Gelling, Cutover to Camtasia, three days to fill

The gel infused foam mattress we ordered showed up Wednesday night.  We got around to putting it on the bed last night.  Although my old mattress was quite old I was hesitant to switch it up.  Despite it’s age it was still delivering me a comfortable night of sleep.  The mattress we got is the same model as we have had in the guest room for a couple years, a 12 inch thick gel infused memory foam.

These mattresses come rolled up in a vacuum sealed bag.  Setting them up is kind of fun.  As soon as you cut the bag there is a loud sucking sound as air rushes back in to restore the mattress to it’s normal dimensions.  I thought it might make for interesting YouTube video but I don’t think my hopes were realized.

I didn’t really care if the video footage was less than spectacular, it gave me a chance to mess around with my new video editing software, Camtasia.  I stumbled across it after doing a Google search for Movie Maker alternatives.  It seemed very clear that you get what you pay for when it comes to video editing software.  Although Camtasia does cost some money it won’t break the bank like Adobe Premier will.

After downloading the demo and messing with it for a little bit I could quickly tell this was exactly what I was looking for.  It lets you do professional style edits and effects in an intuitive manner.  In the mattress video I just threw some random things in there for testing like music, an overlay and transitions just because.  In addition to being a great video editor it also has strong built in screen capture support meaning doing things that involve capturing action on the pc is super easy.  I look forward to seeing how I can improve my video production moving forward using the software.

I have one of those much anticipated three day weekends coming up.  I don’t have a big formal project on the books but several small ones instead.  There are big mulch sales this weekend so I am having Cindy buy 20 bags that I can spread in the orchard to freshen it up.

My new Tacoma recently crossed 1000 miles.  Even though I believe the first official oil change is not supposed to be until 10k miles thanks to the synthetic 0w-20 oil it uses, I want to drain and refill it now.  Old school practices are the first 1000 miles is the break in period for a motor which has the potential to create minute metal shavings which could negatively affect the engine down the road, hence my desire to drain/refill it.  With modern engines this may be absolutely unnecessary but I am going to do it anyway for my own peace of mind.

Finally Cindy and I want to reduce the height of the perch in the coop.  Although the chickens have no problem getting up to the top of the roughly 5 foot high perch they do have issues getting off it.  Most of the birds do an awkward kamikaze-like wing flapping dive off the top, awkwardly landing on the ground below.  With the size of some of the chickens like our resident fatty Cocoa we are concerned that the impact from coming down that high could eventually cause injury.  We hope to cut the height of the perch by a couple feet.

The small projects will hopefully not be overly time consuming as we would like some time to just chill.  I would love to have some time to dig into Overwatch in a meaningful manner.  We also are planning to get out to see the new X-men movie, it looks epic.