Here’s a photo I took of a 1/2 pound jumbo cheeseburger and onion rings at The Depot in Jonesboro, AR using a Nikon D70 and Sigma 24-70mm, f/2.8 lens. Cassandra and crew at The Depot did a great job making the burger dressings look extra delicious. I can also say that their burgers taste as good as they look - it was probably the best burger I’ve had in Jonesboro.

I did a little fall spring cleaning on the blog tonight. I’m repurposing heyletsock.com, you know, kind of like the Terminator in T2…  I’m designing and hopefully launching a new site in the coming weeks, so I hope the cheeseburger holds everyone over for a little while longer.

Check out my newest toy. It’s called a Grypton and is made by Targus. It’s a cheaper (and less well-made) version of the Gorillapod, a “put your camera anywhere” style tripod. I picked up the knock-off Grypton at Wal-Mart over the weekend. It retails for about $10 whereas the Gorillapod of the same size is about $22. It’s rated to hold small cameras up to 9 oz. It does pretty well with my Kodak V570, but I wouldn’t really want to wrap it around tree branches on a windy day or anything.

Supposedly, it doesn’t perform near as well as the Gorillapod, but I’ve yet to try the real deal. I hear Gorillapod is filing a suit against Targus though. I also hear (or read, rather) the Grypton is too wussy to hold up a flash unit that takes 4 AA batteries, so go for the real thing if you are hanging multiple camera flashes off bridges or something, please.

I would definitely go Gorillapod if getting a larger size tripod of this type for a digital SLR or small video camera. I’ve had the Grypton fall off things a few times already and can only imagine what would happen with the larger version attached to a 3 pound camera.

The Grypton goes skittering across my car dash on turns, as the grip rubber on it doesn’t really do much in the way of gripping. Seeing as I was using two decks of playing cards and sticky tack to mount my camera in my car, I can’t complain too much though. I think I got my $10 worth.

The blog is back from the great beyond! Soon to be much more Abby Normal…

Let’s not forget Campbell’s is doing their part:

So is Yahoo!:

And Google:

And Facebook:

and by do their part, I mean they made some graphics…

What are YOU doing? I’m conserving energy by sleeping until noon.

Let me know if you see anyone else around the Internet celebrating Earth Day graphically.

I didn’t get a chance to post this before the fact, but Saturday I caught a rerun originally recorded in Fall of 2005 of Ryan Adams and the Cardinals on Austin City Limits, which airs on PBS. If you didn’t know, Ryan Adams is my favorite artist currently and I really enjoyed the episode. I looked for this airing on youtube, but wasn’t able to find anything. So, here is a clip of my favorite song of their’s from an appearence on David Letterman:

Also, Austin City Limits is awesome. I recently went to their site and read up on the history of the show. It’s been around for over 33 years and is filmed a KLRU television studio located on the University of Texas campus. I never could decide if it was recorded in a studio or not because of the amazingly real background of the city of Austin. It is indeed done indoors, the backdrop is based on a photograph taken from South Austin and has been in use since 1982…

Here is a link to a short behind the scenes video of what it takes to produce an episode of the show.

There’s nothing quite like seeing a new link in your Gmail header. As long as it’s on Gmail, preceded by the word “New!” and colored red, it really doesn’t matter what it is, the internet gets excited.

Today’s new link introduces a sly little feature called Gmail Custom Time.

So what is Gmail Custom Time? Well, going against all things we learned in Back to the Future, it allows one to send a back-dated e-mail as far back as April 1, 2004. They can arrive as unread or read, oh, and you only get ten a year. Missed sending in that term paper or forgot to send Aunt Edna an e-card for her birthday? No problem.

Nice April Fool’s prank, right? You might want to check out the link today before it doesn’t exist…you know, like Michael J. Fox in that photo…

The testimonials are great.

“I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the ‘first’ to respond to a co-worker’s ‘first-come, first-serve’ email. Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort of knows I used Custom Time on this one, but I’m denying it.”

Robby S., Paralegal

Thursday I helped out selectshots.com with a fashion photo shoot for A Formal Affair, Batesville’s bridal and formal wear store. I’ll post more on the shoot tomorrow. Pictured above is me after the shoot with a sign I found that was lying in a park on Main St.

It’s a Flip Video Ultra - a super portable, super simple video camera. I heard about it today while checking out some footage shot at SXSW this past week. It uses flash memory and AA batteries and hooks to your computer via a flip-out USB connector. There is a lesser line branded only “flip video”, but in the ultra line there are two models - a 1GB 30 minute version and a 2GB 60 minute version. The ultra has a higher video bit rate (4.5 Mbps) and is better calibrated for low lighting than the original flip. The ultra also has a tripod mount unlike the base line.

It produces a good quality video (640 x 480 res) in MPEG-4 AVI format,. It’s plenty good enough for youtube, video blogging and catching things on-the-go. It’s much better quality than a camera phone with video and better than most digital camera’s video functions. For complete specs, check out this page of their site.

Obviously, this is made to be portable and extremely easy to use and cannot rival miniDV cameras and the like. If you are looking for anything of remotely pro quality this is not it. If you are looking to replace the lame video function of your cell phone or point-and-shoot digital camera this could be the way to go.

It looks to be much better than the video function of my Kodak EasyShare V570 and easier to use. I have to turn the Kodak on, switch to video mode, then record. It produces .mov files which I have to convert to AVI before I can do anything with them unlike a Flip Video which already produces AVI files. There is way more noise in the night video than I would like (what’s the video work for that…artifacts?) in my Kodak. I don’t usually even have my point-and-shoot Kodak with me for still pics, I just use my iPhone. I think the combo of camera phone and a pint-size video camera would work better for me. Check out some sample footage from the flip here. Click on “perfect picture quality”.

Some cons of the Flip Video would be that it’s memory isn’t expandable and it only has a 2x digital zoom. Also, if you were recording without access to a device for offloading footage, it would fill up fast. A microphone jack would be nice, but that’s probably over-complicating a simple device. I also checked out the RCA EZ201 Small Wonder, which is pretty much the same thing except the EZ201 takes an SD card to expand it’s memory and has a flip out screen so you can view what you are recording if you are in front of the camera. Makes the RCA seem better, right? After reading many reviews I’ve found that everyone that has tried both seems to like the Flip better for it’s higher video quality.

The 2GB 60 minute Flip Video Ultra is $142.80 (black is $149.99) on amazon.com with free shipping, on special for $139.99 at target.com with shipping not included (it’s available online only at Target) and $179.99 on the official site, theflip.com , shipping included.