1. it’s awesome
2. that’s where he proposed.

Anyways, enjoy a small sample.

Trying out this new gallery feature, which I’m less sure about.

I’m not sure if I should be amused or disturbed by this… you decide.

Anyways, they were half off when I was in Leavenworth, so I got a new one.  It’s better than my old one (in design only… it could never be cooler than one I brought home from Germany).  It plays music on the half hour and the hour (Edelweiss I believe) and the little people dance.  I like it.

Brother, Grandma, and me.

It was certainly sad to see her go, but it got me to thinking about all of the wonderful memories I have of her and my Grandpa (who passed away in 2005).  Things like…

• How they used to take me camping to Eastern Washington when I was a kid (Sun Lakes, specifically).  Even after I rolled off the bunk and landed on my Grandpa scaring him half to death in the middle of the night.
• When they’d come up to our house (again when I was little) they always picked up a box of those sugar cake donuts.
• Grandma always had candy hidden all over their house, because Grandpa wasn’t allowed to eat it because of his diabetes.
• Christmas Day we always drove down to their house to see that side of the family.  They always had the only tree I knew of with tinsel on it.
• The time when we were camping, and Grandma found a tick on her leg, so she poured alcohol on it to get it out.  I was like two, so naturally I was fascinated with the practice of getting insects drunk.
• Seeing them at their 50th wedding anniversary, and wondering if I had what it takes to pull something like that off.
• Getting to spend a lot of weekends in the last 4 months visiting with Grandma (just us) and getting to know her as an adult firsthand, instead of whatever my parents passed on.

Day 1: Travel to Glacier, without overlooking the fact that Montana is Mountain Time when you plan how long it will take to get there.  I was able to find a campsite at Apgar at around 6:00 or so, but it was one of the very last ones.  They don’t do reservations, so you’re gambling on this one if you have to drive a long way.  Should camping fail you (or rolling the dice about your sleeping accommodations seem foolish), about 30-45 minutes up the road in Polebridge you can stay at the North Fork Hostel and Inn.

Day 2: Going to the Sun Road.  I didn’t leave particularly early (9 am) and there were lots of people out hiking already.  If you want to do any of the hikes on the Western side of the highway, you’ll want to leave earlier than that because the parking lots were completely full when I went by.  Logan Pass was crowded, but easier to find a parking spot at.  The hike to Hidden Lake is gorgeous, but it’s 6 miles round trip (and more like 1200 feet elevation gain) instead of the 3 miles / 550 feet the sign says.  Water, a walking stick, sunglasses, and hiking boots are advised – the boardwalk was easy at first but crossed into snowfields past where you can see from the visitor center, and the hike down to the lake is steep.  You will see lots of big horned sheep and mountain goats here.  Round trip I think it took me 4-5 hours (probably would have gone faster if I’d brought water… but again I thought it was 3 miles and mostly flat).  After the hike, I continued heading East along the Going to the Sun Road to St. Mary, and followed the signs north across the border to Wateron Townsite.  The border crossing closes at night, so make sure you don’t get there too late.  The campground in Waterton does reservations, so getting there around 5 or 6 wasn’t a problem at all.  The wind off the lake can kick up pretty good though, so be sure to stake down your tent securely.

Day 3: Waterton, CA.  It’s a cute little town in Alberta on the northern end of the park, which is called Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada (but it’s really the same park as Glacier and they have some joint park management setup to run the two).  The Prince of Wales Hotel is definately worth seeing – it looks like it was plucked out of the Swiss Alps.  There are a bunch of pretty easy hikes in the area and lots of great scenery to take in.  The boat tour is also worth it, even though it seems spendy (I remember it being like 20 bucks Canadian).  It goes back down into the US and you get to see lots of majestic mountains along the way.

Day 4: Many Glaciers.  I actually only stayed one night at Many Glaciers (and two at Waterton), but if I could do it again I’d spend two there.  All of the best hikes in Glacier National Park are here.  The campground does not do reservations, but if you leave Waterton reasonably early you can arrive right about checkout time and grab a spot – I had no trouble finding one.  The Many Glacier Hotel is pretty impressive and worth checking out, but really expensive to eat at.  If you’re tired of camp food, pop into the Swiftcurrent Motor Inn (across the street from the campground) for a much more reasonable lunch or dinner.  According to the guide book, Iceberg Lake is the best hike in the area, although I couldn’t go because it was closed due to extremely high bear activity.

Day 5: Many Glaciers.  A great second day’s hike would be Grinnel Glacier, which according to one of the rangers I talked to is the most accessible glacier in the park and worth seeing.  Another option that a ranger highly recommended was Ptarmigan Tunnel.  The boat tour that launches from the hotel is also apparently pretty good (I didn’t go on it) – especially the earliest one if you want to see wildlife.  Buy your tickets in advance, because all the hotel guests seem to go on it in lieu of the hikes so it’s very full.  If you get bored, finding wildlife isn’t very hard in the area – I saw two grizzly cubs (3 year olds according to a ranger) up on the mountain right above the road, and a Moose cow at the first lake you come to along the Swiftcurrent Valley trail (maybe half a mile in, easy flat walk).

Day 6: St. Mary.  The campground does reservations, so getting here early isn’t a big issue.  Don’t bother buying gas in St. Mary, it’s half a buck cheaper about 30 minutes south in Browning or Two Medicine.  Actually, it’s probably worth it to check the prices online before you go so you know where to gas up and where not to.  In a nutshell, St. Mary is boring.  The visitor center has an osprey nest and lots of information, and there’s an old ranger cabin you can go see, but that’s about it.  I drove down to East Glacier and Two Medicine, which is a gorgeous drive (the first part is through a very recent forest fire, which was neat).  The short hike to Running Eagle Falls is worth it for the waterfall.  In East Glacier, check out the Glacier Park Lodge, which is the most impressive of all of the historic hotels in my opinion.  The 3 story Douglas Firs in the lobby (used as beams) were pretty impressive.  More driving than hiking when it’s all said and done, but the sights are totally worth it.  The boat tour at St. Mary isn’t really worth it unless you love boat tours, I could have learned all the interesting facts by talking to a ranger at the visitor center and saved myself an hour (and $15).

Day 7: Going to the Sun Road (again).  I left pretty early, you can get some good pictures of St. Mary Lake at one of the lookouts.  There are three waterfalls (St. Mary, Virginia, Baring) that you can hike to, either from two different trailheads along the road or along one big trail if you want to walk a bit more.  On the other side of the pass, the Trail of the Cedars and Avalance lake are nice short hikes, but they’re very popular so finding parking may take some patience.  Camping can again be found at Apgar (or one of the several other campgrounds along Lake McDonald that you’ll drive by for that matter on the way to Apgar), or up in Polebridge at the hostel.

Day 8: Travel home.  The drive home felt even longer than the drive there, so take lots of breaks so you don’t fall asleep and crash. 

Anyways, it’s over at http://imagodiem.wordpress.com.  Have a look.

So I have a series of 795 images that I want to make into a timelapse, and they’re in sequential order with filenames like IMG_2294.JPG.  That’s a problem for ffmpeg, because it expects the count to start at 1.  So we’re going to want to rename all the images.  I used gprename, which is a Gnome program for renaming sets of files.  Now my images start out at img_001.jpg, which is what I want.

Next, the files from my camera were too big (speaking of resolution here, not file size) – you’re not going to be posting a 2496×1664 video on YouTube.  Since it looks awful if you let ffmpeg squish the images down, we’ll first resize them all to a more sane resolution, say 640×480.  Imagemagick comes in handy here – we’ll use a little Bash scripting magic to do it all at once.

I made two directories, one for the original images (timelapse1) and one for the resized ones (timelapse2).  Then, I ran this and let the computer work for a few minutes.  Note that I executed the command from within the timelapse1 directory, otherwise the paths will need to be adjusted.

$ for i in *.jpg; do convert -filter sinc -resize 640×480 $i ../timelapse2/$i; done

Now we’ve got a series of appropriately sized images ready to make into a video.  Time for ffmpeg to do it’s magic.  Since I was planning to upload to YouTube/Google Video, I chose Flash Video for the final format since it produces relatively small files (good for uploading).

$ ffmpeg -s 640×480 -r 3 -i img_%03d.jpg -b 1000k timelapse.flv

The key things to understand are the -r and the -b flags.  The position of the framerate (-r flag) in the command is important, if you put the command after the input file(s) it will apply to the output video and not do what you want.  I took my images at 5 second intervals (.2 fps), and sped it up to 3fps so the video didn’t take forever.  Experiment with some low values to see how it turns out.  The bitrate (-b) flag controls the quality of the movie produced, you can experiment with that as well, but in the end you want low values (say 1-5) for Q (quality) when it’s encoding the movie, or you’ll get motion artifacts that look ugly.

That’s it!  Enjoy your timelapse video.

The video doesn’t even begin to do justice to how gorgeous of a drive this is though.  Reminds me of highway 20 up through the Ross Dam area, but even more scenic and awesome.

Remote
Ok, this one is just so cool. It lets you control iTunes or an AppleTV over the wireless network. Works pretty slick too.

MySpace/Facebook
Meh. The MySpace one is a vast improvement over their mobile webpage, but the Facebook one isn’t. They’re also the only apps that have crashed my phone so far. I’m waiting to be impressed with these ones.

Bejeweled 2
Ok, I’m a sucker for puzzle games. Plus this one wasn’t free, but they did a great job making an iPhone version of this game. Same graphics and music that you’d see on the PC or XBox.

PhoneSaber
Ok, this one’s just for silliness. I still have it purely for the fun of running it and handing the phone to other people and telling them to swing around the phone to hear the lightsaber sounds.

Now, this brings us back to the selling part. First of all, I don’t have a spare $2000 for a new camera (see the previously mentioned posts about my wisdom teeth). Now I have a lens I never use anymore (Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM) and a lens that won’t physically fit on the 5D (Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM), so selling them to cover some of the cost was a no-brainer. I’m also getting a new lens with the new camera, the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM, which is superbly sharp and will be a beautiful piece of machinery to work with. That will replace my Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens, which is really my least favorite of all them anyways. Best part is the new lens comes in a package with the new camera, so it saves about $500 over buying them separately.

So having resolved to make the upgrade I got ready to sell my old lenses. I’ll sell my Digital Rebel XTi eventually, but I can’t bear the thought of being without a “real” camera for more than a week or so. I’ve done a little bit of stuff on eBay, mostly buying though – and it’s taken me since 1999 to achieve a whopping feedback score of 10. Anyways, long story short their wizard to sell things is very slick, and it’s really easy to post an auction which I thought was refreshing (and comforting). Having posted them… I was then confronted with the crux of the problem…

Having to wait.

And watch.

And wish.

I’m 2 days into into the auctions… neither of which is at the reserve yet, although one of the lenses is almost 2/3 of the way there. The other is still going for a staggering dollar, which I think makes me want to check it even more often. It’s not like I’m worried that they won’t sell, or that I’ll get scammed… it’s just the anticipation of wanting to always know the status bugs me more often than I’d like. It can’t help that I’m very excited about the new stuff I’ll be replacing it with.

So anyways, if you’d like to wait, watch, and wish with me, here’s the two auctions I’ve got going. I may end up posting the telephoto lens on eBay as well, but I’m waiting on a lead from an individual on a photography forum I frequent that was interested – frankly the idea of a simple price negotiation seems so much simpler to me.

Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM Lens

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Lens

Feeling good otherwise, I went to one of my youth group student’s graduation last night and to a different student’s graduation party today, so getting around isn’t a big problem. Only hunger.