When I’m encoding CDs I’m always amazed at how few of them come back with metadata from cddb that includes the year of recording. I always take care to read through the liners and find the year and key it in before I start encoding. But why do so many people leave it out when submitting to cddb? And why is the year that comes back so often wrong? (Like a 1997 Sun Ra collection of stuff from 1958 will say 1997). I can’t be the only person who considers the year important. How else do you make era-based playlists? Music happens and evolves on a continuum. The year is as important to know as the genre. I hate this sloppy attitude toward music history.
TinyApps
Over time, I’ve slowly been expanding the content on a page I maintain, Why HTML Email Is a Bad Idea . Today TinyApps.org (which is dedicated to simplicity in computing) linked to the piece in their email newsletter (archived here ).
Big Fish Eat the Little One
Just before going to bed last night, I went to turn off the aquarium light and noticed the plecostamus acting weird, sucking feverishly on something. I realized he was sucking the guts out of the guppy, which he had somehow corralled and caught. This was a bummer because it was the longest-lasting guppy I had ever had (~six months). I thought the scene would make good source video for something, but by the time I got a tape into the camera he had abandoned his prey. I waited a while and he came back to it, but backed off every time I moved the camera close. Usually, pleco is dumb as a doornail. I never thought he had any awareness of my presence at all. But suddenly he seemed hyper-aware of my every move. I think that doting on actual prey rather than the usual algae tablets triggered some million-year-old self-defense instinct. For 20 minutes I tried to tape him sucking on the guppy’s belly, but couldn’t get a single good shot.
Permission
Interesting piece by David Weinberger, Out of Control on the fact that the web was conceived by Berners-Lee as a place where scientists could link to each other’s work without permission, and that the web is a permission-free environment in general. Kind of obvious and old hat in a way, but then again, I never thought of it quite in those terms before either.
But I do not count myself among those who are aching for the death of copyright.
Visit to a Sad Planet
Finally got around to compressing and putting online the first (and so far only) actual DV movie I’ve made (as opposed to travelogues and personal mini-documentary things).
This 4-minute mock “sci-fi opus” is a video accompaniment to Leonard Nimoy’s 1969 monologue “Visit to a Sad Planet,” which is but one in a long series of monologues, poems, and spoken-word pieces recorded by Nimoy and Shatner in the late 60s.
If you’ve got the bandwidth, definitely go for the 30MB Sorenson version. It looks and sounds much better than the 10MB version. Of course, both of them suck compared to the uncompressed 720×480 original, but you can’t just go putting 1 GB movies on the net… dammit.
QuickTime and IE
So it turns out the reason my QT movie didn’t work properly under IE/Win is because MS burned Apple with the release of IE 5.5/6 by dumping the old Netscape plug-in methods. Nowadays you have to wrap your embed tag inside an object tag, and set all the parameters identically for each. Fine if you find out, but I feel sorry for all the people with legacy QT content online which suddenly no worky no more. Anyway, the trapeze page should work for everyone now. Sorry about that.
Got my UC Berkeley staff ID card today, which meant I was able to order BBEdit at an educational discount (you have to fax proof to BareBones).
OSX Guidebook
If you think you know all there is to know about using OSX, you’re probably wrong. Rob Griffith’s OSX Guidebook is out , it’s great, it’s worth the shareware fee (I helped edit it ;)
Trapeze Practice
Finished tweaking my first iMovie. It’s pretty limited software compared even to personalStudio, not to mention Final Cut Pro, etc. But what it does well, it does really well, and it’s not hard to get quality results. Would be nice if it output MPEG, but it does support a huge number of QT output options, and is way easy to learn and work in. But personalStudio spoiled me for real-time everything and 10 layers. Maybe someday…
In early 2000, before I got married, I went down to Santa Monica and spent a day on the flying trapeze, in the back yard of a guy who does stunts in Hollywood. We shot some video that day, and that’s what I used as stock for the iMovie experiments.
Here Is New York
The J-School hosted the California exhibition of Here Is New York – photographs by people and journalists who were there on the front lines of ground zero. They’re selling copies around the country for $25.00 each and giving the proceeds to relief efforts. The show is so moving, so amazing. We also had photogs from the NY Times and NY Daily News who came out and showed slides and recounted their ground zero experiences.
OSX Guide
Have been corresponding a lot with Rob Griffiths of www.macosxhints.com. We set ourselves up as sister sites (his site and betips.net). He’s working feverishly on a 60-page power guide to OSX, with tons of information I never would come across just surfing around. I’ve been one of his editors, giving regular feedback on drafts as they roll in. Have learned a ton in the process. He plans to start selling it in PDF format to help support the site, which is ad-free. Should be around $4. Y’all should get a copy when it’s released, which will be soon.
This has taken me away from working on the OSX piece I’m writing for Eugenia, but it’s time well spent.