bonnie & jason

Boo!

Growing up, Bonnie was never allowed to carve her own pumpkin.  Her dad figured it would be better for her and Benita to just draw on them lest they lose a finger in a horrible pumpkin carving accident.  But now that we’re in the 21st century, advanced technology has developed kid-friendly (and clumsy-wife friendly) carving kits.  So yesterday, Bonnie and I carved our first pumpkin (we both still have all our fingers.)  We even toasted the seeds in the oven with some garlic spread (we use it on everything.)

You’ll notice that the design is a fairly common one with the exception of the “jazz-hands.”  The reason Bonnie picked this design is because she had a dream a couple weeks ago that our as-yet unborn baby was put into a pumpkin and stuck her hands out through the holes while poking her head out from the top.  This was but one fun/cute dream about the baby that we can add to the list.  (Baby in prison dressed in a black and white striped onesie.  Baby climbing up a tree.  Baby in the middle of a huge donut.)

Speaking of babies, our cousin Deeann has some of the cutest baby Halloween pictures on her blog.  I particularly like the pea pod one.  What is it with Babies in food?

Along the theme of Halloween, Bonnie had bought this pumpkin cake pan (on massive sale from Williams Sonoma after last Halloween) which we finally put to good use.  It’s a chocolate chip pumpkin cake… with leaves and vines of green frosting.  Brings me back to the days of Home Economics with Mrs. Simoncelli.  (Yes, I took a cake decorating class in like 7th grade.  And no, I am not gay.  I took it to meet chicks.  Just kidding.)

Pizza pizza

A few months ago, we decided to finally use our pizza stone, one of the many wedding presents we don’t use often enough.  Since it was our first attempt, we figured it would be a good idea to use a store bought Boboli crust.  It didn’t work out so good… mostly because we used tomato paste for the sauce.  Also, Bonnie likes her pizza with a crispy thin crust whereas the Boboli is a thick and chewy crust.  Despite that so-so experience, we decided to try it again, except this time, we made our own crust.  Also, we used tomato sauce with Bonnie’s own secret spice combination.  A few mushrooms, some pepperoni, and some ground turkey finished the toppings.

They turned out pretty well!  To the point where Bonnie actually wanted to take pictures and post them on the blog.  Ok, so maybe they weren’t exactly “circular.”  (I had some problems transferring the pizza from the cutting board to the pizza stone.)  But the crust was thin and crispy.  And the toppings were tasty.  It was just really messy with all the flour and dough.

In addition to the pizza, we also made some garlic bread with the leftover hot dog buns from our weekend BBQ.  (Jeff, Xiao Yi, and Jay came over for some sirloin and hot links on the grill.)  Benita accused us of being ghetto but she ended up eating more than half of them!  Hot dog buns are good because they’re nice and fluffy and suck up all the buttery garlicky goodness.  Mmm…

On a side note, if you’re wondering about whether or not an All-Clad pizza stone is all that… I would say it works fine.  Although the cookie sheet I used for the second pizza seemed to work just as well.  However, one thing you can do with the pizza stone is cut and serve the pizza right on the stone which is nice and kinda fancy.  Now, if I can only figure out how to make the them round.

FS: 1996 V6 LE Camry

Eric and Kathy are selling the Camry and buying a Lotus Exige.  I mean, they’re buying a shifter kart.  Ok fine, maybe they’re just selling the Camry.  If you’re interested, here’s the Craigslist ad.

My parents actually bought two of these… a white one in 1992 (to replace a POS Oldsmobile) and a red one in 1994 (after I totalled the Maxima, oops).  They still drive the white one and my cousins now drive the red one.  It actually scares me to think that I drove the white one in highschool.  It seems so long ago.  Good times, good times.  But I digress… the point is, I can personally attest to the reliability of these bad boys.

sidebar: While perusing my alma mater’s website, I came across the student council announcement for Halloween costumes.  The following quote was in six of the 14 sentences: “Students must be covered from the collar bone to the knee with costume.”  This just emphasizes the reality that Halloween is basically an excuse for people (perhaps especially high school girls) to show as much skin as possible. I guess this way they can claim, “I’m not really skanky, it’s just a costume.”  As a soon-to-be father of a little girl, I’m going to fully encourage the idolizing of people like Danica Patrick since all the other female superheroes, sports stars, etc. aren’t quite as well covered.  (Just don’t tell her about this costume.)

Perry’s Pumpkin Patch

Deeann and Calvin organized a trip to Perry’s Pumpkin Patch today. It was a perfect California Autumn day for a little pumpkin picking… and corn maze trekking.  The corn maze wasn’t really a maze.  It was more like a walk through the corn following the people in front of you.

Here’s the ofoto album.

On another topic, it’s amazing to see how fast Abigail and Rylee are growing up.  Rylee knows everyone’s name (not a small feat in this family) and is such a well behaved little girl.  Abigail is so good natured and can practically stand on her own!  I can hardly picture Deeann and Calvin without her even though she’s barley more than 6 months old.

It started me thinking that it might be worth taking the maximum family leave after all.  This time in their lives seems so fleeting.  We’ll have to take a closer look at the budget I guess.

Samsung HL-5087W 50″ 1080p DLP HDTV initial impressions

With the Canon HV10, of course, I needed an HDTV to view the footage.  After much research on LCD, Plasma, DLP, cost, brand, etc., I decided on the Samsung HL-5087W.

Amazon had a great deal compared to any other vendor and even included free shipping.  I got it for $1699 and I just noticed the price has now dropped even further to $1550 from Electronics Expo.  (You need to pay shipping with them though.)

Why?

At the end of the day, I decided that I wanted  1080p and 50″ but was not willing to pay the premium for the LCD and plasma versions.  Also, the extra width of the modern DLP really wasn’t an issue for me.  Neither was the “rainbow” effect that some people can see with DLP displays.  As such, I was trying to decide between the Samsung and the Sony KDS-50A2000.  At that point, it was more a matter of price than anything else.  (The Samsung was more than $300 cheaper.)  I suppose I also liked the aesthetics of the Samsung better.  Finally, when I went to the store, I couldn’t tell a difference in picture quality.

Performance

I have a DirecTV HR-20 HD DVR hooked up via component cables.  It pulls in what would be off-air HD via the satellite so I don’t need an extra antenna.  (I’ve heard image quality is actually better off-air though.)  Overall, image quality seems to be what I expected.  HD channels look great.  SD channels look ok.  The only complaint I have is that the HD channels occasionally look over-compressed.

sidebar: The DirecTV DVR interface is lacking in many ways.  The UltimateTV (which has now been relegated to the basement) interface works much better.  The biggest complaint is that the 30-second jump doesn’t actually jump.  It basically just fast forwards and then stops.  So instead of instantaneously shifting through commercials, I need to watch them go by semi-quickly.  It’s also harder to manage recorded shows.  I’m hoping many of the issues get fixed via automatic firmware downloads… we’ll see.

The best image quality I’ve seen, however, is from the Canon HV10 connected via component cables (it doesn’t have an HDMI output.)  The TV resolution really shines here and color and sharpness are fantastic.  I also don’t notice any of the compression artifacts that I noticed with the DirecTV receiver.  I can’t wait to see what it looks like with HD DVD/Blu-Ray 1080p sources!

Final Thought

I’m not sure if TV’s need to break in like speakers and receivers, but I feel like the image quality has gotten better after the first week of use.  Maybe my eyes are just getting used to it.  I’ll update this again if I notice any other changes.  Anyway, if anyone knows anything about this, I’d love to hear it.

Canon HV10: initial thoughts

I haven’t had a chance to put the camera through it’s paces yet, but here are my first impressions:

Handling

The camera is small!  The vertical format isn’t a problem for me as it has been for some reviews have stated, but my hands aren’t all that big.  For point and shoot stuff, it works just fine.  I will say that some of the buttons are kinda small so you won’t want to make adjustments while shooting.  The zoom function works ok… although in my opinion it’s a little too “on-off.”  You move it a little and nothing happens and then wham-o, it zooms too quickly.  It’ll get better after I get some practice, but I still think they could have done a better job with the calibration.  The only other comment I have is that I found it easier to put my middle three fingers in the hand strap instead of my last four fingers.  This way, I don’t have to hold my arm at such a vertical angle.  The only caveat to this would be if I was using the electronic viewfinder instead of the fold out screen, which I don’t see happening all the much.  To tell you the truth, the EVF is so small and hard to use, I’m not even sure why they bother including it.

Picture Quality

In a word, “fantastic!”  Resolution is great and the low-light performance that camcorderinfo.com bashed isn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be.  The zoom lens has pretty good range and the digital zoom up to 40x is actually quite usable.  (I probably wouldn’t go with the 100X range though.)  The best part about the camera, however, is probably the optical image stabilization.  When zoomed out, the image is rock steady.  When zoomed in (even at 40X digital zoom) you don’t have the headache inducing jitters that accompany non-stabilized images.  Aside from the actual stabilization, however, is the quality of the image itself.  Unlike electronic image stabilizers, optical systems don’t have to go through any processing mumbo-jumbo to get stabilized.  As such, the image quality is as good as if you had the camera on a tripod.

Battery Life

Not good.  The battery is small and might be able to get you through an hour of shooting.  I haven’t tested it all the way from fully charged to failure, but I’m definitely going to get the larger capacity battery.

sidebar: I got a generic BP-315 from eBay… sucks.  Never again.  At first, it wouldn’t charge beyond 75%.  When I tried to “reset” it at the seller’s suggestion by draining it all the way and then charging it fully, it wouldn’t charge at all!

Digital Camera

The camera actually works quite well.  The picture quality was better than I expected and the controls weren’t as awkward as I expected.  I suspect the fact that the camera uses a CMOS sensor has is a good thing.  Also, the image stabilization that works so great in camcorder mode works just as well in still image mode.  Even the flash works essentially the same as any other point and shoot camera.  Finally, you also have the option of doing some manual control with shutter speed and aperture which I did not expect.  To tell you the truth, I did not expect to use this feature of the camcorder all that often, but now, I’m thinking I can probably leave the Powershot S400 at home if I’m taking the camcorder with me.

Other

I still have to spend some more time with the camera and play with more of the manual features.  I also was hoping to find some way to use the image stabilization only in the vertical direction so I can pan without getting any jerky movements in the horizontal direction.  I don’t think that’s an option though.  (Disappointing as my SLR lenses do this quite easily and effectively.)  Finally, I need to figure out how much hard drive space this thing is going to suck up and decide how I’m going to archive footage.  Along those lines, I may need to upgrade the computer as well if I can get some clients to integrate some simple videography into my wedding business.  We’ll see.

That’s about it for now.  I’ll post more impressions as I get some more time behind the lens.

Faster, faster!!!

So Eric, Dennis, and I finally got together for a karting day.  We went on an “expert/amateur” day which means that you need to be fast enough and show enough control to make sure you don’t get in anyone’s way.  As it turns out… Dennis is really slow, Eric is borderline, and I’m probably just on the other side of said border.  Oops.

Anyway, I did take some video of Eric going around with the new camcorder and Scott Speed was there driving around (he’s really smooth) and we didn’t break anything so it was a pretty good day overall.  (We did replace the brake pads, but that’s more of a normal wear item.)

Anyway, here are some of Dennis’ pics.