Having just poured myself a gin and tonic, it being hot, I put it aside for a bit. When I remembered it was there, I picked it up and took a big slug, followed by surprised sputterings and profanity at the burning sensation my mouth encountered.
I either forgot to mix the drink as I put it aside or I used a whole lot more gin than I thought I did. The lime slice within the drink is suspended in a state of neutral buoyancy, about an inch above the bottom of the glass. I'm feared! Was I distrait?
Oh, holy cow, the irritating sanctimonials of the GOP thing are on the radio, gotta go turn it off before I blow a gasket. But first, a cautious taste. The verdict: I think I forgot to stir.
Tune in for updates of unknown sobriety!
UPDATE: Viv drank it. She's non-bloguese (French for "Cuban"), so no drunken posting from me* - sorry!
*yet.
Beans for Breakfast announces a Bush Trophy for Auction on eBay, proceeds to MoveOn. Pass it along!
Ages ago, Viv and I picked up a pair of Lucy chairs to go with our red formica kitchen table. Eventually, we figured out that we should have picked up four, but by the time this happened, Target was no longer carrying the chairs in-store. The topic came up at our party a couple months ago and Sunday night Viv reminded me about it when I was in a Googlin' mood.
The skinny is, Target carries them online, but the delivered price was abut $220, free shipping notwithstanding. American Chairs offers them as well, but the shipping costs pushed it up over $200 again.
The link I initiated this post with, however, produces a shipping-inclusive price of $197. Now, I'm not necessarily ready to spend $200 on a couple of chairs, but maybe Viv is. So here's the link.
I spent much of today pushing and pulling at the random video sniplets being generated by our two video-capable digital cameras. I've blogged before about shortfalls in Apple's iTools regarding the use-practice of toting these things (essentially, it's impossible to just dump the video onto an archival DVD mastered via iDVD).
Poking about in semi-familiar software is a fine and relaxing pursuit in some cases, and so it proved today. I'm interested in writing about my workflow and so forth so the next time I take a few years off from video work I can dig this up and get moving, possibly faster than I did this time.
To begin with, it's necessary to select the movies you want to convert to an iDVD format. I did that by opening the date-named folders I keep all my camera-generated content in, a folder for each day and camera. I used the old-style window view that includes disclosure triangles, set to sort by file type. Therefore, recent folders grouped at the bottom of the view. Within each disclosure-triangle opened folder the movies also grouped.
Command clicking my way through the list to select all of the movie files, I dragged them into an open new iMovie project on my second monitor. I then went and did something else for several hours. iMovie converts motion media into fullscreeen DV files - a half-meg, thirty-second snippet with sound could inflate to about fifty megs, and on my aged gear, it's not a snappy process.
Once the files have appeared in the clip tray within iMovie, it was necessary to manually reorder them to reflect the chronological order in which they were shot. If this was a commercial project, I would have logged and probably renamed each clip, as well. As it is, I'm still undecided if I'm going to invest the time to try to slap a narrative onto the clips or not. I think I am planning on adding a soundtrack, simply because the videos from the Veo are silent.
There are two common problems that result from using hand-held still cameras as video cameras. One, it's easy to shoot in very low light circumstances, and there's really not much to be done on the spot to address the issue. When you shoot, you gotta make do. Two, because we normally shoot still pictures on the cameras without being concerned about vertical or horizontal composition, I find we do the same thing when shooting video.
This results in sideways video, something which should be so trivial to address that I'm still amazed at the way I ended up resolving it. To an extent, I feel that a low-light correction tool should also be available in iMovie (as well as a rotation tool). On the other hand, iPhoto has no good low-light correction tool either, so who knows.
To address both issues, I ended up using Final Cut Express, which I picked up a ways back cheaply as a promotional upgrade from Premiere. The solutions to each are far from intuitive, but at least one's easy to figure out.
I identified the problem clips in iMovie by name, and then in FCE, selected the menu item "Open." Navigating to the iMovie project folder containing the media files, I selected each one of the DV clips, one at a time, to open.
With the file open, I then dragged the "Motion" and "Filter" tabs away from the preview window to create a side-by-side layout for the clip. In the case of a sideways clip, using "Motion" I scaled the clip by 75% and rotated it by 90 degrees. I then set the background to "black" in the Background menu item. I then exported the clip to a new QT movie using the same settings at the original DVD clip iMovie had created (same size as the clip being worked on, 29.97 fps, etcetera).
When opened in QuickTime Player the resulting movies played well, and have the additional benefit of not requiring additional processing time from iMovie when reimported.
To correct a low-light asset, I opened the file in FCE as described above. Then I added several filters to the Video Filters tab (sadly, I didn't take notes and it's been over an hour since I did this procedure, so details are sketchy). Among the filters enabled were Brightness and Contrast, Color Correction, Unsharp Mask and Desaturate Highs. The conceptual steps are:
- lighten the overall image
- center the color contrast so that whites appear white
- darken the shadows without losing the detail that appears when the brightness is turned up.
These manipulations are likely to cause obvious artifacts in the image. I found Unsharp Mask to be helpful in addressing these problems, as well as adding definition and depth to the transition areas.
HyperGami offers this paper sushi kit. There's also this display page of various models on a different site. The models apparently stem from different sources, such as the tako (octopus) model, this selection of gunkan. Of course, what goes with paper sushi better than a nice, frosty mug of paper beer?
To eat sushi, someone must go down to the sea in ships. Up anchor under that paper moon and set sail over a cardboard sea with these vessels.
A slow-loading, insanely-detailed model of the British galleon HMS Mary Rose, with comprehensive instructions - in Russian! Enjoy. Once you've knocked that out, here's another ship from the same period at the same site.
And finally, in case that sushi was out a bit too long, may I recommend Ed Bertschy's fabulous nineteenth century hearse? Scroll down to see it in all it's macabre glory, and note some of the other goodies he's got on offer, among them a paper cello, a plunger-style "Blasting machine" of great beauty, and of course, a working paper steam engine!
On our way to pick up Spence and roll on to the Daymented Everything Party, I was over come with hunger, so we dropped into the U-District's Sushi Express ("Drive-By Sushi!") to nosh.
While there, I saw a blogger I do not know except by sight, Dan's pal Zannah, come in and sit down, presumably with hubby.
The food was fine, although we learned that the crew was new; the kaiten train was a bit barren for long stretches, and alas, no beer.
I kept calling Mr. Elope to see if he wanted to go to the party but he proved as elusive as Mr. Bob Dobelina.
When we finally adjourned my throat suddenly hurt like crazy and sadly, I had to bow out of the party. So I came home and spent the evening doing detailed financial projections and analyses for a meeting I have in the ayem. I might suggest moving to to a smaller, less packed venue in order to minimize my germic footprint.
Having managed to view fragments amounting to one half of the final episode of the decidedly average The Spartans, I variously learned or was reminded that:
- Upon the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, about 7,000 Athenian invaders were imprisoned for a fair period of time in a quarry at Syracuse, exposed to the elements and fading fast. According to the transcript of the show,
The Athenian prisoners had only one chance to live: the Syracusans had a passion for the verses of the playwright Euripides, and prisoners who could recite them in a style that pleased their tormentors were allowed to leave the quarry to be sold as slaves.
To clarify: The Syracusans held the prisoners of war in an outdoor prison camp, subject to torture, and would not let them go until they said words which pleased them.
- Upon the Spartan-led defeat of Athens, the Spartan leader Lysander erected an expansive monument to himself and his allies. The show did not display a reconstructed image, and I wonder if someone has assembled such a thing. I had thin luck Googling for it at all.
- Following the Spartan defeat of Athens, Sparta was the dominant military power in the region, and "her commanders became known for corruption," a fact which sourly comforts me.
Interestingly, I came across these class notes for a play by Euripides which appears to directly address these themes.
I, Cringely hangs out with Doug Englebart and reminds us of who that might be, extending the Cringley streak (he's been traveling afield a bit since moving East and it seems to have increased the scope of his work).
Computers had no user interfaces in the sense that we know them today. Heck, they had no USERS. Computers were not networked. They didn't even print. And into this primitive world, Doug Engelbart drove to work the day after he'd proposed to his sweetie, wondering what to do with his life. And by the time he got to work, he had in his mind something not at all unlike our computing experience today. Amazing! It was so amazing, in fact, that Doug had to keep most of his ideas secret simply to avoid ridicule. He shared his vision with colleagues, and they counseled him to keep it quiet so being a kook wouldn't hurt his career.
The PG Wodehouse Library: public domain Wodehouse.
Aaaaah. 36 Wodehouse titles, all free, all for Palm.
We're back! Didja miss us?
(The last week-plus was an exercise in stealth distance blogging, all done by remote control from fabulous Laguna Beach, California. We saw tiny sharks! Also of interest is the fact that Gmail performed considerably better than my desktop email app.)
This seventeen seconds of Veo-video was shot four blocks from my in-laws' house, the place my wife grew up. Generally speaking, I like visiting.
How To Make 3-D Photos, chez engadget. No special gear required beyond a digital camera and Photoshop. Are you lissnen mobstas? I'm loookin' at you, Mr. I8M.
I've embarked on my annual peregrinations in the company of that amiable nitwit Bertie Wooster, and for some reason, the voices of the excellent Fry and Laurie are echoing in my head more clearly than they have in the past. Wodehouse casts the whole oeuvre in Bertie's wildly flighty voice, and consequently I hear Hugh Laurie's piping, bug-eyed take on the pride of the Woosters flibbertigibbeting about in my skull.
It's quite pleasant, really.
I found the television adaptations that the comedians starred in hilarious; I haven't seen them for years, and of course, there are now DVDs available. Viv tells me she hasn't ever seen any of the episodes, so I think I might be ordering them soon.
That aside, the incessant prattling inside my head led me to wonder: is it possible that Mr. Laurie executed any audiobooks of Wodehouse's original confections? Garishly polluted Google results make the answer to this unclear, but the sparse examples of Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster audiobooks I unearthed did not feature Laurie reading, so I rather doubt that this item was ever produced, what what.
Bit of the stiff, that.
The white fish is swimming upside down more now than last night. Before I fed them tonight, he was swimming normally. As soon as he ate the food, he became unusually buoyant, like an underwater balloon. None of the other fish in the tank seem to have this problem.
I noticed him struggling to swim down to the bottom last night after feeding, and as he tired, he'd bob to the top of the tank, slowly rotating until his belly brushed the surface of the water, then seeking to right himself in a frenzy. In all other respects, he appears healthy.
But as he tires, he swims upside down more and more. I am reasonably certain the white fish will follow the call of an impossibly beautiful black fish looming
in the distance sometime in the next couple of days.
Stolen from Museum in Norway [NYT]
OSLO, Norway (AP) -- Edvard Munch's famous paintings "The Scream" and "Madonna" were stolen from an art museum Sunday while stunned museum-goers watched armed men threatening the staff at gunpoint as they took the artworks to a waiting car, police said.
As an art historian, several things come to mind:
- The Scream should be visualized making the Mr. Bill expression I have titled this entry with.
- Somewhere a supervillain strokes a long-haired Persian cat, chuckling.
Pursuant to an interesting discussion, In the Heart of the Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick is hereby bookmarked, or rather linked.
The book is said to be based upon the incident that became the basis for Moby Dick. I'm starting to lean into nineteenth-century readings again and this sounds tasty.
Given my towering pile of on-deck matter, however, it may be a few moons before I get to this one.
Sky Above, Hubbub Below [blogerated NYT link] is a mid-length appreciation of NYC, as seen from a light plane on a summer's day. It's a sweet bit of flight writing that I quite enjoyed.
Manny's junking his Wired archive. He highlights a 1996 article by Neal Stephenson. Interestingly, this story was the moment that Wired shortcircuited, for me. Of course, my disenchantment with the mag first crystallized with the terrible, faux-fad cover story on the Zippies. My suspicions deepened at the obvious shill job on Walter Wriston (We've seen the future - and middle-aged bankers will lead us there, french cuffs shining whitely in the bitstream!).
But Stephenson's long, sloppy French kiss to the ideals of Ayn Rand really did me in. It's one long love-blind poem to global capitalism, romantically propagandizing for an adolescent fantasy of tax-free offshore data havens, and I threw it across the room, cursing, several times as I read it. I believe the most commonly used word was "Bullshit!" I have a recollection of telling someone that I expected to see headshots of fiftysomething white men in suits, jauntily puffing cigars, adorn the covers shortly (trawling the cover archives, the Wriston cover appears to be the closest fit, although this comes close; so, um, I guess I got that wrong).
In hindsight, Stephenson successfully described Enron's business model. Boy howdy, we should be glad that no-one has implemented the apparently-frictionless hyper-exchange he visualizes. Imagine a world run by countless Enrons! I'd rather die!
Instead of possiblities, I saw lies; instead of a grand vision I saw the death of community; instead of liberation I saw failed nation-states and global war.
Of course, I can't make it through one single article in The Economist without the same enraged, stuttering profanity. I am not unaware that I'm an edge case; of course that by no means changes the fact that I'm right. ;)
I just spent the last half-day trying to fix my father-in-law's e-machines desktop Windows XP box. He can't clearly explain what happened, but somehow he became concerned that a new scanner he'd purchased had installed bad stuff on the computer, and I think he sought to remedy this by hand-removing some of the items he thought the installer had put on the disk. Hand-removing stuff under Windows is a bad idea.
At any rate, the upshot of all this was a non-functional sound card - the system thought it was running fine but no audio was produced. After walking through the unhelpful, very basic audio troubleshooter built into Windows, I took a deep breath, cleared my calendar for the day, and initiated a support call and ticket with e-machines.
After a brief intake, it was determined that the never-registered machine was out of warranty, and that the ticket would run $20 to initiate. I had been expecting some sort of charge, so I okayed it and we began.
After a few followups and verifications, we were recommended to run a full system install, wiping the HD, after pulling my father-in-law's documents to a backup. Happily, we were able to do that with no gnashing of teeth, and I initiated the system restore.
When the initial-boot Windows XP setup appeared, it appeared over soothing music! Hurrah, the card's fixed, I thought. After reboot - nothing. Alas.
One more phone call, and I was advised that the physical sound card was bad and that I should simply replace it. Now, my father-in-law really enjoys his computer, but rather than learning about it by reading or becoming a tech-nerd, he has evolved an elaborate personal set of metaphors that suffice to allow him to use the machines. However, that means he's likely to blame the last person who touched the machine if things start going awry, and thus, the last thing I wanted to do was pop the case and start rummaging around in the guts of the machine.
I may understand how to assemble and disassemble computers but my level of expert Wintel knowledge dates to 1993, the first year I could afford to buy a Mac and get the hell outta Dodge.
After some frowning thought, I realized that the support person who advised me to buy a new soundcard had missed a clue: the machine played audio when booted into the setup routine. The card, physically, was fine. There had to be a way to address whatever tangled thing had cut off the circuits from the software.
One more call back to e-machines and I was told, in this order:
a) your machine is still in warranty for another year
b) we're refunding your $20 ticket fee
c) use the device manager to uninstall the modem, then reboot
d) we're going to reinstall the audio drivers from the restore CD before the modem drivers are re-enabled at startup
As it happened, due to a slight accident, the machine booted into Windows directly, with the startup chime!
I'm happy that the emachines support people were able to help; each time I placed a call I was connected to a real, live human within 30 seconds of having navigated the intake telephone tree.
On the other hand, I was told that the machine was out of warranty and that the audio card was dead, inaccuracies that would not have been corrected had I not pushed back, something that makes me reluctant to recommend the manufacturer to naive PC-users.
Finally, I have to note that the whole experience occupied me for four hours. Yeesh. I'm sticking with my Macs until they pry 'em outta my cold, dead hands.
UPDATE: One reboot later, the sound output is AWOL, again. On a clean install! Man! How do you people live with it?
As an element in my comprehensive rearguard exploration of last week's/month's/year's interesting computer doohickeys, I have finally begun a sustained experiment in using Gmail, which is proceeding apace.
Only one bump to date: the unflagged blackholing of a flood of comment spam from comments.cgi on the blog left me a mite frowny - if I can't see the mail, it's hard to click the mt-blacklist link, now innit?
As is my wont, here are some Gmail toys, for whenever I get around to them.
Mark Lyon's list of Gmail candy. It includes Pop Goes the Gmail, for POP3 access, as well as his GML, an app to allow you to pop your current mail archive into Gmail, should you feel so inclined.
Most useful on Mark's list in the short run is Address Book to CSV 1.1, which enables a user to export from Address Book into the format that Gmail supports to build its' own contacts list.
There's also the propellerhead tomfoolery of a PHP script that converts your unused Gmail space into an offline backup solution, something that I could have sworn that tall guy over there wrote about, but I find no trace of it.
TidBITS' Adam Engst says it's time to take another look at OmniWeb, a Mac-only web browser by the Seattle-area Omni Group.
I'll be investigating it further sometime in the near future. Omni is a pretty interesting operation, something of a rarity on the Mac side, that clearly is devoted to the 'first in space' biz model. This means that they have consistently been first-to-market for significant application uses at nearly every juncture of the evolution of Mac OS X. It also means that follow-up developers solve problems left unsolved by Omni while adopting Omni's successful solutions.
The first-to-market aspect of OmniWeb 5 is the product's use of WebCore, an underlying element of the OS that Apple introduced recently. Without hitting the books, it's behind parts of both Safari and Help Viewer, as I recall.
Paul Frankenstein has been musing on what WebCore and other things-to-come may mean in future. OmniWeb 5 may be of interest to him for that reason as well.
This weekend, Viv and I went to a free production of the play Red Noses in a nearby park. It's running through the end of the month at the Miller Community Center on 19th, just over the hill from Safeway on 15th.
The play garnered a lukewarm review in the P-I recently, and I have to concur in the judgement that the production was uneven. I'd say it was still a decent summer night in the park - I saw bats! It was a big cast - about twenty - and the outdoor setting was less than ideal, planes overhead drowning out dialog more than once.
The play is about a religious order that formed in France during an outbreak of the plague, advocating holy clowning as a spiritual balm; it's also a pretty cynical, anti-clerical play (perhaps anti-church is a more accurate phrase). its' depiction of the Pope, in particular, as a cynical lord of the age, is a central narrative feature.
The actress portraying the Pope (Lisa SanPhillippo) steps beyond the part as written to present a vision of the Pontiff of Avignon as a kind of bug-eyed Ralph Steadman caricature, hideously hilarious, brutally over the top. I suspect that her performance is close to the spirit that the company hoped to execute the play in.
Unfortunately, timing is the essence of comedy, and I rather expect that the sheer volume of the play undermined the possibility of refining the timing of the bits, such as they are in the play. Rebecca Davis, as Father Flote (the founder of the order) is effective and held my attention - but her perfomance lacked bite or menace, which undermines the base concept of clowning to hold death at bay.
I must note that the tipping factor in leading us to see the play was my awareness that a very funny man of known and merciless wit who spends his days engaged (however self-deprecatingly) in a battle against a hideous disease was playing a significant role in the production. His wit leads me to impute a certain persuasiveness to him, and thus I rather wonder if he played a role in the selection of this play.
Saturday night, I caught two Bogart films on TMC, 1951's uneven The Enforcer, a fictionalization of the discovery and prosecution of the notorious Murder, Inc., and a great film I'd unaccountably missed in my peerings at and mumblings on the era's work.
That film is In a Lonely Place (1950), based on the recently-republished Dorothy Hughes title of the same name. earlier this year, Bookslut ran an intriguing, thoughtful appreciation of the original book.
I won't rehash the plot here, but I will reiterate Bookslut's note that the film is much changed from the original. Bogart plays Dixon Steele, whom Hughes presents as a wannabe writer; in the film, he's a has-been screenwriter.
The film's writers, Andrew Solt and Edmund North, have a ball with the screenwriter's tension between book and film, going out of their way to establish the screenwriter's obligation to discard the book. The film's tense narrative kicks off with the murder of a hat check girl last seen at Steele's home. She has come by to retell the narrative of a potboiler that Steele is being sought to adapt. Steele makes no bones about his contempt for the source material.
Perhaps I was sensitized to this content by last year's wonderful Adaptation - but I sure didn't find any commentary about it elsewhere on the web.
The film is one of the most effective films I've ever seen Bogart in, and I highly recommend it to you.
I spent a big chunk of today finally exploring the integration features in iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie. I'm working from a mixed base of assets representing the two most recent camping trips we went on (to Mount Baker in June and to the Olympic Peninsula this month).
As it happens, long-time MacWorld editor Jim Heid saw a prior entry on the topic of helping my Mom learn to use her new Mac, and kindly offered to send a copy of his book, The Macintosh iLife. We corresponded, and he sent a copy, inscribed to her.
I hadn't ever really even attempted to use the apps as they were designed to be used (with the exception of iTunes), and before I sent the book on, I wanted to work through a demo project involving all the integration features with the book at my side, so I would be familiar enough with it to refer Mom to a chapter as needed. It's been helpful, although my questions have been a bit more specific and technically oriented than the book is designed for.
For example, I did find a passing reference to the fact that iDVD only supports slideshows composed of up to 99 individual picture files, as I searched for reasons a folder of images was not generating the anticipated button upon drag-and-drop.
So, beyond the passing help the book's provided, here are the issues I'm having that I think are failings in the suite of apps, speed not being considered (I'm using them on a G4/400 at the very low end of supported machines, and the speed is quite intolerable, something I cope with by time-slicing with household chores such as laundry and dishes).
The best feature that the suite provides is the ability to marry sets of images to selected songs from your music library. Unfortunately, each of the image-oriented apps - iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto - provides this feature with a slightly different implementation, and thus far I have not found a good way to seamlessly combine the various implementations. iMovie, for instance, will render your stills into a sliding, cross-fading quicktime montage using the well-known Ken Burns Effect. Unfortunately, the various transitions available in iPhoto, for example, are unavailable (at least at first) in iMovie, and in particular in the attempt to create a Ken Burns extravaganza. Furthermore, selecting and previewing a song and transition sequence in iPhoto is easy, easy, easy. Duplicating that in iDVD, or iMovie, is not quite so straightforward.
(UPDATE: Yes it is. in iDVD, dragging an iPhoto album from the iDVD Photos selection pane will also bring iPhoto slideshow effects into the iDVD slideshow.)
iPhoto offers an 'iDVD' button, presumably to allow you to send your iPhoto slideshow to iDVD. I say presumably because each time I used it, iDVD would launch and then crash. If it launched, would it add the sideshow to an existing project, or close the current project, replacing it with the new slideshow? I can't say.
iDVD disappointed me in ways that are similar to and reflective of QuickTime Pro, rejecting native mpeg files for drag-and-drop inclusion in menu-item playback. I'll be experimenting with optimal ways to incorporate the variant mpeg formats generated by our cameras into iDVD, probably routing through iMovie.
As I noted about a month ago, Apple's applications treat video and photos as truly disjunct, something which made sense prior to the prevalence of dual-media recording devices. This is something that Apple must change to retain the leading-edge cachet regained with Jobs' return.
In one hour and thirty minutes I will be taking the first drivers' test of my life.
Update, 2:30p. I failed. This is not surprising or upsetting given that I haven't practiced at all for several months and loathe cars* and driving anyway. But my tastes and desires aren't germane here, and I'll be testing again as soon as possible. I was ready to go two weeks from today at 8am, but was overrruled.
*As a class, I mean. I have no problem with individual cars and kind of like ours as a specific object. But I would happily disappear it and all other cars from the world with a wave of my magic wand if I could do so.
[I posted this on MeFi yesterday, and it's just chock fulla linky goodness, so I'm posting it here to keep it handy.]
Head Back to Mono in 32k at the rineke.net records archive, where a rather consistent curator has digitized a goody chunk of his record collection. It's posted in more-or-less every iteration imaginable. Observe the linked scans (1 mb page, careful!) of the covers (also in multiple resolutions up to full-size). Note the records themselves, in sleeve or out, depending. Most especially, savor the clean, low-res mono mp3s that cry out to be played through the dashboard speakers of a 1967 Dodge Dart.
[Chris Dent is particularly directed here.]
Bonus Big Beat Bonanza: The site's author is also behind the similarly detailed archive of shows by ex-WFMU dj The Hound, from 1987 through 1995, heavy on the rare regional sides beloved of certain of my pals down New Orleans way.
Last, but not least, rineke.net hosts the adventures of a platoon of Tux clones, sealing my geek admiration for the overseer of the site. There's more, of course. My propeller beanie's off to you, sir, and long may you wave, or particle, as is your choice and preference.
I, Cringely for August 12 concerns our country's current unsupportable, unjustifiable rate of imprisonment, a suicide, and a government commissioned study that may have predicted dire results indeed if mandatory sentencing were to be adopted.
Serendipitously, we learn today that the latest trend in dealing with our spiraling inmate population is charge them rent. That's lovely. A reliable labor and revenue source!
danelope strikes back with an hilarious extended remix of my recent mini-opus. Somewhere, a donkey laughs.
The Walking Ruins penned a song on the topic (live recording, speakers down!), about the Lake we call Griffey, back in Indiana.
NJ Guv outs self, quits [rot-safe NYT link].
Wait, maybe pride is not the word I'm after here. Quitting is for quitters, after all.
God, I love New Jersey politics. Why isn't there a cable channel?
UPDATE:Ken proffers color commentary.
Matt's wife Kristen picked up a copy of the fine, fine Bud Brewer LP Big Bertha, The Truck Driving Queen for him this afternoon. Matt, in turn, links to the entire album online, and calls our kind attention to the immortal classic "Caffeine, Nicotine, and Benzedrine (and wish me luck)."
Matt is a national treasure and he should be ferried about the country in a semi with his record collection.
Well, yesterday's filmic experiment was a dud, apparently due to my ignorant choice of media to export the file to. Once, I swear, I had all this stuff down, but it's been a few years since I needed to whack off a movie clip for download and browser display. I guess I expected iMovie to just take care of that at the media level, but I clearly should have known better. Microsoft and Apple infighting and Apple crippleware strikes yet again!
Just a few moments of Googling would have revealed this page of useful brush-ups on iMovie export formats, which clearly implies that mp4 is not the way to go. It also notes that plain old mpg movies are not supported by iMovie's export.
Smack! Bad Apple!
The page also notes that none of the default Windows media video formats are supported by iMovie, not a big surprise. To be evenhanded, we'll turn away from the burning cheek of Cupertino and deliver a satisfying, meaty blow to the unshaven, pale cheek of Redmond.
Smack! Bad Microsoft!
I am sure there are some hoopty-hoops I can jump through here to convert the file outside of iMovie. I actually have both piles of shareware movie-file converters and manipulators and Apple's prosumer video editing software, Final Cut Express, so I can get thar fum hyar. But I'm trying to think within the box, so to speak.
Pre-iMovie, registering your QuickTime install and coughing up $30 unlocked a raft of video manipulation features that were present by default in any open movie window - some cool, useful stuff, such as resizing, rescaling and cropping, or even rotating the orientation of the video. Either I don't have a registered copy of QTPro any more, or these features have been disabled. Googling fails to reveal a flurry of squawking users, so it's probably the latter. Unless it's just because I was hoping to use these features with MPEGs.
Oh, nooo, it's not like I would ever want to use these editing features on movie files created by our cameras. Sensibly enough, the manufacturers have selected the MPEG format as the most broadly-supported video-file interchange format. Oh, wait.
That bit up there about never needing to use these features on MPEGs? Strike that. Invert it. Verrrry good. All together now:
Smack! Bad Apple!
At any rate, sorry for the bad asset.
Here is a .mov format file of the film from yesterday. 1 minute, 1.x mb. Sorry QT phobics! Maybe next time. The MPEG-4 is still available, and it looks much better.
(1 minute. 6 mb 1.8 mb, 320 x 240 mpeg, no audio. Control-click to download, looks like I have Apache set to not stream mpegs or something.)
As I mentioned, Viv and I (and Spencer) were out of town this weekend. We were on the Olympic peninsula, in an ill-advised attempt to visit the Hoh river valley on the rainiest day of the summer. We failed.
Instead, we gave up fighting the rain in Port Angeles, and eventually moseyed over to stay at the Crescent Lake campground, Fairholm, on the far east end of the lake. (Cabins and a lodge are also available - oh man, I bet a winter stay here would be something.) On the north side of the lake is a flat, wide trail, a converted railroad after which the trail is named, the Cedar.
Partway along the trail is a large railroad tunnel, filled with ties and collapsing within.
At 1 am, Spencer and I walked down to the lake and watched cloud formations over it move around. The moon rose over a high shoulder of the steeply forested surrounding hills, and I saw a bright green meteor flash in, arcing from west to east.
Sadly, we did not get much hiking done, due to extreme dawdlesomness, but on the way back we drove up to Hurricane Ridge for the obligatory best picnic table in the northwest, where we were accosted by the usual menacing array of deer, chipmunks, and mid-size birds. Our meal was closely supervised by two regally nonchalant adult ravens, each the size of a small black pony. The deer and assorted other wild hooligans have been my acquaintances in that spot for years; the ravens were something quite new.
Crescent Lake is currently in the local news, on and off, for diving recovery projects. Years ago, the lake was also the site of a celebrated, grisly murder mystery that began with the recovery of the saponified body that became known as The Lady of the Lake, a tale I sadly neglected to learn before camping. Next time, I get to tell the ghost story to end all campfire ghost stories.
I do have loads more pictures. In fact, an overwhelming amount; in addition to Viv's new camera I brought both the old Kodak and the tiny, Lomo-esque Veo, which I think I am getting the hang of. It has a truly irritating interface and settings are totally transient, so you can't assign a default mode for it to boot into, but the lens produces shading and hazing that are clearly in the Lomo tradition (not to assert that the Veo has any of the magic of the eastern European wonder, mind you).
The film above was iMovied from bits of 10 to 30 second silent mpegs captured with the camera. Amazingly, I filled the card up with stills and clips on one AAA battery.
Seafair Weekend with Flipdingo.
If you were out of town, as we were, this is pretty much the good stuff that you missed. I'll crack a tall cool one as I review the evidence.
BFRO Geographical Database of Bigfoot Sightings & Reports.
Yes! Washington maintains a clear if not commanding lead over soi-disant sasquatch homeland Kullyfornya. But number three in this horse ape-like creature race is... Ohio, with an astonishing one-sixty.
A surprising number of states also show recent updates, if not recent sightings. Indiana even has updates from this year.
I must not forget to mention the time I saw a bigfoot in Anacortes.
MacMerc.com: iChat Tips, Tricks and Hacks looks at the generally disappointing bag of addons that have appeared for iChat, a topic I've bemoaned in the past.
I recently started dabbling in IRC a bit again, and started with mIRC, a geeks' client if ever I saw one, and have settled, for now, on the considerably more Macish Fire, a multi-protocol chat client that supports AIM and IRC as well as MSN Chat and whatever else.
It's particularly clever in its' implementation of IRC chat channels. Create a buddy, name it after the channel, enter the channel's settings, and that's it.
Given that iChat is a product that's been encumbered (and enabled) by AIM-related contracts, I can understand the lack of multiprotocol support from Apple. But given that, as MacMerc covers, others have written plugins to enfixen the wee bairn, might we not expect multiprotocol plugins to raisie their wee sparklin' eyes?
(I have no idea what the heck is going on with the pseudo-Scots grammar and vocab. None whatsoever, and I further disclaim all responsibility.)
At work, I've been trying out Trillian, in between swearing fits concerning documentation and arbitrary dialog-entry relationships on the part of the Win XP team. It seems to work just fine, and the swooshy-yet-somehow-not-terribly-obtrusive eyecandy it comes with is neat too.
dealmac and Mac Prices are much on my bookmark list of late.
dealmac's subsidary dealram is also on the hitlist.
I have to say, the bundles are leaving me kinda cold, on the whole. Ah well. The rule is wait until you can't wait, right?
The eagle eyed Manuel linkied me via email with ye olde Duke U. repository of American sheet music cover pages, covering the years between 1850 and 1920. Each decade is presented in its' own browsable gallery, although it takes a few clicks to get to the good stuff.
But the good stuff, well, it's good.
A typographical horror representing the much-maligned banjo. A nightmarish vision of The Boy with the Auburn Hair. The Bloomer's Complaint, a Very Pathetic Song. The Captain With His Whiskers.
A page from the 1860-70 gallery with many fine woodtype-esque compositions.
I. W. Baird's [highly colorful] Musical Album, fom the 1870's gallery - the era of reconstruction. By no coincidence, this collection (both this decade and after) contains many 'plantation' tunes, in which dialect is used to express an imputed longing for the antebellum south on the part of persons of color.
I think it's worth noting that Duke was at the time and remains a seat of Southern privilege.
Dance of the Night Hawks, who may have been on the prowl for Dusky Dinah, her chicken, or her banjo (still).
Honestly, there is simply too much to summarize. I was obligated to post it to MeFi, Manny: thanks a ton, this is really neat.
The Tao of IETF covers the steps to submit an RFC as of Aug 2001. The tippy-top of the document denotes changes since then but only to one section.
I have a pretty-farfetched idea for an RFC. More knowledgeable support is appreciated from any who have internet supergeniushood.
danelope survives the fires of the night of July 30th - August 1st.
[cue Dragnetty/Parry Masonish trombone sting]
Can he take another night?
(Please note among his links is a live stream of SPD radio chatter. Cool! Among the linked streams at the site is the Jersey City PD, also having a busy day today.)
