Just the other day, as I was playing with the company’s GoPro for the first time, I was wondering what the company’s story was. 60 Minutes provided the answer.
So it turns out the MARC doesn’t run on federal holidays (or, at least, Veteran’s Day) but WRI doesn’t get this holiday off. So after visiting a very empty train station with the girls, I drove into DC this morning. Which wasn’t really that bad, but the parking garage under my building was locked. It was supposed to be open and available but someone at the security company didn’t get their dates right, so I parked up the street at Union Station.
Our weekend was good, although Finn started out with a fever and some throwing up on Saturday Morning. I drove up to Hereford with some friends to look at a Scout in a field, which was a lot rougher than the ad made it out to be. The seller had an unused 6-point rollbar in pieces to offer, which was tempting, but the price was too high for me right now.
On my return Finn was feeling better, so we did some shopping and ran some errands. Finn fell asleep in the car for a couple of hours which was probably a very good thing.
Sunday the weather was warm and sunny, so I took Finn up to the tire park to play while Mama got some important work done at the house. She spent most of her time on the tire swing, making new friends and delighting in letting everyone know she’d thrown up the day before. After watching the Ravens game, I took her over to the Coopers’ for some cocoa and to donate money to UNICEF; hopefully it will make its way to the people in the Philippines, which sounds like it got absolutely flattened this weekend. The Coopers were filming the fundraiser for a PBS bumper, so hopefully Finn may make her debut on camera sometime this fall.
Busy week here. We took Finn to some friends’ for a Halloween straight from a greeting card: well-lit streets full of happy children, friendly houses, and great costumes. It made me proud to see my girl walk down the street holding hands with one of her best friends.
Leaves are in full swing here in the ‘Ville, and the streets are beautiful. It’ll take a week or so for all of them to drop and collect on our front lawn, clogging up the downspouts and rustling underfoot.
I got my final paycheck from idfive with an added quarterly bonus, so I splurged a little on some kegging equipment; a new gas block has replaced the two-way brass splitter I inherited, and now I’ve got a dedicated third line for carbonation installed with a one-way valve to prevent any backflow. The valve body is bolted to the edge of the surround and the gas lines are all cleaned up and out of the way.
I also picked up three sheets of 3/4 MDF board in preparation for building new speaker enclosures. I’ve run my woofer specs through some new online tools (I was using a poorly printed graph in a book in 1991) and it looks like my original calculations were pretty close. The tweeter I used in one of the two speakers seems to be on the fritz, so I’ve got to track down the issue and see if it needs to be replaced. The new speakers will also get different porting tubes and hookups, but the next big thing to source is a way to cut a clean circle for the woofers.
One of the items I inherited with the new job is a GoPro Hero 3, essentially a tiny HD videocam with a wide-angle lens and a waterproof housing, bolted to a giant suction cup. I tried it out on Sunday in some different situations, outside and inside the Scout as I drove out into Ellicott City and back. The built-in editing software is intuitive and powerful, but it’s going to take some more time to sort out how to get the best possible footage encoded in the right way.