Colin Smith shot dead

Liverpool's top gangster Colin Smith shot dead

Suffice to say, I'm not the Colin Smith in the article.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Quicksilver Tip: Fix a Slow Quicksilver

Over the last week or so, my much beloved Quicksilver has gotten very, very slow and sluggish. I'd hit the hot key (option-space in my case) and start typing. And then I'd wait. After a few seconds, the command would register and the action would take place.

After snooping around for what the problem is, I found a few web pages that suggested reducing the catalog size. Yes, I did have a large number of items in my catalogue. Therefore, I promptly unchecked many of the items in my catalogue and issued a rescan command. However, contrary to my expectations, this had no noticeable effect.

Apparently deselecting items does not actually remove them. The whole lot is still sitting in memory. They are only cleared out after Quicksilver is shut down and restarted. Ugh. That's the way I had to fix things on my old operating system.

Gripe aside, here's the lesson. To really fix a dawdling Quicksilver, pare down your catalogue and restart the application.

Movie Tip: Rotate Movies With BitPlayer

I've run into a rather simple problem. When taking short movies with a digital camera, it is sometimes nice to film in a portrait orientation. However, digital cameras always assume movies are in a landscape orientation.

It turns out that there are a number of available tools to rotate movies. I'm sure that most top-end movie editors can do this, but iMovie doesn't. QuickTime Pro can, but I don't want to shell out for the pro tools just for a simple edit.

The solution I found is to use BitPlayer, a simple video player with the abilities to apply some transformations and re-encodings. All we have to do is rotate the video in the playback display and export it with the current settings applied. All very simple!

Calgary 33 - Toronto 10

Yahoo! The Stamps stomped down the Argos with a solid victory. After the last two games, I was worried about our favourite CFL team, but today's game was a nice reasurance. It was especially nice to have Burris turn in such a well-tuned peformance. He seemed to have the team hitting all the right plays. In the end, a very good game.

Go Stamps!

Solar Insect

Solar Insect, originally uploaded by smithco.

Now this is an interesting little thing. Somehow this cool little photo of a nifty tiny robot shot up to be the most viewed photo on my Flickr stream. I have no idea how that happened. I never promoted this photo, sent it to any groups. It's yet to be favourited or showcased anywhere. But somehow, it is my most viewed photo.

Trip to Disneyland

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A Weekend With Friends

It's always good to spend a weekend with an old friend. I spent this passed weekend with my old friend, Mark J. Matthews. I'll post photos and movies of the weekend in some posts to follow.

What's your CFL 2007 outlook?

The new CFL season is underway.

The Stamps took a nice 37-9 victory over the Ti-Cats yesterday. Looks like Calgary is off to a fine start and Hamilton still has to work out their issues from last year. Meanwhile, BC squeaked past Toronto, the Pegs tied Deadmonton and Sask beat Montreal. All in all, an interesting first set of matches.

So, what's your outlook on this season?

iWoz

iWoz, originally uploaded by smithco.