Liam

Well I've been waiting for this for a long time, but Flickr has finally introduced video! Now I just need to sort through all my old videos and maybe clean up a few and start uploading!

Here's a sample of things to come. :)

How awesome is this?!

So Steve is finally back from his epic cycling journey across New Zealand (incidentally, if you are interested - check out his blog for his day by day journal entries) and luckily we had a chance to swing by and see him and Jody this weekend before Steve shaves off his crazy beard. I'm not sure what Steve's original plan was when he set out on his journey, but after seeing a few photos of him just a few days / weeks into the trip, I was very impressed with the beard he had grown. I'm sure one of the reasons I was so impressed is because I definitely couldn't grow a beard anywhere near as impressive - even with twice or three times the amount of time, but I digress...

I encouraged him to keep it going, but sadly about a month (maybe more) into the trip he decided to shave it off. I expressed my disappointment and encouraged him to start again - this time without any trimming whatsoever. You see, at the time I was reading a book that Amy had given me for Christmas titled The Year of Living Biblically and the author had immersed himself into the bible, trying to follow it literally for a year. One of the rules was that he wasn't able to cut his hair (or shave his beard) and his beard was damn impressive! Anyways, I saw the same potential in Steve so I told him to go for it! And he did! You da man Steve!

I must say - it's even more impressive in person. Liam really liked it too - Steve even let him feel it which made him laugh. Maybe someday I'll get a chance to give it a try, but like I already said - I don't think I could come close to producing the face fungus that Steve managed in just a couple of months.

Welcome back Steve!

Looking at the picture to the right, it's pretty obvious that Liam was in need of a haircut - for the first time in his life. This past Saturday morning, he got one. Amy and I took him to First Choice Hair Cutters, in a little mini mall close to our place. Liam was very good during the entire haircut, not shedding even one tear. We were a bit surprised. He did keep the barber on her toes though, frequently turning his head unexpectedly. I didn't manage to get a picture of him at the barber shop, you see the damn batteries in the camera died before I could get a picture, but I did manage to do a couple of videos before the batteries died. I'll need to re-encode them so I can post them on here. Or maybe I'll just take a picture of the new haircut at home and be done with it.

Liam has started crawling! This video was taken the day he first started crawling. He has since gotten much faster. I resized the video using Popcorn, with some custom settings and the quality is pretty crappy. However - the file size went from 96 MB down to 2MB so I can't complain too much. If anyone has any suggestions for a good (mac) application for resizing videos, please let me know. I was considering purchasing Quicktime Pro to do the job.

EDIT (Apr 10, 2008): I've uploaded the video to Flickr and so I changed this post from the 'video' type to a simple blog post and am just embedding the video below. Much easier and cleaner.

My first attempt at posting a video here on my blog. Hopefully it works.

EDIT (Apr 11, 2008): I've uploaded the video to Flickr and am embedding it here instead of hosting it directly.