Just wanted to take a minute to say Happy Holidays to everyone out there, hope you enjoy the little christmas scene (left) that I put together this afternoon for the launch of the new site.
Always fun playing around with 3DS Max 2010, Papervision3D, and Flash!
Welcome to my newly redesigned and greatly improved website. After numerous revisions over too many years to count, I finally have a complete, SEO-friendly, Back-button loving, Flash accentuated website which should make updating things much easier in the long haul.
The core of the site is powered by some custom php I wrote after being inspired by SWFAddress 2.2 (an open-source project to which I am a minor contributor).
I still have a great deal to do but things are being migrated over bit-by-bit.
I also discovered during the changeover how to implement a proper redirecting solution so as to not break any old links to the site!
We wanted to get rid of the ugly, rotting fence in front of our place, so we did some checking around and decided to get a cedar hedge put in, instead of another fence. Sure, they require maintenance and upkeep, but I think the benefits outweigh the work involved in keeping it up. It’ll give us more privacy, cut down on road noise, and should stop a lot of garbage from accumulating in the previously unused corner of our lot.
I looked at the cedars they sell at big box garden centres, the “emerald cedars” which are 6-8′ tall, but apparently those are better for decks and don’t really fill in to become a solid hedge. They also would have been cost prohibitive at around $20 each, and a ridiculous amount of work for me to plant myself. After a bit of searching I found the Cedar Guys, who are a small, local operation just northwest of here.
They have great prices, provide a warranty for their work, and sell Ontario white cedars which is exactly what we were looking for. I took a few pictures of the job coming along (see related)
These guys were real pros, they came in with three guys and two trucks, and had the trench dug and the cedars (all 170 of them) planted in around three hours. They cleaned up the job site and overall Heather and I are both very satisfied with the new hedge!
Just a follow-up to my previous post regarding Adobe AIR, my first real application is being deployed by the Discovery Channel (Canada), check it out and let me know what you think!
Daily Discovery Desktop Widget
So they are trying to put up some devices which measure the wind (anemometer) in Lake Ontario just off of Scarborough, and the residents are apparently up in arms. I don’t really understand what problems people have with wind power, but I’d like to address a couple of claims the naysayers have been using to prevent the development from going ahead.
“Wind Turbines are an eyesore!”
To which I’d respond, which of the following is less of an eyesore, wind or coal? The power has to come from somewhere!
“Migratory birds will be killed by them!”
This has actually been proven false in locations where wind power has actually been implemented in the real world, such as Europe.
“Radar studies from Tjaereborg in the western part of Denmark, where a 2 megawatt wind turbine with 60 metre rotor diameter is installed, show that birds – by day or night – tend to change their flight route some 100-200 metres before the turbine and pass above the turbine at a safe distance.”
The thing I really don’t get is where people think all the power is magically going to come from if we don’t harvest the best free resource we have, the wind. It’s clean and about as environmentally friendly as you can get.
Here’s hoping we see more wind turbines and solar panels in the future, Ontario!
Been diving into Adobe AIR pretty heavily lately, just for some personal projects which will be unveiled in a new few weeks, and I gotta say it’s a great way to put together small desktop apps.
Stay tuned for some new releases coming up!
The plants and shrubs are all coming into bloom, making for a pretty nice photo!
When we bought our house it was December so we had no idea what the gardens would be like.
I guess the previous owners were pretty handy in the garden by the looks of it, hopefully we can keep it going!
Just a quick post to point you all to a new HOWTO I just posted, it’s quick and dirty but shows you the settings you need to use in Premiere Pro to get valid h264 video for Flash 9+, using Premiere Pro CS3.
Hope it saves someone out there some time!
Over here at my new gig at the CTV Digital Media Group, I’m working with the development team building out CTV’s new online video players, which will get deployed across most of CTV’s properties.
Here’s a few of the currently deployed players (still in Beta, but they work well.)
I got a promotional email from Amazon today, recommending some items they thought I should buy, which, you know, I really appreciate.
Anyway, one of the items they were promoting was a Panasonic Blu-Ray player, and it was listed for $698USD, which I thought was rather steep, so I thought I’d check out the listing and see what was so great about this player.
Apparently, all that extra money is for the “Pixel Precision Progressive Progressing for HD” component. Seriously, what the hell is that?
