Michael and Jaspenelle

Snow Angels in Spokane

I ran across this video on Anibunny’s blog.

It is exactly what I needed to boost my spirits this evening!

Feline Friday: Squirrely Torment

Just a short video (I think I am starting to get the knack of uploading these.)
This squirrel has been visiting to harass the cats for a few days.

Video: I’m rolling over!

Camping Recap

Imagine this picture, only in the dark, after a long drive down a rocky dirt road with a six-year-old scared that the bears would get her in the back of the van. That would be us on Friday night, driving to South Skookum Campground. Apparently the ranger I have talked to earlier in the day had been wrong about it being open. It closed on Labor Day, which was the weekend before!

Skookum is one of those wonderful secluded campgrounds, you know, the ones without phone reception? Which is awesome, except when you are stuck out there late at night with no way to tell the people who are coming up the next day that it is closed. However, we are a stubborn resourceful group of Pagans, so with a little bit of exploring by lantern light, we were delighted to find the host site was only 200 yards down the road and that someone had left the outhouse unlocked (double score!)

So we hoofed the basics down there (tents, sleeping bags and diapers,) pitched the tents and settled in for the night. Sal played his Native American flute for a time, a beautiful sound to drift off to sleep with. I did wake up three times during the night. A couple of the times were for Damian’s usual nursing and changing^[1] and once was to the sound of coyotes in the distance and something scamper past my tent (possibly a chupacabra or a baby sasquatch…)

The view coming out of our tents in the morning completely made up for Friday night’s misadventures though:
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Feline Friday: a steadily growing friendship

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Oh! And there is a new Simon’s Cat video on YouTube:

In the Grass

This weekend my Grandpa Tolman came to visit. Mommy has lots of photos to sort but this is a little video grandpa took of me in Riverfront Park. Mommy and Daddy are talking about ways to keep the girls away from my adorableness as I grow up.

This is World Breastfeeding Week so this Saturday we might go back to the park to support La Leche League International at Kids Day. I want to lay in the grass again, it felt sooo neat!

Breastfeeding Commercial

Where The Hell Is Matt?

I know some of Matt’s videos have been around for awhile but I particularly like this one (can’t remember which blog I ran across it on.)

I love to see happy people, I think that is why I love it so much.

Introducing “Video”

I’ve been working on a new website for about 2 weeks, and now it’s ready to share with the world. Quite simply, it’s a catalog of our home videos. Jaspenelle’s Dad bought us a video camera for Christmas, and we have made several videos.

Video by michaelandjaspenelle.com

Most people would use YouTube or some other video sharing site. I considered using them, but I prefer to host web-content myself whenever possible. If you are using a third-party, like YouTube, you have to agree to their terms and deal with their servers and their policies and restrictions. I don’t like being restricted.

The website was actually developed quite quickly - because of several existing open source solutions, I actually had a working (albeit not very pretty) mockup working after a few hours of coding. The remainder of the 2 weeks of development was making things nice and experimenting with different features. It’s built using the following technologies:

Linode

condor.garjasp.com is a Linode 360, a UML virtual server. This let’s me micro-manage everything about my hosting environment, and run any services or software that I need or want.

Ubuntu Linux

The OS is Ubuntu 7.10 Server Edition. I would have used Debian, but they are always out-of-date. Previously, this server (when it was known as manticore.garjasp.com) ran Gentoo (of which I was also a developer), but that became too difficult to keep up-to-date and secure.

Apache HTTPD Server

Only the world’s most popular http server. I have an intimate relationship with this beast, and have tamed it quite well. All configuration is pulled from LDAP (using a set of PERL scripts to autogenerate the config on startup) and is highly optimized to the server environment. For the video site, I have some mod_rewrite magic to create the pretty URLs.

PHP

The website backend uses PHP5. This is used to check for a valid video file, generate and read metadata, get a list of available video files, and allow for different templates based on the URL. It will be quite easy for me to extend the video site to have Categories, RSS feeds, or anything else I can come up with.

FFmpeg

After videos are uploaded to the server, they are encoded to FLV by FFmpeg. It is also used to generate the PNG thumbnails.

Flowplayer

Another great piece of open-source software, flowplayer plays the FLV files generated by ffmpeg. It’s highly customizable and scriptable, so I was able to make it do exactly what I wanted.

Yahoo User Interface Library

YUI provides the core scripting components to make the Web 2.0 features easy to create. I use it for easy DOM access and for dynamically loading the video metadata.

Carousel Component

This is an add-on to YUI that I use for the neat scrolling of available videos.

Blueprint CSS

In the past I have used YUI for designing websites and CSS design. I recently heard of Blueprint CSS, and it works pretty well for what I wanted to do. I’m not actually using much of the CSS framework directly - most of my CSS is actually a modified form of it’s classes. It provides a nice reference and jump-off point that YUI just couldn’t provide. YUI requires too much HTML bloat, and that’s something I’ve always disliked about it.

Currently, the code for the website is not in a releasable state - some things are very specific to the current environment. Over time, I hope to get it cleaned up, add a nice admin interface (right now all administration is done via WinSCP and SSH), and make it more configurable, then I may release it to the general public.

Let me know what you think!

[video] Spokane River

This is some of the video Michael and I recently took along the Spokane River. The first clip is from Bowl and Pitcher in Riverside State Park and the remaining ones are from various parts of Riverfront Park in downtown Spokane. The river has crested though it is expected to stay at or near flood stage for awhile, especially with the hot weather and rain still in the forecast.