The new Rino 530s are out. With much better radio range and beautiful color screens, they are far nicer to use than the older models. So what do you do with your old 110 or 120? I decided to give mine to the dog. Tuesday, BB and I both wore rinos during an airscent training problem [...]

I'm writing quite a few Zooey posts since I let the blog slide for so long and need to get some of my favorite puppy movies and pictures up. Here is Cindy playing ball with Zooey when she was . I've been working on getting her excited about smaller balls. She has size one soccer [...]

Today, Zooey and I joined Cindy, Carolyn and Slugger at Adventure Park. We were also joined by lots of kids. In fact, it took me a few minutes to realize that the crowd was isolated the pieces of equipment that the dogs were on. All the kids wanted to be in the same place. Imagine [...]

Today, Zooey and I joined Cindy, Carolyn and Slugger at Adventure Park. We were also joined by lots of kids. In fact, it took me a few minutes to realize that the crowd was isolated the pieces of equipment that the dogs were on. All the kids wanted to be in the same place. Imagine [...]

Last Sunday, Titan and I went to the Malamute Working Dog Clinic sponsored by the Potomac Valley Alaskan Malamute Association. I figure Titan is a fifth generation malamute and nothing like a shepherd, so I m real curious about malamutes! Turns out, he s probably lots like them. But not quite as vocal. Well, you ll hear plenty of that in these clips! If you don t have QuickTime and can t see these clips, then you can at least see the thumbnails above. You can also visit my site at flickr to views the photos and comments. They aren t the best quality, but you get the idea. (Okay, the dumb photographer me accidentally had the camera set to macro- all day.) Denise started out the clinic with some basics. (12MB) Then we watched dogs getting harnessed (1.4 MB) Finally, Hike! (2.2MB) Next two young novices get harnessed and find that it s a bit scary! (2.6 MB) But they get better. (.5 MB) Titan pulls a cart. (.5MB) There is lots of cool howling by excited dogs. (1.7 MB) There is one tiny patch of snow in the shade. Wow! The shortest sled ride ever. (1.1 MB) Finally, Laura harnesses Buck the beagle and it s his turn! She tells me that the last time he came to this event he was eight weeks old and got to be pulled in a cart. He s three now and ready to pull! (9.7 MB) Titan and I had a really good time. I think we both really liked those hairy malamutes!

Though I wanted to attend Vloggercon today, travel was pre-empted by a East Coast Winter storm. I tried to login and view the event, but my satellite modem was not up to the task. So here is my best memory of the day. I hope everyone in NY had fun! (winterstorm.mov 10 MB)

I m conferencing in San Diego this week. IUI 2005 is at the Catamaran on Mission Bay. It s a very pretty location and because the sun finally emerged today, I took a little walk. I took these clips of some guys surfing with parasails. These clips were taken with my cellphone and then edited in iView Media Pro. Here s the movie. Tomorrow I ll try to post a video from last night at the Living Room Cafe Listen to this post.

From October 27 to 31 2004, BB and I attended a 40-hour advanced cadaver training course in Philippi, West Virginia. The class was taught by none other than Andy Rebmann. His co-instructors were Charm Gentry and Kathy Holbert. It was chilly and rainy nearly the entire time. But we had a good time. BB and I shared a room with Laura Totis and her Rottie Aron. We spent the days both in class and in the field running exercises such as mock crime scenes, building searches, buried aged sources, car searches and all sorts of different kinds of problems. I wore a deja view camwear 100 for the entire course. I patched together a movie of several clips to give you a feel of things. What I most lack in this movie are action clips of me working my dog. Or other dogs working, for that matter (we had little opportunity to observe since we were so busy working.) In five days, I only managed to capture one clip of us working. And that s what the review will address. But first, enjoy the film! On the positive side, the cam was very easy to use and had excellent audio and video quality. It s strengths are what dejaview advertises: you can serendipitously capture the past 30-second when you press the capture button. Also, the camera is very small and unobtrusive. I clipped it to the underside of my hat and ran a wire from the camera down my jacket to a box clipped to my belt.And the first person perspective with a hands-free mode of operation is extremely useful this kind of technology is here to stay. The fact that I have a wishlist of future features says a lot about how much I want this product to improve. But first, on to the negatives: The wire between the camera and capture box can cause problems if you are moving quickly or vigorously. You can see in the one clip where BB is dragging me to the lineup that the cable connection was tenuous; When you are immersed in an activity and not just an observer, it is extremely difficult to remember to hit the record button ; 30-seconds was not enough playback for the training activities that I was recording. I needed 2-3 minutes. The type of activity has bearing on how much video needs to be buffered. This should be selectable by the user; The tiny button on the video box gave no feedback about whether I had pressed it hard enough; What you see visually with your own eyes is at a higher level of detail than what the camera captures; the camera seems to be further away; Now for the wishlist: Digital zoom! Using my eyes, I was able to read the sign in the final shot in the clip above. You can t read it from the captured video. Continuous buffer. Okay this is a tall order, but how great it would be to be able to have a history of several hours or more! The ability to capture video now and also still shots; Voice annotations. It would be great to annotate or mark significant events using speech; Wireless connectivity between the camera and capture box; Time stamping and geocoding. The more metadata the better. ; I m sure I will find other uses for this cam, but for dog training it was much less effective than what I had hoped. Back to a good old digital video camera. Or maybe the viosport adventure cam! Listen to this post.

I recently got my new Camwear Model 100 wearable cam from Dejaview Camwear. It s a wee bit disappointing since the recorder is bigger than I imagined and it s hard to imagine wearing a cable from my hat down to my waist. Also, I really want to be able to do continuous recording, zoom, etc. Sometimes you want a bit more than 30 seconds. But I guess more will come with the next version . I ll do a more thorough review in my next post. Warning: skip the following paragraph if technical details lead to seizures or other unpleasant effects. In any case, the video and sound quality is quite good. Mydejaview uses the divio nw901 mpeg-4 codec and records at 30 fps. Here s the ASF file that was produced after I took after I pulled the cam out of it s box late at night at the office. I had a horrible time getting the ASF file that mydejaview produces to something that a QuickTime player could play. I tried to create an AVI from Asftool and several other PC-based video editing and exporting tools and was unsuccessful. Probably, they didn t know about the divo nw901 codec. Windows MovieMaker didn t work because it didn t recognize the audio format and there was no sound. (If anyone knows the answer to these things, I d love to hear about it!) In the end, I had to use a tool called ShowBiz DVD 2 that mydejaview distributed with the cam. I compressed into a DivX AVI file at a 320 x 240 frame size and at 29.97 frames per second. I also compressed audio to PCM 16 bit stereo at a sampling rate of 32 kHz. I had no fine-grained control after this and so decided to re-compress using iMovie on the Mac since I wanted to adjust bitrate and a few other things to make file size even smaller (plus I didn t want to be limited to a WMV file). So I re-compressed to the 3ivX at a data rate of 40 and also compressed to an MPEG-4 audio. So in summary: the original ASF file of 1978 KB was transformed into a 2733 KB avi file. Then this DivX AVI file was re-compressed to an 892 KB 3ivx file using iMovie. Darn that was painful to figure out! After all that, here s my out-of-the-box experience when I opened up my cam after receiving the package at work. I still need a way to insert audio descriptions in my text since the audio cast is not so interesting without the video. I also want to insert textual descriptions inside of the video for both searchability and the hearing impaired. For now, I m going back to casting in a Mac voice since I m travelling and don t have access to the higher quality Rhetorical voice. Listen to this post.

There has been a lot of discussion about encodings and file quality and size on the videoblogging list. I ve been playing around with it this evening with a short clip I created using several photos of my house (back when I first moved in). Here is the smallest and best I could make of this 15-second clip. It is 680K. I used the 3ivx codec at best , frame rate of 15 and data rate of 30 KBytes/sec. I also used an MPEG-4 audio at 44.1kHz, sample size 16 and 2 channels. Not bad! Here it is. If you can t see this video, then download software here. The size is consistent with my goal of having video on this site that is small enough for loading when the page first comes up in the browser. I love having video that is near instantaneously available. The dog in the movie is not mine. But a dog always livens up the landscape! Listen to this post.