Wayne D's Blog

I was lying on my couch Sunday afternoon, EEEPC perched on my chest, living vicariously through the tweets of other, trying to not hack my lungs out as I suffered from a late spring cold, when a tweet went by from Amber MacArthur about an awesome entry in the CommandN-Mesh contest. How was that for a run on sentence? After whining about there not being enough camps and conferences in Toronto I find that the Mesh conference is less than two weeks away. I watch the entry Amber is tweeting about and figure there is no way that I can put something together in one day to compete with the mad scientist. But wait, this guy is in Vancouver, Air Canada has just added another surcharge to their fares. If he hasn't booked yet it's going to cost him a fortune to fly to Toronto on short notice. There is hope, now I just have to put together a concept, record it and get it in by midnight. I come up with a minimalist concept inspired by the Cali Lewis style of broadcasting, jam as many words as possible into as short a time as possible. Luckily I have a facility for fast talking. I write my script on the EEEPC, turn on the webcam and shoot. Problem, for some reason the file the EEEPC produces an .ogg movie doesn't seem to play properly on anything I have including the EEEPC. The other problem is that my 30 second video runs about a minute ten. I forgot to add that it's Mother's day and we are supposed to go out for dinner. Off to dinner we go.

While at dinner I rework my original concept into something that has a modicum of entertainment value. When we return I head downstairs and try to install VLC so I can capture the video. I struggle with dependencies for a while, get it installed and realize I don't know how to use it. The clock is ticking, I have to do something quick so off I go to ustream. I am pruning and paring my script, finally getting it down to 170 words. I don't have any video editing software installed and besides I don't have time to learn how to use it. I'm going to have to do it straight, without editing. Lacking a teleprompter I put my webcam on six pack CD magazine to put it at the right height and drop a box into the centre of my script page so the text flows around the camera. I carefully arrange the windows so I can click record and then move the mouse to centre my script on the page.

Take 1, I start and flub the line. Take 2 I pause for too long and screw that one up. Maybe I should learn how to edit video. Take after take, lines are flubbed, awkward pauses get in. Ok, let's rewrite that line so it flows better. Cali makes this fast talking look so easy. Next time I'm going to do this long enough in advance that I can memorize the script. Damn, another line flubbed. This take is no good because I closed my eyes before stopping the recording. Finally I get one done that isn't too heinous. Then I lay another one down, that one seems a bit better. I'll keep that one. I play it back , crap the sound is going but there is no motion in the video. I download the .flv and try it with mplayer. Even worse, It plays back at 60 fps and the sound is completely hosed. I cross my fingers and submit it for conversion to .mov. I wait a tense few minutes download it, whew, it plays fine. Damn it has that goofy white dot noise at the bottom I have never bothered troubleshooting. Almost 10 p.m., no time to fix it, must send it off. Maybe someone will get a laugh out of it. The next morning I get a short email "That is awesome!!!! Thank you! Seriously, great work...". Hmmm, maybe I'm not such a hack. I decide I'm tough enough to take the ridicule, I'll post it to my blog and see what happens. So here it is, please don't be too harsh.

Here is a link for the Flash impaired meshcontest.mov

I figured that when I didn't win the contest I could see if I could get the two days off and buy my way into Mesh. Today I see on their blog that the conference is sold out. Sigh, maybe next year.

I tried to find the Geekbrief episode where Cali Lewis explains her fast talking but was unsuccessful. If someone knows the link please post it in a comment. My estimate of my words per minute count is 242.

I sit here and I type my bloggity blog and wonder if anyone ever reads it, then one day something happens to convince me that there is a point. Back in mid April I write a post questioning why emusic had turned me down for their affiliate link program without offering any explanation. Turns out someone from their affiliate marketing program read the post and couldn't figure out why either. He sent me a nice email apologizing for it occurring and pledging that it wouldn't happen again. Ahhhh, the power of the blog.

Seriously if you like independent music you really should check out emusic. Over my time as a member my music library has become filled with legal nonDRMed MP3's from many, many great indie artists. If you search my blog for emusic you'll see a listing of some of the music I've downloaded over the past few years. The best part is that you can sign up for their free trial and get 25 songs, if you decide you don't want to be a member you cancel and keep the songs. Of course they'd like you to stick around as a member but if you don't you get to keep the 25 free tracks. Currently they charge $9.99 a month or $11.99 for Canadians for 30 tracks. They have plans at slightly higher fees for more tracks a month. I originally became a member just after I bought my iPod because they had the music of many of the artists I liked to listen to in a convenient nonDRM'd format. If you want to give it a try you can click on the banner below and I get a referral bonus. They have also recently added audio books and if you want you can get a free audio book too.

As part of my attempt to catch up to bleeding edge of technology I took my EEEPC to the Marlies playoff game last night. I was supposed to be conducting the Marlinotes for the first part of the game while our fearless leader jetted in from NYC expecting to arrive just around game time. New rule for '08, don't rely on airlines. His flight was delayed 3 hours before it left leaving me holding the clipboard and marker. My plan for ustreaming our perfromance at the game came a bit unhinged as I tried to juggle mt beer cup, eeepc and song list while not missing a cue. The challenge in playing at a hockey game is when you get the cue that you will be playing at the next whistle it could be anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes later. Keeping an eating, drinking, and chatting band on their toes and ready to play in this situation can be a tad bit difficult.

After the first intermission I did manage to get the EEEPC online using the free wireless at the Ricoh Centre and streaming to an audience of at peak 5 people. The cool thing was that one of them was a former bandmate who now lives and works in Japan and saw my tweet about the Marlinotes on ustream. Another one of the viewers was an Argonote band member from Waterloo who saw that I was streaming through my Facebook status. The experiment was not a complete success, after about 45 minutes we lost audio, a band without audio isn't much fun so I terminated the experiment. I did record a couple of videos but they didn't turn out well enough to keep. I'd would have liked to try streaming with the Argonotes at the Rogers Centre but for some bizarre reason Rogers, one of the two major ISP's in Ontario doesn't offer free wireless in their own facility. Perhaps they have reconsidered and we can expect to see it this year, especially since Rogers is getting ready to announce the iPhone. You may be wondering why I used ustream after writing about live.yahoo.com so much. The simple reason is that Yahoo has still not resolved the audio issue that live.yahoo.com has on Linux. Maybe now that they aren't all polishing up their resumes they'll get a chance to look at it.

Why am I slagging the iPod touch? One of the Marlinotes is a big Cali Lewis and Geekbrief like myself and she has an iPod touch. Cali was also streaming on ustream last night and guess what the internet enabled iPod touch won't do, flash video? Guess what everybody and their dog on the internet uses for streaming video, flash video. I graciously loaned her my EEPC so she could get her Cali fix. She and I are both figuring out how we can get Cali and Neal up to Toronto during the big trip. The big trip is a trip she and her husband Neal plan to take in an RV starting this summer. Fifty states in fifty weeks and hopefully at least one Canadian province. We figure we will at least have to pay for the gas for their RV and perhaps get them some media exposure when they hit town. There must be tonnes of Geekbrief fans in the GTA who could make time for a meet up.

You may have noticed that I have changed my blog skin. This was because I realized the other skin wasn't putting the right sidebar on the individual posts. Probably something I messed up, now I'll get another wave of search robot hits as the notice the changed pages and rampage through the site.

When I was in Miami last week I finally got a chance to try out Hulu. I had heard so much about it that I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately it wouldn't stream, it would start, then stop, then start again. I would have thought that it was because my EEEPC didn't have enough power but I heard the same report from one of my friends who had also tried it while visiting the United States. She said that ABC.com streamed fine for her. My friend also reported that pausing the Hulu stream, a common technique to allow more video to be buffered didn't work. Is this because of some DRM paranoia?

Today while browsing through Valleywag I cam across an embedded video for Amanda Congden's new project sometimesdaily.com It didn't stream very well either, this time on my Windows XP desktop system so you can't blame Linux this time. It appears that in order to satisfy our requirement for instant gratification video services aren't buffering as much video as they used to before they try to play it. Sessions.aol.ca worked fine when I checked it today so I don't think it's my internet connection. I have embedded the Amanda Congden clip below so you can try it out yourself. It's nice to see that Amanda is back, I had subscribed to her occasional podcast on iTunes but there hasn't been a new one for quite some time.

Introducing Sometimesdaily from Sometimesdaily on Vimeo.

(update May 25, 2008, misspelled Amanda's last name, sorry, fixed now)

It seems that the default behavior on Linux when it detects an error during the fsck check during boot is to pop out to a shell and tell the user to fix it. This is a really bad idea, if you want to take over the world, fix problems that you can automatically. How many people running Linux these days are competent enough to manually fix a file system? In the past couple of months I have ran across two people who have ended up with auto fsck check failures during the boot process as a result of power failures. Both cases were fixed without incident by running fsck -y after the system had popped out to a naked shell prompt.

The use of windows has dumbed most computer users down to the point where they don't know what to do at a shell prompt, in fact it tends to make them break into a cold sweat. Even Ubuntu 7.10 which is supposed to be Linux for Windows users doesn't try to fix things automatically during boot. Maybe the new version does but I doubt it.

Done ranting.