As part of our Easter Sunday service, I did a bunch of recording for preservice music, postservice music and various parts of the service. Unfortunately some of the audio got a bit goofed up because the levels were set a bit too high, but it came out good enough to post on the church’s YouTube site. If you just want to hear some incredible organ, skip to minute 39.
Tim and I usually use our GoPro’s as part of the recording. We call one of them “Dave Cam” since it sits behind our incredible organist, Dave. This time I set the second one up in the balcony and set it to take a photo every two seconds. I used that timelapse as filler for the main video linked above, but the raw timelapse itself is pretty fun to watch. It starts at people are filing in before the service and ends as people are cleaning up after the service.
When Jay was out here, we were poking around in Morning Glory Bowl at Crystal. I haven’t spent much time back there and wasn’t a very good guide. We ended up on top of a cliff. I hiked out and came down the easy way but Jay decided to make his way down. Unfortunately he was facing the wrong way, decided to unclick from his skis to turn around, and … well… that’s where the video starts. Thanks to Jay for giving me the thumbs up to post this video. I originally held off because I feel a bit bad for doing nothing but laugh at him, especially since this was partially intentional. My fall the day before was quite a bit worse and was completely unintentional. And at the end of that one he collected my gear and brought it down to me. When he fell, I was already down the hill and just watched him hike back up. I’m such a good friend.
On the way home, Jay realized that he didn’t have his phone. Using my phone, we pulled up the “Find My iPhone” page and the GPS said it was sitting at the bottom of this cliff. Luckily it still had enough juice that he could erase it remotely. Maybe we’ll have to hike this area in the summer and see if we can find it but the odds seem pretty low.
All of the videos that Tim and I recorded during the Sunday, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day services have been editing and posted to YouTube. We have some extremely talented musicians in our congregation! You can find all of these videos on the Calvary YouTube page or check out individual videos from the links below.
The last video in this list uses two camera angles, one of which is a GoPro positioned over the shoulder of our organist, Dave. It’s fun to watch his fingers fly over the keys. Next time we do this, I need to get another camera pointing at his feet. His appendages are a blur!
Since recording all of these videos, I have reworked the sound board and I think that our next batch of recordings will have even better sound. Most of the sound you hear in these videos comes from a portable Sony recording device left on the front pew. In situations where the speakers/singers/musicians were right in front of one of the main church mics I was able to use some of that sound as well. In the future I hope to rely more on the church mics as they can be positioned much closer.
We headed out for a last minute camping trip to La Conner, WA with Tyla’s family a couple weekends ago. We’ve been to that campground once before, but the last time it was cold and rainy the whole time. This was a quick trip, but the weather was good and Oskar had fun playing in the water. I, of course, had fun playing with the camera. I finally succeeded in getting shots of Oskar shaking off where the sun was at the right angle and he wasn’t blurry. A shutter speed of 1/1000th is just barely enough to freeze most of him. I also attempted a timelapse of the sunset. That’s fairly difficult since the exposure changes so rapidly but you have to leave it fixed or else the sky never gets darker. This one is pretty short and not stellar, but I embedded the YouTube video anyway. More photos are available in the photo gallery.
We took over 2.5 hours of video on this last trip so it took quite a while to piece it all together. I got it down under 15 minutes but didn’t feel like cutting it down much more. The format of this one is a bit different than last time. It goes day by day. I also color corrected most of the shots from the ZX3 and I think it looks a lot nicer. Thanks to Anand and his wife for supplying the globe map clips!
One of my favorite rooms in this house is the garage. Coming from the extremely tiny garage in the condo, this one feels like a monstrous cavern. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if I could drive in one bay and drive out another. Or could I do laps with my motorcycle? Watch the video below and find out! I did a lot of laps with the motorcycle but I was trying to make a full loop without putting my foot down. I finally did it in the last shot you see here in the video. I wonder what my neighbors thought?
It inevitably rains in the Puget Sound area over Memorial Day, so this year we decided to head east of the mountains. For those of you unfamiliar with Washington geography, the Cascade Mountains run down the state and create two very different environments. The west side is dominated by the ocean weather so it’s very mild year round with lots of rain. The east side of the mountains is a certified desert with extreme temperatures. You’re almost guaranteed to get sunshine. So with that knowledge in hand, we looked into a trip to the Grand Coulee Dam.
Unfortunately Tyla and I came up with this plan with her family very late and only had a couple camp sites to pick from. I picked a spot at Sun Banks Resort mostly at random. You know how you have that one horribly wet camping trip that will forever make you say “well it least this trip isn’t as wet as THAT one”? I now have a similar comparison for loud and tiny campsites. Our site was maybe twice as big as their camper. Our fire pit was about 8 feet from our (thankfully friendly) neighbors. And the rest of the campground was populated by college kids drinking and partying nearly around the clock with brief breaks for vomiting. I’ve never seen that many beer bottles laying around a campground. The only good thing is that we were on the end of the campground in a group of sites that were a little bit separated from the main party and we bordered the lake. That being said, I felt pretty dumb for picking the site but it could have been worse.
On Saturday we checked out the dam and the Visitors Center there. We found a spot for Oskar to swim and basked in the sunshine. We capped off the day with a short drive back to the dam to watch the laser light show. You should probably see it once but be warned that it’s 40+ minutes long. We were all fighting sleep by the end.
We started off Sunday with a trip back to the dam to take a tour. There are a lot of restrictions post-9/11, but we went down into the third powerplant and they drove us across the top of the dam. I’ll probably make a second post full of the facts we learned on that trip. It’s an incredible piece of construction!
After lunch on Saturday, we headed out on a hike that I picked off the web. At 4 miles and 600 feet of elevation gain, it seemed pretty simple once you got past the “0.15 miles of rock scramble.” Once I saw the hike, I should have turned us around. That first bit was pretty treacherous, often requiring getting down on all fours to make it up the sandy and rocky “path.” Nancy and Logan made it up the first part and then turned around. The rest of us continued on but turned around before making it to the top as we were running out of water and energy. Plus we knew that going down would be even harder than coming up. Unfortunately that was very true.
We had barely started back down the trail when Tyla took a tumble. The squeamish among you should skip this paragraph. She caught her thumb nail on a rock and bent it back about halfway down the nail ripping the nail off the nail bed. Blood ensued as I whipped out my first aid kit and tried to remember the class Tim and I took. I got her bandaged up but then we had to get all the way down the trail and she had lost use of one hand. Thankfully we made it down without any more serious injuries.
Bear Grylls says that a very bad day is a series of small mistakes that you ignore. I was tired of ignoring small mistakes so I decided to put an end to it by taking Tyla to the doctor. If we were at home we might have tried to clean it up ourselves, but we didn’t have many supplies. The only doctor in the small town that was open on Sunday was the ER so that’s where we ended up. They cleaned it out well for her, gave her tips on keeping the pain away, and were very nice in the whole process. Thankfully there was no line so we got through pretty quickly. After hearing what they had to say about it, we probably could have skipped that trip, but I was happy to have finally erred on the side of caution for once and we both felt better knowing that nothing more serious had happened.
So I have to give a huge thanks to the Brandt family for hauling their camper halfway across the state, feeding us, and putting up with my bad choices! If I ever get to pick another campground, I’ll try to find a bigger/quieter one and you can bet that the next hike will be something we can all do without major risk of injury. Thank you all for being so nice about the whole weekend!
This post is already getting pretty long so I’ll save the pictures for another day. However, on the way out there I did mount the Kodak Zx3 to the windshield and make a timelapse video. I wanted to show everyone who quickly the weather and environment can change! In an hour or two, I can drive from wet, cool weather, over a mountain pass through snow and down into a desert complete with tumbleweed!
I received a Stebel Nautilus Compact Horn (ST-100) as a birthday gift from Mom and Dad. It’s a nice upgrade to the stock horn on my 2009 Kawasaki Concours 14 ABS. If you ride a motorcycle, you probably the feeling when somebody merges into you with their windows up and the radio blasting. You’re lucky if they can hear their horn. Now I won’t have that problem.
If I add up the entire project time, it is about 12 hours spread over two days. If I did it again I think I could pull it off in less than two hours. Much of the time was sucked up with 3 trips each to Home Depot and Radio Shack. This whole project was a bit over my head, but I’m very happy with how it turned out.
The step that took the longest was figuring out how to activate the horn. I wanted to replace the stock horn, but I couldn’t find a way to tie into the stock horn button without cutting the wiring harness. I finally gave in and did it, but it took a lot of time to convince myself it was the right move. I’m glad I did.
I’ve posted a series of photos showing the main steps to document the effort, but I’m not responsible if you use these to try it yourself. It’s important to note that I also had the wiring harness from Murphs’ Kits, but it’s not necessary, and if I was doing it again, I’d probably build my own. I would have used a bit thicker wire (is that “lower” gauge?) and shorter wires. But then again, if I didn’t have that harness I would have had a harder time knowing what I needed to do.
If my instructions don’t do it for you, check out the installation instructions for a different the Stebel HF-80/2 on the same bike. It’s smaller though so it gets mounted where the stock horn is. I couldn’t mount this one there because it would have hit the front fender if I compressed the front forks over a bump.
This first picture is the bike before any modifications. I installed the horn right below the flat lighter black plastic piece in this photo.
I’m not going to cover how to remove all the plastic bits. I relied heavily on a set of nine DVDs tailored for my bike. I can’t recommend these AngelRideVideos.com discs enough! This next shot shows all the plastics removed. Note that I also took the battery out since I’m messing with the electronics.
Follow the wire up from the stock horn and find where it goes into the main wiring harness. Take the plunge and snip the two wires. I made sure I had snipped the right wires by reconnecting the battery, firing it up and pressing the horn button. No noise. perfect.
The next two shots show the horn mounted in position. I’ve placed spade connectors onto the bare ends of the wiring harness and plugged into the harness from Murphs’ Kits. I got a strip of aluminum from Home Depot, drilled bigger holes, bent it, and cut it to hold the horn. I later added some zip ties to secure it even more.
The horn requires a relay since it draws so much power. I mounted that on the other side of the foam onto an existing bolt. Very convenient.
This shows the install location with the right fairing replaced. Once the top piece is in place, you can’t see the horn at all. I suppose there are other places that you could mount this for a slightly louder sound, but this is plenty good and it is easy to access.
The end result is impressive! I had no idea what to expect, and honestly, it’s not quite as ear bustingly loud as I thought it might be, but that’s probably good considering that my wife works at a hearing clinic. With a helmet on, it’s no problem to honk the horn, but working the garage right next the horn I put in ear plugs during testing. The real shock is hearing an air horn coming from a motorcycle. I took before and after video to show the difference, but you really have to hear it in person to appreciate it.
I recently picked up a Panavise 809 Camera Window Suction Cup camera mount. It’s for my little car timelapse video hobby, but it dawned on me that it might also work for the motorcycle. I was able to stick it onto the gas tank and get a pretty good view with my Kodak Playsport Zx3. There is a significant amount of vibration, but by bringing the footage into Adobe Premiere I was able to use some filters to remove some of the vibration effect.
I posted the video on YouTube and it’s also embedded below. This video was taken on NF-56. It’s the forestry road that runs between exits 47 and 52 on I-90 up in Snoqualmie Pass. At that point the highway splits and this road runs down the valley in the middle. It’s a great ride! After I reached the end I took a quick zip up to Alpental and then got back on I-90.
Look right around the 5:00 mark and you’ll see a guy come streaking down the hill dressed in full leathers riding a longboard (also shown in the image above.) At 5:15 I passed the second guy followed by one of their friends in a car. It’s completely illegal but it looked like a lot of fun. I’m nowhere near crazy enough to try that though.
Yesterday I posted a timelapse video where the main feature was the GPS points on the topo map. When we drove back from Potholes a few weeks ago, I focused more on the images. I taped a USB webcam to the rear view mirror and had it connected to the laptop which was running an app to capture an image every two seconds. That worked great except that there was a problem with the inverter and the laptop battery died before we even made it back over the pass.
I took the images that we were able to snag, combined them with the GPS data and created another timelapse video. It’s all done with a custom C# program so if you geeks out there have any questions, let me know. Basically it’s a WinForms app with a web browser that loads the Bing maps and then I use Win32API calls to capture an image of the app. I have another app that combines all the image files into a WMV file.
The next thing I want to try is using the little HD video camera to record the images/video and see how that works. I have a suction cup camera mount that should make it easier to mount in the car and using the video camera means that I won’t need to have the laptop running. I plan to give it another try when we drive out to the coast in a couple weeks.
The video is embedded below, but again, it works best when you view in full screen HD quality. The GPS wasn’t able to get a lock on the signal for a while so it starts out with just images and then the location data kicks in. I wasn’t intentionally trying to keep our camping spot a secret since you could just watch the images and figure out where we were.
It inevitably rains in the Puget Sound area over Memorial Day, so this year we decided to head east of the mountains. For those of you unfamiliar with Washington geography, the Cascade Mountains run down the state and create two very different environments. The west side is dominated by the ocean weather so it’s very mild year round with lots of rain. The east side of the mountains is a certified desert with extreme temperatures. You’re almost guaranteed to get sunshine. So with that knowledge in hand, we looked into a trip to the Grand Coulee Dam.
I received a 
I recently picked up a
Christmas Church Videos
The last video in this list uses two camera angles, one of which is a GoPro positioned over the shoulder of our organist, Dave. It’s fun to watch his fingers fly over the keys. Next time we do this, I need to get another camera pointing at his feet. His appendages are a blur!
December 23
Judy Flute – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXHsZfQSFCM
Sermon – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R44WPJfnrFQ
Choir – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSdamoQx-Y
Sunday School Girls – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnOw2DyrGsg
December 24
Preservice – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDEPP4M2WiE
Sermon – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7DGqjOTvxo
Duet – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq0dJnJohFU
Choir – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWqXCTnLQig
Postservice – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpu6LjB9IFQ
December 25
Preservice – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikaHgzA-eDI
Piano solo – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtWFoZbht4Y
Choir – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp7KVuVMHB8
Postservice – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ySYqaSuUs
Since recording all of these videos, I have reworked the sound board and I think that our next batch of recordings will have even better sound. Most of the sound you hear in these videos comes from a portable Sony recording device left on the front pew. In situations where the speakers/singers/musicians were right in front of one of the main church mics I was able to use some of that sound as well. In the future I hope to rely more on the church mics as they can be positioned much closer.