Battleship – My First AE Project

I’ve been in a particularly creative mode lately, so I decided to tackle Adobe After Effects. After Effects (AE) is primarily used for creating motion graphics and visual effects. My interest in AE originally was to be able to do dynamic pans and zooms on my time lapse footage, which is captured on a tripod as still frames and can sometimes be rather boring. After Effects will allow me to compose the time lapse at the full resolution of the images (~2000 x 3000 pixels) and then build a ‘camera’ that can zoom and pan around the shot without any loss in quality. Lending interest to slower shots or helping to direct focus on a particular spot.

All that said, I had never used After Effects before this weekend so I spent a long time watching tutorials online about how to use After Effects (Video Copilot is a great resource). Using what I’d learned, and various other Google searches online I was able to put together this shortened music video using the song Battleship by The Usuals.

The whole clip probably took me about 10 hours to build. Its basically a lot of key-framing to get the animation and camera moves.

I had a lot of fun animation the battleship tilting, breaking, and sinking. I played with adding bubbles and flames to certain words and scenes but in the end didn’t render them because they detracted from the overall feeling of the clip. Just about every word in the clip is a 3D object, built as a pre-composed scenes for the blocks of text. I animated the block for simple fly-ins and then used camera moves to rotate the blocks and pan around to each letter. The whole thing was tedius and I had to ask Cody for the lyrics in a few spots to make sure I was getting it right but overall I’m really glad I did it, because it got me comfortable with After Effect and ready to take on the next challenge.

You can see all the camera move key-frames in the screen shot above.

Epic Waterfight

The most intense squirt gun fight I’ve ever whitnessed

Time-lapse Project

Day In, Day Out is a project of mine to capture a typical day in Downtown Sacramento through time lapse. It will likely take me a long time to get the whole thing done, I’ve estimated it will take a little less than 50,000 shots to complete the entire length of the video. Anyway, last night I started sketching out some of the shots to get the timing and ideas “on paper”, and went a little bit overboard so I wanted to share:

Its a very short clip, in case you can’t tell (which is very likely, Adeline could have drawn better sketches than I did) the first shot would be a time lapse of the sun rising over the capitol, a shot which I hope to be able to capture from the Penthouse balcony of my building and the second shot is looking down at the corner just in front of my building (from roughly the same location) at 7th street, and the Light Rail station as people board the trains.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas for some cool time-lapse of downtown sacramento. If your interested in helping with this project too, let me know it might be fun to have a couple people doing time-lapse and join it all together into one continuous movie.

My Summer Vacation

Do you remember in elementary school, after summer break when your teacher would have you stand up in front of the class and explain what you did over the summer? Me either frankly, but its so cliché I couldn’t avoid brining it up since it leads right into my post today.

I want to actually start this off by saying I’d love to get some input back on this, tell me what you did over the summer. A lot of the people I’ve grown up with are just getting their families started while others aren’t done exploring the world. I’d like to know where life’s path has lead you.

As much as it irks me to admit it, Facebook is great for keeping tabs on old friends, but it lack any personality, its nothing more than a list of milestones. Facebook lacks the telling of a complete story. And I know this sort of thing is often left to a letter in a Christmas card, but frankly the Holiday’s have enough things going on, I think its time to go back to elementary school when we updated our friends at the end of the summer. So without further adieu, My Summer Vacation, a report by Kyle Klaus:

I’ll admit, 2009 started out on a bit of a sour note. But I ended up having a great new years with Matt Lockyer, his girlfriend Kelly and brother Travis in Oakland. It was a bit of a foreshadowing event, but more on that later.

2009 marks the fifth year of this blog (through various forms) . While its not much of anything to celebrate, and to say its been constant would be a lie, I’ve still enjoyed putting my musings, ramblings and ravings to ‘paper’ and I hope to continue. This post actually makes number 316 over those five years for anybody who is counting.

In February Kerry and I (as well as the rest of her family) made the long drive down to San Diego to watch the 2009 Rugby Seven’s tournament. It was only the second time I had ever been to a rugby game, and this was on a whole different level. I had a great time and took a ridiculous number of photos of the event. Also, before we left to San Diego we spent a brief amount of time enjoying the very very rare snowfall in Cameron Park.

In April though, Kerry and I split up. Without trying to be too much of a downer, there wasn’t much love left there and it was just simply time to move on. Unfortunately, our lease wasn’t up until the end of September, so we stuck it out and continued to live together until the end of our lease (not really something I would recommend, but we managed it OK).

On a better note though, I started taking tests towards my MCSE certification. The link does a better job of explaining fully what that means than I will here, but basically its a Microsoft certification that says I know what I’m doing when it comes to managing computer systems and, bottom line, is a meal ticket to higher pay. I still have 5 more tests to take to finish my certification, but with the tests I’ve done so far I can officially call myself a “Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP).

I also was able to spend a brief time with the Hoffman’s at Cody’s parents cabin. We went for two reasons, one because the place is awesome and a great way to spend a weekend, but more importantly Cody and Becca wanted some portraits of the very beginning of their new family.

In September I moved out on my own! This is somewhat of a highlight to the year for me. I’m living on my own now in Downtown Sacramento. Its only a studio apartment, but its comfortable and makes me feel très chic. Keith (my brother) only lives a few blocks away, so we’ve been able to work more closely on a small project of ours called Flublub (more on that when its closer to finished). Being able to walk to family, friends and the downtown life has been a gift I don’t plan on wasting.

In case you thought I forgot to mention work; I’ve been working for Airtop Technology Group since February ‘08 as a Technology Consultant. Its a small company (only four of us) but we have some big plans. Most of my time is spent with clients providing proactive service on their servers and workstations to make sure they continue operating 24/7. Its sometimes a thankless job, and that can wear but if I’ve done a good job, nobody knows I was there in the first place, so in a way its a complement.

So that brings us to about now, where I’m enjoying the cool crisp air of the night, listening to my eclectic collection of music and composing overly lengthy posts. Now its your turn, tell me what you’ve been up to. You can email it, post it in a comment below, or put it on Facebook somehow.

Until next summer my friends.

Greylisting

So one of my clients showed me some rejected mail she got when trying to send to a user whom she knew she had the right email address for.

The return mail was a “451 4.7.1 message delayed” error and had a link for http://greylisting.org. So I went to check it out thinking we were on some sort of deny list (IE, a blacklist).

Turns out, greylisting.org’s policy is to deay/block ALL incomming mail the first time from any source. They rely on the user trying a second time to allow the message through … I’m not making this up:

What happen is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected with a “try again later”-message (This happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). This, in the short run, means that all mail gets delayed at least until the sender tries again.

What the fuck? This is ludacris. If things keep going this direction then SMTP is due to become a proverbial paperweight, and we’ll go back to the days of faxes and carrier pidgens.

Furthermore, whoever came up with his “greylist” idea needs to be drug out into the street, shot in each join and told to walk to a hospital, where they’ll be rejected the first time and have to try again later.

May God have mercy on the soul of the internet.

Bagged Lunch

In the past few weeks, I’ve missed easily 4 lunches. In those same past few weeks, the lunches I did have, were nearly exclusively fast food. I do on occasion make time to sit down at a Subway, but even then I usually get a food long, and sometimes ask for a toasted BMT (likely they worst sandwich on the menu).

Besides the fact that I’m eating extremely poorly (my late night math puts my average caloric intake for just lunch well over 1000), but I’m spending more money than I need to be. According to Mint.com (a subject I’ve been meaning to create a whole post on) in the month of June I spent $135 on fast food. Its hard to get a solid per day cost though since often I use cash, and occasionally it goes on the company card but some guestimating tells me I spend about $8 per day (during the work week) on fast food, or expanded out a little under two-thousand dollars per year. Yikes.

So today, on my way home from work (at 9pm) I decided to do something about it. I stopped in Raley’s, grabbed a basket and started gathering supplies. My goals were more along the lines of getting a filling, satisfying and physically robust meal than making a perfectly nutritious one. I figure the nutrition can come in more seriously when I get used to this new pattern, and I have more time to plan meals than skimming nutrition facts in the super market.

Over the past seven years I’ve been working, I’ve taken in maybe 10 bagged lunches. For a very long time I’ve had excuses, and "reasons" to not take a bagged lunch. However, no matter what I tried to convince myself of, I can easily put together a lunch that can sit in the car all day without being destroyed and if I make the lunches ahead of time (like, when I get home from the store) then it doesn’t take up any more of my mornings.

All that said, what did I end up with in my bagged lunch? A single serving of Oberto Beef Jerky Strips; "Chicken of the Sea" Tuna Snax (tuna dip with crackers); A bag of Sun Chips; A bottle of water and a few pieces of hard Caramels for desert. Which puts this meal at a much healthier 390 calories (overall nutrition information is posted to the right)

I also took the opportunity to look at more than just my lunch eating and spending habits. Its no secret that I like Starbucks (mmm, venti, soy, no-water, Chai Tea Latte). But, the amount of money I spend on Starbucks each month could probably feed a third world village. Not to mention that a twenty ounce cup of steamed milk (albeit soy milk) satisfies none of my morning nutritional needs. So I also picked up some instant coffee (for my caffeine fix) and a variety pack of instant oatmeal.

Its not a complete plan, and has some gaps (like dinner) but its a change for the good, and one that I hope will inspire others to do the same. Save yourself some cash, and make those miles on the treadmill count for something: brown bag your lunches this week! I’d also like to hear from people with the things you put in your bag.

Portrait Perfection

In good tradition, this post is a bit of a read (although not as bad as some), so get yourself a cup of coffee and prepare to read every mundane detail of my weekend.

Update! I’ve uploaded all the pictures for your viewing pleasure. Check them out here.

I’ve known Cody and Becca since January 2006 (wow, has it really been more than three years!?). They were our Neighbors when I lived in Elk Grove and came over to see what was going on the night we got a little crazy with some rum. From that night began the summer of nightly BBQ, wonderful weekends and perpetual tom-foolery (see examples here and here).

Since then they have been able to buy a home in Elk Grove, and start their family and while I was over for Dinner about a month ago they asked me if I would take some portraits. I was flattered and shortly we made plans to go up to the Hoffman cabin at Donner Lake for a weekend to have some fun and take the pictures.

I took all of Friday off so I would have time to get all my stuff together and take care of a few other nagging things around the house. I ended up  on the phone, going through emails and taking care of some paperwork though so I still worked part of the day. I made a trip up to my parents house as well to pickup my Camera (which Chadd had borrowed) and to show my Mom the Blog I setup for her (http://tracysnotes.com, more to come on that later though). and left from there straight to Cody and Becca’s house.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t what we hoped for when we planned the trip a month ago and it rained the entire drive up, we even had a few miles of light snow as we crested Donner Summit (~7,200 ft). Once we got to the cabin, and were settled, Cody and I passed time playing some board games and I did some reading before we turned in for the night.

We woke up fairly early Saturday to cloudy skies without rain and made a point to get out and start taking some pictures. We did have some very light rain (almost a mist) to deal with, and snow on the ground but I think overall we were able to get a lot of great shots in. I did a preliminary processing job on the photos so far, but they aren’t ready for prime-time yet, so I’ll save all that for a later post.

After we wrapped up our multi-location photo shoot we headed into Truckee to get groceries for the rest of the weekend. Cody and I stopped in the local bookstore and did some quick perusing, but didn’t end up finding anything interesting. We all headed back to the cabin for one last set of pictures (indoors) and lunch. Becca made fabulous sandwiches while Cody and I played a game of Arkham Horror. I did some more reading, and played more games. Cody and I even managed to play one round of Axis and Allies before dinner. Again, Becca made a delicious Pesto Ravioli meal while Cody and I played (noticing a trend here?). We all played Coloretto, Yahtzee and watched SNL before going back to bed with the rain pouring outside.

I got up Sunday morning around 8am and intended to make a pot of coffee, but all I could find was decaf and a bag of Peet’s coffee dated Aug 2007 so I gave up, and decided to read some more of my book. When Becca got up a little later she ended up making some of the Decaf (turned out to be all there was) and scrambled eggs with toast for breakfast (by the end of the trip Cody and I were feeling pretty guilty that she kept doing all the work while we played). Cody and I played a few more games and after lunch we packed everything up to head home.

All-in-all it was a great trip in spite of the rain. We were able to get the portraits done that we wanted to do and I read a few chapters in my book but mostly I had a great time relaxing with friends.

Virus Hoopla thanks to Conficker and CBS News

“OMG! Did you hear about that April Fools Day anti virus, Conficker. Am I protected from that?” I’ve heard this question or something like it at least a dozen times today and my answer was the same every time. What have YOU done to protect yourself.

Let me start by saying from what I’ve seen, the conficker virus that was featured in a CBS news story today is no better or worse than the rest of the virus’ that have been around infecting computers for the past 5 years. For those who missed the news, conficker is a worm that will turn your computer into a zombie, doing more or less whatever its creator wants it to do, usually send out spam.

While I admit I am not a typical computer user, I don’t think its all to hard to avoid these problems with some simple common sense and a little thought about what you are doing and what you expect your computer to do in response. And before anybody makes any comment about Apple computers being “immune” to viruses, save your breath. You are not immune either so pay attention.

First, and this is so obvious I hate to put it to paper, but get an anti virus program. If you are a home user (IE, your computer is in your house) then you have some free options at your disposal. To keep things simple, I generally only recommend AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition. It is far and away the most popular of the free anti virus applications. It is a simple, but thorough anti virus application, exactly what you need in your home. And unless you still use Dial-Up Internet any modern broadband Internet uses a service called NAT and a network masquerading that keeps your computer hidden on the Internet like a firewall would.

If your a corporate user, chances are you already have anti-virus on your computer, and a full hardware firewall and if you don’t you should call your IT department to ask them what they are getting paid for. Don’t have a support department? Find a local consultant group (like Airtop) that can get you on track.

So that covers the first base, but is probably the least important part. The next portion of safe computing is all about you, and your computer habits. I don’t mean to say you have to be paranoid all the time, but pay attention to whats going on. One of the more mischievous tricks I’ve seen lately (related to the Vundo virus) creates a web site that mimics a scan of your computer (it’s basically a pre-recorded video) telling you that you have some number of viruses and should download their “free anti virus software” to get rid of them. In this case, the program it wants your to download IS THE VIRUS. If you just pause and think about what you are doing before you panic you likely will realize that on your own. You should get to know your anti virus program. Know what its called so that when a window pops up and claims you have a virus, you know if its legitimate or a farce.

While “think before you click” more or less covers everything I want to point out that there is one area of the dark underbelly of computing that nobody talks about but nearly everybody knows about. Peer to Peer sharing is a means of sharing data between multiple people anonymously and is synonymous with applications like Napster, Limewire, Bearshare and others. This is a lurking beast in the peer to peer system though. If you have one of these programs just un-install it. There is little you can do with it that’s legal anyway, and likely nothing you’ve done with it was such. But the bigger problem is that its full of more viruses than a Chicago alley of hookers and crack addicts. If you do a search for anything, you’ll notice that nearly immediately you get 5 or so results with names that match what you searched for (go ahead and try it, I’ll wait). I would venture to guess that every one of those initial results is a virus with a name that’s dynamically created to match your search results in the hope you download it. But even the results that take longer can, and often are, viruses that people have knowingly, or unknowingly downloaded and now are sharing out into the P2P networks. Coupled with the legal implications of using the P2P networks with the higher than normal chance of doing something dumb just make theses programs a cesspit that I personally want no part of.

If you think you already have a virus or you know you do I typically use the trial version of a tool called Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to do a full scan of the machine for anything and everything unwanted. As soon as the scan is done, and you’ve removed anything that was there, you still need to install an active anti virus program like I recommended above.

In summary, get anti virus software and think before you click. I remove viruses from clients computers on an almost daily basis and nearly every time they either didn’t have any software to protect them and/or they did something they realized was dumb when it was to late to go back. Finally, don’t let old ladies on CBS scare you away from using your computer. Its a machine like your car, take care of it and it’ll serve you reliably for a long time.

Bachelor Shopping

Mike White came up to visit today, unfortunately we didn’t have anything to drink or snack on when he got here. So Kerry, Mike and myself made a quick run to WinCo Foods to stock up on the essentials (Beer, Soda, Chips, Queso and Cocoa Puffs).

Apple’s New Shuffle … Loosing sight of reality?

I doubt I’m the first to say this but Frankly I don’t even know when the shuffle was announced. I just stumbled on it today and while I like the mini-ness of it I think there is a serious issue.

Portable music players, since the original Walkman, have always come with headphones. I’ve always expected them to be crap and never have I been disappointed in that. In the past, they were a thin metal headband and scratchy foam cover, now you can expect a hard plastic in-ear set that leaves a lot to be desired. Over the recent years I’ve settled on Sony’s relatively in-expensive in-ear buds. They are comfortable, with a rubber surround and have good sound quality. I have a set of the headphones that came with the iPod Nano and they are the typical garbage. Apples standard headphones are made of hard plastic and hurt my ears after less than an hour of listening so when I bought my iPhone I didn’t even take the headphones out of the box.

Now though, we come to the point of my ranting. The iPod shuffle has no buttons on it. None, nada, zilch, zero. So in order to control the volume, or even skip a song you MUST use Apple’s P.O.S. headphones. If you loose the headphones that came with your shuffle, or they break, you’re going to be out $30 to get a new set. That’s nearly half the cost of a new Shuffle people.

“But Kyle, Apple has better ones you would like”. They do, your right, but they are $80, the same cost as the device. Personally, I have a tough time spending $35 on the set I like, $80 is too much.

The whole thing reminds me of this very old Foxtrot comic. Before the advent of USB drives and wide spread email. Floppy disks were THE way to move data from one place to another.

Apple, I’m sure you thought this through and have a plan. But I wont be buying it, nor do I recomend it to anybody.