I finally just split the documentary in half and re-rendered it for viewing on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8hbbyI8uCI
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRl7QYPHeUg
Totally coincidental that this is happening as rummors are surging on the internet about an iminent phish reunion!
I’ve added sound to my fractal video! Check it out on Youtube and let me know what you think. I am especially eager to get feedback. I’d like to fine tune it before submitting it to the Black Maria Film Festival (and possibly several others).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIu-3hmd-OI
This is also the HD version which should give you a better idea of what the ending looks like!
Jeremiah
The reason for this action is that the banks are trying to cover their own asses. Make no mistake they don’t give a crap about any of you! JP Morgan Chase alone had 5.1 Billion dollars in losses related to sub prime mortgages in this quarter alone and executives are scrambling to try and prevent further losses. Before you begin to feel bad for these banks please familiarize yourself with the sub prime crisis.
Sub Prime Review (you can skip this if you are very familiar with the sub prime scandal)
Sub Prime loans were predatory loans often pushed on people with aggressive sales tactics and in some cases (
These “sub prime” lenders however never had any intention of keeping your loan. While they were making fistfuls of cash on fees for every loan given out they were also bundling these loans together into equities equivalent to bonds and selling them to the big banks (the ones where you have your HELOC) They assuaged the banks fears and made these investments appealing by getting bond insurance companies to back the investments. Essentially they were sold as a risk free way to make tons of money.
Now you and I know there is no such thing as a free lunch, but apparently investment banking executives were convinced that this was the goose that laid golden eggs and jumped head first into these investments without doing the proper research. Now they are making the American people pay for their own mistakes.
YOUR HELOC IS FROZEN BECAUSE OF THEIR BAD JUDGEMENT!
That’s right they basically gambled money they should have been investing properly and are putting the squeeze on you when they lost their bet.
JP Morgan Chase(NYSE:JPM), Bear Stearns and the Federal Reserve
Now this is particularly offensive in the case of JP Morgan Chase (the nations third largest bank). You may or may not have heard that they recently bought Bear Sterns. Bear Stearns was a company that had invested hugely in these shady equities. And they went bankrupt because of it. Consequently JP Morgan Chase got to buy Bear Stearns for a steal! Not only did they get an excellent price but the American people guaranteed to cover JP Morgan Chase’s losses beyond a certain point. Well the Federal Reserve did. They put billions of tax payer dollars at risk by covering JP Morgan’s ass. So JP Morgan may very well reap huge rewards from their purchase and the tax payer will see none of those rewards even though our money covered JP Morgan’s ass.
Now what thanks do the American people get? A lockdown on our credit.
My Personal Story
6 months ago I went to Chase to obtain a HELOC to take advantage of low interest rates and consolidate student loans. 2 years ago my wife and I bought a house for 410,000 which we put a 120,000 down payment on. The house was appraised at that time to be worth $445000 but because it needed a new septic system they sold it to us for $410,000. Total in debt was just over $300,000. The tax appraisal came in at $415,000 (this determines property tax and is usually lower than the actual value of the home) So when I went into chase I was very surprised when they said that my home was only worth $380,000. It turns out they use an automated system to evaluate house prices called AVM (alternate valuation model). So we convinced them to authorize a drive by appraisal of our property. The drive by came back at $440,000 and they approved us for a $90,000 HELOC. That was less than 6 months ago. Within that 6 months our home was appraised for taxes at $430,000.
So now the squeeze is on chase and an executive decided to have all homes values evaluated again and to have credit lines reduced or frozen if the value was at all lower. Guess how they decided to evaluate the value of homes… That’s right AVM! So when their automeated computer appraisal came back at $394,000 The Froze my HELOC because my home had lost $46,000 in value.
Now this is complete Bullshit for several reasons. If you look at the numbers you will see that based on their automatic systems my home had actually increased in value by $14,000. This conforms with the increase in the Tax Appraisal ($15,000). Unfortunately for me the original AVM was not what was on the books. What was on the books was the appraisal from the actual human being that drove by my house. So they are comparing Apples to
My only recourse (or so I am told) is to pay $300-500 to get my home appraised! It does not matter to them that I have never missed a payment. It does not matter to them that I never took out more than $18,000 on the HELOC. It does not matter to them that in the six months I have had the HELOC I have paid it down to $2,000 an average of over $3000 a month in payments! It does not matter to them that a comparative Market analysis CMA shows a mean sale of $456,000 (another indicator that my home value has actually increase $15,000).
I don’t know what it is like trying to get a HELOC now a days but I my first choice will be to finish paying off my Chase HELOC close it. Then close all of my chase credit cards(also never been late on a payment). Finally I think Chase also bought my mortgage I would even consider paying the 400-500 dollars to refinance my mortgage with another company.
Of course the first raid options I looked at were the prepackaged items from Buffalo, Infrant and a couple of lesser known names (like Thecus)I dug up on Newegg.com. These were attractive options because they are pretty much idiot proof. In my initial stages of searching I was a little put off that I had to buy disks with the units however with a little bit of work I was able to find diskless versions of each of these. So I started digging into the specs. Most of these systems have pretty modest specs, they are not powerhouses as they do not need to be playing demanding games nor do they need to be able to serve files to thousands of people at once. Still I have to admit I am a performance geek so I carefully considered each spec and decided what would work best for me. First I looked at the drive format; I already had several Western Digital 500GB RE2 SATA II hard drives laying around so I wanted to take advantage of that performance. To my surprise Many of the prepackaged options were limited to SATA I (150MB/s) controllers!
This is the original reason why I decided to investigate building my own file server. Now I am pre disposed to DIY projects. I should mention that subsequent to my research several companies have come out with newer options that support SATA II. I also have a hardwired Gigabit Ethernet network in my home so and onboard 10/100/1000 Network card was required several of the newer products also have this. The Infrant ReadyNas Pro however does not come in a diskless version and the base version is $2000! It is nice to have such a small form factor device but when I already have my own hard drives $2000 is a little above my Price Range. I also wanted a solution that wasn’t necessarily limited to only 4 or 5 hard drives. Now had I been starting from scratch then maybe I would have considered the benefits worth the Price Tag. As things were though however, I ruled out prepackaged solutions as either not having the Specifications I was looking for or being too expensive.
So I decided to build my own box. It seemed like a great idea since most modern motherboards (including my own Mac Pro Motherboard although I don’t have access) include raid 5 functionality. This opens up the possibility of basing the raid directly out of the motherboards BIOS! My other option would be to use a software Raid solution; in particular I looked into Linux ext3 raid 5, Freenas and openfiler. I also looked at Resync and Time Machine as ways of doubling up my data.
In the next Part I will continue talking about hardware options I considered. I’ll follow that up with writing about Linux vs. FreeBSD/FreeNas vs. Openfiler and my discovery of ZFS. I’ll probably give ZFS it’s own section and follow up with a conclusion. If there is not any information in any section I do not touch on please leave a comment and I will be glad to amend a section to include what you are looking for:)
Lately I have been thinking a LOT about safeguarding my data. I like many Americans probably are keeping more and more important data digitally. I have to think it is natural to have an inherent mistrust for the longevity of digital data. Which means that I have to start seriously considering measures to safeguard my information. I currently have 4 Western Digital RE2 500GB drives in a 0+1 raid in my Mac Pro. I chose the RE2 because of it’s purported enterprise level design standards. 0+1 Protects me against drive failure but not against accidental data loss or overwriting, for that you need a redundant storage system that indexes files at certain points in time.
For instance at my work we have Veritas backing up versions of files at 12 AM and PM every day on a 4 week rotation which means you can roll back a file or folder to any 12 hour interval in the last 24 days! This is an awesome solution but really that much redundancy (potenntially up to 48 versions of a file) is only practical for a work enviroment where most files are Word and Excel files. Most home users will want to back up larger media files which do not change much over time.
So I looked at a number of options:
Resync, Raid 5, Time Machine, and finally ZFS. Unfortunately for me apple decided to disable raid 5 on the Mac Pro even though it is supported on the motherboard! Instead they want you to buy a $1K Raid Card, Forget about that! For a long time I considered some raid 5 implementation to be my best bet. In the next part of this article I will talk about the different variations of raid 5 solutions I looked at:)
So it has been a long time since I have written a blog. That’s OK because I think I could count my readership on one hand. I have been taking a lot of pictures lately of Hopewell Valley Central Highschool’s Boys Lacrosse team. Tyler is the JV/(part time Varsity) goalie. Check the Pictures out at this Link:
http://www.jdlphotovideo.com/Gallery/Photography%20Gallery/Events/Sports/Hopewell%20Valley%20Lacrosse%202008/index.html
or Just go to www.jdlphotovideo.com and click on the link on the front page (although it may not be there much longer). Next year when Tyler is the starting Varsity goalie you can expect to see pictures of at least every single home game!
Stay tuned for my next entry about sfegaurding your pictures!
I’ve updated the family photo albums! Also I am happy to announce that to the general public I will soon be offering 15% off of my prints through the end of the year! This is an initiative to increase sales, who knows I may actually have to files sales tax with NJ!
I also went to the first of Tyler’s indoor Lacrosse games now happening every Saturday to practice taking pictures. I thought I did a decent job for my very first time. The lighting stunk and I am self conscious about using a flash and distracting the players. Luckily I have an amazing lens that is good at coping with the low light. I will start posting the best of these pictures on the website in the events gallery. Eventually when Hopewell Valley starts their games I will be at least every home game taking pictures. I am hoping to start to expand my business into selling sports photographs to players and their families.
I am going to be updating the status on all of my art photographs! Some time this week they will no longer state that they are not yet ready for printing 
I am hoping that this combined with a 15% off holiday sales push will bolster my sales.
I’ll also be uploading more Family Photographs! Tyler and Sam from Halloween and lots of Thanksgiving pictures will be uploaded, including a whole section devoted to the family’s two newest photographers Molly and Riley Golski.
Tyler is also starting a Fall Lacrosse league. I plan on honing my sports photography skills at his fall games in preparation for shooting Hopewell Valley Lacrosse Games this spring!
In other news Sam Orlando (Tyler’s girlfriend) qualified for the world tournament for Irish Dancing after Placing 12th of 144 at Nationals! I hope this is right.
Great news.My combined domains: http://blog.jdlphotovideo.com http://www.jdlphotovideo.com http://www.fractalfilm.com have been receiving a phenomenal number of hits, around 500 a week. This may be laughable in comparison with a lot of websites but I think it’s pretty good for something that is less than a year old! Page views per unique hit are still under 2.0 though and I want to get that number up to 3-5 pages per unique hit.
I am very happy to announce that very soon I will be posting the rough draft of my fractal footage for my new upcoming piece on my website! I have finally edited out all the little jumps that were produced by the calculations well except for one. Which was impossible to edit out simple based on cutting frames. I probably notice it much more than anyone else will. The I had to struggle making a video that was high enough quality that the compression didn’t cause any major interference but that it was small enough for people to be able to view it over the internet. This was actually quite challenging but I eventually got something I was happy with. When you actually see the piece you will know why it was so hard! At the same time I hope that viewing it on the web produces even a fraction of the sensation of visual hyper stimulation it causes at better resolutions and bigger screen sizes. I have watched the video on my 1920×1080p 24 inch computer screen at it’s original 1080p definition and it is stunning, I can only imagine what it would be like on a theater screen! I’ll post again once it is up!