And He Blogs

Old Time Horror Radio . . . including Lights Out - “It-is-later-than-you-think!”

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I’ve been using a product from Serious Magic called Visual Communicator since it came out in 2001. An email in my inbox alerted me that the company has been acquired by none other than Adobe! It’s always serious news when a product you have known and loved gets bumped into the big time, and it doesn’t get much bigger than Adobe. Of course the last newsworthy purchase that Adobe made was that of Macromedia, the makers of Flash. Now Adobe gets to call their own some great products. Not only Visual Communicator, which is a kind of TV production studio in a box, but also DV Rack (video production truck in a box), Ultra (software for creating virtual sets using chroma-key), Ovation (a PowerPoint add-on for dressing up boring slides), and Vlog-It! (an all-in-one video blogging solution).

So the next question is, what does this mean to the development of the software? Well I can only believe good things. I currently use the Adobe Video Bundle to do graphic work and video editing. The possibility of integrating Flash, Adobe Premiere, and Visual Communicator is quite exciting. Now I hope this doesn’t sound like a commercial endorsement. I was a user before I was a spokesperson

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Those Sony folks are at it again, quite literally painting the town in their latest advertisement for their Bravia LCD TVs. You may remember their previous “bouncing balls” ad (or advert as those in the UK say) a while back. There are some details about the setup for the shoot, but I’d like to see some of the clean up afterwards. Fun!

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I am always hesitant to profess my love for a new product or update, and there is the risk of jinxifying my life, but I must say that I am loving the new Firefox 2.0 (actually it’s in the final Release Candidate 2, or RC2, stage). You can see the list of new features at the FFRC2 site, but let me give you my top three:

1. Built-in spell-check!!! Yes, that’s three exclamation points. Great for checking those words as you blog, or write in your Wiki. It gives you a red underline for unrecognized words, just like MS Word (only less obnoxious in my opinion). Right-click the word for suggestions or too add it to your dictionary. I know there were plug-ins to be had to do this, but “built-in” is the way to go!

2. Close individual tabs with a close button on the tab itself, not off to the far right. Hey, I’m using a widescreen monitor now so enough said.

3. This one is big and it works. Session recovery. What that means is when your doing your research and you have fourteen tabs open and something causes Firefox to crash, when you restart Firefox it will ask you if you want to recover your previous session. I can tell you first hand that it works.

This version seems as stable as 1.5, though there are a few things that I notice don’t work. Since it’s a new release it has compatibility issues with some extensions. One of them being the Bloglines toolkit, you know the one that gives you the red dot on the “B” in your browser when there are new articles to read. Not a big deal for me because it seems there are ALWAYS new articles to read in Bloglines. Anyway my fix for this is to add a toolbar link to my feeds in Bloglines. I also had to update some themes, and the throbber doesn’t go to the Firefox home page (it does nothing).

The final release of Firefox 2 should be done by the end of October. I’ll update if I notice anything agregiously egregiously (thank you spell checker) wrong with the RC2. Also, let it be known that jinxifying has been added to my dictionary.

UPDATE: There is a new Bloglines notifier for Firefox 2 (but it’s not on the Bloglines site yet).

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I’ve touted DivX in the past, and you can’t go very long without hearing someone mention YouTube this or that. Well, for a while now, DivX has had a YouTube-like site called Stage 6, where they feature videos that are presented in the DivX format (you’ll need the DivX web player to see them). YouTube has not been short on content worth watching, though original content is not necessarily their forte. The Stage 6 site, while not nearly a YouTube, offers up an original film called In This Corner. It’s a short film set in the year 1988 and while maybe not Oscar-worthy, it does have a good combination of humor, suspense, and triumph, enough to make it well worth your time (did I also mention teenage angst and Nintendo).

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By way of Dave Winer I saw what he describes as a sweet video on You Tube. However, there’s more to the story, and more to be said about the story. I’ll let you watch and read. File this under cock-eyed optimist.

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I had the opportunity to work on getting the video of President Frawley’s Inauguration up on UMW’s website this weekend. The people who asked me to “work” on a Saturday forgot how much fun this kind of stuff is to me. While the job of capturing video and editing is not hard work (and I could teach most people how), I am reminded of how the presentation of media on the web is constantly changing. The editing is the easy part. What’s more difficult is the use of the myriad of compression schemes and CODECs, and there is a constant evaluation of how they perform relative to each other. Even more vexing sometimes is the strange way the editing software behaves when you are trying to convert your file with a deadline, or discovering that your editor doesn’t do things the easy way. Are you getting a hint of some of the workflow frustrations I had with this project?

Anyway, I had some nice comments about how it turned out, and I was pleased as well (there’s still some work to be done). What I love about working on these video projects is - reliving the event. There is a great excitement associated with this president and what the future at the University of Mary Washington holds. I found myself getting emotional as Dr. Frawley spoke of a phone conversation with his son about “traveling into the future” (and laughing at how a colleague described it - an Abbott and Costello routine), and of a game called “brain-wire” he played with his daughter. Having an almost four-year-old son, I can relate to these games. All you are thinking about is their future, and at the same time you are desperately trying to keep hold of the present. I wish President Frawley good luck on his guiding us into the future.

UPDATE: An iPod version is now available

 Inauguration - iPod version [30:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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