Saturday, March 15, 2008

Media Magnate

Brian's Garage Workshop is stepping outside the garage (literally) to give you our first streaming video. Well, its really just a cool time lapse of me building a swingset for my kids, but I DO use wood, so it counts.

Since this is my first time doing this, I'm going to try a few different services to see which is the best.

Here we go...



...and heres the blogger player...

[removed. its crappy]

And i suppose we'll try Blip TV as well...



and hires..



another attempt at hires...



For those that are curious, this was shot with a Nikon D200 SLR and 18mm lens. one exposure was taken every 12 seconds and the pictures were simply strung together at 15 frames per second making 1 second of video time = 3 minutes of realtime. It compressed ~6 hours of working time into 2 minutes. I think i might try this technique in the shop when i am going to be out there a full day working on a project.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Skynet is self aware

Hi all. I came to a realization today thanks to quasi-anonymous commenter David (aka runningwood).

I was sitting in a meeting at work when a mysterious email came across my handheld device. It said "Anonymous has commented on your blog." I had only had one other comment in the entire history of my blog and figured that one came from somebody happening across my little corner of the internet by happenstance, or perhaps with the help of the "next (random) blog" feature at the top of all blogger pages.

I read David's comment and thought - "holy crap, people are actually reading this thing. I dont know how they found me, but they found me." then i read further on davids comment and he said he learned of my site from THe Wood Whisperer.

"cool" i thought. I had used this site as 'my website' when commenting on Marc's blog in the past. "somebody must have clicked on my name in one of the comments and found it" i thought as my meeting dragged on past 6pm.

A little more digging and i come to find that I was listed on the TWW Network webpage as a full on amatur woodworking blogger. imagine my surprise - i guess Marc is really on top of the whole woodworking blogger thing. I have been up there for a month almost and nobody bothered to tell me. (thanks for the heads up, Marc...)

Well, since people are actually paying attention i suppose i should be a little more diligent in putting up content. Here is an explination of why things have been slow around here for about 3 weeks...

1) I am in full on finishing mode. blogging about finishing sucks. I take all my pics with my cameraphone and try as it might, it really cant discern between wood that is fresh off the planer vs. wood that has been sanded to 320.

2) I have had to do some actual work at my job the last 3 weeks. this cuts into my blogging time as i was spending a couple hours a day writing about furniture-building instead of tending to my spreadsheets. I will hire someone tomorrow to do the spreadsheets so i can get back to this site.

3) I have been saving up for a massive finishing post that takes you through the process on the hourglass table from start to finish - it seems to flow better this way.

Here is a quick update in advance of the big finishing post. I pre-finished all the pieces BEFORE glue up on this one. this is my first time trying this and it worked pretty good. all the major components are more or less through their full treatment and the table is glued together and i am afixing trim over the next few days.




Here is the most recent pic. the thin pieces of wood you see lying on the table are the edge banding for the plywood shelf and for the underside of the apron.

I am having some cupping issues with the top, but i will address those in a future post.

thanks to everyone for reading.

-Brian