Projects Possible

What’s could be worse than forcing your friends to watch family slides of your vacation?  How ’bout putting those slides to music and making them available for the entire world to view?   I was cleaning up one of my old computers and found a Windows Movie I made that is a compilation of pictures from a 2004 visit to Yellowstone.  The piano is by a musician named Dax Johnson.  I think you can find his CDs online.

This trip was my last extended trip to the Park.  I’ve been back a few times for a day or two but nothing of any great length.  I really miss it sometimes.  I think I need to add a return to my to do list.  I have a few books that I would like to read and the overlook at Artemesia geyser is just calling to me.  

I hope you enjoy the 7+ minute video.  I assure you it is much better than having me invite you over for a slide show that could go on for hours.  As my wife would say… Once you ‘ve seen one hole in the ground bubble up… why would want to see another?  Click on the Write a Comment link below and let me know your thoughts.

Loading...

Previously on Projects Possible I posted information about the Live Streaming webcam at Old Faithful geyser.  It was actually a video link at the bottom of that post that connected you to the live feed.   Well as it turns out that live feed link is no longer valid and to try to make the camera more viable they have created an official link which will periodically time out and can not be loaded directly into the windows media player. 

The National Park Service now has a web page dedicated to the live, full-motion, streaming webcam.  You can get there by going to: http://www.nps.gov/yell/photosmultimedia/yellowstonelive.htm.  From this page you will be able to Launch the camera, get the transcript of the audio portion of the feed, get help from the Frequently Asked Questions section, and find out about Cannon’s involvement with the camera.

I have included the link below to the camera which will open in a POPUP windows on this page.

Launch Old Faithful Streaming Video

 I’m a tinkerer… and my blog is no exception…there is always a project that is happening.

If you are a regular reader you have probably seen many things changing and then changing back again… Since I like to tinker with things I don’t expect this will go away… What I do hope to accomplish soon are the following…

• Settle in on a theme… Wordpress is my blog of choice… now I just need to make sure I know how I want it to look.   (I’m thinking it is going to be K2 but I am struggling getting the sidebars to work the way that I want them to work.)
• Fine tune the sidebars to include some dynamic changing content as well as some standard fare and navigation
• Build a Deep Lake page… Deep lake for those of you that do not know is the location of our Lake home… Some items I want to include on this PAGE would be the webcam images - 2 webcams now,  an image gallery or two of lake related things, and the weather station data.
• A Yellowstone page…or more specifically a Geysers of Yellowstone page.  I want to put the single cam image there as well as the streaming image so that they are quick and easy to get to.  I will also include the image gallery and a few links.  (A great book that I’ve carried around (and read and referenced as well) for years is The Geysers of Yellowstone by T. Scott Bryan.)
• More regular blog postings… Since this blog covers the things I work on, ponder and enjoy there should be no lack of content… 

Keep your eyes posted… and if you have any K2 “tweaking” experience let me know… I have quite a few questions.

As a Montana native born and raised just a few hours from Yellowstone National Park I don’t think I really appreciated what we had.   I remembered going to Yellowstone as a kid.  I also remember my “Landform” class in high school that had us visit the park for its geologic wonders as an end of year trip.  It wasn’t until I had graduated highschool and decided to accept a summer job with the park concessionaires that I really fell in love with the park but more importantly I fell in love with the geysers.  I worked at Old Faithful each of my summers in college and between 1982 and 2004 I would say I probably only missed visiting Yellowstone during the summer on 5 or 6 occasions and I made up for those by staying longer in the years that I did get to go.

My weeks in the park were predominately spent watching the geysers… for hours on end I would sit at the same thermal feature and watch the subtle changes that led up to the eruption.  And with each year and with each thermal feature I would learn something new and notice changes in behavior from prior years.     I think it was my wife that told me that it was boring and didn’t understand how I could watch a hole in the ground with boiling water for hours in hope and anticipation of an eruption.   Over the years and after meeting many other “geyser gazers”  it became quite apparent to me that we come in all shapes, sizes, colors and commitments… There are gazer purists where everything is “black or white” and intervals and durations are tracked to the closest second.  There is also the other extreme with the casual observer who thought the eruption was pretty cool and if he happened across another one he would sit and wait.   I would guess that most “gazers” are somewhere between the two extremes.

When I can’t be in the park I rely on what others have to say about the features and their observations.   The Internet has helped this tremendously with websites like GOSA (Geyser Observation and Study Association) , and email lists that keep me updated.  I have also found the webcam to be invaluable… You can see below the first image is what we’ve had for many years… clicking on it will bring you to the page that updates every 30 seconds or so…. but if you have the bandwidth I recommend you click on PLAY in the media player… A live image from the boardwalk at Old Faithful will begin.   I’m not sure who has control of this camera but it has incredible zooming capability and they can zoom right up to the boardwalk at Lion…they can also direct this camera down basin so you can see the steam clouds of Daisy, Grand, Giant, etc…

 Enjoy and if you have other links that might be of interest or comments let us know!!!

Loading...