Category: Doug

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Skvid Number One

Skvid = SKit on VIDeo

Last week our pastor asked me to put together a video skit to help illustrate a sermon in a series of lessons on stewardship: What happens when we overwhelm ourselves with choices and activities? Of course, it also illustrates beautifully the quirkiness of the Wilcox family.

I did the video in Windows Movie Maker, a free download for Windows XP. I had to overcome a quirk that kept locking the software up, discovering that previewing clips in the preview window wouldn’t work correctly, unless I dragged the clips to the timeline first. I can’t explain that, but wish I’d found the answer hours earlier. Movie Maker isn’t bad, but I need something that will let me treat the audio track from the video separately, as well as add more audio layers.

The film was shot entirely out of sequence, in order to meet the availability schedule of the actors (my kids), over the course of a very busy Saturday. The Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back clip was created by shooting our own HDTV, the quickest way I could think of to get the piece I needed.

Background music includes Ella Fitzgerald’s, “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” and the title theme from Back to the Future.

Overall, it’s a tad too long at just over 6 minutes (the goal was 5 minutes), and I never got around to including any video transitions. I may tweak it a bit in the next few days, especially if I try out a more advanced software package, and hope to get it down to 4 to 4.5 minutes. I recall seeing George Lucas talking about an old filmmaker adage, “Films are never finished, just abandoned,” and how he had the technology (and money) to keep going back to his films to finish them the way he wanted.

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Shootin’ with the Brethren

Back in September, Nichelle, Isaac, Phil, and I participating in our church’s extremely informal, annual skeet shoot. (I know not all churches go shooting together, and one certainly won’t find the Apostle Paul writing about it, but we do, after all, live in New Hampshire.)

Neither Nichelle nor I hit any of the clay pigeons with our 12-gauges. Phil nicked one or two, but didn’t really fare much better than we. Isaac, however, managed to nail three of them (putting him in 5th place for the day), with a more-his-size 410.

We also did some handgun shooting. I found that to be highly invigorating. (Translation: “Quite the rush!”) Target shooting is also a little easier than skeet shooting, so doing that last helped rebuild my shattered ego after being trounced by Isaac.

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NaNi the Brain Surgeon

Last week we were visiting the McGrath family, and they (as usual) offered the kids some food. NaNi was eating a bread roll, and said, “Dad, we can cut open your head, and put this inside, and glue it back together, and you’ll act all crazy. Then when you’re done acting crazy, we can cut your head open again, and put your regular brain back in, and glue it back together again.”

A week before that, she said, “Dad, I can’t take my head off, because my blood is sticky—just like glue—and it holds it on.”

What a kid.

Oh, she also is crazy about dresses. Two weeks ago she slyly pronounced, “Dad, if you buy me a twirley Cinderella dress, I am soooo letting you take me to the ball.”

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Amazing Dental Technology

This morning I reported to my dentist at 8:00 a.m. to have a crown done. They use a CEREC system, and I was amazed by the technology.

They shot me up with Novocaine, got rid of the old filling and ground down the disintegrating part of the molar. Then they use an IR imager to get a 3D image of the tooth that remains, and match—in beautifully animated 3D—the crown that will be milled to the base that remains, using the tooth outline against a database of about 500 3D teeth to get one that looks natural. (See the video above. It’s jaw-dropping.)

The dentist then can adjust this using a mouse and 3D view. They pick a tint that matches the rest of your teeth, throw a block of dental material in a tiny, computerized milling machine, and in 11 to 22 minutes, the crown is done.

This gets molecularly bonded (rather than just cemented) to the original tooth surface, and voila—essentially a new tooth, in less time than it takes the Novocaine to wear off.

I was out and on my way again at 9:20.

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Shiver Me Timbers! Talk Like a Pirate Day Is Here Again!

‘Twas A grand, glorious day when I awoke. “Wench!” demanded I, “Where be me mornin’ grog?”

But then I learned a right powerful lesson: Be not calling a fair lass a “wench,” if’n she be stronger than thee. Painfully quick the lesson was, and quickly painful.

I woke me offspring up this mornin’ by yellin’, “Avast, ye good for nothing lazy swabs! Get out of those bunks ‘fore I have ye keelhauled!”

Arrrrrrr!

We had a great time talking like pirates on the way to school, and David tried to convince me that, as it was a holiday, he had the day off. I changed the words to our usual Geek song fare, “Can’t you see I’m white and piratey?” and “That Be the Power of Love.”

See last year’s post here.

Reuters covered it with this article.

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Bizarre Family Re-Invades Moultonborough


Our boring, personality-less family.

Well, we’re back (again) from our now-annual trip to Moultonborough, New Hampshire.

Highlights:

  • NaNi woke me up every morning by knocking on my head as one would a door, and announcing, “Dad, look out the window.” Thankfully, it was never very early, but to her, daylight meant it was time to do things.
  • Isaac and I climbed Mt. Percival, elevation 2,212 feet, near Squam Lake. (A full 1,000-feet higher than our usual hike across the street.) Nichelle, NaNi, David, my niece Jenn, and my sister Cindy made it much of the way, but didn’t get to the summit. (They were scared off by a report more seasoned hikers.) This is the first “moderate”-rated trail from our new AMC White Mountain Guide, 28th: Hiking trails in the White Mountain National Forest (Appalachian Mountain Club White Mountain Guide), and it was wonderful. While the others went slowly down the first part of the hike, Isaac and I really pushed it to get to the summit, but the view was worth it. The trail back, only 1.9 miles, seemed much longer. I couldn’t have done any of this without the 6-day-a-week weight training program my beautiful Nichelle has me on. (The hike was a great leg and cardio workout; the next two days I could feel muscles I didn’t knew I had.)
  • Neither Isaac nor David caught any pickerel this year. They didn’t spend as much time fishing, but more time swimming. We had bait left at the end of the week, even.
  • NaNi caught the biggest sunfish we have seen to date. It was actually too big for her to hold up the pole as Nichelle took a picture.
  • In an incident involving a fishing reel NaNi managed to disassemble, recovering the same reel from the bottom, getting the line tangled up in the paddleboat pedals, losing the reel permanently in the pond, getting stuck, and prayer … NaNi and David had quite an adventure. NaNi was very impressed that David “prayed to God twice,” and “knew the right thing to do.”
  • One of the few down sides to this trip was that Naomi has developed an unprecedented degree of fear of bugs and spiders, especially considering in whose family she is. She spent an hour or two one night, quite literally screaming, apparently from some nightmare about spiders which persisted into her mostly-woken state. (She was afraid of a lot of things, compared to earlier in her life, and was highly suggestible, but I expect she’ll have outgrown those issues by next year.)
  • We did our first all-family picture at Clark’s Trading Post, and Nichelle and NaNi did their traditional “Southern Belle” photos. I’ll try to get pictures up tonight.

We’ll post a Picasa Web Albums slide show after we go through the pictures.

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Dual-Core Processors and Video Performance

I’d installed Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, a game which is a couple of years old, on my relatively new dual-core AMD Athlon machine at home. (It should run fine on both machines, and I own two copies, making it ideal for gaming multiplayer with the kids.) To my surprise, the game ran absolutely horribly—a first for this box—in fact, it was completely unplayable. The video, even in the opening movie, stuttered whenever it was trying to do a fade affect. In the mission I tried, the characters wouldn’t move, although I could pan the camera, almost like the game was trying to poll the keyboard wrongly. The video seemed far jerkier than it should have been, also.

So, I did the usual bit of updating the video driver and DirectX drivers, but that didn’t help.

After a little research, and a couple of forum posts that didn’t have the right answer, but did point to a related Microsoft Knowledge Base article, I learned the cause of the problem. With visions of having to patch my BIOS (a slightly risky operation), I wen to the AMD Web site as Microsoft recommended, and discovered a surprisingly straightforward solution:

AMD Dual-Core Optimizer – The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API for timing by directly using the RDTSC (Read Time Stamp Counter) instruction. Applications that rely on RDTSC do not benefit from the logic in the operating system to properly account for the affect of power management mechanisms on the rate at which a processor core’s Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is incremented. The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer helps to correct the resulting video performance effects or other incorrect timing effects that these applications may experience on dual-core processor systems, by periodically adjusting the core time-stamp-counters, so that they are synchronized.

A quick Windows install and reboot, and the game ran flawlessly—at 1280 x 1024 with all the video and sound options maxed out. Sweet!

I believe there is a similar utility available for Intel multicore processors.

For the benefit of others:

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Week of a Million Smiles

Well, we’re back from vacation and what an amazing and wonderful time we all had.

To start off the vacation was Mom’s wedding. What a lovely couple Mom and Dad make! They are truly in love and so very sweet together. (Pictures taken by our “official” Wedding photographer Mike Matheson are available here.)

We spent a few days with Mom, Dad and family before heading to Orlando, where the Hinxmans arranged for us to stay at a borrowed apartment. They also are tireless park-attenders, and took us around Disney World and Sea World on a six-day sprint.


NaNi tells Cinderella a story about a ball she plans to attend.

What an amazing time, jammed packed and loads of fun. So much to share, too late now to do it, but you can check out the pics in the Picasa album. We have loads to share so check back in a day or two.

Picasa Web Album
Disney PhotoPass Album


Isaac and David pose with Stormtroopers at the last of MGM’s “Star Wars Weekends.”