Photo of the day

Today’s photo is from a shot I took just out the hotel door on my way to a conference. I actually walked in a circle almost getting hit by a few cars to find the angle for the shot. Once I got back to where I first saw the shot I snapped it and moved on.

As I sat at the conference the idea for the finished picture came to me and evolved a bit as I played around with a few photo editing apps. It ended up being a bit more sinister than I originally envisioned but c’est la vie!

Once again this was shot and edited only on my phone.

Before:

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After:

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Photo of the day

Today’s photo is a combo of two. Shot and edited on my phone.
Before:

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20120126-160812.jpg

After:

20120126-160820.jpg

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Flowcharts for Big Answers

344 Illustrated Flowcharts to Find Lifes Big Answers | Brain Pickings.

I want this book, and for $10 I will have this book.

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Eating healthy is hard

Calories in 13" Flour Tortilla.

So I am trying to lose some weight and tracking what I eat with Calorie Count over at about.com. Its not perfect but its pretty good and easy to use. One thing that is nice is it has a lot of restaurant food items in its database. There is a Chipotle near my office so I eat there occasionally as I can see what is going into my food and then enter it into Calorie Count pretty easy.

Well I though that things were going well today with a healthy breakfast and upcoming dinner. After entering all of those Items I saw that I still had about 1000 calories to go for my 2000 calorie daily target. So instead of getting the Bowl I opted for the tortilla thinking I would come in well below the radar. OOOOPSIE!

Turns out the Tortilla at Chipotle is 330 calories with 860 mg of sodium. So my lunch went from 500 calories to 830 and my daily sodium is way over. Goddamit!

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Where’s the beef? 2012(Update)

The flaw in the report is that it treats American consumers as passive actors who are victims of diminishing supplies, rising costs and government bias against the meat industry. Nowhere does it mention that we’re eating less meat because we want to eat less meat.

via Were Eating Less Meat. Why? – NYTimes.com.

Interesting article on American’s trend of eating less meat. I can attest that Kate and I are eating less meat mainly from a weight loss perspective, but the economics are impossible to ignore. Add to it the fact that meat is heavily subsidized and uses up a lot of oil to move around and our house is easily following this trend.

Best of all is that Kate has really jumped on board with things and is making some amazing recipes. Check out these books:

[UPDATE] – Kate has chimed in with the following:

I BEGAN eating less meat mainly from a weight loss perspective.

I CONTINUE to eat less meat due to aforementioned reasons.

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Definition of ADD?

Mission Control

via Apple – OS X Lion – Over 250 new features. Read about all of them..

It seems to me like having multiple desktops of applications running based on certain activities is not only gonna slow your computer down a lot, but give you a severe case of ADD.

Does anyone use this?

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Yeah I’m a fanboy

Negotiations with the carriers:Android handset makers: Here are our phones. How would you like us to change them so that you will sell them?Microsoft: Here’s $200 million. Please sell our phones.Apple: Here is our new phone. It comes in black or white. We will let you sell it.

via Daring Fireball Linked List: U.S. Carriers Dont Want Stock Android Phones.

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35 at 35 – Growing Older but not Up

This is a Mix of 35 Drum and Bass Tracks that I decided to put together for my 35th birthday:

After buying and downloading the songs from Beatport I used Platinum notes to repair the volume and clipping of each track, and then used Mixed in Key to determine the key of the song. I lazily warped them all in Ableton Live and then used an APC 40 to mix them together. I tried to match the songs up harmonically so that they flow together. I am just now beginning to relearn about the musical scale and am still pretty much in the dark about how it works. Then I got all crazy wicky wicky with it to create the hour and twenty five minutes of beats you hear here.

Technically I am infringing copyright here but its unclear exactly as over 70% of each song is being mixed over another song. I purchased all of these songs and created this mix cause its fun to do and I think it sounds pretty kick ass. If you like it too you can follow the links provided on each song and purchase the ones you like or all of them if you are that cool. To the creators of the songs I am sorry if you feel I am hurting your ability to make a living in any way. You will notice that this is not available for download and I am encouraging people to buy your art. My take on this is that you are getting free publicity on songs that not many people know about, but if its that big a deal you can either have Soundcloud shut me down or ask me to take this down.

The artists should also notice that here on my site I have removed the rel=”nofollow” tags that Soundclound has on the links on their site. This means that I am telling Google and other search engines that those pages are badass and should get link juice from me. One thing I notice that Beatport is pretty awful at is showing up in the search engines for individual songs that they are selling. I would love to help them with this and they are welcome to contact me anytime. I think that they will sell tons more music and make the artists even more cash.

Once again my point here is not to take credit for any of these amazing songs I just wanted to put them together in a way that will get more people to hear them.

Here is the tracklist of 35 at 35:

  1. 0:00 Chasm (Future Engineers ReSet) – Implex, Mav
  2. 1:05 Frozen Lake – Verbal
  3. 4:20 Ugly Duckling – Calibre
  4. 6:58 Grace Light – Mav
  5. 9:30 When They Wanna – Serum, David Boomah
  6. 11:40 Diabla (Metrik Remix) – Funk D’Void
  7. 13:07 All That Jazz – Fresh
  8. 14:34 Cigars N Money – Dom & Roland
  9. 16:44 Vigilante – Dramatic, DB Audio
  10. 19:16 God of Speed – Mav
  11. 22:42 Taboo – Lynx, Hellrazor
  12. 25:03 Glass Soldier – Medics
  13. 27:14 Foreign Bodies – Calibre
  14. 30:29 Delta Zero – Madmen & Poets
  15. 33:01 Climbing Up the Walls – Marcus Intalex, Lynx, Danny Fierce
  16. 36:48 Serenity – Madmen & Poets
  17. 39:20 Buddhist Meditation – Stereotype, Physical Illusion
  18. 41:08 Set it Off – K-Tee, Friction
  19. 42:30 Backlash – Optiv, BTK
  20. 44:18 Rainbow in your Hand – Command Strange
  21. 46:50 Aztec – Spor
  22. 48:39 Movin On (BJ Marky and Bungle Remix) -Artificial Intelligence
  23. 50:49 Im for Real – Dramatic, DB Audio
  24. 52:49 Meantime – Sub Focus
  25. 54:49 Play Tonight – Tantrum Desire
  26. 56:26 Pay Your Own Way – Tantrum Desire
  27. 58:58 Basic Memory – Phace
  28. 60:46 Skeptikos (Mav Remix) – Bop
  29. 63:40 Reunion – A Sides
  30. 67:39 Twisted – Rido
  31. 68:49 The Meaning – Mav, Krone, Xonora
  32. 72:21 Overdose – Wilkinson
  33. 74:31 In Coma – Morebeat
  34. 77:25 Mystic Sunset – DJ Marky, S.P.Y.
  35. 79:35 Stuck – Mage
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Workin for a Livin – Zion Trip Fall 2011

In 2010 Kate and I made our first trip to Zion National Park and immediately fell in love with the place. We liked it so much we went back for New Years when everything was covered in snow and it was equally as awsome, just cold. This year we decided to spend an entire week at Zion and even rented some Kayaks to take along. I did my best to document things and put together the following video for you to watch and enjoy.

The music is by Mav and is called God of Speed. You can buy the song here at Beatport for $1.49 with no DRM and support the artist to make more great tracks.

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Yackpacking: Knoll Lake Arizona

Just because I go backpacking as much as possible does not mean I enjoy the backpack part of the deal. Backpacks are heavy and yeah heavy. As an option you can put your pack in a kayak and suddenly things get much nicer. We did our first yackpacking trip to Knoll Lake up on the Mogollon Rim a couple weeks ago and I took my camera along. Here is a pretty simple edit of what went down. The song was in our heads all weekend long so thats how I chose it. Let me know what you think:

Everything was shot on a Canon 60D with an EFS 18-135mm lense. Timelapses were done with an Intervolometer and beverages ranged from San Tan Brewery to Vodka n stuff.

Kayaks were rented from Arizona Hiking Shack and were inflatables. I got a double to put more gear into. These kayaks were not the best for Lake running. No keel made going straight a task. Still they were fun and I will be doing this a lot more.
If you need to go inflatable Advanced Elements makes some nice boats:

I built the timelapses in QuickTime and then imported to Final Cut Pro X. Music is All That Jazz from DJ Fresh.

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