freeform goodness

A few weeks ago I went through a lot of trouble to embed a short video in the “right” way here on the blog. Frankly, it’s way more of a PITA than normal people are going to put up with. I saw a note that Vimeo had introduced “universal” embed code so I decided to revisit the subject. I’ve had a Vimeo account for a while, and I’ve never really used it. It’s a much less noisy place than YouTube, really — it seems like they’ve actually put a little work into interaction design.

Curly and Chet II: Electric Boogaloo from Dave Walker on Vimeo.

Thanks, of course, to Ilkae for the soundtrack.

:: Dave Walker 08:45 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/pets]
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I liked the way the light looked, streaming through a side window and into the aquarium.

Download Video:
Works with most devices: “MP4”
Works with neckbeards: “OGG”

Obligatory geeky details follow:

Video was shot on an iPhone 4, and edited in iMovie for iPhone. Soundtrack is Whirling Of Spirits by Balil.

I converted and downsized the video for h.264 platforms in Handbrake, and converted to Ogg for Firefox with ffmpeg2theora. I’m using the Video For Everybody to serve things with the HTML5 video tag. Flash fallback is untested, because I can’t be bothered.

Oh yeah, the oranda is Curly, the shubunkin is Chet.

Writing entries without an HTML5 aware version of Tidy is painful. Suggestions welcome.

:: Dave Walker 12:43 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/pets]
:: tags: pets

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Congratulations and all the love in the world for my parents, Roberta and Charles Walker, who were married 50 years ago today in Detroit.

:: Dave Walker 20:10 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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Tessa and Emily.

edit: apparently using “enhanced privacy mode” (e.g. no cookie) for a YouTube video breaks whatever magic MobileSafari uses that allows embedded YouTube videos to be played back in the native YouTube player instead of The Flash Abortion™.

:: Dave Walker 19:44 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/pets]
:: tags: pets

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Every few years I get burned out on the concept of hair care (though, as I get older, my hairline has gotten burned out on the concept of me) and cut all of the crap off.

Morning hair maintenance now consists of a little pre-electric shave lotion and about 45 seconds with my shaver.

:: Dave Walker 10:36 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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I’ll be uncharacteristically concise and economical with my words because this sitting in a chair thing isn’t really working out all that well for me yet.

Saturday morning, I had my morning coffee and sat down to play a little WoW. I had a few things to take care of, but largely I’d planned a pretty relaxing day. It was not to be. A little after 9AM, I felt a very sharp, very noticble pain in the upper right (from my POV) part of my abdomen. It felt like a particularly nasty gas cramp at first, so I popped a couple of simethicone caplets and sat back down again. They didn’t help. As a matter of fact, the pain quickly ratcheted up, followed by a sudden, intense burst of nausea. Another burst of nausea followed and I, er, returned my morning coffee to the sea. Did I have food poisoning? Bad cream in the coffee? Another burst of nausea and things were getting decidedly unpleasant — since there was nothing in my stomach at all by this point, the only thing coming up was pain. Really, really intense pain. Worse than any pain I’d ever felt before-type pain.

Uh oh.

See more …

:: Dave Walker 19:35 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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Currently short one gall bladder, but wielding a few more scars and a not inconsiderable allotment of pain. More to come when I feel comfortable sitting upright…

:: Dave Walker 15:15 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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I’m visiting my sister’s family in the Cleveland, Ohio area. We just put a severe hurt on turkey and trimmings, and now I’m indulging with a spot of peach cobbler and my birthday cake, which my wonderful niece Taylor was nice enough to bake for me. I’d ordinarily be linking to some action shots on Flickr but I left my camera on the dining room table so you’ll have to just imagine us all sprawled across the family room in tryptothan torpor. There are worse ways to be.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow yanks and, um, happy Thursday to the rest of y’all.

:: Dave Walker 19:27 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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:: tags: family

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Thanks to Randy Charles Morin for making me the Blogger Of The Day over at iBLOGthere4iM.

:: Dave Walker 19:01 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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After reading my post about my recent Canadian business trip, my Dad sent along a few scans of some photos he took during some of the camping trips we took in Ontario during the early 1980’s. Thanks, Dad!

:: Dave Walker 16:11 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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