Mark your calendars (if you’re keeping track at home).  On August 12th, 2011 my will was finally broken and I have become a mini-van owner.  This post-dad point of view is 100% on-board with a mini-van and the lifestyle that it promises.  Mini-van’s are all about convenience and comfort.  They’re all about capacity and doors that open themselves with the push of a button.  They’re all about cup holders and arm rests and tinted windows.  They are about incrementally improving the family travel experience.

Just like last time, this is a new era.  An era that I fully admit that I resisted before but have come to completely embrace.  Next time I’m thinking about taking a stand on the topic, I’ll just remember this humbling moment when I waffled.

Again, if you’re interested in the technical side of things, I decided to give Kdenlive a spin this time, creating the entire clip with that software.  It is yet another outstanding video editor that has come to Linux recently – and I am thoroughly impressed with its capabilities.  It’s definitely got more of a learning curve than OpenShot, but it’s still reasonably intuitive.  I found that it is better at handling Pan & Zoom type effects (Ken Burns style) than OpenShot, with a much smoother result.  However, tiling photos and video is still something that I’ve found difficult to do – and has resulted in several crashes.  I eventually gave up on that effort.  The title generator is not as snazzy as OpenShot either.  But it seems to be snappier, and renders on the fly better than OpenShot.  I’m really torn between the two and may ping pong between them until I can decide which I like best.

July is going to be a much bigger video.  Until next time…

This was taken a few months ago… but still pretty adorable in my opinion.

Alright, that’s all you get for today.  Back to work.  Until next time.

I’m away from my girls for the first time since Claire was born, which is a big milestone in itself.  I underestimated how much it would tug at the heartstrings to leave Suzy and Claire behind for this relatively short jaunt to Asia.  As I kissed Suzy and Claire goodbye, I held back the tears and tried to steady my voice as I told them I loved them and that I would be back in a week.  Just a few weeks earlier, I didn’t quite think I’d be this emotional, but as the moment drew near I thought about all of the missed evenings with Claire and dinners with Suzy.  And don’t tell Suzy this, but I even will miss changing diapers in the middle of the night.   Sigh.  I do love my girls so much.  To make matters worse, all of the movies on the flight over to Korea were “themed” tear-jerkers.  Great.  Stupidly, I sat and watched these movies, descending further into my pit of despair.

Before leaving the house for the airport, Suzy, Claire and I did some last minute testing of Skype.  I was unsure about the microphone setup with Linux, and so I attempted to switch to Suzy’s laptop instead.  I’m not sure why I ever doubted setting it up on Linux, because it seems to be working just fine, whereas on her Windows XP laptop we can’t seem to get the video working correctly.  Chalk one up to Ubuntu.  The real test will come when we finally are able to get a real video-call going.  Unfortunately, they’ll either have to be super-late calls (after midnight here), to catch her early in the morning.  Or they’ll have to be early morning for me (late afternoon for Suzy).  I still find it pretty darned amazing that we will be able to see each other and talk in real time all the way on the other side of the globe (just about).  It’ll be nice to start the day here with a little reminder of home to take the edge off .

My live view of Suzy and Claire from Asia.

UPDATE: And yes, I posted this after returning from the continent.  Too busy to actually post in Asia…