Tag: movie

Mexican dancing girl hides menacing stranger

Jack W and Nita Hagemeyer abt 1938My archeological dig through family photos continues. Framed pictures offer hope of more photos underneath, maybe younger versions of the old guy on top. In this case the top pic was yet another copy of a particular shot of my dad and his sister as little kids, squinting into the sun.  Don’t they look like the Little Rascals?

Flipping the frame over, I pulled out the rusty nails holding a cardboard backing with this stamped on it:

Mexican picture and mat - Hasty(4)-001

Radio Picture Frame Co.?  Odd.

Under the kids’ photo was the advertised Hand Colored Mexican Picture, although it looks more Spanish to me.Mexican picture and mat - Hasty(1)-001 Mildly interesting but not nearly as exciting as the movie poster that had been cut up to use as backing board.  The fine print says, “Copyright 1936, RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.”  Who was this ruggedly handsome man?  Does he look threatening because someone called him yellow?

RKO Radio Pictures - Yellow

You Know You’re a Geek When…

image

You’re in the hospital and your first choice of movie of the day is Lord of the Rings.
Playing on the flat screen in the room connected to your laptop.
And you’re blogging about it.
Of course, it helps that I have a geek wife who thought to bring the movie and cable out.

Here’s the full thread of hospital updates:

Views From the Hospital
More Views From the Hospital
You Know You’re a Geek When…
The Strangeness of Being Half-connected to the Internet
Latest Hospital Update
Drug Users Pay For This?

Interesting things – Hoard much?

I had a day off recently so Susan and I went to see Harry Potter. After parking in the parking garage *gasp* I noticed that the car next to ours looked odd. I then saw that it was overflowing with crap.

The front seat was just as full.

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Why I buy so few music tracks and movies

The short version is that the media companies aren’t serving my needs in the simplest fashion. I won’t buy DRM’d product. I won’t buy from companies that make me jump through hoops. I won’t buy from companies that treat me like a criminal when I’m trying to give them my money.

The much longer reason is given by Clay Shirky.

Go read it.


Technorati : drm, economy, fail, movie, music
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Watch Jupiter Rotate

This is an excellent movie of Jupiter going through a full rotation as the New Horizons spacecraft flew by it in 2007.


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E.T. Cluster

IMG_6735_gimped.jpg

Here’s a picture of one of those clusters that are fun to find and relatively easy to photograph. The E.T. cluster. Also known as the Owl cluster it apparently gained its more modern name from the famous movie came out as it looks a bit like a little man with big eyes.


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Really cool movie of Jupiter

This is from NASA via Tom’s Astronomy Blog

Look carefully and you’ll see moons and moon shadows zip by along the meridian with the Great Red Spot roiling just below center. Follow the link for more info.

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Jupiter Aug 19, 2009

This is my first real attempt to stack movie frames to create a higher detail shot of anything. I think it turned out pretty good considering that the seeing wasn’t very good last night and this was my first real try at stacking.

JupiterFinal081909.jpg

I used a Canon sd700 in movie mode at 15fps to capture 10 seconds of video which was passed through virtualdub to create an uncompressed avi that was then run through several iterations of registax until I got the results above.

One frame from the video looks like this:

JupiterFinaloriginal.jpg

I still have a long way to go with the tools but not too shabby. Wish I’d tried this the night before when Io was transiting and the Great Tan Spot (it’s not red anymore) was visible. Oh well, next time.


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Why I don’t pay attention to reviews

There are several movies that people around the office are looking forward to this summer.

One of them is Iron Man.

Yeah, not so much. It could be good. It’s also just as likely that the best parts of the movie are in the trailer.

Time will tell and I’ll wait to hear from people I know personally.

Here we have one reviewer that all but says the movie sucks.

And here we have another one that just gushes gooey goodness about it.

Yeah, I’ll wait.

Browncoats Rise Again

There’s a group raising money to fund a new season of FireFly. If you haven’t seen the series, go see it. If you haven’t seen Serenity, the movie, go see it. Then pony up a few dollars.

http://www.browncoatsriseagain.com/

Update Jan 18, 2006: Or maybe not. Appears that the people involved were convinced that money from fans would never get Serenity off the ground and donations have been halted for the time being. Keep an eye on the site for future news though.

Update Jan 29, 2006: Go to the browncoats site and follow the recommendations for getting another series off the ground and then go to http://www.fireflyseason2.com and fill out the survey to help some more.