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Friends Working Hard On Great Stuff
It's gratifying to see so many people I know around me (figuratively, not physically) working on cool projects. And it's nice to be able to help them.
For instance, on Saturday I spent 3 hours on a Skype call with José, who lives in Madrid, discussing, with many tangents along the way, a project he's been working on for 2 years (or more, in a way) that will someday become, I suppose, an animated web-based graphic novel. Or maybe even a movie? It should be a movie. Anyway, I won't link to the site for it because I don't know if he wants the in-progress work to be public, but it's pretty cool. A sort of science-fiction allegory set in a dystopian near-future.
Another example is more disappointing. Petr just reported that he is cancelling a film project he's been working on for several months. Doesn't really give a reason. This is one of 3 or 4 films he's in the middle of and on his blog he reports every day on progress he is making on one or more of them, in addition to other artistic pursuits. It's exciting but then I remember he has yet to finish a film. Even one of the many short projects I've seen him start over the years, to my knowledge has never been pronounced "done" and made available to the world. And I've collaborated and helped out (as crewperson, sound designer, etc) on several of these projects. I wish I could break into his house and make copies of a bunch of his raw footage and then edit it into something and release it.
See, I know how to polish a turd. José and I were talking about this during our long skypecall. I told him the story I heard long ago about Stanley Kubrick, who told a fellow director that, yes, you can polish a turd - if it's frozen.
The point in this case is, life doesn't usually give you jewels. You get rough stones, or even turds, and you have to figure out how to make them shiny and nice, or at least passable. But Petr seems, sometimes, to be unwilling to accept anything but jewels, which he will then polish into superjewels, he thinks.
sigh. No! take the crap and run with it, Petr!
A Little Something For The Commute
Ok, this totally rocks. a talk show in a car. The latest one is about "belt-sander races."
I'm against driving, but if you have to commute in a car, at least doing something creative like this mitigates things somewhat. Plus, hey, it's car-pooling.
This is already one of my favorite vlogs. not just because of the gimmick, but the guy is really charismatic, and a good interviewer. And a good driver, too, I guess.
(via We Are The Media)
Geek Abuse
I just remembered something that happened yesterday that annoyed me slightly. I stopped by the Dry River space to see if the internet connection was up, because it had been out all the day before. I'm one of the 2-3 people who set up the computer lab and sort of maintain it. So I come in and boot up one of machines, it's just opening time so nobody else has tried them yet, and I'm waiting for it to boot and this guy that hangs out there, one of the many eccentric street characters that hangs out there, asks me "So what's the scoop, Perfessor? Is there internet?"
This is the equivalent of being called "4-eyes" or whatever back in grade school. It was said semi-jokingly, or maybe the intent was to be completely humorous. But I was irritated. And to some extent "perfessor" is an honoriffic, so it's complicated. It's a bit like beefy jock types that call people who are less beefy "big guy." (this has happened quite a bit in my past). Obviously it's an insult, it's sarcasm, but it may be unconcious, or if not it's easily deniable that it was intentional.
I'll qualify these gripes by saying that as I'm a privileged white middle-class straight male I actually have no real idea what I'm talking about, but in no way am I comparing it to the daily abuse that women and people of color and other opressed peoples are subjected to. However it's interesting to notice through that lens, so to speak. For instance how often are women annoyed when they're called "girls"? How often in general are people mean to each other, especially to those different from them, without even noticing?
Zero Coke Movement
At first I was confused, but I guess that a new anti-coke consumer boycott campaign is somewhat in response to a Coca-Cola ad campagn to sell their "Coke Zero" sugar-free product. The boycott actually goes further and mentions that you should stop drinking all soft drinks, drink water instead and send the money you would spend to fund efforts to get clean water to those who don't have it.
This is good advice. I don't drink soft drinks, or packaged beverages at all, except the occasional bottle of juice. Coffee is my guilty disposable-income vice, but I only have about 1 latte or whatever a day, so I don't think I'm that bad.
This seems like a silly thing to even be blogging about. but I saw that page and then thought of some people I know who are drinking cans of soda all the time. Plus we just had a big discussion on a mailing list I'm on about fatness in the U.S. and high-fructose corn syrup. bleah.
whew.
Feeling a bit overwhelmed.
There's so many things going on, projects and things I'm involved with. And now I'm sick, for no apparent reason other than the stress of all this stuff going on - I've been eating right, sleeping enough, etc. Hopefully I can kick it fast, I already feel better than yesterday, but who knows what'll happen. I need to take it a little easier, I guess.
recent things not mentioned on blog yet:
Looking for an Audio CMS
So I have this site, Phonophilia, which is all about field recordings and other sound. I want to keep adding to it and I want a better way to do that and manage what's there. So I've been looking for days for some kind of content-management system for audio. I basically want something that can look at a directory full of sound files and make a nice looking little index page, reading the ID3 tags of each mp3 file to get details... stuff like that.
I don't want just a podcasting tool, if I wanted just that I would just use LoudBlog, which seems pretty cool for that limited need. Though something that generates RSS for each page would be nice. the thing with podcasts and blogs is it's all about the NOW, the latest, not about managing content that's both old and new.
So, dear reader, do you know of anything like this? (I was spurred to asking you from reading José's blog where he just asked a couple real questions of his readers. And I had answers!)
multiclips
Video geek alert. Yesterday I installed Final Cut Pro 5 and one really cool new feature is "multiclips." Basically you can link together multiple clips shot with different cameras of the same thing and then really easily make an edit, clicking back and forth between the different angles like a TV producer doing live Superbowl coverage. (you know: "ready camera 2... camera 2. Camera 3, find me a close up of a ref... ready camera 3... camera 3... ready camera 1.... camera 1...")
So I tested it out with some footage I already had captured of an Earth First demonstration. It was super cool. Something that would have taken a day to piece together took about about 30 minutes. The results are not perfect, and I purposely cut back and forth too often just to demonstrate how easy it is. But it works, and it's a fun little clip; about 5 minutes and 11 MB.
weekend
The thing about living in the desert is I almost always get at least a little dehydrated while I'm sleeping. If I also have a little bit to drink the night before, I get even more dehydrated, and wake up feeling hung over, more so than in wetter climes. Last night was a preview screening of a new film called Presente by another member of the Pan Left video collective, Jason Aragon. The film is about the Migrant Trail Walk, a yearly symbolic 7-day hike from the border to Tucson organized by border activists here. After the screening was an afterparty that was pretty fun. There were border activists and video people and it was at this house that's actually a small, sort of weird college, just a couple blocks from my house.
So after the party last night today I woke up feeling really worn, even though I think I only had like 3 beers. And tried to fix that by drinking coffee, more coffee than I should have, starting off a whole process for the day of too much coffee. After breakfast I started transcribing all the english in my Juarez film so that it can be translated into Spanish. I had to wrestle with software, looking for something that was just right, and I just couldn't find something to do what I really wanted the way I wanted. But Transana almost is sufficient. It's a cool program, but it's written by academics who want to analyze how people talk, I guess, rather than translate films. But really the only problem is it doesn't export to the kind of text file that DVD Studio Pro wants, STL, so i wrote a little filter in perl that converts. It's a actually the perfect sort of job for perl. I'm so glad I know perl.
Then I had a headache so I went and had a coffee while meeting with Daniela, someone else from Pan Left, and a high school teacher she's working with on a video production class. I'm going to be helping them out with a day or 2 of editing instruction. That should be interesting, teaching 15-year-olds how to use Final Cut.
Then I still had a headache so I had more coffee and worked on transcribing more. I guess I should have just taken a long bike ride or something relaxing to enjoy the beautiful day, but I really felt like getting more accomplished.
Well, now I feel okay and I'm going to go downstairs and make dinner. yay.
Prominent lawyer shot dead in Juárez
Diana Washington Valdez of the El Paso Times reports that yesterday afternoon in downtown Juarez a well-known lawyer was shot and killed. He was lawyer for one of the bus drivers who was falsely arrested and tortured for some of the murders of women there. He mentioned recently that if he is killed he would blame a local police official who'd been harrassing him. Journalists from Spain are in town to report on the murders and were scheduled to interview him soon.
Let Us Pull
Of course everybody geeky enough and who cares enough about privacy concerns (related to both government and corporate breaches thereof) has been following the Google story of the feds asking for their logs. I've been in an extended discussion with a friend about that, about Google's ethics, and about what most people do or don't want from or know about or believe about Google and privacy and security.
He just pointed me to a blog that pointed to a story in the Register that reports that 77% of Google users don't know that Google "records personal data."
In this discourse i think a lot depends on the meaning of "personal data." To be fair, the quote above is from the headline, but the actual article, written by the every-snarky but tech-savvy Andrew Orlowski, uses the phrase "Google records and stores information that may identify them" (emphasis mine). Recording an ip address and a history of searches isn't neccesarily going to lead to a person, as in a name, and an address to send the stormtroopers to. you'd need the cooperation of someone's ISP to physically find them; and with dynamic IPs, which is how most people get online, i think, it might be hard for even an ISP to say which of their subscribers did what when.
Bad news for homeland security, better news for google and the datamining industry, who can say 'we don't really have data that's THAT personal.'
Jos