Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
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.
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.
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).
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
Amy doing her hair in the bathroom mirror:
She: “I’m binding my hair.”
Me: “Why don’t you bind your feet while you’re at it?”
She: “Why don’t you bind your mouth while you’re at it?”
We have this kind of exchange all the time. Simple inversion humor in funny voices. I dunno, maybe it reads wrong on the page, but in real life, these are the gems of daily conversation that keep our relationship continuously surprising, entertaining. It’s all in love.
Hoo boy… disturbing spam. Disturbing because it seems so totally sincere.
Subject: Time Travelers PLEASE HELP!! ..
If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through time I need your help!
Also if you are from any of the following planets and can help me as mentioned please reply:
Vadikar,Nefarious,Tralfamadore,Valnator,Travers,Edenad
I come to you for help, and need a way of doing this in the following way exactly in such a way
that there will be little or no danger. I come to you in peace. Trust and honesty is an absolutely must!!
My life has been severely tampered with and cursed.
I have suffered tremendously and am now dying!
I need to be able to:
Travel physically back in time.
Rewind my life (including my age).
Be able to (remember what I know now) so that I can prevent my life from being tampered with
again after I go back.
I am in great danger and need this immediately!
Only if you are a time traveler or nice alien and have this technology please send me a
(separate) email to:
xxxxxxxxxxx
Thanks
“If you’re so fond of the simple life, why is there an anti-matter reactor in your basement?”
– Archer