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Showing posts with label videos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label videos. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Trust

It turns out that Kevin doesn't like carrots. I tried to give some as a treat and he completely ignored it and wanted to bite my finger instead.

I got brave and let him take a bite. Or two. Or three. Or ten.

It didn't break the skin or hurt at all. Either he went easy on me or that's the best he can do.


I tried to coax him onto my open hand later, using a few different seeds as bait. He seemed puzzled and bit me a few times. Again, no pain or blood shed, but he was pretty determined to make my hand go away.

I think his biggest problem is that he closes his eyes when he puts his face near my hand. He goes into cautious, defensive mode. I guess he's protecting himself in case I attack? His vision is already bad because he's a mouse, but with his eyes closed he can't see where the seeds are to grab one so he just bites at random with hope that he'll find an edible snack.

Anyway, I think this was a huge step in building trust with him. I wish someone had told me that the bites didn't hurt or draw blood. Is this really normal for a domestic mouse?

When he climbs up at the door, he's starting to look down at the table more often as if he's tempted to jump down. I still try to avoid giving him any treats when he's there, and instead give them to him inside his cage.

Monday, October 17, 2016

Still patient

Kevin is still eluding my attempts to pet him or hold him. He does seem to be getting used to the hand intrusions in his cage though. Even my kids were able to almost pet him yesterday when they were over.

One of these days I'll keep my hand in the cage when he attempts to nip me and see if he'll try it more than once. :)

A Google photos compilation video of a bunch of clips...


Thursday, October 6, 2016

Don't touch my stuff

This week I discovered that Kevin doesn't particularly like "the big hand" going inside his cage.

I thought we were making good progress toward him being held, so I attempted to pet him while he was inside his cage. If he ran off, all I had to do was stir up the bedding on the floor of the cage a little and he'd come running back to make me stop.



He tried to nip at me a couple of times as if to say "No, we'll have none of that. Beat it!" No broken or even scratched skin, but they were definitely his teeth that I felt. It was still kind of cute. He was getting a little too excited, so I gave him a few treats and left him alone.

No more of this

Last night i tried a different approach. I've stopped giving him treats by allowing him to climb up to the door and hang out to take them from me, and instead I am now putting my hand inside the cage to give them to him. I think he just needs to get used to having my hand in the cage to build more trust.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Maiden flight not so good

After countless hours flying the RealFlight 7 Sim, I was ready to take the Blade 450 3D out for its first flight on Saturday. With hardly a breeze in the air, the conditions were ideal.

I decided to use my homemade training gear. Unfortunately, the grass up at the park where I used to fly my plane was in need of mowing, and I stupidly decided not to start off on the paved parking lot. This was mostly because it would have put me in view of a group of people at the far end of the lot, and I wasn't ready to have an audience, except for my long-time friend who came along to watch. But long grass meant I had to get more altitude, which defeats the purpose of using training gear. Duh.

I think the flight last less than 3 minutes before ending in disaster. I'll let this edited video speak for itself.


The end result was a broken main rotor blade holder, which cost me less than $10 to repair (pack of two!), and now I have a spare in case it ever happens again.

Green: The part. Red: Where it broke.


Repairing the heli wasn't as easy as I expected. Blade provides you with the tools for the heli, but what they don't do is provide you with two allen keys the same size that are required to remove the blade holders. You need one for each side as you unscrew one, so it doesn't just spin freely. Thankfully, I did have another in my tool box.

After the repair, I ran the prop for a few mins as fast as it would run without taking off, since I was doing this on my front walkway and that would surely have ended on a bigger disaster. It seems to be pretty stable.

So, what's next?

Either I'll try the training gear again, but this time on pavement so I don't need to lift off as high and have more time to get comfortable with the controls, and trim it properly... or, I'll skip the training gear and keep it higher and fly in a circle or oval, rather just hover.

One thing I noticed with the RF7 sim is that I often find it easier to fly around than simply hovering. Keep it moving forward and worry about altitude and and roll. Hovering seems to require more concentration, for me anyway.

As a side note, when I was testing my repair I noticed something odd about two large gears that drive the main rotor blade and gyro. (I don't know their names off-hand)

The two gears, after I removed the obstruction.
 It looked like they were attached so they would spin at the same speed. Now, I don't know very much about the inner workings of these yet, so I wasn't sure if this was by design or if something else was broken. When I turned them by hand, that confirmed that they do not turn at the same rate. Upon further inspection, it looked like something was jammed between the two gears. This is what I removed.


A broken tie-wrap.

I looked over the entire helicopter and there doesn't appear to be anywhere that may be missing a tie wrap. Every wire is secure. I don't think this came off during the crash. If it didn't, then that means it was there the entire time. Could this have affected the stability of the helicopter? Perhaps. The controls didn't feel bad to me, but seeing as how my heli experience up to Saturday was on the sim, I'm not sure if I would have noticed the difference.

Hmmm...

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Rain sucks

The topic says it all.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, and Monday was the day. I got rained on, while cycling home. Up to then, I was fairly lucky and the worst I got was a light misting.

The worst part wasn't so much the rain, but the puddles I had to ride through at the side of the road. My shoes were soaked.

I got a sports cam for my Birthday earlier in the month and I've begun filming most of my rides. Sometimes there's an asshole who cuts me off, and other times there's something cool to see. This is one of those "something cool" moments.

I'm really pleased by the steadiness of the camera, considering it's mounted to my handlebars. It's a Contour ROAM, but it doesn't have any kind of stabilzation feature. I've tried mounting regular video cameras or pocket cameras and the quality of the footage is terrible. I plan to eventually post a video of an entire ride (sped up around 300%), just for fun. By the end of summer, I may also have enough for a compilation video showing how bad some cyclists are.

Friday, June 10, 2011

It'll stop... eventually

I realized on Monday that this is the first time in 18 years that we haven't had a pet in our home. It is also the first time in over 30 years that I haven't had some kind of pet.

We adopted Sam in 1993, the same year we got married. We picked her, and her "brother" Quincy, at the Ottawa Humane Society. I'll be honest and say that she wasn't my first pick. I had seen a solid grey kitten but it turned out that she had ear mites. They said they would give us the drops for them, but because we were getting two kittens, we'd have to buy more to treat the other cat at the same time as a preventative measure. I continued my search and noticed a black and white kitten. She stuck out a little more because she was a little larger than the other kittens. In the end, she was smaller than most cats and I couldn't have chosen a better cat. Or maybe she chose me; that's how it works with cats, isn't it?

We picked the names for Samantha and Quincy while we sat in the car at the Blair Animal Hospital, when we took them for their first visit to get a checkup. I don't remember why I chose "Samantha". Perhaps because it could be shortened.

I had other cats when I was growing up and none lived as long as Sam. We had a famiy dog, Peanut, who also lived to around 18 years old.

I took a break from surfing the web on Monday night and got up to get a cup of water. Without even thinking, I glanced over to where she would normally be lying on the floor, waiting for that familiar little "Mrrr?" as she would get up to follow me. Her floor space was empty.

"Oh yeh... right."

In the kitchen, as I finished filling my cup, I looked down at my feet so I wouldn't step on her if she was sitting behind me, waiting to ask for food.

I then instinctively looked to where her bowls used to sit, to see if she still had food, and they weren't there.

I heard noises, again, later as I was sitting at my computer. Not imaginary noises. I'm sure it's just the house settling, but the first thing I assumed was that it was Sam hopping off the couch or the automan, or playing with a toy... and then I remembered. It gave me goose bumps.

The other evenings this week were more of the same.

I keep replaying Sunday's events in my head. It's like a bad dream. She has a problem with her foot. They'll fix it. We'll pay a big vet bill. We'll all go home. That's how it was supposed play out.

We had canned food and an unopened bag of dry food that we bought from PetSmart a week or two ago. Sandra called them on Monday and they let us return it. I went to the Humane Society web site on Tuesday morning and made a donation.

For such a tiny furball, she sure left a big hole in our home.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Setting date and time on Mini DV Pocket Video Camera

Aviary cgi-ebay-ca Picture 1 I picked up a cheap Mini DV Pocket Video Camera off Ebay recently for 1 cent. Ok, so the S&H was $15.99, but for the whole price, it was a steal. My intent is to mount it onto my R/C plane this summer and shoot some aerial video like I did a couple of years ago with another camera. Since it has no internal storage, I also ordered a 2GB Micro SD card for it, from another Ebay vendor, for $7.

My purchase finally arrived yesterday. The camera is smaller than I expected which makes it ideal for my purposes. The brackets it came with will make great plane mounts.

The software drivers came on a mini CD and installed without a hitch. The printed instructions were clearly translated from Chinese, and not too surprisingly, difficult to understand. On the CD was a batch file, Updata Time.bat, used for setting the device’s internal date and time. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. (That’s not a typo – that’s how it is spelled) :)

I searched the web and found a couple of different YouTube videos demonstrating how to set the date and time on this camera. None of them worked. First, it didn’t seem to recognize this TAG.txt file that the videos used. The file created by the batch file is named time.txt. The information being put into the file didn’t look quite right. I determined that it was parsing the date from my PC incorrectly, either because I’m running Windows 7 or because the region is set differently than a Chinese system.  After some trial and error, I managed to fix the batch file so it inserted the date correctly, and in turn, was accepted by the camera.

If you have one of these cameras and the batch file isn’t working for you, the solution is really simple, and you don’t need to mess around with the batch file.

Open Windows Notepad (NOT WordPad) and enter the following information on a single line: yyyy.mm.dd hh:mm:ss.  So, for example, if you were to use today’s date and time, it would be 2010.05.18 08:29:00. Note: the time format is 24 hour time. Save the file to your desktop as time.txt, plug your camera into the PC, copy the file to the camera, unplug the camera and turn it on. When you turn on the camera, it will read the date and time, set it, and remove the file on its own.

If you’re the type, like me, who wants to fix the batch file, this is the section you need to change:
set b=%date%
set yy=%b:~0,4%
set zz=%b:~5,2%
set dd=%b:~8,2%
set xx=%b:~11,3%
Change it to the following:
set b=%date%
set yy=%b:~10,4%
set zz=%b:~4,2%
set dd=%b:~7,2%
set xx=%b:~0,3%
If it still doesn’t work, you may need to add or change one of these lines:
if exist J:\DCIM copy time.txt J:\
Change the “J:” to the drive letter that the camera appears as on your system.

That’s it, that’s all. I might throw together my own video and post it. In the meantime, I let the author of the linked video above know about this so if anyone contacts him, he can share the information.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Rogers Television Sucks

I woke up early this morning to watch the live broadcast of the Landsdowne Park South Side stands demolition. It was supposed to be broadcast from the City of Ottawa web site starting at 7:50am, with the actual implosion at 8:00am.

I was sure there'd be plenty of replay broadcasts available later in the day, but it's not the same as actually seeing something like this LIVE.

I got up at 7:30am and loaded up the web site at 7:45. The Rogers Television logo stared back at me from the web page. That should have been my first indication that this was going to go very well.

On cue, the live broadcast began at 7:50am. As 8:00am approached, the streaming broadcast began to stutter.

"Great. Rogers can't handle the demand", I said to myself.

A few minutes after 8:00am, according to my PC time, the warning horn sounded.

More streaming stutter.

My wife and I joked that we're going to miss the implosion. We'll see one frame of the stands still intact, and on the next it'll be gone.

That's pretty much what we saw.

The broadcast stream continued to get worse. Pausing for 10-15 seconds at a time.

Seconds before you could hear the countdown, the tiny screen went all blue. WTF?

You could still hear the occasional bit of audio.

Then the countdown started. Or parts of it. Followed by broken sounds of the explosive charges going off.

Then a picture. A paused picture of the left side of the stands beginning to fall.

Then applause as the demolition crew cheered.

I sat staring at the one image.

All week, the newspapers were warning of road closures and advising people to watch the broadcast stream. That there was no way they could get anywhere near the site to see it live, and then Rogers totally screws up the broadcast stream.

I'm sure it was all due to their inability to handle the demand, but what the hell did they expect?

Way to go Rogers. Fuckin' morons.

If you're interested in seeing what most of Ottawa probably missed, they're replaying the event here: Implosion of the lower south-side stands at Lansdowne Park

Am I the only one who thought the entire stands was going to be demolished? It's still kinda cool to see.



This is a spectators video of the implosion. I guess you could get somewhat near enough to see it in person. Judging from a few comments you can hear on the video, I wasn't the only one who thought the entire thing was coming down.
Zemanta Pixie

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Are we having fun yet?

Speaking of packed places...


Pushers

No, not druggies. These people are paid to pack as many people into the trains as possible.



The next time you have to ride on a packed bus, or train, remember these poor souls. :)

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Peyton Manning SNL Skit - *UPDATED*

I was watching SNL last night and this skit came on. SNL hasn't had anything this funny in a long time.



NEW LINK -- quick before YouTube pulls it down!

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Quincy Video

It took YouTube a while to publish it, but it is now up. Here's the video I made. Despite the corny sound track, I still love watching it. :)

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Suitable for all audiences

While watching the Sens vs Leafs game tonight on TV a Kia commercial came on.

At first it looked like the controversial one, where the lady cop is making out with a young guy in his car. This one...



Various police forces didn't like it because they claimed it was degrading. I thought it was funny. And I don't think any less of female police offers because of it. Anyway, the police got their way and KIA backed down and pulled it.

I was surprised when it came back on. I started to say to my wife, "Hey, I thought they pulled that..." and then around 5 seconds into it, just before they pan back to show the cop car, it cut to a message on the screen that said:

And now a new ending that
is suitable for all audiences.

The next thing you know, we're looking at a goat standing in a field, happily eating grass and wagging its tail. Too funny. :) I couldn't find a clip of the new commercial, but I did find this story about it.

Anyone who has seen the original commercial knows that the woman in the front seat with the guy is a cop.

It'll be interesting to see if the police forces complain about it again.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Bugatti Veyron @ Top Speed

This is insane. 407 km/h.

Imagine having an accident at that speed? I doubt there'd be much left of the driver or the car.

Here's one that crashed at 160 km/h.

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Korean Sushi

I'm not too keen on the thought of ever trying sushi. Up to now, I thought that sushi was always dead. If I were to try sushi, it would have to be dead.

It seems that I was wrong.

Saturday, March 3, 2007

Customer Service

I used to work in tech support. I used to manage a team in tech support. I can relate to this. Oh boy, can I relate to this.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Sens vs Sabres (aka Slugs), February 22, 2007

Great fights last night. :)



Although, Lindy Ruff should be penalized and/or fined for sending out 3 goons to take out our guys.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Snickers ad homophobic?

Apparently, due to the complaints from The Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the maker of Snickers has bowed under pressure and pulled the ad from TV and their web site.
"This type of jeering from professional sports figures at the sight of two men kissing fuels the kind of anti-gay bullying that haunts countless gay and lesbian school children on playgrounds all across the country," Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese said in a statement."
Give me a freakin' break. Get a sense of humour, for crying out loud, and pull your head out of your asses! It was FUNNY!

It depicts two straight guys who accidentally kissed! For them, it wasn't normal, and they reacted. What else are they supposed to do? They didn't say or imply that it was wrong. It just wasn't something that they wanted to do. If you're reading more from that, then it's YOU that has the problem. You're so paranoid about being discriminated against or whatever, yet you don't hesitate to complain about the silliest things that you don't like, drawing attention to yourself, and making you look like a bunch of big whiners.

I don't know how long this will last on YouTube before it gets yanked for the same idiotic reasons that it was yanked from TV, but here it is.