Click to play the timelapse video of cleaning leaves. The 1080p version is much better quality than the others

I’ve been using the TC-80N3 clone I got for my birthday to take some timelapse shots of various things.

I’m going to take a shot a throwing together some of the timelapse scenes I have shot into a longer sequence about the change from fall to winter weather.

Here’s one clip that I think is Time Lapse of cleaning up fall leaves on YouTube .

Panorama of Mount Nebo at Midnight

This trip was about as last-minute as you can get. We decided to hike to the north peak of Mount Nebo Friday afternoon, and left my house around 4:30 PM and headed towards the Nebo Loop in Payson – planning to stop for food along the way.

It turns out, there is only really one place to get fast food on the road from Spanish Fork to Payson, and once we realized that we had passed it we backtracked to it. It’s a Burger King that is attached to a Chevron station. We place or orders, buy some gatorade and misc stuff, and then head back into the car to head to the trailhead.

Chris drives a TDI Jetta, and he takes great pleasure in getting as many miles out of each drop of diesel that he can. I guess part of getting high mileage must involve keeping your tank really low, because after twenty minutes of driving up the hills on the Nebo Loop, his car informs us we have a range of only 5 miles left. A few more turns later and it’s at 0 miles of range left. The tough part about driving a diesel car is that even if you have the lungs and the hose and the lack of morals that would allow you to siphon gas from someone – you are going to have a hard time finding another vehicle in the middle of the wilderness that takes diesel. Chances are if you find one, it’s pulling a hunting trailer and has a 4:1 gun-to-person ratio… so we decide to turn back and get some diesel in his car. Man… If ONLY we were just at a gas station…

We end up starting our hike about 90 minutes later than we had wanted to, but decided to keep going anyway since the people’s GPS tracks we saw showed it only being 4.5 miles to the summit and we tend to hike at least 2.5 or 3 miles per hour – so we could still make it up there by dusk or shortly afterwards…

I recorded my GPS track of the same route that guy we were following used.

Here’s his track, which shows the route we took but lies about how long it is:

On the west face of the ridge, the wind was blowing strong and was bitterly cold. The moment you crossed over to the east face of the ridge the wind was completely gone. As luck would have it, much of the route is on the west face of the ridge (perhaps because people tend to hike early this in the day, so being in the shade in the summer would be nice, but I’m not convinced that the person who put the trail up originally thought things out much since it has a lot of spots where you go down a few hundred feet only to immediately climb back up that same amount).

We reached the summit and took a few pictures of ourselves with the lights behind us, and then I set up and took a panorama. Normally, I shoot several exposures and blend them for an HDR panorama. In this case, there wasn’t a need for HDR. To avoid spending the entire night up there taking images for the panorama, I cranked up the ISO to 6400 and used 8 second exposures. I shot at F/8 at the hyperfocal distance of the lens because the depth of field is important for these things. The end result is the 360×180 Panorama of Mount Nebo at Midnight – lit by a nearly full moon.

It was extremely windy at the summit, and the wind was very cold – so by the time I was done shooting this I was having a hard time even moving my fingers. Some parts of the panorama are degraded because the wind shook the camera, but overall I think it gives a good impression of what it is like up there at night. It’s a nice view – better than the view durring the day in my opinion. Now… had I know that we wouldn’t be getting back to my house until 4:30 AM – I think we would have hiked something shorter instead.

I really need an Ultrawide Angle lens for this kind of thing. If anyone reading this feels like sending me around eight-hundred bucks, I’ll go buy an UWA lens and I’ll take as many 360×180 panoramas of your house that you want

Climbing with kids in Maple Corridor

Friday I went to Maple Canyon with Rhett and Steve Boynton and his family. In the afternoon we climbed in the Maple Corridor, and I took a panorama of Maple Corridor in Maple Canyon is pretty cool because of it’s rather unique geology. The entire thing is hundreds of vertical feet of conglomerate – which is more easily described as “big cobblestone cliffs”. Climbing on it feels like you are climbing on a never-ending antique chimney. It’s also unique because it has areas where an extremely easy climb will be only a few hundred feet away from an extremely difficult climb.

The kids had fun, in particular because the most fascinating stick in the known universe was apparently found there. Both Rhett and Porter (the other boy in the picture) were infatuated with this one stick, and no other stick would satisfy them. Eventually Porter relented and let play with it for most of the time there, but in exchange Porter got permanent custody rights when we left.

This is an HDR panorama, but to get the kids faces not so blurry I took them from a single exposure and merged them in with the 32-bit merged exposure. I think in the future this might be how I approach moving subjects in hdr photos that don’t themselves have a large dynamic range (i.e. people or other things that are moving) – it worked well but still keeps the aspects of HDR that are good (such as the brighter rocks towards the top not being blown out or the shadows in the dark areas not having any detail)

Demolition Derby video on MobileMe

• Gas prices around the country are dropping precipitously
• Utah gas prices are dropping slowly
• Utahns are paying 20 to 30 cents more per gallon than the rest of the country

The conclusion the media feeds to us is that Utah residents are being gouged. An all-out witch hunt has been started, even going so far as to call for state legislators to investigate the reason for the high prices. KSL called for a one-day “boycott”. Heck – even the governor has decided to start a probe into the prices.

Look at the data for yourself

The sensationalist media seems to prey on the uninformed public being too busy to actually look at the data and think for themselves.

One Simple Explanation: Utah prices lag the national average by a few weeks

Note in the chart above, that in March the Rocky Mountain region was paying less than the national average. Hmm… You will also notice that if you shift the price curve over a few weeks – you will see that the Rocky Mountain Region pretty well mirrors the national average, only it lags behind by a few weeks. When prices are increasing, this favors Utah – because people we will be paying two-week old prices… but when prices drop sharply in the national average, we pay more.
Why is this so hard to understand? Sure I don’t know exactly what CAUSES the lag in prices, but it’s pretty simple to see on the graph – if you allow for a 5% to 10% error it’s a pretty decent approximation.
Also notice this: Prices in the Rocky Mountain region (that contains utah) are dropping just as sharply as the national prices. (Funny side note: I’ve heard local media taking credit for this drop in Utah gas prices, saying such things as: “Yes, I know gas prices are down to 2.49 a gallon, but can you imagine where they would be if we didn’t bring so much attention to it?” (My guess – probably even lower. It seems the only thing the attention has done is curb a slight amount of demand which has, in turn, stretched out the lag time of gas prices in Utah because they can’t move their supply as quickly, and therefore they are stuck trying to sell off the old gas that they bought at two-week-ago prices for a longer period of time)

It’s not just Utah

It’s conventient to go on a rant about how we are paying higher than the national average – but anyone who passed high school algebra should know that when you have an average in a population with any variance, you are going to have some values above the average and some values below it. That’s why it’s called an average.

In the above graph, the national average has little red triangles on it to make it easy to identify. From the above graph, you can see that a lot of regions are paying above the national average – and the West Coast (the top line) is worse of than the Rocky Mountain region.Note, some regions seem to overlap – which is what makes it look like there are more regions paying above the average than there are paying below it. I didn’t slice the country into regions, I just used ones that the government already had.

According to the logic of the media – only people living in the Lower Atlantic, Midwest, or Gulf Coast regions of the country are not being “gouged” by “evil oil barrons.”

In Conclusion

If you are a member of the Utah media and are tempted to continue going off on this topic – please be aware that eventually the quiet thinking members of society will get fed up and expose you for the idiots you are. This is a non-issue. Go find someone abusing puppies or something to talk about, and stop wasting my time telling me how I’m being “taken advantage of” and showing clips of random people at gas stations answering the question: “Which do you feel: violated, or gang-raped by the big oil company that is stealing food from your starving children’s mouths?”

The hike up here is strenuous. The last few miles are definitely the hardest part of the hike. My butt hurts worse than a drunken sailor in san Francisco (they have uncomfortable bar stools over there)

There is another peak to the north of here that is slightly higher – up until 1970 this south peak was listed as the highest peak, but by then the trails already went up to here. If we really wanted to prolong this trip by a few hours, we could head over there, but I will save that trip for when I am actually in shape.

I’ll post some pictures later.

In the most unbalanced detour ever, they had two options:

1. Rappel down 250 feet
2. Bike 6 miles.

If you have to even think twice about that, you have never rappelled before. A 225 foot drop would probably take me no more than 30 seconds to rap down. A 6 mile bike ride in 30 seconds may be possible – if you bike 720 miles per hour – but it is not likely. (Biking faster than the speed of sound is not a likely possibility – unless you are Jason Graham)

After the detour, the teams traveled to Heber and talked to a bear. (How did they find that bear for the show? Strange) On the way there, the Weavel family continued trashing on Utah – this time by picking on the mountains.I think that slowly throughout the show, the Weaver family is making everyone in the country mad at them by trashing on their stomping grounds. If they haven’t trashed on areas you enjoy – don’t worry – they will.

I started laughing when I saw them take some route I’ve never heard of to try to get to Park City from Heber. They were thinking about taking 40, but they decided on some roundabout road. There was no way they could turn their car around because they were pulling a huge trailer. They will definitely be in last place because of that boneheaded mistake.

I’m still watching it – so I will update it when it is done. (this blog was brought to you by the power of the blackberry)

Update: The Weavel family was dead last, but unfortunately it was not an elimination round. In the discussion with the host, it almost sounded like they wanted to quit. I wished that they had – but they didn’t. One more week (at least) of this annoying white-trash family from Florida.

Before I say any more, I should point out that I did in fact enjoy the primary program. It was a well put together program run by a very on-the-ball primary organization.

Data on our Primary

Since the program had the names of all the kids in the different classes printed, it was easy for me to figure out just HOW huge our primary is. I created a histogram while I was in Sacrament, but this one from Microsoft Excel looks a little bit sharper. I also counted how many unusual names there were and calculated the percentage of unusual names. It was a smaller percent than I would have expected – but I guess it goes to show that strange names just jump out at you. Here is the breakdown by age, and strange names. Add the two numbers together to get the total number of kids in that age group.

Totals: 124 kids, 30 strange names (25% of our kids have strange names)

1997 seems to be a significant year for our ward. The number of kids per-year more than doubled that year, and has remained that high ever since. (At least judging from these data.) There could, of course, be some kind of deathmatch that our primary has every year at the end of the eighth year where half of the kids are killed – that could also explain the sudden dip in numbers.

Unusual Names in Utah: a disturbing trend

Going back to the idea of unusual names – there seems to be a trend in Utah to try to name your kid with the strangest name possible. You get double points if it is pronounced nothing like it looks. There was a trend that started a while ago where people would take a normal name, twist it around, and spell it in a strange new way. This trend has continued, but the “new big thing” seems to be using the strangest combination of letters possible and calling it a name.

Here are some of the examples I came up with (all of these are from the program.) Oh, and just to answer the question before it is asked – yes, they are all caucasian. Yes, even Xakoi.

Unique Names

• Adisyn
• Whytli
• Cortlyn
• Shaden
• Acacia
• Tymber
• Axel
• Samara (not strange – but poor kid will be picked on for the rest of her life because of ‘The Ring’)
• Celek
• Xakoi
• Zander
• Makenna
• Colton
• Braeden
• Tiaza
• Malikk
• Brilee
• Kiylia
• Kaid
• Makayla

Who let the hippee out?

Our primary also sang a song today titled “Holding Hands Around The World.” I do not believe this song was in the songbook when I was a whipper-snapper. The song is what its title makes you think it is – a hippee-inspired song about holding hands with kids around the world. It has a strange 90′s music feel to it. It reminded me of that famous Coke commercial – only not quite as good. I can easily picture some girl smoking pot singing this song while she braids dandelions to put in her hair. If I never hear that song again as long as I live, I wont feel cheated.

What happened to the Merry Misses?

If you are like me – and are hopelessly out of the loop when it comes to primary things – you may not be aware of the names for primary classes. There are three names now. Gone are the Blazers, Merry Misses, and other names from the past. There are Sunbeams and Valiants still – and anything in between is called “CTR” They identify the CTR class by the age of the kids. When I was in primary, I always liked the milestone of changing to a different class name. Oh well. At least they still have the song “Give Said the Little Stream.”

In conclusion

My primary is a gigantic organization. There are 60 adults involved, 124 kids, and far too many strange names. There is a big jump in the number of kids that are 7 than the number of kids that are 8. I have no idea why. If you know why – feel free to let me in on the secret