as ze frank likes to say:

flowers are the only things you can kill, wrap up in paper and give to someone without it being creepy.

for example: here’s some dead puppies. they’re red. irish setters. red means i love you.

in that regard: happy valentine’s day!
 

he’s also done a valentines day video last year, and check out his blog (note part 5)!

local time: 26.11.2005 19:38

fuer die deutsche version dieses posts, bitte auf “[blah blah...]” klicken!

ok, here are some photos from the tolga bat hospital, and from the trip to the reef.

and as a special goodie, i’ve uploaded this little proof, that i was NOT killed by the first private host in singapore, who would have taken over my identity.
(hi, dad ;-) )

videopost – please choose language below

[view video*]
english version (MPG, 20 sec, 1,77 MB)
german version (tyrolean dialect) (MPG, 20 sec, 1,77 MB)
* sorry, i just had to copy caroline’s idea of the banana-mic. besides, i didn’t want to buy a whole loaf of bread just for a 20-sec video…

 
[view photos: cairns photo update]

 
[lyrics quote of the moment]
it’s so beautiful here, she says
this moment now
and this moment now
vienna teng – recessional

[more...]

i never got to post this *here*, but there it is now:

in the last few months, every now and then i found some time to play with my JG-RC2 and i’m really content.

the final firmware isn’t available yet, but i’m fine with the preliminary one, so far. (that’s how i got it in the first place – the final product version is not available, so i ordered the beta-version. but only the firmware will be different in the final version – and it’s upgradeable.)

[more...]

remember the previous time-lapse project that i published?

all the pupae hatched about 3 weeks ago. actually, when the first one hatched on july 20th, i decided to slow down their final steps of development and caused a not so unusual (just think of today’s climate) …cold-weather period. ok, i put them in the fridge. they were not harmed, but didn’t hatch until i had the time to watch over them, two days later.

when i got home on friday, i quickly set up the equipment and placed the pupae in front of the camera. because there were 5 pupae and i didn’t know which one would hatch first, i had to take (bigger) overall-view photos and crop the interesting part later.

i had relocated the pupae onto a nearly planar twig when they were done pupating, so i could focus on all of them at once.

the whole process of one peacock butterfly (inachis io; tagpfauenauge) hatching only took about 14 minutes (including the unfolding of its wings), so it was at least three times more exciting to watch them hatch live.

i was shooting at a higher resolution (so i could get all of the pupae in the picture and still have detail) and the “temporal resolution” (interval: 4 seconds) was pretty high too, so although i had 5 pupae, only one video turned out the way i wanted…

 
here’s the video:

butterfly hatching (download video)

i also put up a few of the single photos as an overview:
[view photos: time-lapse, part 7: butterfly hatching]

i was just surfing around, and surfing on from there, … and then i found ellen degeneres’ website.
and then i surfed that site and discovered her public announcement, saying that children shouldn’t flush down their fathers’ fish, and i wanted to link to the file.

in the source code, there were lots of javascript-masking of the actual file, and in an html-comment, the following address was written down:
http://progressive.stream.aol.com/…/ellengreeting_dl.mov

i thought, “how nice, they made a little note for themselves and forgot to erase the real link!”, but i think this is actually a special video that ellen recorded for people who wanted to get the video directly.

 
here’s the link i wanted to show you in the first place:
http://progressive.stream.aol.com/…/ellenpsa_dl.mov

i love that woman’s dry sense of humor!!

 
i also found this in one of her tv interviews:

[quote of the day]

 

 

on saturday, i went by a huge field of stinging nettles, and i noticed that the peacock caterpillars (inachis io, tagpfauenauge) had already left their community and spread up, so each one would have their own plant.
this is usually a sign that it won’t take long until pupation, which i thought makes a great time lapse subject.

i collected a total of 14 caterpillars, plenty of their feeding plant (=stinging nettle, urtica dioica), and went home to set up a terrarium that would fit their needs.

it took me some time to get what i needed: there should be all but one spot where they *wanted* to pupate, because time-lapse recordings require very fixed settings. eventually, i came up with a way: i let there be only one horizontal element where they could hang themselves up, and shaded that part of the terrarium.
soon, the first one settled down, and i could set up the gear.

by the way: don’t assume that slippery glass would stop them from going anywhere – they just spread a thin carpet of silk-strands and go where *they* want.

[more...]

this is funny: go to http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/25.html and watch the video.

when watching it, try to count the total number of times that the people wearing white pass the basketball. do not count the passes made by the people wearing black.

AFTERWARDS, view the whole post. (please don’t spoil this!)
[more...]