :P


My dad turned 65 early this month and we thought playing a dedication would be a great idea for his birthday celebration.  We put together a chronological slideshow with his baby pictures right through to his most recent Christmas photo with all the major events of his life in between:  high school, university, wedding, kid, second kid, third most awesome kid, another kid, kids growing up and getting married and grand kids.

Thats me pulling on my brother's leg

Even though my dad got a bit teary, he really liked it and thanked us for it.


Now even though I saw the video about sixty gazillion times whilst making it, it was only when I saw it played on the big screen did it hit me that what I had, photos of my dad's life, was something that was 65 years in the making.


I'm less than halfway through his journey and I can see that there's still so much to look forward to.


So much happy memories to be made.

The Email Box

I keep my emails.

(except the ones that don't have subject lines)

Partly because its required at work and I just got into a habit of it.

And partly because I'm just really sentimental.


A few days ago I was procrastinating at work and decided to archive my emails instead of doing boring documentation.

I started archiving emails back from 2005 but could not help reading a few.

Some very rude emails were still there.  And reading through the forwarded stuff and the conversations with the boys brought back laughs.

But I was really quite surprised of the things I wrote - I'm such a stupid head!! Hehehe.
I mean, I'm so emotional and reactive and really quite naive in the things I wrote.  Perhaps I changed quite a bit these last few years, but definitely many things I would have handled differently.

I had a final read of a few emails before it all turned into one *.PST archive file.

That was that I said.  Its move-on time.

I need to make space for more mail.

Free is so good

Very excited about a new website project I'm working on.  It's going to be a really simple site, which I hope gets bought by Google for gazillion dollars.  But dreaming aside, I'm really doing this project to up my interwebz skills (part of my new year's resolution - be more nerdy).

I've hit a milestone by installing Linux on my laptop.  I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 with Apache 2.0, PHP5 and MySQL.  Its all sounding very geeky, but its really not. Its just programs with very techno savvy names.

But one thing I was very happy to discover was how much Linux and the open source community has grown over the past few years.  I've tried Linux back in 2003 and what a catastrophe that was!  CD drivers not working and crazy terminal commands to get things going.  I couldn't even get the interwebz going.  

But after installing Ubuntu and playing with it a few days, I'm convinced my next (non-gaming) computer will run Linux.  It's got alternatives to Microsoft Office and Photoshop plus all the Web Server applications which would easily total over $2000+ on a Windows system, but available all for free with Linux. Its really quite amazing.

This is probably going to keep me busy but I'll try and blog when I can.  And I'll try not not blog so much the geeky stuff.  I'll probably start a different blog for that.

:P