Sometimes being a Dad ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Fun & games? Not so much this week. There’s no need to go into detail, but let’s just say the past week hasn’t been great. As much as I’d like to post an awesome article about my Drobo system and family pictures, it’s getting put off for a few more days. In the meantime, here’s a few links to a few things that I’ve done recently, in addition to a nice redesign I did for the Geek Dads @ Home site.

• Geek Dads @ Home #32: Wave Over Here
• Not Completely Unnecessary Baby Products
• More Not Completely Unnecessary Baby Products
• Geek Dads @ Home #33: There’s an App for That

For those that get more than just a holiday card from our family, the odds that you’ll be getting something from Walkers this year is extremely high. Just thought you’d like to know. Best. Cookies. EVER.

Seriously, these things are addictive. Half my body weight can probably be attributed to these cookies, which might not be the best selling point (sorry, Walkers), but they are just too damn good.

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Jen Goode of JGoode Designs. Jen’s a friend of mine, and was looking to interview other stay-at-home/work-at-home parents for her gig with Examiner.com. My interview was published this morning! If you’re interested in working at home, especially with kids in the picture, this might be of interest to you. Check it out: “Some daddies are geeky, an interview with Daniel M. Clark”

Big thanks to Jen Goode!

It’s been just about three months since I last updated this site… technically. There were two posts that were made more recently, but after reorganizing and reconsidering the direction of my online activities, I removed them. I have also removed a few dozen older posts, from an era that I wish to put behind me.

Going forward, this is what I’m up to online:

• This site will focus on a bit of everything that interests me, with an emphasis on comics, being a stay-at-home Dad, movies, music… general life stuff.
• The Geek Dads @ Home podcast is alive and kicking, despite our missing a week here or there. We’re up to episode #19 now! The podcast is me, Scott Jangro and Joe Magennis. Sam Harrelson is gearing up for a teaching job and has bowed out, but we look forward to him joining us periodically as his schedule allows.
• The Big Book of Spam is no more. Sufficient interest in the project couldn’t be generated.
• Kids and Comics remains open, and will be updated in the near future. Kid-friendly comics were listed there as far as 5 months in advance, so I don’t have too much catching up to do. Next month, I will finally publish Comic Book Movies: Not For Kids?, a series of articles reviewing and recommending kid-friendly movies based on comic books. You won’t believe what I’ve had to go through… subjecting myself to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3? Yeah, done it. I’ll never be the same.
• Mediocre Web Comic was an interesting little project, but ultimately, not for me – not regularly, anyway. That site will stay up, but updates will be very infrequent.
• I have a few minor affiliate sites that will remain open, and I will continue to spend time learning the ins and outs of the affiliate marketing industry. Regretfully, I can’t make it to Affiliate Summit in New York this year, but I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to swing the West conference in 2010.
• I’m on Twitter and Facebook, but I will be limiting Facebook to only close friends and family in coming weeks.

Here’s what I’m not up to online:

• I am not involved in any way with AffSpot.com or it’s owner. If you hear differently, please let me know so I can take action.
• I am not involved in any way with CafePress.com or the print-on-demand industry in general. I will no longer reply to emails regarding that company, that industry or the book that I published in 2006 about them.
• Review Builders is still live, but is no longer being maintained. As far as I’m aware, all the Builders are still functional. They will likely break sometime in the very near future, though I have assurances from Debbie Carney that the Loxly Gallery-based Builders will be just fine for quite some time to come.

Thanks for stopping by!

I know it’s easy to blame everything on “the economy” these days, but honestly, who wants to pay $55 a month for basic cable service, even in a good economy?

In an effort to reduce our monthly bills a bit while we ride out the poor economy, we decided to axe the cable television service. Our rationale is that we never watch TV on a schedule, and we’ve got broadband internet access, so why pay? We can watch all the shows we’re interested in online. Granted, we won’t be able to watch the season premiere of Lost next week as it airs (ABC.com will have it available for online viewing the following day, if they do it the same way as they did with season four), but is it really that important? Is it $55 a month important, just to see it as it airs? I say no. Two days ago, I spoke with Comcast and cancelled our service. Yesterday, the technician showed up to collect the box and do whatever it is that technicians do to the lines. This is an account of our first day, yesterday, without cable television service.

Quitting Cable: Day One

I woke up to the sound of the house alarm being turned off and the cable guy coming into the house. Angela dealt with him while I got up, and by the time I made it downstairs, we were a cable-free house. First order of business: figure out…

Okay, the first order of business actually had nothing to do with this. But after I was finished, the next order of business was to figure out my audio/video situation and how to tune in our local channels. Our TV is a five-or-six-year-old Sony, standard. It’s got the coaxial connection and component connections in the back, and that’s it. Needless to say, simply setting it to channel 5 had absolutely no effect. Lots of lovely snow.

Well, I figured that with the digital transition coming up next month, it would make sense to just go ahead and get the converter box and an antenna. I had a chiropractic appointment at noon, and stopped by Best Buy afterward to pick up the necessary equipment before heading home.

Side note – I didn’t bother to wait for the government coupon, or even to apply for it yet, because according to a report on the radio a few days ago, the government is out of money for the coupon program. I’ll get on the waiting list later, and try to work something out with my receipt from the store if I ever get a coupon (I’m not holding my breath). If it doesn’t work out, well, I still paid less than I would have for a full month of cable service.

Installing the converter box and antenna took about five minutes. Using the remote control, it searched for signals and found a few dozen – far, far more than I expected. The downside? Nearly all the stations seem to be either Spanish-language or Christian. It’s the strangest thing… there’s NBC, there’s ABC, there’s PBS… then there’s about 32 channels in a row with names like “God TV”. Weird.

Winter was watching me work on the TV with great interest, and asking if she would watch Word Girl, to which I could only respond with, “not right now, honey. Daddy’s working on fixing the TV”.

Many months ago, I connected my MacBook Pro to the TV and home theater system, so I didn’t have to worry about setting that up. I’m able to move a browser window over to the TV and stream shows from a variety of sources.

For the rest of the afternoon, we watched a few shows online on the TV and, well, that was about it. Dinner. Bedtime for the kids. A bit of online poker, then some work on my sites, with the TV off the whole time.

So far, I’m not missing cable.

Ian Christopher Clark was born three days ago, Saturday the 20th. He’s happy and healthy – a very content little guy – and we couldn’t be more thrilled. His big sister is doing great, too! She’s very excited to have a baby brother.

I’m trying to stick to a weekly schedule for updates here or else I wouldn’t bother. Today, it’s going to be very short. My grandmother, Felismina Roderick, died last night at the age of 85.

Please, take care of yourself and your family, because there’s never enough time. Don’t take anything for granted.

Well, I got it working!

Since I put out my call for help, I’ve been spending some time trying out different programs that boasted the ability to rip chapters from unprotected (i.e. homemade) DVDs. Using the trial versions of the programs, I was able to rip anywhere from ten seconds to two minutes, put the clips into iMovie and iDVD and burn to disc… with varying degrees of quality and success. In the end, I found that Cinematize 2 worked the best. The workflow is this:

• Insert DVD (external drive since I’m working with mini-DVDs and my MacBook Pro is slot-loaded).
• Fire up Cinematize 2. Import the DVD and apply these settings:
  • Video – Decoding: Decode to Quicktime
  • Video – Decoding Mode: Automatic Selection
  • Video – Output Codec: DV/DVCPRO – NTSC
  • Video – Output Quality: Lossless Quality
  • Audio – all default settings
  • Subtitle – all default settings
  • Output – Save Chapters: As Separate Segments
  • Output – Save Quicktime As: Self-Contained, Files With All Data
  • Output – Output Format: Quicktime File
• Hit Extract Data and go have a bagel or something. Each chapter on the DVD is being ripped into its own Quicktime file.
• Fire up iDVD or iMovie. I’m actually just using iDVD for the most part, because I’m not too interested in cutting my own stuff. Maybe someday I’ll take the time to edit the clips, but for now, I just want the clips on a DVD that I can stick a decent menu on and send to my parents.
• Once everything is in iDVD, I move it all around, give the clips their names and burn. Done!

That’s all there is to it. The quality of the burns is great – granted, I won’t be winning any Best Photography awards, but if Kevin Smith can build a career on Clerks, I can accept the quality of my home movies. No need for a big investment in Final Cut Pro or anything, and no need for a dozen different programs to accomplish the task. True, Cinematize 2 isn’t free (or cheap, depending on your point of view), but for $60 I can’t complain. I’ve paid as much for some video games that were more disappointing and less useful.

Tags:custom+dvd,home+movies,dvd+authoring,cinematize,quicktime,iDVD

I’ve just spent half the day trying to find a solution to my problem, and wow, has it been confusing. What I want to do should be fairly simple – I think. Here’s the situation:

We have a video camera that we use to record home movies. It records directly to mini DVDs, in standard DVD format. I’m on a Mac, and I want to take each chapter off of each DVD that I’ve got, rearrange them, and burn them to full-size DVDs. Now, I know I can use iDVD to make great menus and such, and that’s cool, but I’m running into trouble getting my clips from the DVDs into some usable format.

One thing I’ve tried is to rip the whole DVD as an mp4 using Handbrake and importing to iMovie to set the chapters (since the chapters are lost as the contents are saved to a single mp4 file). From there, I expect to push the project into iDVD. The problem is that iMovie takes hours to import a simple 35 minute video clip and that’s unacceptable. I tried converting the file to DV format, and iMovie imported that in about half an hour, but it played at super-speed… unusable.

Incidentally, Mac the Ripper crashes on my machine when I try to load my content. It will load and rip a store-bought DVD just fine, but my home movie DVDs crash it.

Does anyone have any easy ways to accomplish what I’m trying to do? I just need to bring in several clips – chapters – from my many mini DVDs, rearrange them, and burn them to standard sized DVDs. Help!

Tags:custom+dvd,home+movies,dvd+authoring

Here in Albuquerque, on the southeast corner of Coors Blvd. and Montano, is a collection of carvings set amongst fields of sunflowers. It’s quite striking, really. I have three photos to share, and then… weirdness. I can’t really… well, you’ll see.

Okay, now for the weirdness. It seems to be an explorer kinda guy from a distance. Once you get closer though, you notice that he’s holding a rake and a walkie-talkie, and he’s standing on a dragon.

He’s standing… on a dragon. In Albuquerque. What the message is here, I won’t pretend to know. I can only guess that he’s a landscaper who came across a dragon in someone’s yard one day and managed to slay it with the rake. I’ve never heard of a dragon felled by any garden tool; I can see maybe a shovel, if it was sharp (and the dragon small), but a rake? Can you imagine how many times you’d have to scratch the dragon before you managed to draw blood? My rake can barely get all the leaves into a pile, but Super Landscaping Man apparently has one that will cut dragon hide.