Lower cabinets are so NOT useful

I took some scraps from the garage and made some shallow trays and mounted them on full extension drawer slides in the island. Lower cabinets are a pain because you have to crouch down and reach way in to get/see what's in there. Not any more! These trays pull all the way out, giving you full access to what's in them. The slides are rated for 100lbs too.

Halloween 2008!

Here are the requisite Halloween pictures of the family!  Every year Jennifer comes up with our family costume theme (and does most of the assembly & design work).  This year's idea was heroes and villains.  The boys were all super heroes and we were villains (that is more or less what the reality is anyway, right?)  Hopefully, you can guess who everyone is:

JJ makes Mommy breakfast

JJ loves to help with cooking meals and other baking related things. One morning, he decided he would make breakfast for Mommy:

The stemware (his choice) shows a certain style, doesn't it?

Beam me up, Scotty!

Aaron has no problem with cake either

Now that's good cake!

More zoned out game play

Aaron is enjoying himself too!

JJ's birthday day at chuck e cheese's

Today is JJ's actual birthday, so he got to go to Chuck E Cheese's
with his family and drop tokens on whatever he chose! Here he is on a
giant moving truck (though you can't quite see him).

The Cristus

This is the famous statue of Christ at Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

The Tabernacle

This nice lady is giving us a personal tour of some history of the
tabernacle.

Taking a break in the shade

Some of the cousins chillin int he shade.

The Salt Lake Temple

The traditional reflection pool shot...

The happy couple

Who's that stud?

Yes, it's Aaron!

Travelling with kids is hard

I know it's great for them to see new things and all, etc, etc, but it
sure is a trial travelling with three boys 5 and under...doesn't feel
like a vacation!

Sent from my iPhone

Jen fetching her food

The boys all dressed up and somewhere to go (they're there already).

Reception at the museum

Here we sit in the atrium of the museum for the reception.

Jenny on the hammock

Reverse view of the house's porch

Trip to Utah

We've headed off to Utah to attend Jen's cousin's wedding. One of the
families rented a house, so we're renting two rooms in it. The house
is really big and has a massive backyard. The boys are really loving it!

Here are a couple of shots of the yard:

DVDs are my life

We just got finished producing almost 500 DVDs ourselves! That means burning, printing, packaging, shrink wrapping, etc. Where the heck did all these DVDs come from, you ask? I video-taped two different dance concerts and sold copies. I'm happy to be finished, and next time, I'm going to send them out to be done (as many as I can, at least)!

Future heck raisiers

The family came with me to pick up the scooter and the boys had a great time climbing on the bikes and trying on helmets...

I'm officially on two wheels

Well, here it is:


I'm now on my way to saving the planet (I'm really not that altruistic, just tryin' to save a couple bucks). It's really zippy and brings me back to the good old motorcycle days. Although, I'm used to handling a 1000cc, 600lb beast, so this 150cc, 200-something pounder is a bit different. But it's fun! Believe it or not, it has remote start, anti-lock brakes, and an alarm.

I'm being careful to follow the 'break-in' procedure for the first few days. Said procedure means not gunning it everywhere, twisting the throttle wide open, which gives the motor a chance to, well, break in. So, I don't have any idea how fast it will really go, but rest assured, by the end of the week, I'll know! It has no trouble getting up to 45, and the guys at the shop where I bought it say it'll get to 65 easy.

Scooters get good gas mileage

Well, I'm just about to join the hundreds (if not thousands) of Las Vegans that are switching to the scooter as the main mode of getting to work. They're hard to come across here in town apparently. The dealer told me that they're having a hard time getting them in, but I managed to put a deposit down on a 150cc one that should be in by the end of this week. I'll save around $250/month in gas driving that to work. I have many years of experience braving the ravages of the weather on two wheels here in the desert, so I can't say that I'm looking forward to it, but it'll be nice to save some money and do my small part in reducing my 'carbon footprint' (though it's really about saving money).

Pictures to come as soon as I've got it, of course.

Got 8 hard drives laying around?

Most people probably don't, but I do have a bunch of hard drives laying around. The shame of it is that there's no space left in any computer to make use of them. They're perfectly good, and with all the video projects (not to mention the 100's of gigabytes of movies we have), I'm low on space. Enter the eBox-U:

It's an 8 bay USB hard drive tower. What's that, you ask? It'll take 8 hard drives of any make or size, and let you get access to all of them via USB. It has it's own power supply and everything. You can configure the box to let you access each hard drive individually, or you can set them up in 4 groups of 2 drives, or 2 groups of 4 drives, or one giant group of 8 drives.

So now, I can easily store all the HD video footage I've acquired, as well as have space to do all kinds of processing. I've got five drives in there now, and I'll be adding more very shortly...

Jenny will not be left out of the stage action

No to be out done by her kids, Jenny taught the musical theater class, choreographed the numbers, and played Anna in the performance all at the same time! One important thing to note about this performance is that the sound guy messed up their music; during one of the songs, the music skipped to the exit music. The well taught kids quickly found their places and continued, but once that music ran out, they were left in silence! However, undaunted, they finished their routine singing acapella (with no music, for you lay people), and masterfully, I might add. The show must go on!


Jenny: The King and I from David W on Vimeo.

Kids videos right here

You can watch JJ and Weston on stage right here by clicking the play button, or if you want to see the HD version, you can click on the video title in blue, and it will take you to vimeo.com where you can see it in 720p. I recommend clicking the fullscreen button (lower right corner), and then turning scaling off :)



JJ's Stage Debut from David W on Vimeo.



Weston's Stage Debut from David W on Vimeo.

Another milestone met

Aaron has been promoted from rear-facing baby seat to big boy front facing seat.


JJ, consequently, has been upgraded to a booster seat, and Weston gets to inherit JJ's previous car seat (just like any good middle child):


I think Aaron approves of his new digs:

Dance Concert Shooting Done

I'm done shooting all dance concerts, now the real work begins! Footage must be edited, titles added, menus and DVDs to be published. Also, I've discovered that my computer is laboring under the weight of HD footage; it's quite a bit more work for the computer to handle. So, I've put together my own 'render farm':



Instead of just one computer processing the HD to it's final output, I've got 8 (these 6 plus my office computer and the media center computer). The video is split up among all these computers, and each works on it's own piece until all pieces are re-assembled at the end, all over the network in my house. There's nothing quite as cool for a computer guy as having a render farm...

I've posted a 720p HD clip of one of the dance numbers from the Bunker Dance concert so you can see it in HD, found here: http://www.vimeo.com/1222248.

Still Frames From The Hope Falls Footage

You've seen plenty of the behind the scenes stuff, here are a few individual frames pulled from the footage I shot in NY. Pretty dang good, if I do say so myself...

The boys all get shots at the same time

The only thing worse than having to take all 3 boys to the doctor at once for their well checkups is arriving there and realizing that they all need to get shots while they're there!

Father's Day

My Father's Day has been good. My main present was a new laptop! My 6 year old one didn't survive the trip to NY :( Plus, I needed one that could handle transfering video from the camera for the dance concert gig, and Best Buy was having a 2 years no interest deal, and there was space on my Best Buy card, so...new laptop! I initially walked in to Best Buy with my mind set to buy a Mac Book Pro - until I saw how much they are. $2000! It's hard to justify that when there were PC laptops 10 feet away with the same and better specs for less than half the price! I ended up getting an HP with 3GB RAM, 320GB drive, core 2 duo cpu. Looks like a Mac Book, Pro or otherwise, will end up just being a luxury (unless I can somehow justify it for a work related thing...).

Where has all the blogging gone?

I've been so active on my blog because of my New York adventure, but now that it's over, I've slowed down...the last couple of days were grueling. We were just trying to get as much shot as possible before I headed out. We did pretty well, and Peter and Stephen will be picking up the couple shots we couldn't get. I will do my best to post some video clips of this project.

Even though this project is drawing to a close, I arrived in Vegas and hours later was jumping on my next project! My plane got in at 12:30am, which put me home about 1:30am. I got up and headed over to Cashman Theater to sell DVDs of the Bunker Dance Center concert! I've videotaped the concert for several years now, and we sell a lot of DVDs. Thursday is dress rehearsal day and a good day for selling. Saturday was the concert, and I was there for about 12 hours. There are four shows, 9am, 12pm, 3pm, & 7pm, each one about 1.5 hours (the last one is longer than the rest). This was another great job for the Sony EX1, my new HD video camera. It records onto express card flash memory. There are two slots, and when one card is full, it automatically rolls over to the second card. At that point, I pop the first card out, pop it in to a laptop, move the files off the card, and pop it back in the camera. It worked out really well, and the picture looks amazing. At the end of it, I've got 110 GB of footage. Again, I'll post some footage eventually...

Reviewing footage

At this point, with one and a half days of shooting left, we have
about 130 GB worth of footage. Thats about 7 hours. Peter
is starting to go through it between shot setups.

The old building's elevator

This is the kind that you have to operate, and you have to know what
floor its on. Theres no "up" or "down" button. If you're on the 3rd
floor and its on the 4th, if you want to use the elevator, you gotta
hoof it up to the 4th floor.

Need curtains in your shot?

Grab any random bolt of fabric, put it on a C stand, and wa-lah:
curtains! Notice the framing on the monitor to the right. Looks just
like curtains, eh?

Garrett drinks and is generally upset

More day for night stuff, we've got the windows blocked out and lit
with tungsten lights: instant night!

Jen has gone home and its back to work

By this time, Jen is halfway to vegas. We had a great time and it was
sad to see her go, but I think she had plenty of adventure!

Back to work for us. This is the ground floor where we've been storing
our equipment.

Jen and I at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The view of Manhattan from the Staten Island ferry

One of our Hope Falls cast

In the post below, I mention Sydney; here he is!