Savanna at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge 2007 from Scott Miller on Vimeo.

I finally got Dominica and my first video from our trip to Walt Disney World in 2007 posted up no Vimeo.  I have been meaning to get this done for forever and just have not gotten around to it.  Now that there will be baby videos coming soon it is rather important that I eliminate any potential video processing backlog and get things completed.

This video was shot using our Canon Elura 60 camcorder from the balcony of our hotel room at the Animal Kingdom Lodge where we stayed for a weekend early last year.  If you have a good video player on your computer such as VLC you can download the original 640×480 video in h.264 (m4v) also from Vimeo.  Original h.264 video of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge.  This version should play beautifully on AppleTV as well and is available via the vlog feed for our subscribers.

Dominica, Liesl and Oreo slept in until around ten.  I was in the living room playing some Fable 2 on the XBOX 360 while I had some quiet time to myself.  Today is my relaxing day for the week and I am taking advantage of it.

I spent the bulk of the day playing Fable 2.  What an awesome game.  I am so glad that Dominica decided that we needed to get that as our one game for the XBOX 360 for “Christmas” as a gift to each other.  I am over halfway through the game now playing as the boy and going for “good and pure”.  Dominica is only about an hour or so into the game and is playing as the girl and has decided to go for “evil and corrupt” so that she can get as different of a storyline as possible from mine as she has watched so much of the game as I have played it.

Dominica spent most of the day shopping and surfing the web from the laptop that we have set up in the living room.  Christmas is always a busy shopping time.  We are so thankful that we live in an era when Christmas shopping is an online affair.  There is no way that we could handle going out to the stores looking for things.  We would go crazy.  It would have to be me doing it all as Dominica can’t go out shopping.  We learned that lesson from the grocery store a few days ago, and the grocery store doesn’t have crazy Christmas crowds.

We were both very thankful that today got to be a “do nothing” day for the most part.  Liesl was a little fussy today but not horribly, and today we began switching her over to cloth diapers.  Cloth diapers are cheaper, better for the environment and better for preventing diaper rash and/or contact dermatitis – which I had as a child.  Liesl has a little bit of diaper rash at this point and so Dominica felt that it was the best time to start switching her over before it got any worse.

We did several loads of laundry and two loads of dishes today plus hand cleaning.  We generate so much stuff that needs to be cleaned every day around here I just can’t believe it.  And several loads of garbage too.

This afternoon Oreo started acting strangely.  We first noticed that something was wrong when he went down to the basement all by himself to get away from us.  He wasn’t acting funny beyond that so we didn’t think much of it.  As the day wore on, though, he started spending more time away from is in the basement and started acting more sluggish and sickly.

I took Oreo out for a walk and he didn’t even make it past the front walk before he was sick twice.  Hopefully this is nothing more than a stomach ache.  I brought him back inside and offered him dinner or a bone and he wanted neither.  I went down to the basement (which is when I managed to get the videos uploaded to Vimeo) and spent a few hours with him while he just lay on his pillow feeling sick.

Later in the evening I forced him to go on a little walk just to make sure that “everything was working” since he hadn’t been eating.  Everything was working (you can work out the details there for yourself) and as soon as he was done I scooped him up and ran him back to the house because it is so cold outside and he is so weak.  So at least we believe that there is no blockage and it appears that he just doesn’t feel well like he has a doggy flu.  He went to bed as usual and seemed to be about the same so we will watch him through the night and judge how he is doing in the morning.

We are not aware of him having eaten anything strange in the last twenty four hours.  He was very happy, alert and perky when I took him on his long morning walk around the top of the hill.  He seemed to be in better than usual spirits, in fact.  He was extremely energetic and after his walk demanded his breakfast and then made me play fetch with him for half an hour or more.  It was surprising how healthy he seemed.  I know that he was still feeling okay at two thirty when Dominica and I had our lunch because he cleaned our dishes in the kitchen (we had mac and cheese for lunch.)

The only possibility for him getting into something that he should not have, as I think about it, was on our morning walk he was spending some time sniffing under a boulder (we have a lot of those here) and with his nose burried in some leaves it is possible that he ate something in there of which I was not aware.  I did not think that he did but looking back it is theoretically possible.

We will just have to wait and see tomorrow.  We were all off to bed around midnight.

This video was taken in Newark, New Jersey’s Branch Brook Park part of the Essex County Park system. Branch Brook is the largest park in the city of Newark. Tomorrow begins the city’s big Cherry Blossom Festival and we wanted to get a video of the blossoms before the crowds descend on the park. But when we got to the park we discovered that there are no cherry blossoms at all and there is a huge storm expected tomorrow. So we took Oreo for a walk in the park and took a video anyway. It was a beautiful day and would have been perfect for the festival had there been anything to see.

This video was shot with a handheld Canon Elura 60 and edited with Pinnacle Studio 10.7. The music is Spring from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

I got a chance to shoot this video right down on the corner of Broad Street and Raymond Boulevard at Military Park. I heard the sound of bagpipes coming through the window and so I grabbed the Canon Elura 60 and ran down as fast as I could. I managed to record the bulk of the parade. The sound isn’t so good. It is very difficult to record in high wind with a camcorder.

The parade took place on the Sunday after St. Patrick’s Day and the route headed southward on Broad Street.  Because the streets were roped off I was able to stand in the Broad – Raymond intersection to film the parade.  It was a short parade and I didn’t manage to get it all due to poor camera skills but what I did manage to get appears to have turned out relatively well.

This is my “farewell” video blog post from Geneseo, New York. This was Dominica and my first home that we purchased in July, 2003 and this past weekend we completed the packing process and the house is ready for the movers to take everything away. It is sad selling our very first home and we wanted to have a little video to remember it by. I didn’t have much time to shoot the video so this was taken after the packing was done and we were about to walk out the door, most likely for the last time. Unfortunately because of when I had to shoot the video and the fact that the lights in the house had been packed the basement is almost entirely unlit and is almost impossible to see and the entire house is completely full of boxes so the impression is quite different than how the house was while we were still living in it.

This house was very special to us. It was the first home that either of us ever bought. It was the house that we bought to move to when we got married having bought the house just a few months before the wedding. It was the only house that my mother and my paternal grandmother would ever see of mine. It was the only house that Mr. Humphries would ever live in. It was house where we got Oreo. It was where we spent the first almost four years of our married life together. It was the house that we bought with the intention of building the ultimate theatre room in the basement which we never got a chance to finish. A house can be a very nostalgic thing. I can see why people can be so reluctant to leave a house that they have lived in for a long time. This house was the home that I have lived in more than any other since leaving my parents’ home.

The structure is an end-unit ranch style townhouse right on the end of the village of Geneseo. We start in the driveway where you can see Dominica’s 2002 Mazda Protege 5 waiting to take us back to Newark. The garage is painted in a wine colour that Dominica was very excited about. We never quite finished doing the trim in the garage. We only just put working locks on the house after many years of using defective ones that had come with the house. We should have just left them. There is a lot that we had planned to do but never got around to doing. When we bought the house we were one of only two structures in the complex. We were the fifth unit to be filled and the last of the original buildings. No one new moved in after us for quite some time as an entirely new building had to be built. As the camera swings around you can see the finished development with many new homes almost all occupied. The landscaping and other niceties were never quite finished and I seriously doubt if they ever will be.

When we first moved to Geneseo there was just beginning to be speculation that a Super Walmart might be built somewhere close to us to replace the aging Walmart that was located over in the plaza near Wegmans. At the time the project sounded absurd and highly unlikely. But it wasn’t long after moving in that construction began and for some time now there has been a Super Walmart just behind the house which is just barely visible in a shot looking over the deck. The Tim Hortons was built next to the Walmart and for a while we went there on a regular basis.

In the basement you can just barely make out the baker’s rack located in the “server alcove”. That alcove was a major selling point of the house for us and it served as the location for several servers and related networking and power equipment that ran for almost every moment that we lived in the house. The hum of those servers was a part of our lives.

The theatre is the saddest part of the house. We had had such dreams of making that into an amazing theatre and listening room. We never even got to the point that we put down carpeting. The walls are painted black but were to be carpetted as well. The screen area was painted with a carefully formuated Benjamin Moore paint very carefully to make an excellent movie viewing surface. With the projector mounted near the back wall it was able to fill every inch of that screen area. As the camera turns around you can just make out the mounts where the stereo and theatre equipment had been mounted to the ceiling behind the seating area to make it accessible without interfering with sound or image. The amplifiers had been mounted into the ceiling to get them completely out of the way.

The last room in the basement was my office for the more than the first two years that we were in the house. That room was originally filled with bookshelves and desks. It was also the hub of the old Age of Empires II Friday nights games. But after Andy moved out I moved my office to the second bedroom and the basement mostly sat undisturbed.

I hope that you enjoy this short video of my first home. I didn’t want this important memory to be lost and so I recorded it here. There is no talking in the video – it is just a chance to share in a significant moment of our lives. We are excited about moving on to new opportunities and adventures. The house has been all but empty for a long time. We use it on a regular basis and dad has been there almost every other day. But it doesn’t feel like home anymore.

The subject of this video is the United States’ and Canada’s recent modification of the long standing Daylight Savings Time system. In this poorly shot video I will talk about the ramifications of these changes here in North America, to the global economy in our newly flattened world and to the IT industry. This is a video essay project.

Shot with a Canon Elura 60 digital camcorder and edited with Pinnacle Studio 10.7. Video is 320×240. Camera was handheld.

The weather is amazing but I have to work on this particular Sunday thanks to the new Daylight Savings Time changes. But work ended up being slow, it was more of a “just in case” situation. So this is my drive home. This is actually the lead up to the “My Commute” vlog from just a few days ago. This part has me talking from Warren to the outskirts of Newark and that part has just the drive into Newark.

As always, the Xvid is for most users watching on their PCs, Linux or Mac computertive Zen Vision. The iPod version is for, well, the iPod video or Apple TV devices. The WMV version is for Windows users without Xvid codecs installed or to stream without downloading.

If you don’t have the Xvid codec, download it here.

I don’t suggest this video for everyone.  It is fairly long and mostly silent.  But it you want a feel for where we live and what it is like in the area or want to know more about the wonderful city of Newark it gives you an idea of what that part of down looks like along the Passaic River.

During the ride as you come up Route 21 we are traveling along the Ironbound just off to our right.  We cannot see it because of the raised train that runs along that entire route.

Download “Scott Alan Miller’s Sunday Commute” from OurMedia in 640×480 XVid format.

I uploaded the video to OurMedia in several formats so that you can download whatever format you want or can use. If you can use it, Xvid is definitely the best. It looks and sounds the best and still has the smallest file size followed by MP4 for iPod and then the much larger Windows Media Video file.

Download the Xvid from OurMedia
Download the MP4 for iPod from OurMedia
Download the WMV for Windows from OurMedia
Stream from the OurMedia Hosting Page

The video is only a few minutes long and is in 640×480 Xvid format.  The download is about 155MB.  Thank you to OurMedia for the hosting.

Dominica and I decided to take a Saturday and just drive around the city of Newark showing off the area in which we live. The video starts with a cruise down Raymond Boulevard from University Heights to Military Park. Then we drive up Broad starting from NJPAC. Any tour of the new Newark wouldn’t be complete without riding on the new Light Rail/Trolley from NJPAC Station to Broad Street Station and back. Finally a stroll through Military Park.

This is my first semi-serious video project and I spent most of my time figure out how everything was going to work and go together. This is extremely rough but, I think, enjoyable. 14 minutes. Narrated by Scott Alan Miller.

If you have problems viewing the Xvid file, you can download the codec for free from xvid.org. Xvid is a free, high quality implementation of the Divx format – one of the MPEG4 family of codecs which also includes WMVHD and QuickTime. Xvid is often considered to be the highest quality compression of all of these formats. Xvid is one of the preferred formats of YouTube and is the optimum choice for playback on the Creative Zen Vision M and W portable video players.

The 320×240 Xvid version of the video is perfect for small but high quality downloads and for playback on the Creative Vision M and Creative Vision W portable media players.

The 720×480 Xvid version of the video is the “ultimate edition” closest to the original uncompressed version and is best for playback on a computer monitor or on a television.

I took this video on my commute on the fifth but by the time that I managed to get it posted to YouTube the SGL website had gone down and I was not able to make it available.

Correction: In this video I accidentally referred to 1180 Raymond Blvd. as a gothic structure when it is obviously art deco. Sorry.

Download the Video in Quicktime
Watch the Video Streaming from OurMedia

Runtime: Approximately 3.5 minutes
Specs: Apple QuickTime 640×480 at 30fps

Down the Tour of Broad Street, Newark, New Jersey
Watch the Tour streaming from OurMedia

SDTV – 480i, 480 interlaced lines in 4:3 format.
EDTV – 480p, 480 true lines in 4:3 format.
HDTV – 1080i, 1080 interlaced lines in 16:9 format.

SGL Vlog Returns – Now from Newark, NJ

Scott Alan Miller Commuting on April 4, 2006 in New Jersey

Video of Scott Alan Miller in New Jersey on his first day of work Part Two

Scott Driving to Work in New Jersey Part One

Come along with us as Dominica and I get a walking tour of John and Michelle Nicklin’s new house in Arnold, Maryland. The video quality isn’t all that great but you can get a kind of feel of the house. Unfortunately we were only able to get shots of the first floor and not even all of that but it gives you a good feel of the place.

This is a short video of Dominica and Michelle at dinner at The Melting Pot in Annapolis, Maryland with Frankie playing.

This is the video that you all have been waiting for… well okay at least the people in the video who have never watched anything else that I have made have been waiting for to see how badly it turned out. This is the longest video that I have yet and one of the first ones that I have made any attempt to edit together. It is over five minutes long and the quality is pretty low. We are really hoping to have a real video camera soon but for now we are still limited to the capabilities of my little digital camera.