It’s hard to squeeze an entire year down into one Kenny Rogers song, but here’s my attempt. I love you Elijah! Happy Birthday!
You can find all of Elijah’s birthday videos in this YouTube playlist.
Best Of YouTube
It’s been a while since I’ve done a Best Of YouTube post, but, as usual, a lot of great content has been flowing into my eyeballs. First up this time is from the Flite Test guys. They are doing some full scale flight content in addition to their normal RC content. They went to Oshkosh for the big airshow and posted a good wrap-up video. Fun fact: They talk a lot about Sean Tucker in the beginning. He was the only signed photo I had in my room for much of my childhood.
If you pay attention to video shot with your cell phone or most other consumer cameras, you may have noticed a jello effect where straight lines of things moving quickly through the frame aren’t straight. It’s caused by something called “rolling shutter.” Whether you already know about that or not, this video is still incredible. The special effects do a fantastic job at explaining the subject matter.
Modern Rogue is pumping out good content. Some of it is a bit too long for my tastes, but overall, I’m excited when they put out a new video. They’ve had a couple martial arts/self-defense videos. The latest one is about choking someone quickly. While you’d need to practice to get good at it, it’s not super complicated and it seems pretty easy to remember.
Little Gym
Elijah has gone to Little Gym for most of his life. Toward the end of each session, they have “Show Week.” I couldn’t make it to this one, but Tyla took a bunch of video and I edited it together. The older man who is a teacher is the founder of the whole corporation. It’s pretty neat to have him as one of Elijah’s teachers!
Cape Disappointment Drive Timelapse
I enjoy making timelapses when we go on road trips. I rarely watch the whole thing straight through, but sometimes there are interesting spots that are fun to revisit. Plus, it’s a fun little project to have going along the trip.
I made a timelapse of our trip from Woodinville to Cape Disappointment State Park in the southwest corner of the state for our most recent camping trip. The video has the trip down immediately followed by the trip back (6:36 is when we are at the campground.) On the trip down there, notice the incredibly bad traffic. It added 2 hours to the 3.5 hour drive. On the way back we only hit one bad spot but it was really bad and even the backroads were jammed. It added 30 minutes.
We are planning a drive out to Montana soon to visit some of Tyla’s family. I’m working on some modifications to my setup to make it easier to do those super long timelapses.
Happy Birthday Elijah
Best Of YouTube
I posted about this one before, but I’m loving “The Q” YouTube channel. He is making loads of interesting stuff out of cardboard and cheap materials. This is an awesome channel for kids of all ages to watch and try at home. The latest video really caught my attention. He makes a digital microscope out of a cheap webcam, a cheap light and some cardboard.
The “This Old House” YouTube channel is kind of hit or miss for me, but their recent video about diagnosing a plumbing problem was pretty enlightening.
And for the third video, let’s stay with This Old House because if you ever need to paint a window, you’re going to want to know about this trick for masking off the glass.
CLPAK End Of Year Program
Last night was the end of year program for Elijah’s school. The kids sang some songs, Pastor shared a devotion, and there was a graduation ceremony for the two kindergartners. It’s always fun to see the church so full of people who don’t normally attend! The program went well. A huge thanks goes to Mandy, Grace and Linda for all their hard work preparing the kids for the program and to the parents who helped with the rest of the night too.
Best Of YouTube
This first video is actually two videos. Sneaky. The one embedded below is a series of physics riddles. Watch it first and think about your answers. Once you feel good about your answers, what this video to see the actual answers. I only got two right (and one was little more than a lucky guess.)
Mark Rober is the world’s most awesome uncle and he’s done it again with an awesome Hot Wheels video. Elijah loves his Hot Wheels track and I want to show this to him, but I don’t think he’ll understand that it’s not totally real. He’ll spend the next month asking me for enough track to fill up our whole house.
And finally, I’ve never thought about how ravioli noodles are made, but now that I’ve seen it done, it seems like it could be a fun project. I’ll add this to the list of things to build if I ever get a lathe.
Easter Videos
This year I forgot to do my traditional Easter blog post, so instead I’ll share the videos that I recorded during the Easter service. In order, the videos are: preservice music, the sermon, a choir song and postservice music. I also included the first verse of I Know That My Redeemer Lives at the end of the sermon video.
Christmas Music
Christmas is always a special time for music at our church so I try to record as much of it as I can. This year I ended up posting TWELVE videos from the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services. It as a lot of editing! This was the first time that I’ve done the AV work for a big holiday service using our new amplifier and speakers. It was awesome to be able to mic up the singers and actually balance them individually so that they could both be clearly heard. I want to find out a way to add some more mics but our setup is pretty simple/limited.
I’ll embed a couple of the videos below, but you can view them all on our YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/calvarylutheranwa I created a few playlists to help organize the content (Sermons, Music, and the school kids.) From Christmas there is 1 sermon video and 11 music videos.