WILD

I got into Anchorage last night on the Pen Air Flight. I got checked into the hotel, and gave Jon a call. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and figured I see what he was up to. He and his girl friend came over and picked me up. We went out to the Outback for dinner. It was good to see him. Sounds like they are both doing really well.
I got up this morning and headed over to the airport. I was lucky enough to get an exit row to sit in. It turns out I was in the seat right by the door that you walk in at. I got situated and waited for everyone to get in their seat. I ended up sitting next to kind of a weird guy. You run into those types of people in Alaska. He was nice, but had some trouble with finding appropriate topics to talk about. I ended up talking to one of the flight attendants for quite a while. I learned about his experience running the Boston Marathon. He said he read a book call some thing like “the swim to antarctica” that helped him run it.
I got to Minneapolis, and tried to get on an earlier flight up to Hibbing, but there weren’t any. So instead of killing my time sitting in the airport I decided to hop a cab to the Excel Energy center. I got here at 5:30 and was able to find a seat. I am only going to be able to catch about an hour of the game, but It’ll be fun.

pictuures to come soon….

MacWorld – Day One

John, Chick, and I met down stairs this morning at 7:15 to head over to the MacWorld check in area. We were essentially at the beginning of the line. Here is what it looked like as we were leaving the check in area.

The class I was taking today which is continuing on tomorrow is covering all the aspects of video compression. I am learning quite a bit. The person teaching the class says that he is a “compressionist”. All the does for a living is compress video for big companies. He worked for Abercrombie & Fitch for the last 5 years compressing their video for their website, and for the in store TV’s that play the videos while you shop. I’m not sure, but I think he now works for a company that just compresses video for major companies around the country. Pretty crazy that is all he does. He was talking about how much easier compression is when using a High Definition camera. He has basically sold me on needing one of them. 🙂

We learned about all the major compression software’s like Sorenson Squeeze, Cleaner, Compressor 2, and a couple others. I learned that pre-compression work is very important to make your video look a lot better. Adjusting the color, saturation, sharpening, and a few other things can really make your video look much better. I am looking forward to playing around with these new ideas when I get back. I also learned that you could use all the computers on your network as a “cluster” to divide up the compression task and make work go a lot faster. If I can find some computers to get this working on I think it can really save some time.

After the conference we stopped off at a couple stores including the San Francisco Apple Store. Its a pretty cool store full of 30 inch monitors and every Mac software and hardware you can think of.

After that we headed back to the hotel and grabbed some dinner. I had a very tasty steak, after which we went out for a walk around town. It is nice to be in an area where you really don’t need a jacket when you are outside.

That’s all I have for now. I should get some sleep before the day starts tomorrow.

Board Room

My journey has begun. I am sitting in the Alaska Airlines Board Room right now waiting for my flight to Seattle and then on to San Francisco for the beginning of the adventure. The Concilus’ made it safely back from Bali. They are pretty tired out since it is almost 5:00 AM tomorrow in Bali. I am planning on taking a lot of pictures, and posting them during the week. I will try to get a daily update of what’s going on. More to come later…

Board Room

My journey has begun. I am sitting in the Alaska Airlines Board Room right now waiting for my flight to Seattle and then on to San Francisco for the beginning of the adventure. The Concilus’ made it safely back from Bali. They are pretty tired out since it is almost 5:00 AM tomorrow in Bali. I am planning on taking a lot of pictures, and posting them during the week. I will try to get a daily update of what’s going on. More to come later…

Board Room

My journey has begun. I am sitting in the Alaska Airlines Board Room right now waiting for my flight to Seattle and then on to San Francisco for the beginning of the adventure. The Concilus’ made it safely back from Bali. They are pretty tired out since it is almost 5:00 AM tomorrow in Bali. I am planning on taking a lot of pictures, and posting them during the week. I will try to get a daily update of what’s going on. More to come later…