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.
Second Avenue, Seattle. 11:00 pm.
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.