The Jack Noodle Journal

Here we are again! Just the dudes hanging out on a Monday morning. Mommy has gone back to work again and it’s just baby, papa, Philip, Pierre and Abby.

I think I’m going to take a photo of the two of us each year on the start of the school year from now on. Maybe that can be a thing. Make sure and remind me next year.

I do enjoy my time with the little guy.

We are going to have lots of fun.

I can already see that there is going to be more running around and chasing than there was last year.

The little Noodle is very busy.

Journal entries might not be as long. I am required to go and play right now.

You know the song right? Don Henley. I guess the line is “after” the boys of summer have gone. I always get that line “I saw a deadhead sticker on a cadillac” stuck in my head towards the end of summer. “Little voice inside my head said don’t look back you can never look back”.

Yes my friends. Summer is coming to an end. K’s summer break is over and she is going back to work now. That signals the end of summer for the residents of the Noodle compound. Bless those teachers! Have a good year ladies and gentlemen of the teaching profession. We love you for the work you do with our little brats. K’s first day back is today. I believe it is an inservice day without the kids. G Noodle is at grandma’s house today.

The G man and I are going to start up the telecommuting schedule again so we can hang out while mommy is at work. K went back to work and the telecommute started on the 25th of August last year. Wow. G was a different kid back then. I don’t think I’ll be as freaked out this year being alone with the little guy during the telecommute as I was last year. I think the little noodle will be far more entertaining now. I’m not sure how naps are going to work though. I can’t imagine him going right to sleep at 12 everyday laying next to me on the couch while I watch Perry Mason. I’m not sure if we’ll both fit on the couch anymore.

It’s going to be fun.

When does summer officially end? What do you say internets? Oh great oracle? Hmmm… September 22nd? Labor day?

It was a pretty good summer. We definitely had 2 distinct sections this year. The beginning summer and then everything after the 4th of July. Beginning time we spent with Mr. Baptist. There was a good chunk of time at the beach. 2nd Half started up North with the Shelton Twins and then to Eastern Oregon to my Mom’s lands for a weekend. We stayed around the house most of the 2nd half of the summer. Aunt Gina’s knee surgery was an event that occupied a healthy portion of 2nd half of summer (she’s doing well). Oh yeah. A couple of heat waves to mix things up.

There are photos of summer fun on my Flickr page.

For the official Noodle record:

The Black Eyed Peas album, “the E.N.D.” was the album of the summer for the first half. The Dead Weather album, “Horehound” was the official album of the summer for the 2nd half. I’m still listening to the two albums nonstop.

We didn’t do any blockbuster summer movies this year. I haven’t seen any of them so I can’t give you a review. I did see “Blue Velvet” at the Laurelhurst a couple of weeks ago but of course that came out in 1986 and wasn’t a blockbuster.

We mostly just watched season 2 of Madmen and that was it this summer for viewing fun.

Oh summer, we will miss you.

Let’s see… I wrote about the woes of atrophy back when… Two months ago… ah yes, June 16th, 2009. I believe it was a Tuesday. In that post I referenced a part 2 I was going to create, and here it is. This isn’t really the part 2 I was thinking about writing back then, but I thought I would continue with it anyway as it is sort of related. Yeah, yeah, whatever…

I was pretty bummed out and tired then. I’m not feeling so bummed out now. Perhaps I have been getting enough rest lately?

I was planning on retiring from the internet back then. Something about the online world was bugging me. The constant time burgling and feeling like real life was slipping away while I was logged in to Facebook. I would have still kept up with the journal of course, just turned everything else off.

Funny thing happened though. Spending more time on Twitter (no more Twitter talk! Geeze!) actually made me decide not to retire and give the internet another try. Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I found a bunch of good Tweets to follow that led me to some interesting links. I must not have been finding anything cool before to inspire me?

What? Oh, a for example?

Well, I discovered the pretty awesome site dropular after reading a tweet left by Rob Sheridan. That’s just one example.

I’ve also been doing more actual computing the last half of the summer. Creating stuff, making things. That has cheered me up quite a bit. I did the redesign (not done) and Wordpress upgrading of this here journal. I got my mom’s site into Wordpress so she can now do her own postings (totally not finished with that project). I had some fun with my road trip video work and getting into Final Cut a bit more.

Over the last couple of weeks I picked up working with Flash again. I haven’t even looked at Flash for a number of years now. I’m teaching myself ActionScript 3. ActionScript 3 is insane. As a not-so-sturdy coder, I’m finding myself getting lots of headaches from how hard I’m trying to understand this stuff. I’m getting it though and that has been pretty cool. I’ve been working on a Flash project at the office and have been learning lots.

REALLY knowing the ins and outs of Flash and ActionScripting is something I should have gotten serious about long ago.

So creating and spending many an hour making stuff on the computer has broken my early summer funk.

I was questioning what I had been doing the last 4 years with my BS in multimedia and web design the other day. One of the conclusions that I arrived at was that I needed to get back to being excited about web design and multimedia. Try to remember what it was that I thought was cool about it that would cause me to enroll in a program on it.

Maybe I could look back in the journal to my school days for some answers?

So as you know, during the day when I come across a link that I think I would like to blog about, I email it to myself and title it blog notes (oh yeah, described here). Well, the blog notes 40 email consists of 33 email responses to myself. I thought I would empty out all the blog note 40 topics here and move on to blog notes 41 in my email.

On telecommuting:
Why the economic downturn could be good for digital nomads.

Does personal communication improve the work/life balance? I don’t know.

I might have already posted this link on how to convince your boss that telecommuting will work, but I’ll post it again just because it’s that good.

Ah ha. TV watching guidelines for toddlers.

I was just thinking about this topic again last night. We are trying to keep G Noodle away from watching television. When he’s 2 we will probably be a tad more relaxed. It’s crazy already how hypnotized he becomes when the TV is on. I think not having cable is going to make it easier for his TV viewing to stay to a minimum once he gets older. When there’s nothing on it’s easier to keep off. Go outside and play for crying out loud!

Here’s the set list from the Nine Inch Nails concert I went to last spring. I made a playlist of the concert on my iPod ad have been listening to it pretty frequently. Oh yeah, I already wrote about it here. Wait that concert was back in December. Yikes.

Another link about Nine Inch Nails that says they had the best selling MP3 album of 2008. Yes I’m a NIN fan.

Here’s a long video about the making of “The Shining” that I was meaning to watch.

This is a pretty good article from Oregonlive about Laika and the movie “Coraline”. Coraline is now available on DVD so this is definitely an old article. I think Laika is an interesting bird. Being a Portland creative though I can’t really have that strong of an opinion about them either way as I would love to work with them in the future. I would love it though if my dad bought me an animation studio.

A link to 35 beautiful Summer Wordpress themes. Could be useful. I’m currently getting a theme up and running for my mom’s new Wordpress page.

That brings us to 13 helpful cheat sheets for building Wordpress themes.

Here’s 35 websites using paper or what looks like paper in their design.

These 25 websites are using vintage retro styles that I think are pretty cool looking.

50 questions to ask yourself about your website.

And of course, who doesn’t need 105 Free Grunge Fonts.

All those blog posts with numbers in their titles, right? You’ll see it a lot on Twitter. Yeah, that’s a thing see. I’m going to figure out ways to put numbers in the titles of my Noodle Journal entries so I can get higher rankings. Yeah, probably not.

I really like this guy, Stephan Glerum’s artwork and plan on writing more about the style in a future post.

I would like to watch these Final Cut Pro videos some day. I’m digging into Final Cut a bit more these days. I’ve also got becoming a Flash expert back on the list of things to do.

A page on video compression for YouTube that would probably be good to read again.

I’m going to make a music video here soon that uses music that falls under the Creative Commons License.

There seems to be several old links about the economy in the blog notes:

Article on brand names that I was probably meaning to read at a later date.

Here’s an oldie about shoe companies doing poorly.

Something about Christmas.

That’s about all I can handle of links for today. That’s most of them from blog notes 40. Quite a few of the links were dead already. Some of the links were just how-tos that I was using for work stuff. A couple of YouTube videos I had links for were taken down by NBC.

For more link fun make sure and check out my shared Google Reader page as well.

Summer Road Trip 2009 from Jack Noodle on Vimeo.

Greetings. We went on a little mini vacation last weekend.

We drove over to Eastern Oregon to see my mom and Greg at their properties outside of Baker City Oregon. They have been spending their whole summer over there this year.

We had a fun time. It was a really good trip. It was nice for G man to see his grandparents. We had a great visit.

It was a big test for us to see how G Noodle would do on such a long car ride. He doesn’t like long car rides. He previously has only rode 2 to 3 hours in one sitting. Baker is about a 5 to 6 hour drive. G did really well. There and back, out of 12 total driving hours, he probably only cried 2 and a half of them.

Yes I recorded a home movie of our trip and that’s it up there.

It’s been a while since I have posted up any video.

Martin’s German video blog posts have really been spurring me to get off my butt and start shooting more video. I also thought that those kids in Germanland might like to see their true homeland again for a bit.

It’s pretty long. I’ll understand if you don’t make it all the way to the end. I edited my footage down to just under 20 minutes. I had a total of 46 minutes. I was going for a 10 minute video.

I did lots of cutting. I think there may be too many quick cuts in the middle. It gets a little choppy.

The picture looks really good. One of these days I’ll be a pro with this gear, I tell you! I got in some nice learning with this video. Boy oh boy. It’s really all about having mad compression skills.

I yearn to learn all the nerdy stuff behind the numbers and buttons. I had some of it down during my school days but have long since forgotten it. What really is the deal with H.264? Why is it called that? What is it doing?

Vimeo really presents a nice video. I think it might be a little bulky for you kids with slower connections. It is kind of skipping here at the house, but it’s totally smooth of course on the office’s super high speed pipes. If you have a problem with it, make sure HD setting is off. Maybe let it load up first before you watch it? I’m also wondering if I might have selected too many keyframes during the compression process?

Yeah, it’s really a family home movie. Be forewarned. There’s some really good shots of G Noodle though if it has been a while since you have seen him. He is growing like a weed.