NXiL MEDiA

The Walkingstick Monopod

Adam White — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:21:48 +0000

So, if you have ever wanted to take some scenic pictures of out door scenes, but from a high angle, you probably thought like I did, get a ladder. But that isn’t convienient for what I’m wanting to do. You see, in a few weeks, I’m going to be participating in what I like to call an Urban Walkabout. It’s an event I’ve been planning for the last couple weeks that involves walking around town photographing some scenic locations in Edmond. I already did a test run… or walk, because I physically can’t run and learned a few things. One of the things I learned, is that I didn’t want to take pictures from 6 feet off the ground all the time. For photographing buildings, especially large buildings, it is nice to get up a little higher to shoot the photo. So I came up with the solution. A walking stick monopod. A monopod is like a tripod with one leg. You can buy them at photo stores, but since I am usually walking to these locations, I thought I would have some fun with walking sticks. Deep down, I’ve always enjoyed walking sticks. Making them, walking with them… well I guess that’s all the ways I liked them.

My First Attempt

The little walking stick

Camera mount

This is me overdoing it

The moses staff. Much taller.

Actual tripod head with swivel.

I took this off a $15 portable tripod

The Outcome

So this was a quick test I did of the high walking stick photography early morning in front of my house. Not much to look at, but you get the idea.

The front of my house

Looking out at the neighborhood

The walmart pricing scam

Adam White — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:35:44 +0000

Let me start by saying that I love walmart. I’m not one of those anti-walmart freaks. I have 6 kids and without walmart we couldn’t afford to feed our family healthy food. I make two trips to the grocery store a week and spend on average $150 per visit. I have learned to be a thrifty shopper and lately I have noticed a trend in walmarts pricing that is on the edge of dirty marketing and a scam. I figure the best thing to do is educate everyone I know about the issue and perhaps with enough attention walmart will find a better way to make a profit.

I’ve known about the point of purchase trick that only marketing giants like walmart can pull off. They sell the same products at the register that are the same price as the item in the back of the store, but if you look closely it contains as little as half of the product that is in the back of the store. I’m not as annoied by this as I can choose to take my lazy butt to the back of the store and save some money or just pay the same for a little less product. Although it is a little tricky, I still find it excusable compared to my latest realization.

It started when I went to pick up a stick of deoderant. We buy as much as we can in bulk, even if it doesn’t save us money, I know we’ll use it and it saves me from making extra trips to the store down the road. They sell degree deoderant in singles and also in two packs as they have for years. Reaching for the two pack it hit me that the singles were something like $1.25 and yet the twin pack is marked at $2.75. For those who suffer from an inability to do math, this might seem like a good deal, but for the rest of the world 3rd grade and up you realize you are paying $.25 more for buying in bulk. This is a little backwards from the way you would assume that product bulking would work, but that assumtion costs you at the register. Tonight I was picking up some sanitiser wipes which we always buy in two or three packs and quickly realized it was also more to buy the pack then to just grab the same ammount in singles. I read all the labels to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

The two reasons I think this is wrong and not a good move by walmart.

They are taking advantage of the trust they have worked hard to build over their always low pricing. If you have built loyalty and trust with your clients, then why not use that to encourage them to consume specific products that have more profit built into them. Allow me to make choices in my purchases, but not take advantage of the trusted assumtion that builking producst should be cheaper or at least the same price.
They are specifically taking advantage of families. I have no problem with businesses trying to squeeze every last drop from gullible young people with loads of disposable income, but I have never seen a single guy walking out of the store with a bulk package of anti-bacterial wipes.

Now, I may be mistaken. This might not be Walmarts fault. I know there is a lot of price negotiation between the products and Walmart. It may just be that Walmart has been able to negotiate a lower price on the singles and it’s the product brands themselves that are keeping the bulk packages priced higher. But in the end, it’s just weird. So just a note, when in Walmart, always check the price on bulked items and generally, it’s cheaper to just buy as many singles as you need. Plus this usually cuts down on extra packaging waste, so you can give a tree hugger a high five and still save some cash.

The Edmond Public Library

Adam White — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:12:22 +0000

So I learned the other day that I was paying $96 a year for the public library. I’m not outraged by this unavoidable tax, but I am an idiot for not making full use of the public library. The place is really great. We have been making a habit of going once a week for the past couple months. I have been checking out books like crazy. I don’t read them all, but a paruse them for tid-bits of knowledge. I did come across one book that I havn’t been able to put down, but at the same time, unable to finish. “The American Presidents”. And Tony really enjoys the Diary of the Wimpy Kid series of books. He reads through them in a few days. Maybe out of the sense of urgency that he knows it will go back to the library.

On a side note. I would love to find a plugin for WordPress that would allow me to quickly upload a webcam pic while posting a blog post. I know I can take a picture and save it and then upload it. But it would be nice to be able to take the picture from the upload screen. I’m fix’n to check out some plugins and find a solution. Although it’s all for nothing, because this webcam stinks.

Everythings on hold until late April

Adam White — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:34:36 +0000

If you hadn’t noticed, I haven’t been doing a lot with my pet projects lately. I am slowly converting some of my sites, including this one, over to a new theme system. But besides that, I have been putting everything on hold while my wife is finishing up her National Board certification. Not only has she taken my good laptop hostage to work on her papers, but she also requires me to proof read everything she produces. And let’s just say, I’m not a fan of technical writing for education bureaucrats. But I promised to help her through it, so for the next two months, I will probably not get much done. Although, I have been spending a lot of time in my sketch books lately. I have some fun ideas for this site, and I am still looking for a new direction on EdmondOklahoma.us. Some other things coming down the pike for this summer is a meet and greet workshop for the Edmond Technology Cooperative, but still brainstorming and working out the details. If you have any thoughts or your just interested in attending then send me a note or make a comment below.

Showing Div Attributes for Debugging

Adam White — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:06:34 +0000

I was just playing with a site and couldn’t debug why it was looking weird in IE. So I pondered that it would be helpful to know where and how the elements are showing up. I usually add this line of CSS to help me identify what is breaking or different in a layout.
div:hover {border:1px solid red;}
Using that line, I can hover over elements and see how the site lays out. This wasn’t helping me to much. So I then wrote this up.
div:before { content: " [" attr(id)"] (" attr(class) ")"; position:absolute; border:1px solid gray; background:silver; color: black; padding:.5em; font-size:smaller; z-index:99; margin:0em; } div div:before { margin:2em; } div div div:before { margin:5em; }
The idea was, to show the div elements ID’s and Classes. Combing the two would be pretty helpful, with the exception that I am using IE7 and the :before pseudo class doesn’t work in IE7. I’m hoping that it works in IE8 and will help for future debugging on IE. For Firefox, there are plenty of plugins to help with this kind of issue, but not on IE that I am aware of.

Finding the hidding spot

Adam White — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:30:02 +0000

Rigo’s glasses broke.
Dad - “where is the broken piece, Rigo?”
Rigo – “I don’t know, I guess I’ll have to get a new pair of glasses.”
Dad - “without the piece, we won’t be able to get new ones, we’ll have to buy used ones at a garage sale.”
Rigo walked off and came back in less than 5 minutes. “I found them.” he said suspiciously. He always seems to loose things when he thinks it’s to his advantage and then find them quickly when his plans fall apart. Next time I need to see where his hiding place is.

Thumbnails in WP 2.9

Adam White — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:49:51 +0000

I just updated to 2.9 and knowing what was ahead, I upgraded my blog theme to use the 2.9 built in thumbnail system to implement thumbnails for my posts. I have one word to describe the process, “tedious”. I found some great information on this site: http://wpengineer.com/the-ultimative-guide-for-the_post_thumbnail-in-wordpress-2-9/

I was excited that WordPress had decided to add this to the core, but I’m seeing one thing missing and that is the ability to get_the_post_thumbnail, and just return the URL of the chosen thumbnail’s original image. This would be mighty helpful for designers who want to control the use of images in the theme and do their own resizing using timthumb. I’ll have to dig through the code for 2.9 over Christmas and see if it’s a function that just isn’t documented yet, which is usually the case.

For now, it looks like converting to the new WP thumbnail system means that you don’t nessesarily control the image size and cropping when you pull images in as thumbnails. Not the worst of things for designers to sacrifice, but could add a pain of documentaiton explaining to users how to set their media settings in WP to match the sizes they have previously been using automatically. Overall though, the 2.9 thumbnail functionality is a hit, although I don’t look forward to converting all my themes over to the new system, but I do look forward to using it.

Merry Christmas and Happy 2010

Adam White — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:04:24 +0000

It’s been a crazy winter, and I am really looking forward a couple of long weekends to spend time with family. People celebrate many different things at Christmas time. The thing that I secretly celebrate the most every year, is that we survived. As parents of six kids, life can be pretty draining and leave us pretty drained and exhausted. Einstein’s theory of relativity applies to velocity and the number of children you have. So when Christmas rolls around the first thought is “already?” and the second thought is “We made it!”

2009 Christmas Photos

Adam White — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:02:36 +0000

We try hard to get a Christmas photo every year. This year we had some special help from an old college buddy, Sean Braddy. These are just the rough cuts, but we were so excited to see them, we had to post them.

Old Photo Textures

Adam White — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:54:12 +0000

So I dug through my archives and found these textures. If you have have used Picasa to manage photos, you get pretty good at watching images flash by at 1000 miles per hour and stopping when you see what your looking for. Marlene doesn’t think I’m seeing it, but with as many pictures as we take, I can scroll through our family history in about 30minutes at full speed and usually find what I’m looking for.