New cool stuff

My new office project is still dragging on; my neighbour expert on laying Arborite is out of commission for a bit (bad back) so the materials are just up there waiting...

Perhaps just as well though: a January trip to the coast (with a week in Hong Kong in the middle) took up 3 weeks — and of course lots of followup needed to be done after it.

And “followup” meant checking out some new cool stuff of course: the recent Google Earth v5 release managed to suck away a bunch of my cycles with a whole raft of new layers, including the intriguing EveryTrail one. It looked like what I’ve been watching for — lay a track from a recorded GPS and then be able to add pix — so I jumped into it. (My first four tracks got up while I had high speed in Victoria; I already had the GPS tracks and some pix on the laptop!)

At a mini “men’s night” Ted showed us some pretty impressive results of a “lite” version of Muvee software that came on his laptop: provide a sound track, some stills and some movie clips; choose a theme — and the SW generates a video! He knew we’d be dubious, so had used the same content with various themes and sound tracks: brilliant! The results had us all amazed — and Ted has since obtained the full version to get some even more dramatic results.

What with GE5, Muvee, and a bunch of image work I had to do for some new Panoramio pix -- to say nothing of having to sort through >2,000 pix from the Hong Kong trip — I realize I needed to review the specs for my new system to ensure it can deal better with this stuff. Larger hard drive, more memory... sigh.

And the office? Oh yeah... the new system will fit where I have planned it, and it will fit in the great CPU hanger I plan to use.