Happy New Year. I hope you all enjoyed your holidays.
I’ll get back to blogging next week, which is also when I’ll return to the programming gig. We returned from our annual trek up north a few days ago, but I gave myself the extra week off so I can focus on creating the 2013 family DVD. Putting one of those together is a major undertaking, but worth the effort. I’ve talked to other parents who’ve shot plenty of video of their kids, but never done anything with the footage. I can’t imagine having 10 years of unedited video sitting around on digital tapes or drives. That’s almost pointless.
So I made the decision after the girls were born to never let a year go by without reviewing all the video footage and photos and editing them into episodes that capture something about their childhood: first day of school, summer fun, Christmas with the relatives, life on the farm, etc. Quite a few of the episodes end up as music videos, like this example from years ago:
Hard to believe that’s the same girl who now gets herself invited to speech and math competitions.
The girls love going back in time and watching their childhood unfold. So do I. If the house were on fire and I could only grab an armful of valuables on the way out, it would be the family DVD collection — or more likely the hard drives where I’ve stored the footage, Premiere projects, and master DVD images.
Anyway, that’s where most of my time is going this week.
I’ll also return to the gym next week, where I expect to see hordes of grim-faced people hitting the treadmills in yet another failed attempt to start a new year by losing weight. By around April, most of the newbies will give up and the gym population will return to normal. That seems to be the annual pattern.
I’m pretty sure I gained a few pounds over the holidays myself (yes, I indulge in holiday treats), but unlike, say, 10 years ago, there’s no sense of failure or panic. I’m not starting the year with a mistaken notion that I need to starve and torture myself to undo the damage. It’s a simple matter of returning to my normal diet and workout routine. Give that a few weeks, and I’ll be back where I was in November.
Enjoy the football games if you’re a football fan, make your resolutions reasonable if you make resolutions at all, and I’ll see you next week.
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What a cute video – that did make me laugh. How quickly they grow up, enjoy every day (as I’m sure you do!!)
What a cute video – that did make me laugh. How quickly they grow up, enjoy every day (as I’m sure you do!!)
“If the house were on fire and I could only grab an armful of valuables on the way out, it would be the family DVD collection — or more likely the hard drives where I’ve stored the footage, Premiere projects, and master DVD images.”
Georgene decided to get a premium DropBox account. She now has well over 100 GB of stuff in the “cloud,” mostly family photos. I just ran out of room on my main drive while editing a video, so I may need to do the same.
You might consider that for your own backup needs; it’s fairly cheap. So far, I have not come up with a better solution to long-term backup storage. DVD’s just aren’t big enough anymore.
Hi-def video is huge — we’re talking hundreds of gigs for each year’s collection. So far, my offsite solution is to occasionally copy everything to a 3TB drive and send it to my mom to put in her basement.
The hockey game was pretty good. Watched it with a mushroom and cheese omelette.
Didn’t need the guy from the Weather Channel roaming the sidelines to tell me how cold and snowy it was.
“If the house were on fire and I could only grab an armful of valuables on the way out, it would be the family DVD collection — or more likely the hard drives where I’ve stored the footage, Premiere projects, and master DVD images.”
Georgene decided to get a premium DropBox account. She now has well over 100 GB of stuff in the “cloud,” mostly family photos. I just ran out of room on my main drive while editing a video, so I may need to do the same.
You might consider that for your own backup needs; it’s fairly cheap. So far, I have not come up with a better solution to long-term backup storage. DVD’s just aren’t big enough anymore.
Hi-def video is huge — we’re talking hundreds of gigs for each year’s collection. So far, my offsite solution is to occasionally copy everything to a 3TB drive and send it to my mom to put in her basement.
I do something similar this time of year–get my house organized and get rid of stuff I don’t use. It feels great when it’s done!
I did that too. Turns out I don’t need things like power adapters for external drives I tossed two years ago, clothes I haven’t worn in two years, etc.
The hockey game was pretty good. Watched it with a mushroom and cheese omelette.
Didn’t need the guy from the Weather Channel roaming the sidelines to tell me how cold and snowy it was.
I also indulged over the holidays, and I also have no sense of guilt about it. It’s amazing the difference when you eat bad over the holidays, but you know exactly WHY it’s bad and what you need to do to rectify it. By the end of the holidays, my stomach was screaming, “what in the hell are you doing to me?” but I assured it that it would be getting steak, bacon, eggs, veggies, butter, etc. very soon.
Happy New Year fellow Fatheads! 🙂
Knowing how easily I can drop the few pounds I’ll pick up over the holidays also makes the indulging more enjoyable — no nagging worries about how indulging now means starving later to lose the weight.
I do something similar this time of year–get my house organized and get rid of stuff I don’t use. It feels great when it’s done!
I did that too. Turns out I don’t need things like power adapters for external drives I tossed two years ago, clothes I haven’t worn in two years, etc.
I also indulged over the holidays, and I also have no sense of guilt about it. It’s amazing the difference when you eat bad over the holidays, but you know exactly WHY it’s bad and what you need to do to rectify it. By the end of the holidays, my stomach was screaming, “what in the hell are you doing to me?” but I assured it that it would be getting steak, bacon, eggs, veggies, butter, etc. very soon.
Happy New Year fellow Fatheads! 🙂
Knowing how easily I can drop the few pounds I’ll pick up over the holidays also makes the indulging more enjoyable — no nagging worries about how indulging now means starving later to lose the weight.
I indulged over the holidays as well. It’s amazing how much better the concept of “moderation” and “self control” works when you’re not starving all the time! I got to have reasonable amounts of traditional holiday treats, remain low carb the rest of the time, and, for the first time ever, LOST weight over the holidays. Okay, at a slower pace than I might have been able to if I hadn’t had all those “cheats”, but I would have been happy just staying at the same weight I was mid-October. It is truly liberating to know you can have your cake and eat it too, so long as you watch how much and eat steak and heavy cream the rest of the time 😉
I thought it would take a few weeks of my normal diet to return to where I was in November, but I’m pretty close already, judging by how my clothes fit.
That’s a major advantage I noticed early on: when I “cheat” on my low carb diet, I might gain a pound or two or three overnight, but it’s mostly (all?) water, so it comes off as fast as it went on, assuming I go straight back to low carb. On low fat diets, “cheating” meant messing up weeks, if not months, of progress and taking at least a few weeks (often much longer) to get back down to where I was when I cheated. It was extremely demoralizing, and made me “give up” on more than one occasion. Now I know a cheat is a minor setback, and within a few days, I’ll be right back to where I was, or lower. It’s awesome!
Cheating for me is also guiltless now for the same reason: I know I’ll drop whatever weight I picked up quickly just by resuming my normal diet.
I indulged over the holidays as well. It’s amazing how much better the concept of “moderation” and “self control” works when you’re not starving all the time! I got to have reasonable amounts of traditional holiday treats, remain low carb the rest of the time, and, for the first time ever, LOST weight over the holidays. Okay, at a slower pace than I might have been able to if I hadn’t had all those “cheats”, but I would have been happy just staying at the same weight I was mid-October. It is truly liberating to know you can have your cake and eat it too, so long as you watch how much and eat steak and heavy cream the rest of the time 😉
I thought it would take a few weeks of my normal diet to return to where I was in November, but I’m pretty close already, judging by how my clothes fit.
That’s a major advantage I noticed early on: when I “cheat” on my low carb diet, I might gain a pound or two or three overnight, but it’s mostly (all?) water, so it comes off as fast as it went on, assuming I go straight back to low carb. On low fat diets, “cheating” meant messing up weeks, if not months, of progress and taking at least a few weeks (often much longer) to get back down to where I was when I cheated. It was extremely demoralizing, and made me “give up” on more than one occasion. Now I know a cheat is a minor setback, and within a few days, I’ll be right back to where I was, or lower. It’s awesome!
Cheating for me is also guiltless now for the same reason: I know I’ll drop whatever weight I picked up quickly just by resuming my normal diet.
Hey Tom, hopefully this isn’t veering too far off topic but what software do you use to make the DVD? How expensive is it and how hard is it to learn? I have no experience with video editing. Do you know if iMovie on the Mac is any good? Thanks for the insight, seems like a worthwhile project.
I use the Adobe production suite, which I consider vastly superior to Apple’s Final Cut suite. It’s also far easier to learn and use. I had to switch to Final Cut when making Fat Head to be compatible with the post-production houses. Never liked it, never will. I switched back to Adobe’s programs as soon as I was done with Fat Head stuff.
The Adobe products I use when putting together these projects are Premiere for video editing, Photoshop for photos, Audition for audio editing, and Encore for authoring DVDs.
When learning new software, I like the tutorials on VTC.com.
Hey Tom, hopefully this isn’t veering too far off topic but what software do you use to make the DVD? How expensive is it and how hard is it to learn? I have no experience with video editing. Do you know if iMovie on the Mac is any good? Thanks for the insight, seems like a worthwhile project.
I use the Adobe production suite, which I consider vastly superior to Apple’s Final Cut suite. It’s also far easier to learn and use. I had to switch to Final Cut when making Fat Head to be compatible with the post-production houses. Never liked it, never will. I switched back to Adobe’s programs as soon as I was done with Fat Head stuff.
The Adobe products I use when putting together these projects are Premiere for video editing, Photoshop for photos, Audition for audio editing, and Encore for authoring DVDs.
When learning new software, I like the tutorials on VTC.com.