This past weekend I was back down in Austin in what has started to become my annual Labor Day trip. Austin is a great and inviting city that is growing a lot.
Dallas skyline from the Hyatt Regency Hotel
I stayed at the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Dallas over the 4th of July holiday last week. Here’s some photos and video taken from there.
Solar Impulse at DFW Airport
Wednesday I was able to go over to DFW and check out the Soler Impulse plane. The plane was in Dallas as part of it’s cross country tour in preperation for an attempt to fly around the world with a solar powered plane in 2015. There is more info about the project at solarimpulse.com
Timelapse of the Downtown Dallas Skyline
This timelapse was shot from the Omni Hotel in Downtown Dallas. I used a GoPro Hero2 since I forgot to bring my intervalometer for my Nikon camera.
Carrollton’s Festival at the Switchyard
Photos from the third annual Carrollton Festival at the Switchyard
Last Saturday was the third annual Festival at the Switchyard in Historic Old Downtown Carrollton which has become an event that I look forward to each year.
Videofest Expanded Cinema
This year marked the 25th anniversary of Videofest and to start off the fest that was held this year at the Dallas Museum of Art was a program called “Expanded Cinema.”
Woot Arduino Printer
I recently bought the Ardunio inventors kit from Sparkfun to play around with the Arduino and I’ve been looking for a project to make with it when I saw DangerousPrototypes Thermal Twitter Printer based on their web platform. I thought that I could build upon that and use the Arduino and add and LCD to it.
Enter the finished product
It uses the Arduino, Arduino Ethernet Sheild, a serial enabled LCD, and thermal printer from Sparkfun. It works by scraping a couple of twitter rss feeds and outputting the results. The LCD parses the @wootoff twitter account and formats the results to start with the price. It checks for updates about every minute. In my next version I’d like to add a last call notification to the display.
The printer works in a simpler function and pulls tweets from the @wootchatter account that are also displayed on Woot’s community forum. I use several variables to save the last printed tweet and check it each time that the rss feed is parsed to make sure that it is not printing the same tweet every minute. In the next version I’d like to make some better formatting of the tweets to make them more readable and stand out more.
Best of SF Photos
Arcade Fire at Gexa Energy Pavilion
Last night I went to see Arcade Fire play at the Gexa Energy Pavilion that used to be called the Superpages.com Center , the Smirnof music center before that and the Coca-cola starplex amphitheater before that. This was the first time that I ever went there to see a show and walking around kinda gives me the feeling of being at the state fair with many of the same iconic fair concessions being deep-fried all around the venue. The stormy weather that rolled through the area just before the gates opened kept most people off the lawn area and under the mostly water proof roof that covers the seats at the Gexa Energy Pavilion.
In the last six years since Arcade Fire last played in Dallas at the much smaller venue Trees they have received several Grammy awards and have seen an explosion in popularity with their 2006 album Neon Bible and their 2010 followup The Suburbs. Opening acts for Arcade Fire were Schmillion and Okkervil River; both from Austin. I didn’t hear much of Schmillion but I really liked Okkervil River and will be getting their new album when it comes out on May 10th.
Arcade Fire’s set was an energetic line up of the hits that the crowd would riot if they didn’t play and a nice mix of deeper cuts and newer songs off the latest album. There really wasn’t a “time to go pee” song in their lineup and carried the energy through their final song Wake Up from their 2004 debut album.
Arcade Fire lead singer Win Butler told stories about missing ‘warm rain’ that he remembered from growing up in Huston being reminded by the warm rain that blew through Saturday afternoon during sound check. He also talking about going to a French restaurant with his wife and band member Regine and seeing Dallas Mavs player Tyson Chandler coming in to eat dinner and asking the waitress about the dishes that they served then saying ‘no thanks’ and walking out. Who doesn’t love a good crepe?