Ellie has been posting to her blog again. She is in the middle of a three-post marathon, and is hoping that her former readers will come back and leave some comments!
Here’s her blog.
Monthly Archive for November, 2007
It’s not that I post that often, but it was ironic that during the past 5 days off of work my blog was unfindable and un-editable. It drove me a little crazy, at the back of my head, but I somehow fixed it a few minutes ago. Like most problems with computers, it was the difference between a 1 and a 0. I’ll probably follow Peter to his host and migrate soon.
We did, indeed, ride our bikes on the new 3 lane section of I-355. I had a hard time counting to see if there were 5 thousand bikes, but it seemed like a lot. I also know that you could have probably snuck into the ride pretty easily. You didn’t have to pay tolls, either… You can’t tell from the video, but it was a pretty hilly ride, and the wide open space gave the winds a chance to pick up some speed. Even when you went downhill you had to pedal to compensate for the wind. A fun event, and maybe one that won’t be repeated for some time… The number and diversity of participants in sketchy weather was a testament to the hardiness of Midwestern bicycle enthusiasts.
A note about the movie. I used the new version of iMovie from iLife ‘08, which is also a total rebuild from scratch. The only feature that is interesting is that it keeps a library of your video clips, in much the same way iPhoto has a gallery of your images. It is fancier, but not as capable as the ‘06 version. Luckily, we can all keep using the old ‘06 version too. I had a hard time controlling sound, and other basic features in the simple construction of this clip. It has an built in export to Youtube feature, but the quality of the export/ upload was pretty poor. You can see that in the titles, etc. Most iMovie users have been disappointed with the fact that they did away with the timeline view of your film. This means all you have is thumbnails of clips, and that’s what makes it hard to edit the sound. Overall, I doubt I’ll use iMovie ‘08 very much, but I’ll play with it a few more times to see if it shapes up to be useful.
This version was aimed at all the new movie makers who are using their digital cameras to take movie clips. It will quickly string together clips and send them to the web, but most of the special effects, and fine tuned controls are not available.
I have a chance to do an organized bike ride on a yet unopened tollway. It looks like 5000 riders will be doing the 20 mile ride on the pristine pavement. The weather looks to be kind of damp and cold, but it will be interesting. I’m hoping to bring back some photos. From the looks of it, it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, they’ve never done anything like this in our area before, and it’s our first new tollway in 20 years. It opens to cars tomorrow.