Today is a big day for cool links that have been sitting in my email and that I have finally gotten around to checking out plus one that I managed to discover all by myself. So we will start with that one.
Mighty McPilgrim: Plymouth, MA. Discovering America’s Hometown For this film the team over at Might McPilgrim actually took the time to film with real 16mm film and hand splice it together. That is no easy project. You have to give them credit – the final project turned out great. (Mighty McPilgrim is most famous for their short piece: BrokeMac Mountain.)
The Five Stages of a Giraffe in Quicksand was sent to me by a coworker and is one of the funniest clay animations I have seen in a long time.
Jerome Murat doing a live stage performance in France.
In the Old New Thing there was a link to middle schoolers playing classic video games. It really shows how much things have changed since we were all little.
I also discovered through the ZenCast tool from Creative that National Geographic is making some short videos available for free from their website. I didn’t find any way to download these shows directly so you will need to use a podcatching tool to get them easily or else you will have to manually parse the XML feed information to figure out the individual links.
Danielle Ralston managed to track down some photographs of the missionary center in Papua New Guinea where they will be stationed in the middle of next year. It doesn’t show much but it is interesting to see pictures of and in buildings and places where they will be working.
I woke up early this morning just after four and didn’t feel very well (maybe I have caught whatever Bob Crissman had the other day but in a much more mild form.) I ended up being up for almost two hours. I managed to use the time to get the Video Tour of Newark posted on the site which took quite a while with the two huge uploads that I had to do to get the video onto OurMedia. I also converted a bunch of videos that I had downloaded so that I could put them onto the Creative Zen Vision M so that I could check them out once I was able to get back to bed.
I went back to bed just before Dominica got up to go to work and slept for about an hour. I woke up several times over the course of the hour and was pretty delirious. I managed to drag myself out of bed at half past eight and was feeling a little better at that point.
I didn’t go into the office until almost eleven. Things have been really slow and there is nothing to do there anyway. I have just been reading tons of magazines and working on SGL and the Flickr site.
Tomorrow I am working from home for most of the day. In the morning it will be just me and Oreo hanging out. Then I have to go in nearly to the office for a lunch meeting at a nearby restaurant. Then I am heading down to Edison to meet Dominica on her afternoon off so that we can do some final Christmas shopping and attempt to get an estimate on the damage to the BMW. That has been lingering forever now.
I found out from Mary yesterday that she has a new job down in Dansville now. Her mother lives in Dansville so she is crashing there during the week. It is awesome that she has a new job but it is crappy that she just finished moving into a new apartment in Warsaw that is too far away from her new job for her to be able to use the new apartment except on weekends.
I tried contacting NJIT about their totally online MSIS program but was not able to get any information today. Every time that I attempt to contact them there is no one there. Hopefully someone will get back to me quickly.
Dominica and I decided that tonight we were going to go out exploring to find some Indian food in our area. Dominica did some research and discovered the Udipi Cafe not too far away from Newark at the end of US 280. That is a bit far but not ridiculously far so our plan is to head out there as soon as Dominica gets home from work. I will be very hungry by then. I have actually made it for an entire week without having more than a single meal on any given day (although I did some after mean grazing at the Nicklin Christmas Party it wasn’t very much.)
We got home and took Oreo up to the apartment and then set off to find the restaurant. Traffic was bad as it was still rush hour but it wasn’t too bad because it was the expressway almost the entire way. Luckily we are getting to know our way around Newark pretty well so getting to the expressway was easy even when the most direct route was so congested that we had to find another entrance to it.
We finally found the place and were very happy with our dinner. They actually have a “dosa bar” just like an omelet bar on their buffet and everything is vegetarian. The food was very good but there was a lot of stuff that we had never had before so it was a big learning curve for us. People had to help us figure out how to eat some of the stuff but everything was very delicious. We will definitely be going back there again. Dinner was also really cheap. We got a lot of food for not very much money. One of the big advantages of all vegetarian restaurants – all of the costs are lower. If you have one meat item, especially in a buffet situation, the cost skyrockets.
We came home and decided to pretty much just call it a night. I moved some videos over to the Vision M so that I could watch them from bed. I finished converting Dead and Breakfast and moved that over too.
The rails for the servers going to Scranton arrived tonight. I unpacked them and checked them out. That means that I am in good shape for a trip to Scranton this weekend – hopefully on Saturday morning but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. We now have enough rails to move all of our HP DL360 G1 servers to Scranton. I will get as many of those as possible moved right away.