Tickle, Tickle.

"Evie likes a tickle from Elise"

My First Commute

Yesterday was my first commute to work. All things considered it went fairly well. I rode the 7.4 miles in 43 minutes. The ride back was a little tougher, due to the fact that it is more uphill, and I did that (7.5 miles) in 1 hour even. This morning I did the ride in to work in 39 minutes. I'm going to take an alternate route home tonight which should shave 0.3 miles off of the uphill part of the trip. Of course that will also probably mean that the climb will be that much steeper, but I'll just have to try it and see.

I bought a bike

OK, as Katie hinted about, it's time for an update on my plans to bike to work. I bought a bike! After riding a low-end Scott, a Rocky Mountain Metro 30, a Rocky Mountain RC 30 DISC and a Scott Sub 10. I finally settled on a Rocky Mountain RC 50 DISC from Reser Bicycle Outfitters in Newport. The picture to the left is a stock picture of the RC 50 from Rocky Mountain's website. Mine is pretty much the same, but it's black.

If you're ever in the market for a bike, I highly recommend Reser. They are very knowledgeable, helpful, and encourage you to test ride a lot of bikes so you can get a feel of what you're comfortable with. As an added bonus, they don't make fun of you when you're so out of shape that after your first test ride you're so worn out that you have to go home and take a break and come back a few hours later - or so I've heard.

Anyway, I've taken it on a ride around the neighborhood and around town. Both rides confirmed that I am very out of shape (as if there was a doubt after my test ride). Tomorrow morning is my first commute to work, about 7.4 miles. Going to work will be bad enough, but at least it's a lot of downhill (300 ft decrease in elevation), and it'll be relatively cool. What I'm really dreading is the ride home, uphill in the afternoon. If I make it, I'll let you know how it went.

Biking to Work

A guy I work with started biking to work recently, and I thought I should give it a try. My commute would only be about 6 miles, which is about a third of my friend's commute. Biking would save me money on gas & parking, and would also be good exercise. I was actually discussing all this with Katie right before we saw this on The Office:

I haven't started yet because I don't have a bike, but I'm going to buy a Motobecane Elite from bikesdirect.com, so hopefully I'll be able to start in a week or two. It's been about 15 years since I've really done any biking, so this should be interesting. I'll keep you posted. If anybody has any pointers for me, I'd be interested in hearing them.

Building a Playhouse

Some of you may remember Katie's post a few months ago about our search for a playhouse, then finally buying one, but now you finally get to see the construction process. As a video geek, I of course insisted that we document the entire process, and our camcorder (a Sony DCR-HC90 for the other video geeks out there) has a very nice time lapse function.

You'll notice that we were almost done with the roof when we stopped for the night, then there's a slight pause before the video resumes. That's because we realized that we were putting the roof on upside down, and at that point it was about 11:30pm so we decided to stop and finish it the next evening.

For those of you interested in the Woodridge Playhouse Leisure Time Products (Item #1150), it was fairly easy to assemble, and the instructions were actually fairly good. The materials seem to be of fairly decent quality, so hopefully it will hold up for quite a while.

Giraffes at the Zoo

I was going to make my first post be all about how it was my first post, but that seemed kinda boring, so I'm making it about something - what I worked on last week.

For those of you who don't know, I'm an editor at red echo post, a video post production company in Cincinnati. Last week I worked on a spot for the Cincinnati Zoo to promote their new giraffes. It was a challenging but very interesting spot to work on.

The giraffe in the first and last shots was originally in front of a clear sky background. I keyed it out, applied an effect that creates the outlines, then composited all 3 back onto the new background.



The middle shot was composited from 2 different scenes in much the same way, except that the platform and the people had to be motion tracked to the background so that it looked like it was part of the scene. For that I had to enlist the help of Scott, our 3D animator - he has better tools and a better brain for tracking that sort of scene. He tracked the separate elements, then I composited them back together.