Art La Flamme

So, the kids and I went back to the Black Forest / Schwarzwald on Saturday. Our new cuckoo clock had a defect, so we exchanged it.

And, it was an excuse to go back to the Rodelbahn, and to take a nice drive (and film it) back through the forest.

A few things. The new video camera. It’s OK, but the sound recording always sucks. I need to look at remote microphone options for it, or something.

Also, the video files. They copy over onto my PC quick enough, by copy amazingly slow on the Mac. And they load into iMovie at a rate that is slower than the rate for making a diamond. Evolution is faster than it loads into iMovie. When I started to load it this morning, it told me it was going to take 10 hours. What’s in those files — Viagra?

The camera mount. Love it. I might go back and trim the ends down a bit, and maybe cap them. Mostly, I need to see where we’re going to be moving to, before I throw down and do this, though.

Opa, if you’re reading this, I need the other video camera back. We’re going to go to the Alps in early May, and if ever there was a need for dual cameras on a drive, that’s it!

Oh, and the kids crack me up. When we were in Triberg (photos) picking up the new clock, we parked right by the entrance to the path to the waterfall (photos). Hey, let’s go see the waterfall, I suggest. Noooooooo.

So I cheated. I have gummi’s we can eat while we walk up there. OK, they say. It always reminds me of this cartoon, which I also have on a t-shirt (and don’t wear enough).

See, it wasn’t so bad. They actually smiled for a photo. Must have been a trick.

I guess that counts as a smile.

Here’s one of my favorite photos, but I’ll have to explain it, too.

Dramatic Squirrel, I call it. You’ve seen the video, right? It’s one of those internet phenomena things. I ran across this this week, and download it in order to set it as the wallpaper on my PC. Cracks me up. And it’s sad, how the internet ruins a perfectly charming life.

Triberg, though, is a lovely down. Nice place to visit. And it makes me miss Germany already.

One last topic — My Garmin Forerunner 305. I have geek envy — there’s a new 400 series out. Wireless, and only $300! Mmmmmm, sexy. Anyway, I downloaded and loaded the latest version of the Garmin Training Center on the PC. Nice new features in it — I can export, for example, just one track, instead of just being able to export everything I have ever done. That alone is an exponential improvement for the software.

One OK feature is to also be able to right-click on a track and send it right to Google Earth. Great idea, but an only-OK implementation. Sadly, you can’t configure how you want the data to show up, so I still favor using this great website (and this specific page) to convert the data files to the Google Earth file (yes, Doug, I’m talking to you).

Take a look here — the ones will the billions of points are the tracks exported from the program right to Google Earth (I left them turned off by default), while the nicely colored ones were done via the website. For our ride on the Rodelbahn, I had it color code by speed (we hit 25 mph, BTW), and for the drive, I had it color code by elevation — much nicer than just dots, and easy to do since the data stored by the GPS has all of that in it.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 11:15 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.