• This page is intended to provide new information, tips, and to note recent changes of any signifigance.


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  • ‘09 Year in Review. As the “oh nine” and the “oh no” decade (also known as the decadence decade and the decade of decadent dereliction) comes to a close (the logical “ought” decade not the technical calendar decade), we have looked back on the year noting observations of out of the ordinary occurrences. Such as no spider webs, a hoard of weird dragonflies, no sand rainstorms, snakes in the swamp, record high temps, historic flooding, record high water levels, no brushes with hurricanes, no (named) tropical storms, weather-swapping months, and a noticeable upsurge locally in certifiably deranged people.

    Spider webs. Every year starting about ten years ago, in the month of August when the “doldrums” hit, in a specific area of north Surf Road where somewhat of a “canopy” is formed by trees, an abundance of large spider webs would appear overhead, populated with ugly spiders that looked large enough to snare seagulls. This year, there were none, maybe because of the dragonfly invasion. Maybe the city employees fumigated them with the mosquito spray that seems to almost certainly also inflict adverse effects on the city employees as well as more than a few local “idjits”.

    Dragonflies. Also in past years, usually in late summer around Labor Day, there is a noticeable increase in the number of dragonflies. This year, in the springtime around Memorial Day, we were invaded by thick hoards of thousands of dragonflies of varying types, some of them unusually colorful and as large as small birds, well like humming birds anyway. In places the air was heavy with them, and unlike past dragonfly invasions, these seemed to have no radar, and would fly right into people and even brick walls. Maybe they had eaten all of those insecticide-laced spiders and were drunk on toxic spider venom? Maybe they just caught the wacko “sofla” disease from local residents and started acting like the people here that tend to walk into brick walls a lot (we are NOT making that up)… It was said that these new varieties of draggin-flyers are drifting up from the Caribbean due to local temperatures warming up — same thing is speculated with our local fauna migrating further north, like the “snowbird” tourists to escape the heat.

    Sand storms. Well, we had wind blown sand storms aplenty from the usual days-long un-named mild tropical storms, with drifts of sand piling up to over a foot deep on the broadwalk and Surf Road in places. But, in past years, usually in late summer, sand that had been picked up by funnel clouds, water spouts, and “wind devils” over the offshore islands and even all the way back to Africa, and then carried here by upper winds, would rain down on us. Not like having a sand pile dumped on you all of a sudden, but just a sprinkle that would land on your skin and in your hair and eyes, seemingly out of nowhere on a windless day. Did not happen this year.

    Snakes in the swamp. Obviously, this situation has been brewing, or rather breeding, for a number of years, but this year it was finally announced with a big bruhaha that pythons had finally been “discovered” in the Everglades. Thousands of them. BIG ones. Large enough to ingest puppy dogs and kittys and kiddies. There was even conjecture that there were large scale brawls going on between gangs of alligators and these new exotic, imported critters. A “slow news” year we speculate. Likely suppressed by the local chamber of commerce types until tourists starting taking videos home to be shown on their local newscasts. Now, about those missing tourists that never returned home…

    Record high temperatures. Not sure how many records were broken this year, but we observed strings of days where the record high temps would be broken in several successive days. There were also many strings of days where “near record” heat was recorded. Many of these records and near-records occurred in non-summer months. And for the first time ever, a triple digit temperature was recorded in the region. Never before had a 100 degree day been recorded here.

    Historic floods. Can’t recall how many, but we had rainfalls of over a foot recorded in rather short periods of time more than once. Called “historic”, even up in Georgia they had the same thing, but not of “biblical proportions”.

    High water. We personally observed never-before-seen high levels of water on the intracoastal waterway boardwalk. At low points, the water was actually coming up through the planks. This was during normal weather, not during the aforementioned historic flooding. Last year, due to the intracoastal increasingly flooding AIA, the level of the roadway was raised by two feet, along with raised adjoining abutments to hold the water back. Have you heard about the global ice melt and the rising sea levels? We think that is what we have been noticing, but this is real up close and personal. Don’t hear much about it on the local news though. Likely suppressed by local chamber of commerce types and the real estate confederation. Did we mention that the ocean waters seem to be coming up higher than ever before, like up to the sea wall on the broadwalk, which had never happened before except during a hurricane of course. But, can’t be due to global warming, must just be all the glaciers, global ice sheets, and polar ice caps melting — that’s normal, they will make a comeback someday, maybe at the same time that the proverbial “Hell freezes over”…

    Speaking of Hurricanes. Not a one this year that we heard much about. Can’t recall any major tropical storms either, except the ones that they didn’t bother to name that just sprang up offshore. There was considerably more tropical storm activity in the New England states this year than what we experienced here. El Nino no doubt.

    Weather swapping. Typically, we can predict what the weather is going to be like for any given month here. This year, such was not the case. For example, weather that we would normally experience in November would crop up in September, and so on. Certifiably weird, all months were consistently inconsistent.

    Certifiably deranged people. Granted, this region has it’s share of old folks on too many mood-altering prescription drugs, not so old folks on illicit brain-altering drugs, crazy weather, full moons, wacko tourists, loony loco locals, and a “melting pot” of second, third, and fourth worlders. But this year we observed an extreme uptake in an intolerable number of certifiably incapacitated idjits. We know not what to attribute this to, but wonder if maybe it’s something in the water. Maybe it’s the economy. Maybe it’s more CO2 and pollutants in the air and less oxygen to breathe. Maybe all the above. Maybe it’s time to move to the wilds of Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, like up into the mountains where the rising ocean levels maybe won’t reach…

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    Know of any anomalistic outliers regarding this region? Feel free to comment or email us…


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  • August update. We remain in minimum activity mode on maintaining this video website, due to concerted efforts on implementing other related websites.



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  • July Updates. Although the number of our faithful returning visitors to this website has been steadily increasing at a rate of about 25% per month, as of July we will reluctantly decrease the amount of time that we devote to maintaining it for a few months. The reason for this is that we have designed three more websites which along with “Life’s a Coast” will constitute a network of related websites, and we will now initiate the development process for them. It is our intent to continue to provide the better videos, basically eliminating the every day “historical” videos that are considered less spectacular (like “rain outs”). We will also now reduce the number of videos that we archive, again weeding out the less spectacular, keeping the number at about thirty-some per month and having only one archive per month (as opposed to splitting each month into a first part and second part to reduce the number of videos per page). And since the “video guy” is also the “tech guy”, we will attempt to reduce the amount of time that he spends just going out and venturing around looking for potential subjects for videoing, so we will have less of those extraneous takes — although, since he needs his daily exercise, we will try to get him to take the video camera along and watch out for the summer rainbows, lightning storms, and of course anything weird (he is the epitome of weirdness). We hope to revert to our previous pattern of posting videos as soon as feasible, but it will likely be a few months…


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  • June Updates. Our PAID video host seems to be having technical difficulties of late, and possibly will off and on in the future (as most do…). Consequently, the videos are at times slow to load, so if you encounter problems, just try back later as the slowdowns typically do not last more than from a few minutes up to an hour or so. Additionally, a few videos may simply disappear here and there, but that is usually straightened out in a day or so (after we discover and complain about it…). On a positive footnote — the video guy is now blading the broadwalk every morning now, so if we can convince him to always take the video cam along, we should be able to get back to posting an occasional “daily” broadwalk clip (he still asserts that capturing the daily broadwalk videos is dangerous, even with less people now that the winter tourist season is over)… A tip for you locals and in-landers that stopped blading the north Surf Road broadwalk extension because the road surface was getting a little rough, it has finally been repaved and is now as smooth as smirnoff ice.


    June 30th ‘09 UPDATE! Firefox released the new version 3.5 for general consumption, and it solves all recent performance problems, back to being fast again even with an overload of extensions (WARNING! many extensions are not yet compatible). The tech guy still recommends Google Chrome for basic surfing and for keeping open some basic apps (like Gmail), but if you moved away from Firefox like we did for a while, it is time to upgrade and start using it for more than working on websites… Click on this link to an article about the new version and here is a link to download it.


    Lastly for the month of June, we recently provided a few “tips” on the area via email to a viewer, who suggested that we add a webpage to this website specifically just for tips like the ones we provided to them and that we have scattered here and there across this site. Well, we have added this page with a few preliminary tips and will work on adding to that daily or even as matters of significance arise. If anyone has input on this, any type of tip or suggestion would be welcome (especially you locals — if you know of something that might not be obvious, pass it along)… The link to the tips page is on the bottom row of tabs at the top of each page on this site.



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    Recent Activity (May 15th). For the month May and beyond, our “spare time” project is to establish the new “best sunrises” and “best sunsets” video pages. The first step of this monumental ongoing task was to migrate the “best ever” samples off of the main sunrise and sunset pages to free up some room there to allow for a more extensive collection of “recent” videos. Now, we have begun the second step of the process of combing both our real archives and the archives that we have created here on this site to find some more good videos to add to these pages, and of course we expect to capture some new ones that can can be classified in the “best” category. So, this new feature is in the formative stages but the number of “best” videos will slowly increase, so you might want to check them out once in a while…

    And, due to some technical difficulties beyond our control of late, we have experienced some urgent situations that required dropping everything else to concentrate on putting out fires, and consequently we have fallen behind on keeping some links current, mostly with the archives. We will fix the links as soon as we can manage to coerce our webhost into resolving problems that should not be occurring….

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  • Recent Activity (April 19th). The last month has not resulted in much of anything that could be considered innovative, but we have managed to add some decent videos throughout the site, and we have added a few interesting webcams to the Webcams page (we have observed that the “traffic” there has increased considerably of late)… Given the interest, we thought that we should point out that as a quick and easy alternative to the video screensaver application you could do the following instead.

    1. Click on this link to the Marriott Marco Island webcam.
    2. On the resultant webcam page, click on the “full screen” button on the rightmost side of the bottom menu bar.
    3. Now, the image may be a little “grainy” up close, but walk across the room, as a screensaver would normally be viewed, for a better visual effect…

    Be sure to let us know of any other interesting webcams that allow full screen mode. If there are other locations where you would like to see this type of live webcam installed (like the Marriott here on the broadwalk), just contact them and suggest that they install one…


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    Recent Activity (March 21st). The intent of this particular post is to alert returning visitors to the fact that we have recently made some significant additions to the Flora, Nature, Beach, and Broadwalk pages and have finally gotten around to adding a new page for local boating and fishing. Also, we have started adding videos of the inland/downtown area at the bottom of the “Visit Here” page and we are now attempting to post a “daily broadwalk” video (but not doing too well on it yet). If you would like to be automatically notified when significant updates (other than daily postings of sunrises and sunsets) are made on this website, refer to the post below titled “Automatic Change Alerts for Websites”.

    The size increase of the videos by 50% was just too much for some of the videos in low light and certain conditions of the subject matter moving or panning the camera too quickly. We have decided to back off the increase by about half. Although most of the videos should provide fairly decent clarity at this increased size, some will still be grainy or blurred and we apologize for any visual defects that you might encounter in some videos — we may just weed out those particular videos as time allows. When we manage to procure a better video camera we will be able to bump new videos back to the larger size with total clarity…


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    Your Requests. The intent of this post is to initially acknowledge recent requests for: increasing the length of videos from about 30 seconds to a full minute; slowing down movement/panning in the videos; posting more videos with no movement/panning for use in the “screensaver” application (and designating them as such for ease of locating them…); to start doing “daily” posts of “broadwalk cruising” as is done with the sunrises/sunsets, to include stationary videos (NOT from a moving bicycle!); to post some videos of the general Hollywood “inland” and downtown area; and lastly to add a category/tab for “out of the ordinary” boats(?). Whereas we shall endeavor to meet all these requests, we would like to point out that the proposed “daily broadwalk” videos can be difficult and even dangerous to capture (dangerous on a bike anyway), so we may not always be able to provide them depending on conditions (plus, after capturing broadwalk videos we have to review them and ponder whether or not the people in the end-result videos might consider the content “intrusive” to their privacy, even though they are obviously out in public sometimes scantily clad and possibly behaving uncharacteristically [some folks do not like the possibility of being observed "back home", like the Google street-view "privacy invasion" scenario...] so we end up deleting most of the takes). Note that we have begun to add some daily broadwalk videos about halfway down the “Broadwalk” webpage and we have also initially started adding videos of the inland/downtown Hollywood area at the bottom of the “Visit Here” webpage (but we will likely set up a new pages for these categories eventually, as well as one for the requested “uncommon boats” videos). Anything else? jeb@lifesacoast.com


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    Automatic Change Alerts for Websites. We do not intend to establish “RSS feed” functionality to provide automatic notification of changes to this website until it is deemed essential. In the interim, if you would like to be automatically notified when significant updates (other than daily postings of sunrises and sunsets) are made on this website, there are free “website content monitoring” applications available to send you alerts. We are currently novices on this subject, and will attempt to acquire more expertise on it soon, but you might consider performing searches on various combinations of relevant keywords (such as website content monitoring). The Snapfiles download site appears to have several free PC-based monitoring applications. However, if you would prefer to avoid installing change detection software on your PC, there are online sites that you can use to accomplish the same result without any software installation, one of which that looks adequate to accomplish this function is http://www.changedetection.com/ (the alerts are not immediate and usually are delivered from 2 to 4 hours after the changes occur). Note that this online change detection site and most others that we checked appear to require entering the URL of each webpage that you want to monitor rather than just the URL of the website itself. If you want to monitor changes to all pages on this website rather than just one or two pages without setting them all up for change alerts, just establish this “Posts” page as the one page to monitor, as we intend to post here when there are significant changes (over and above the daily sunrise and sunset postings). Any advice on the subject of website change detection monitoring would be greatly appreciated.


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    A tip on starting videos. Note that (in most browsers) it is not necessary to position the cursor over and click directly on a video’s triangular shaped play button to start (or stop) the video playing. Rather, you can left-click anywhere on the still picture image of a video. Thought we should point this out as it might not be obvious and is considerably easier, especially if going through the archives and playing a lot of videos. Another tip: if the video has already played, you can restart it at an approximate point into the video (let’s say, half-way through the video rather than at the beginning) by clicking at any given point on the progress bar at the bottom of the video image frame.


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    Viewing multiple videos simultaneously. UPDATE: since we have substantially increased the size of the video images on the main category pages and one video now takes up most of a browser’s window, this technique will not apply to those videos. However, we have not increased the size of the videos in the archives, where this technique might be most useful…

    Since we usually post two or three videos of the same sunrise and sunset daily and also retain multiple takes in the archives, you might consider viewing more than one video at the same time if your monitor screen is large enough. This allows observing the slight changes in clouds and colors as the scenes progress in time, or even to speed up the process of comparing and evaluating the videos for potential downloading. Depending on your computer monitor screen size, how many toolbars you have selected as viewable, and whether or not you display the taskbar in your browser, you should be able to see at least most of two videos and likely part of a third video at the same time. Note that if only part of a video is shown, you can likely squeeze it in by performing the text reduction function of your browser. In Windows I.E. this is done by pressing and holding down the control key (labeled ‘Ctrl’ in lower left hand corner of a keyboard) and then pressing the minus key (usually in the upper right hand corner of a keyboard denoted as a minus sign or “dash”), reducing the size of the content in the window of your browser — continue to depress the minus key repeatedly until the videos are reduced to the size such that they fit to your liking (to reverse the reduction, press the plus key instead of the minus key). If you are going through the archives to find videos to download, you could expedite the viewing process even more by starting two or three videos, scrolling down and starting two or three more videos, then scrolling back and forth observing segments of all the playing videos. Note that a potential disadvantage to playing multiple videos would be that the audio of all playing videos will be blended together. Remember that it is not necessary to click directly on the play button, as left-clicking anywhere on the video image picture will more readily start a video playing, and that you may restart a video at any given point by clicking on the progress bar…


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  • Browser Problems. The Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer browser is known to exhibit problems when viewing videos, the worst of which is painfully slow webpage load time with websites that have multiple embedded videos (like this one…), taking more than ten times longer than other browsers.

    We strongly suggest that you use another browser when viewing videos, and consider the fact that the other browsers are not only faster in other respects but are also more secure. If you do not have another browser installed, it is not a technically tough thing to accomplish, just download and install and use — all browsers function on the same basic premise with menus and options differing only slightly… Below are our recommendations for your best alternatives as of mid July of 2009 — but first we must disclaim that the various browsers are constantly leap-frogging each other with new versions and consequently there is constant change….

    Chrome: Google’s browser, said to be the least vulnerable to exploitation (“hacking”) and it usually ranks as the fastest browser, very good for basic surfing. Click on this link to download Chrome.

    Firefox: in our opinion, the best browser overall, very secure, very fast, adding powerful functionality with the add-on extensions. Click on this link to download Firefox.

    Safari: by Apple for the Mac and Windows, combines many of the best features of Chrome and Firefox and is fairly fast. However, Safari has been reported to be somewhat easier to exploit (“hack”) than the other browsers, so you might want to avoid sensitive surfing and online financial transactions with it… Click on this link to download Safari.

    Opera: Good, fast, and secure, but last on our list of alternate browsers — still, way ahead of Internet Explorer…. Click on this link to download Opera.

    Any comments on this subject are welcome. We will try to update this information if we determine that the always volatile browser situation changes significantly.




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    Eliminating video wind noise. Some of the sunrise and sunset videos have a high level of wind noise. This problem is difficult to avoid in this typically breezy region and impossible when videoing tropical storms and hurricanes. We will first state that the best way to combat this problem is with a sponge windsock covered microphone on a cord that allows you to shield the mic from the wind (a luxury we do not have). The other tip that might be applicable is to edit and lower the bass of such videos to below 100 hz — something we have not tried yet but sounds as tho it might reduce the wind noise…


    If you would like to use some of our “noisy” videos in the screensaver mechanism as outlined on the “Screensaver” tab, consider that the wind noise may be dubbed over with music. For a test, we have tried out Windows Movie Maker (free download from Microsoft for Windows XP) and found that it was fairly easy to dub over the wind noise with music. Note that there is a slight color loss in the dubbing process, but this is an alternative to eliminating any undesired wind noise if you select a noisy video for the screensaver application. Also, some level of wind noise can be blended in with the music to allow it to seem more “natural” if so desired. We have and will continue to dub over a few of the noisiest videos here and there as examples, and they will be noted as such (if you do not like the music we chose for these samples, you can dub over our music or request that the original noisy video be restored). We will update this post as soon as we are able to gather more comprehensive information on how best to accomplish the dubbing process. Any advice or suggestions on this subject via comments or email (jeb@lifesacoast.com) would be appreciated.


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