I have been looking for work in the LA area for a while now. There’s just more opportunities here for what I want to do. I applied for a job as a video editor in Beverly Hills on Monday, May 7. Then on the following Tuesday I got an email back from them expressing interest and asking when I could start. We have been emailing back and forth working out details of the job since then, which led up to phone calls. The job is editing marketing videos for a New York Times best selling author full time in their Beverly Hills office. While I was in Portland talking to them about the job they requested that I edit a couple videos for them. First I shot and edited a quick introduction video of myself greeting them and then I edited a promo video for them. I uploaded the videos to a private link on my website so they could see that I have the skills to perform the job requirements. After negotiating salary I got the job offer on Friday at 5:30PM.

After that I spent the weekend packing all my stuff in Portland and shutting off my utilities and whatnot. Then I spent Mother’s day at Mom’s for a few hours. I was tired from packing and little sleep so I tried to nap at moms. It was hot so I couldn’t really nap for long, so I went back home to finish packing.

When I got home I called my friend Heather Duffy because I told her last Wednesday that I might be moving down to LA. When I told her about this last week she got really excited and said I could sleep on her couch until I found a place. I had let her stay at my place in the past when she lived in Hawaii and visited Portland. Turns out her BF pays her rent (no surprise) and in typical male controlling nature he didn’t want me staying there. I think he’s married with kids because he has his own place and also pays rent for Heather’s place, which seems more like his bachelor pad now that I think about it. Then Heather Duffy was being very rude on the phone to me saying how I never helped her years ago when she was trying to get out of Hawaii but how she has been willing to overlook that this whole time. Ummm… she was shacked up with some other dude at that time that was paying all her bills and she got him to pay her way out of Hawaii. I ain’t no sugar daddy. I wonder what would of happened if Heather told her BF that one of her girlfriends was moving to LA and need to stay on the couch…

On Monday I called around in Culver City and got a storage space. Then I arranged for some movers to move my stuff into my storage space on Wednesday. I also reserved a Motel for 9 days, which I hope will be enough time for me to find a place. I already had this plan for a while and have secured the funds for this. I never counted on staying at Heather’s couch because in all honestly Heather Duffy is someone that you can not count when that say they’ll do something for you as evident by this occurrence.

The drive down to LA was great. I was all packed and ready to go on Monday around 1:30PM but my cat ran off for the day. It was a really hot on Monday – like 85 degrees in Portland. My cat was just sleeping under a shady bush all day. Another funny thing happened. When I was outside looking for my cat an old friend from Jr. High drove by and I called her. She stopped and we chatted for a while and I found out that she actually lives across the street from my house. I’m always so busy that I never had a chance to even look at any of my neighbors in the 6 years I lived there. Turns out she’s a MD so I told her to give me her card and that I would contact her to talk about building a website for her practice in a little while once I’m settled down here in LA. When it got cooler outside the cat came back home looking for food. That was around 9:30 and I got on the road headed to LA then.

I stopped once about 200 miles from Portland to rest. I was exhausted from packing and moving all my stuff. I was only able to sleep for about 4 hours as I tried to lay across the seat in the U-Haul

Then I drove the rest of the way down to LA and only stopped for gas. Actually I had to stop at a rest stop a few times to get coffee and Red Bull because I was really tried while driving. There were a few times where I dozed off at the wheel and woke up when I hit those sleep bumpers on the shoulder.

I arrived at my Motel in Hollywood at around 6:00PM. Traffic wasn’t bad at all. I never slowed down from the highway speed limit due to traffic and I never waited longer than one light cycle at any light. I seen a little bit of traffic on some of the streets that were headed the other direction that I was going, but it didn’t look that bad at all. t think the traffic factor that everyone is always mentioning might be a myth. Time will tell. I’m thinking about getting a motorcycle again anyway so I can zip through traffic.

The people in Hollywood seem really great. That’s another thing everyone in Portland was warning me about… “watch out for bad people down there.” Well everyone seems very friendly and nice. A few assholes, but that’s expected. Not really any bums or crackheads or anything. It’s all nice people walking their dogs and whatnot.

Parking sucks though… I had a car dolly on the U-Haul so it’s impossible to find a parking spot that will fit the entire vehicle and the dolly. I wanted to return the dolly to U-haul today but they were closed when I called. I ended up parking the u-haul like a mile down the road from the Motel. It’s a nice, well lit neighborhood though. There was a commercial building with signs that said the area was being monitored by video. Also while I was at my U-Haul I was trying to fit this bigger padlock lock that I bought but it wasn’t fitting. I was messing around with the lock for a while and people were walking by looking at me suspicious – like I might be trying to break into the U-Haul. One man that walked by even approached me and asked if that was my truck and I explained that it was and that I was just trying to get the lock on it. That’s just another example of the good people that I’ve encountered here so far. I was worried at first that someone might try to steal the car dolly off the U-Haul, but there isn’t any crackheads in this area. Felony flats in Portland is way worse than it is here.

Oh yeah… earlier when I was on i-5 headed to LA there was one area I was driving at and I didn’t notice how low I was on gas. I was on the red mark on the gauge. Then right after I noticed that I was low on gas I see a sign that says the next gas station isn’t for 31 miles!!! I was pretty sketched out. I thought for sure I would run out of gas, but by some miracle I made it to the next gas station.

I want to mention really quick how sketched out my cat was during the trip down. I put him in a crate in the back of the U-Haul. He cried very loud when he was in the cab and it was very distracting. There was no way I could do that for a 20+ hr. drive. I could hear him crying when I first put him in the back, but later when I stopped for gas I didn’t hear him crying. Poor guy must of cried himself to sleep. I couldn’t see him from the door because it was dark, but when I opened to door to make sure he was alright you could hear him kind of groggle as if he just woke up and then he’d start crying again. I tried to use some products that would help calm him down during the trip. I don’t think those products worked though. He’s doing much better now that we’re in the Motel. They’re pet friendly here too so that’s good and they didn’t charge extra for the pet which is another bonus.

For the move I spent about…

$1K on the U-haul and car dolly.
$750 in gas
$700 hotel for 9 days
$150/month storage
about $150 on misc stuff like cat litter, calming products for the cat, padlock for the U-Haul, vice grips, etc.

I paid rent until the end of the month at my place in Portland but I told the landlord that he could clean it up and rent it out before then end of the month since I gave him such short notice on moving. He was cool about it and agreed to return my security deposit.

I haven’t slept very much the last few days. I already packed my bed and couch into the U-Haul on Sunday so I just grabbed the couch cushions and put them on the floor and slept with that as my bed Sunday night. Then on Monday night I napped across the front seat on the U-Haul all crouched up in a ball from about 1:30-4:30 at a rest stop. My pillows were being used as padding for fragile items in the U-Haul so I couldn’t use a pillow the last few days. I’ve been using a bunched-up towel as a pillow. I am so tired and sore from the move. Fatigued from lack of sleep and physically beat from moving everything. I lost my voice from talking to so many people non-stop since last week and I have blisters on my feet and bruises all over. I also have about 6 hangnails. haha. I’m sure I’ll sleep really good tonight on a bed but I have to get up around 7:30 because the parking meter for the car starts at 8AM.

It hasn’t been a tour for me since I’ve gotten here. I’ve been literally running around trying to get all of my affairs in order since I arrived in Hollywood at 6PM and it’s 3:30AM now.

Tomorrow I need to drop the car dolly off at U-Haul in Santa Monica. Then I need to get the storage facility all setup in Culver City. The movers are meeting me at 1PM at the storage space to help me move. I’m paying them something like $90/hr for both of them to help me move the stuff into storage. The storage closes at 6PM so I hope that they can move everything into storage in 5 hrs. After the truck is unloaded I need to return it to U-Haul and then I’ll pick my car up from U-Haul that I left there when I brought the car dolly to them in the morning. Then I’m going to come back to the Motel and spend the rest of the day looking for apartments to rent on Craigslist. I hope I can setup a few appointments for Thursday evening to look at some places. I start my new job on Thursday morning. The hours at the new job are from 8AM until 5PM with an hour long lunch break. I will also use the lunch break at work to look for apartments. My number one goal now is to find an apartment to move into. I might try to find a room to rent that’s cheaper than my Motel and keep my valuables in storage. I just worry that my cat might now do well in a shared house. He’s kind of anti-social and I could see something happening where a roommate would leave the door open or something and the cat would run off all scared and get lost or ran over or something.

As far a sight-seeing today while I was literally running around I saw the stars on the street, which is like a block from my hotel. Sunset strip and Santa Monica blvd is just a few blocks down the road from me. I saw the Hollywood sign up in the hills too. I seen a bunch of palm trees and I even saw a big huge cockroach walking down the sidewalk. Most of the streets only have signs for one street, not the cross street. WTF?!? So I used location search on the iPhone for most of the day, but later on I was figuring out the routes around the area so I could run around town without even looking at the map by the end of the day. That reminds me… I dropped my phone tonight and it cracked the screen. You can still see the entire screen, but there’s a few big cracks that go all the way down the phone now. Bummer

Well that’s it for now. I am super-tired and I’m going to bed. I hope everyone enjoyed reading this update and I want to thank all my friends that have been showing their support for my efforts. Please “Like” this blog post and/or comment on it so I know you read it.

Thanks again! I love you all and I’ll keep posting updates to let everyone know how I’m holding up down here.

Until next time…

It’s been a very busy week for me. I’ve been finishing up a few projects here in Portland while I’ve also been corresponding with a New York Times best selling author in LA about a steady position as a video editor for their office in Beverly Hills. After a week-long negotiation I finally accepted a job offer. So I’m moving to California next week.

The salary is acceptable and I have some great friends down there that are offering me to stay at their place until I get settled in. I’m all packed up and ready to leave Portland. I’ll miss everything about Portland, especially the people, and I hope that everyone stays in touch with me. Here’s a little spice reel below inspired by Joe Muth’s comment on my fb post. See you guys on the South side!

I got a killer deal on this lens brand new for about $850 back in December but I’ve been very busy working on other projects so I haven’t had much time to shoot. I did a couple photoshoots with it using the 40D but I sold that camera body and upgraded to a better body so now I’m shooting a series of macro photos for my photo album.

Shooting macro takes a little getting used to. The lens is prime so there’s no zoom, but when you focus the lens the image actually zooms in the viewfinder. So you have to fiddle with the focus while you move the camera closer and farther from the subject until you find a sweet spot of filling the image in the frame while getting a good focus on the image. Also the focus plane of the lens at 2.8 is very thin. You only have a few millimeters of area that is in focus in the image so you have to compose the shot with this consideration. You’ll also need a lot of light to get a good shot. If you want to shoot macro photography then I recommend using tripod and a remote shutter release too.

I will be shooting some more macro shots soon to complete the up-close series I’m working on. It’s so much fun to shoot macro and it really puts things into perspective in everyday life. Now I look at everything differently and think of how even some of the smallest things would look if I take a macro photo of it. Hopefully this post will inspire others to get out and start experimenting with macro photography.

Please contact me if you are interested in having me do a photoshoot or provide photography lessons for you.

When I received an email form Apple on January 7 informing me that my replacement iPod nano had shipped there was a new serial number for the replacement iPod nano included in the correspondence. I checked the serial number at that time to confirm and it appeared to be a 6th generation iPod nano.

Now that I have the new iPod and I never used the old one I’m using this new nano as a stylish watch. I already use the iPhone for pretty much everything media based on the go. I use bluetooth headphones and the wifi on the iPhone. There doesn’t seem like much appeal to the nano other than a watch. The nano doesn’t have bluetooth or wifi and it can’t play videos back, which is most of what I use on my portable gadgets. I have an iPod shuffle for summer workouts and whatnot, but I still prefer the bluetooth headphones w/ the iPhone vs. the wire flopping around while I’m working out with the headphones on the shuffle.

So I headed to the Apple store to see if they had the Hex vision watch band in stock to purchase for my new iPod nano. If so then I may end up having a pretty cool watch for next to nothing. Turns out they did have the band I was looking for in stock. It was $69.95 for the band but it’s really nice and I like it a lot. It’s made with premium stainless steel. There are additional links included for the band and you can go to any jeweler to have them fit it for you in just a few minutes for a couple dollars if you need to. Mine was a little loose so I sent to a jeweler in the mall and paid them $5 to have them fit the watch for me. The iPod nano clips into the base of the watchband and holds the device securely. It fits nicely and all of the connections are still accessible as well. It looks like something I could wear either with jeans and a t-shirt or a suit and tie.

The timeline of sending out the original replacement request to the time of receiving the new 6th generation iPod nano at my door is as follows:

December 21 – service requested
December 23 – received box to send original iPod back to Apple
December 27 – sent original iPod back to Apple
December 31 – Apple received my original iPod nano
January 6 – Apple shipped 6th gen. iPod nano to me
January 10 – I received the 6th gen. iPod nano

It seems like a pretty quick turnaround. Others on the Apple discussion forums have been stating much longer turnaround times since the iPod nano replacement program went into effect starting November 11, 2011. At first Apple sent out replacement 1st generation iPod nanos. Apparently there were many more replacement requests than Apple anticipated, and speculation beginning around December 20 suggested that Apple began sending out 6th generation iPod nanos as replacements to compensate the additional requests.

So it might be a good idea to replace your 1st generation iPod nano if you have one. Even if you don’t want to replace it with the new 6th generation iPod nano you should still get rid of your 1st generation iPod nano. The risk of the device exploding and starting a fire is too great. Better safe than sorry.

The song is titled A Page That Was Torn. The song is a single track that I wrote around 2004 about two people that have parted ways and several years later one of them reconnects with the other and explains the circumstances of the events that led up to their original departure.

I originally released the song on the iTunes Music Store on March 13, 2007 through Tunecore.com but then I decided to cease the annual renewal on Tunecore and I removed the song from iTunes. I have decided to re-release the single track with availability beginning on January 1, 2012.

A Page That Was Torn is available on iTunes for $.99

The import of the analog footage is in realtime. I have several hours of old home movies to convert so it will take a while to get everything imported into the computer. You can’t edit anything else while the footage is importing and I need to babysit it to make sure the import doesn’t crash or anything. I also like to stop the import sometimes to break the clips up into different scenes. That makes it easier to find clips you’re looking for later.

It’s a good idea to convert your old footage to digital format as soon as possible because those old VHS tapes may be damaged by improper storage and become moldy or something. Tapes can get caught in the head of the VCR and become damaged or any number of things can happen to damage old VHS tapes. If you have old home movies then I recommend that you convert them over to digital format as soon as possible. My old home movies have been in good storage and I just got them from family to convert them over. Some of the VHS tapes are close to 30 years old.

After I convert them to digital format I will back the files up on a separate hard drive. It’s always a good idea to back your files up whenever you can. Another method of backing up files is to transfer them to digital tape, but I prefer to back files up on a separate hard drive. That way you preserve your precious memories and you do not have to worry about ever losing or damaging your old home movies.

I did a marathon study for the FCPX exam for about a week before I took the exam. I passed that exam with %90+ percentile. I knew I had to complete the Motion exam before January 3. There is a chance to take the exam once and if you fail then you can re-take the exam a week later. The deadline for recertification is January 3 so I decided to take the exam on Dec 23. Prometric is on a different timezone than I am so when I took the exam at 6PM on Dec. 23 it was actually 1:30AM on Dec 24 according to Prometric’s system. I wanted my certification to be issued on my birthday so I chose Dec. 23 around 6pm as my target timeframe for taking the exam.

The Motion 5 exam seemed very similar to the Motion 4 exam. I would say that more than %90 of the M5 exam questions were similar, if not identical, to the M4 exam questions. Regardless I passed the exam. Now I am officially an Apple Certified Trainer for the current versions of Final Cut Pro x and Motion 5. I have retained the Apple Certified Trainer credential for the respective applications for over 3 years.

I can not even begin to describe the feeling that occurs before, during, and after taking the certification exam. Needless to say the experience is very thrilling. The moment after knowing the test results is very exhilarating. The knowledge that you have passed the exam and are now an Apple Certified Trainer is a feeling that can only be experienced, not described. I am very happy and fortunate to be among the few to sequentially possess these highly coveted credentials.

The iPhone version of JasperThayer.com was originally created in April using iwebkit at http://snippetspace.com. I was looking into methods of creating a mobile version of my website at that time. After a few weeks of working on the project I finally had a version that only loaded for iOS visitors. I used a combination of php server side scripting to force iOS users to be redirected to the iPhone version and also .htaccess on Apache to redirect the dynamic links for visitors. The app worked great. There was an area for info about me and pages for music and photos.

There were a few problems though. The image gallery was a little buggy. You couldn’t see some of the images all the way and it was missing features like slideshow, swipe to advance, captions, etc. I didn’t like the music page either because when you tapped on a song to play it there was little indication that the song was actually loading to play. So you’d sit there for 10 seconds or more before the song started playing. Most would leave before that. Also the music player before lacked the ability to scrub through the song or see how long the song was.

I added html5 music player to this new version to fix all of that, and I added an entire new gallery for the images. There’s also a new video page and a lot of new videos have been added to the iPhone app. Another thing I did with this new update is create a contact form page. In the last version the email link opened up the mail app on the iPhone. I wanted to keep visitors on my web app so I created a contact form so users could complete the form to send me an email.

It seems like a yearly tradition to update my website around Christmas time. I look forward to the changes in development that come next year.