Nothing needs to be said – just click play and be amazed.
Month: March 2007
Video Woes & Wishing For More Laptop Firepower
I took a several videos today at CTIA, all of Windows Mobile applications being demoed. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight I really didn’t have the right hardware or software to get the job done properly. I thought that YouTube was limited to videos 10 minutes long, but they also have a 100 MB file size limit. My Canon SD800 doesn’t have any sort of video compression beyond basic MJPEG, so the file sizes are huge. An 8 minute 44 second video clip at 320 x 240 resolution weighs in at 325 MB. That means I’m having to compress them to get the file size under 100 MB before I can upload the videos to have YouTube compress them all over again. It’s not like you can see the double-compression though with the crappy bitrates YouTube uses.
Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but my Fujitsu P7010D doesn’t have the graphics power to run Windows Movie Maker (which is incredibly stupid that it requires hardware acceleration and won’t run at all), and I didn’t install Premiere Elements before leaving, so I was left without any ability to edit video files. I tried Movavi, but it turned out to be highly problematic – it locked up on me several times, complained about missing codecs even when Windows Media Player could play back the file without trouble, and generally wouldn’t do a damn thing properly. I really wanted to like Movavi – it seems to have a great set of features, but I’ve tried it on two PCs now (one Vista, one XP Pro) and it was unstable and dysfunctional at editing video, splitting video, and ripping a DVD. Next I installed Nero 7 because I happened to already have the 175 MB “upgrade” downloaded – it’s ridiculous how Nero releases a trial version of the entire suite as an upgrade for customers, but in this case it happened to be helpful to me. A quick phone call to Ashley got me the serial number I needed. I installed it and rebooted, but bizarrely enough Nero Vision (the video editing application) won’t work with the Canon AVI files properly – when I add one to the timeline it only recognizes the first ten seconds. No errors, it just won’t work properly.
I started to get a bit desperate at this point, so I did a search for a freeware video editing application and tried AviTricks. I didn’t work and puked on codec errors. At this point I was loudly cursing Canon for making their video format so difficult to deal with. As a last-ditch effort, I tried the crusty old Windows Media Encoder 9, and it actually worked! The problem is this 1.2 Ghz Pentium M CPU is exactly made for fast video encoding – it’s taking me forever to encode each clip, especially when I encode a file only to discover it ends up being more than 100 MB in size.
I actually spent some time researching what laptops a local Best Buy here had because I was convinced I’d need a new laptop in order to get all this video transcoding finished before I left Orlando – selecting a new laptop is a topic for another post though, because it’s proving to be a frustrating trying to find the right one. At any rate, the closest Best Buy was out of stock on all six of the HP laptops I was looking at. What are the odds? đ The nearest Circuit City only had one HP laptop, not the one I wanted, and no one at the store would pick up the phone. I gave up and decided to rough it with my little Fujitsu, and while it’s slow, I’m getting the videos transcoded and uploaded. Back to the grind…
CTIA Connectivity Sucks
This blog post sums it up nicely:
“Itâs become aritual: thousand of people gather in one place to exhort the glories of communications in this glorious wireless ageâand damn little works as planned. Today, the CTIA WiFi, which already was slow and glitchy yesterday, has been overwhelmed since before the keynotes ended and the show officially opened…I wish I were alone. The cries of âthe wifi is downâ were ringing throughout the press room and elsewhere. Some cell phones are taking much longer than usual to connect. I heard one person wondering if Skype was being blocked because he had so many problems; I could get through on chat easily (when online) but never tried a call. I asked a press room tech assistant about it and he didnât know what Skype is.”
It’s a dark irony that at a conference all about connectivity, it’s so damn hard to get connected. Someone needs to get punched in the head for this situation.
Jeremy Toeman’s 10 Tips for PR People
Jeremy has put together a list of 10 tips for PR people that are working with bloggers, and it’s a great read. Here’s one of his tips:
“Do your homework. Most blogs have an âaboutâ page, in which youâll discover the bloggerâs full-time job (assuming it isnât blogging), region of the country/world where they live, topics they prefer to cover, how theyâd like to be contacted (bonus tip: IM or email is almost always the answer, not the phone), etc. Read this and understand it. Furthermore, doing a little background research will quickly tell you whether or not the blogger is good at keeping secrets/embargos (some do, some donât – learn the difference).”
I’ve received probably 100+ press releases from PR firms in the past 30 days leading up to CTIA, and it’s stunning how completely random and un-targeted they are. I can tell that 99.9% of the people sending them to me have never visited any of my sites, and know absolutely nothing about me or what kinds of things I cover. It’s no surprise then that I delete 99.9% of them without wasting my time reading them.
Jeremy also has a great post covering 10 tips for bloggers working with PR people, and it’s also a good read. Having a background in PR myself, I tend to know what the PR people want and don’t want – but if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that #10 (Setting Expectations) is my biggest problem. I have a real struggle finding the discipline to write reviews in a timely, consistent manner – and more often than not I find myself apologizing to PR people for taking so damn long to write my reviews. It’s something I really wanted to improve upon in 2007, but I have to admit it’s proving to be harder than I thought. I’ll keep at it though!
Well Wouldn’t You Know It…
It figures that the week I’m on a contract writing gig my laptop decides to flake out on me: for some bizarre reason the “e” key is partially sticking and not responding to key presses properly. I was wondering why, when I was writing an article on the airplane, I kept missing the letter “e” when typing. As a touch-typist, you get used to hitting every key with the same amount of force – not too much, not too little – and it’s hard to change the muscle memory in just one finger on one key. I don’t quite know what the problem is, but I can’t risk opening the laptop here (nor do I have the proper tools) so I’ll just suffer through it and try to remember to pound the “e” key whenever I need that all-too-often used vowel.
I’m looking at getting a Sony TX series laptop, largely because the Fujitsu P7230 (the upgrade of my laptop) isn’t all that impressive. I’m holding back though because I generally loathe Sony as a company, and most of their products. I wish Samsung sold their laptops in North America!
I’m in Sunny Florida
I’m down in Florida doing a blog project for Microsoft, and I had to pack up and leave on my birthday (yesterday, the 25th). I wish I could say that I had a great birthday day, but I woke up pretty early (when I think it should be mandatory that you get to sleep in until whenever you want on your birthday), packed my bags, then got on a plane for Orlando. After a very looooong five hour flight sitting next to a family that brought greasy fast food with them onto the plane, I made it to Orlando. I did a poor advance planning job and didn’t prepare any ripped DVDs or TV shows to watch (one of my favourite activities to do on a flight), so I ended up reading a lot of my book, iCon.
Then I had to wait 30 minutes for my bag to show up on the luggage belt. After waiting another 20 minutes in line for a taxi, I got onto a taxi shuttle that went to almost every other hotel before mine first, finally made it to my hotel, waited another 10 minutes in line as the single desk clerk checked in the three people in front of me with Japanese names that he couldn’t spell, stumbled exhausted into my room, then waited an hour for a greasy pizza to show up because I was too tired to be bothered with going out to find food myself. Quite the adventure. I already wish I was back home, but work is work, so once more unto the breech I go!
When AdSense Overrules Content: It’s Ugly
Can you find the content on this page? I couldn’t when I visited it – until I scrolled down the bottom half of the page. And notice too how the icons placed next to the Google AdSense links make it seem like the AdSense links are navigation/story elements meant to be clicked on.
I’ve met Mark before, and he was a nice fellow, but I’ll never visit this site again because it represents the worst in what happens when a hobby site, born of a personal passion for a topic, becomes commercialized in an ugly way. I’m not one to begrudge anyone making money online, it’s how I pay my bills after all, but when a site is more advertising than content, there’s a serious problem. When your visitors have to scroll down to search for the content, you’ve crossed over the line from providing legitimate content supported by ads into the dark realm of an advertising site “supported” by legitimate content. When your content is secondary, you have to ask yourself why you’re even offering it other than wanting to make money off it.
Does Mark have the right to hide his content among advertising? Certainly. But does it hurt his credibility when everything about the site is designed to trick people into clicking on ads instead of finding the content they want? You bet it does. I always struggle with the fine line between content and advertising on the Thoughts Media properties, but I find that if I keep my readers first and foremost in my mind, and think like them, I usually end up integrating advertising in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with what people really want, which is the content. And I also hope (and know) that if I ever cross the line with my sites, people invested in them (community and team members) will smack me upside the head đ and remind me that I’m not in this for the money, I’m in it because I love technology and community.
RockPointe “Compassion in Action” Photo Shoot
On Sunday the 18th of March, 2007, members of RockPointe church, along with interested visitors, assembled in the Crowfoot movie theatres to view a message from U2’s Bono and Bill Hybles about combating AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa. It was, frankly, a nightmare to shoot because of the low lighting. The ultra-high ceilings in most locations made a flash bounce impossible, so I ended up shooting without a flash for most of the shots. The end result is ISO 1600, fairly grainy photos – some of which I transformed into black and white where the grain helps the image have more impact. Looking at them at smaller sizes (sub-1000 pixels), they don’t look too bad actually. That’s the thing I always forget about ISO noise, odds are few people are going to be staring at the photos on a 24″ LCD monitor running at 1920 x 1200 like I am…and when the photos are smaller, the ISO noise tends to vanish.
This was my first real use of Adobe Lightroom, and I was quite impressed with it (for the most part) – look for a review of it on Digital Media Thoughts. Here’s a selection of some of my favourite B&W images…
You can check out the rest of the gallery if you wish.
Finally Going to Gnomedex Am I
That’s right, after years of threatening to go to Gnomedex and harassing Chris Pirillo in person, I finally bit the bullet and registered to attend in August of this year. The $500 USD price tag was, frankly, a lot for me to swallow – I think it’s the first conference that I’ve ever paid to attend. But I’m a fan of what Chris has achieved in the online world and have heard excellent things about Gnomedex over the years: the speakers, the events, and the networking. So I’m going. Are you? If so, let me know and we’ll connect there.
Movies Worth Watching: 300
300 was one of the most anticipated “must see” movies on my mental list, but it took three attempts at going to the movie theatre before I finally saw this movie. My jaw was on the floor much of the time. So much has been said about the movie, I won’t repeat it all here, but if you’re the kind of person who’s heart starts pumping when the action starts, this is a movie for you. There are movies that re-define genres, and in the same way that The Matrix re-defined the cyberpunk action movie, 300 sets a new high bar for old school, hand to hand combat movies. The plot, while not thin, isn’t overly complicated either. There are no real surprises here, though all parts are acted out ably enough. The real gem in this movie is the cinematography, special effects, and choreographed fight sequences. It looks like the graphic novel is was pulled from. The movie has the touch of true mastery, where nothing is out of place and everything is executed with a perfect clarity of vision that is lacking from so many movies. I don’t say this often, but I may very well go see this again in the theatres, and will certainly be picking it up on (hopefully) HD-DVD when it is released.
