Gear: Sony DCR-DVD810 Camcorder

I’ve been trying to cut my teeth on producing videos and at the end of December 2008 I purchased a Sony DCR-DVD810 from Wal-Mart  for less than $400. Last week, before the return period was up, I was seriously thinking about returning it just so I could try out a different camcorder, maybe a Canon in the same price range. But, I decided, meh, for the price this camcorder is fine and there probably isn’t much difference between the competitors products. Big mistake.

Yesterday I discovered there is no way to plug an external, non-Sony mic into one of these things. From reading around a bit on the net it seems that all the major camcorder vendors are stripping the audio capabilities from their cheap cameras — if you consider $400 to be cheap — in an effort to push buyers into he higher end market.  This seems to be true for the entry-level hi-def cameras as well. There are little to no options for using an external corded or wireless mic from a 3rd party.

I thought there was an accessory attachment for the Sony Accessory Interface, or SAI, that allowed for external microphones to be jacked into the camcorder but come to find out the Sony VMC-K100, a great little device that attaches to the SAI and provides a standard mic-in jack, is a discontinued product.  The general consensus is that the product was discontinued because Sony couldn’t sell their crappy mics when there was a mic-in adapter available for $30.

I’ll tell you what, I’d pay $75 for a VMC-K100 right now. I give the DCR-DVD810 and any other camcorder that does not provide a mic-in jack a minus 10 stars. And I hold the corporations who engage in slimy marketing practices such as this in the utmost contempt. I know, that’s pretty much all of them, right?

For what I am trying to do right now, I could live with this camera, excpet for the audio. But if you have any inkling to try your hand at producing decent quality amateur videos, which requires the ability to record decent audio in a variety of differnt situations, DO NOT buy the Sony DVD 810 Camcorder. I can’t make it any plainer than that.  If you need a field camera that you can use on the spur of the moment without fear that an extremely expensive piece of gear may be destroyed, this camera suffices and is probably no better or worse at producing video than comparable products on the market.

Staying fit improves outdoor enjoyment

I didn’t have a very productive day over in TheGarage yesterday and here’s why: I re instituted my treadmill workout about three weeks ago and since then I have burned up yet another treadmill and this time instead of purchasing another cheap-ass but very expensive treadmill from Academy, I signed up for a month at the Angleton Rec Center. Workouts are going well.

Even though I’ve had an unfortunate weight loss gain due to an illness back in ‘06 and have been sitting on my ass up until October of last year, my fitness level has recuperated quite nicely and in less than three weeks on the treadmill I am almost back up to my old routine, which is quite vigorous. I am not at the same performance level, but aerobic and endurance is good.

This is all good but the problem and the reason I didn’t get much done yesterday is that my body is killing me. And unlike my fitness level, my body still looks like shit and now it feels like crap too. I am walking around here like an old man. And it takes a little longer these days for the body to recuperate after a hard workout and the weight isn’t melting away like butter either.

Today will be the fifth consecutive day and seventh consecutive weekday at the rec center.  I am working up to six days a week while keeping ibuprofen intake to a minimum.

I’ve used this treadmill workout to lose almost a hundred pounds back in 2004-05 without having to track a complicated diet. If you are interested, here is the basic workout.

1. Warmup – However much walking and stretching it takes to get you walking at your baseline* for the day. A lot of basic upper body stretching and calisthenics can be done while walking but for step 2 you need to have your legs completely ready for some serious work and some floor stretching is recommended. About 10 to 15 minutes
2. Walk a 5K – Thats 3.1 miles. Walk it as fast as you can with the purpose of improving your baseline. The upside to this is that after a few weeks at it, whenever you are at an event that features a 5K run/walk you can sign up and bust out a 5K no problem. My fastest time so far is 42 minutes. Back at my peak in 2005 I was down to a 38 minute 5K. Fast enough to place in the top 10 or so at a lot of walks.
3. Recovery – slow down to the fastest pace that you can walk and still allow cardiovascular recovery. You will notice over time that the higher this speed is, the higher your baseline is in the 5K. About 5 minutes
4. Incline -  Make it hurt, recover. Make it hurt, recover. About 15 minutes of this. Strive for less recovery and more hurt.
5. Warm down – Reduce speed in increments to a crawl allowing your body to return to a normal state while walking slowly.

That’s it.  Takes about an hour and 10 minutes. I usually carry five pound dumb bells the whole time but you have to work up to that. I’ll probably start that regimen next week. Good balance and control are essential for dumbbell work on a treadmill.

If you don’t feel like you are floating on air when you get finished with my treadmill workout, you didn’t work hard enough.

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*Baseline – This is the term I use to indicate the minimum pace I want to walk and is usually equal to my best previous time. If I am trying to beat 42 minutes, my baseline is 4.4 mph. If I can average over that I improve my time.

A new place for me to write

I didn’t want to turn this blog, the official blog of Gulf Coast Texas Outdoor Magazine, into a personal blog and I didn’t really have anywhere else to write about stuff that doesn’t fit the outdoor theme here so I’ve revived the tech blog, known as TheGarage tech blog.

If you follow me on twitter then you already know about this. If you’ve followed me over the years you know TheGarage is where, as my family grew, all my tech gear wound up, literally out in the garage at my house. I have  a couple of corners walled off with conditioned air and this is where I spend most of my time. You would be surprised what you find in people’s garages.

The tech blog is living at my personal domain, doncallaway.org, and will evolve over the next couple of weeks into a site promoting my professional services. I’ll let you all know what those are when I figure it out. I have plenty of work already but I need to do some every now and then that actually pays some money.

Whenever I am doing a lot of computer work there will be more posts in TheGarage and when I am out taking pictures, fishing, hiking, kayaking, or whatever, I’ll post here.

Follow me on Twitter

If you are interested in getting updates on all my entries for all my blogs follow me on twitter. I’ll be adding the twitter plugin to the magazine, photo gallery, and the old tech blog as soon as I get it moved so a tweet will be  generated automatically for each now post. That seems a lot easier than keeping track of a bunch of syndication feeds, in my opinion.

twitter.com/donicc

VFXY Duality Theme

I entered this image (young and fertile/old and barren) for the VFXY weekly theme though on retrospect maybe this one (nature/industry) would have been better. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on making the decision of which image to submit but after careful consideration of the Duality theme and other complex technical considerations the decision ultimately came down to that it’s hard to resist clicking on a nice breast. I hate to be that way, but there ya go. Hate the game; don’t hate the playa,

I did at least consider the theme of “duality” and tried to find a suitable image to make the viewer consider for a moment how the image conveys the theme. To me I’m thinking duality, opposite facets of some thing, like two sides of coin, like yin and yang, good and evil, happy and sad, fertile and barren, sweet and sour, analog and digital, wet and dry, light and dark, young and old, pretty and ugly… you get the picture, right?

Browsing through the 233 submissions for the duality theme it is obvious that almost everyone thinks duality simply means two things. Only a handful of the images challenge the viewer to consider the theme of duality. Now I’m not saying the off-theme images are bad, just that they are off theme.

The weekly theme thing should be fun. It doesn’t take a lot of time becasue I have about 10,000 images. All I have to do is start scrolling through the thumbs using Picasa with the theme in mind and drop the first 3 or 4 matches into Paint Shop and see which one I can make into the best — or most appealing — image. I might need to spend a little more time on the next one as there are a lot of really good photographers submitting, even though they may not quite understand the theme of duality.

Photo Gallery Adds

A lot of new photos went into the gallery over the last week. Check it out.

Moving from PixelPost to WordPress

Since my last complaint about the lack of a PixelPost to WordPress migration tool that could handle the image attachments along with the database, I took a harder look around and found an old utility from May of 2006 at Shifting Pixel. A commenter there reports as late as November of 2008 that she tried it and that it worked great with  PixelPost 1.7 and WordPress 2.6.3.

I’m not that crazy about copying all the images in the gallery but I’ll give it a try and report back.  Otherwise I will forever have to manage two blog platforms when I could just manage one.

Daily grind

Despite the great weather we have been having for the past several weeks, I spent the last two entire days working at the computer with not much to show. Talk about making Jack a dull boy. I could spend the equivalent of a full time job plus a lot of overtime photographing, filming, editing and publishing what I produce in the field yet the list of administrative things to do is never ending and must be tended to… eventually.

Unless dealing with a crisis of some sort, deciding where to allocate my time every day can be overwhelming and lack of a clear path along with regular doses of doubt and uncertainty, leads to severe procrastination and bouts of fear. Some people call these panic attacks. I just call it not being able to figure out what to do next. When I get this way, look for me out in the woods somewhere.

Sometimes the next thing to do is crystal clear and sometimes figuring out the next step to take is daunting, especially if it involves spending money. I wish I was to the point in my little publishing enterprise that I could afford to pay somebody as I am a lot better at figuring out what someone else needs to be doing than I am at figuring out what I need be doing.

Hmm, I wonder what I should do today…

GPS: A toy or serious business?

As I mentioned before, I’ve been seeing a lot of people out in the refuges doing this geocaching thing. Where you used to see nobody, now you see suburbanites wearing their kid’s backpacks out trekking through the forest and marshlands. Evidently a lot of people are doing it. The Wife has even been talking about doing it!

To date I have not been a big GPS fan because I pretty much always know where I’m at to within a few inches of accuracy and I don’t know if I’ll be interested in doing a lot of geocaching the way geocaching.com does it; however I am starting to get an inkling of interest. Check out TrimbleOutdoors.

On the other hand, given my remote wanderings, I could probably place some pretty damn difficult cachets.

I searched geocaching.com for my zip and there 462 items cached within 25 miles. Most of them it seems are out at Hudson Woods.

That’s hyperbole of course, but damn. Maybe this is why I don’t see as much wildlife out there as I used to. Looks like maybe 5 caches are off trail. Sissies.

PixelPost to WordPress

I started the Gulf Coast Texas Outdoor Magazine Photo Gallery using PixelPost. Looking back it wasn’t such a great decision from at least one standpoint: It’s not WordPress. I have five WordPress blogs and a PixelPost Blog. Talk about a sore thumb.

I look around the Internet at a lot of stuff. Even on a slow day. I looked at a lot of photoblogs before deciding on the PixelPost platform. A lot. And for whatever reason I decided there were no gallery themes for Wordpress that could do what PixelPost could do with it’s basic theme.

Since starting the GCT magazine gallery I’ve also looked at a lot of photoblogs and I’ve seen a couple of WordPress photoblogs with the gallery style theme that I would prefer to use just so I would have a common WordPress platform throughout my enterprise. So far I have not seen a utility to move a PixelPost blog to WordPress. If anyone knows of one that can handle the image files as well as the database, I’d appreciate to know it.

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