Damn You, Tube!

I created a DVD slideshow last month for my triathlon club's end-of-season dinner. Thinking it would be nice to post it online for everyone else to see I tried to convert the iDVD project into a movie file. This turned out to be not too easy as it's kind of the reverse of the normal creation process. I actually ended up having to "play" the DVD with video capture software (Snapz Pro X) making a movie from the screen! Next year I'll start in iMovie and then finish it in iDVD...

The issues didn't stop there though. I had a 21 minute video that was about 160 MB in size. Big. I logged into YouTube and uploaded it, but it turns out that YouTube has a 10 minute limit on video length so not even I could play it. I didn't want to have to do too much chopping and soundtrack fiddling to get it uploaded, so I put it on facebook instead where the limits are 20 minutes and 1024 MB. I did a bit of fiddling, added some title page-type stuff, and got the whole thing down to 19:19 and about 134 MB.

I guess facebook will get the pageviews and ad hits instead of YouTube.

And here it is, squished a bit to fit into the Blogger frames, for your viewing pleasure! Click on it to see a full-size version.

Listening to: I Feel It All by Feist from The Reminder.

News "Flash"

In my morning internet peregrinations I came across a review of a free Flash game called Auditorium. Take Flash, particle physics and music samples and stir intelligently... The result is a very appealing online puzzle/game. I think their web connection has been "slashdotted" since I visited this morning though. They need to host the game somewhere upstream of their office's internet connection! It would be really cool on the iPhone's touchscreen, but the iPhone is a Flash no-go zone...

Last night I went out with some friends to see the new Baz Luhrmann epic Australia. I'm a bit ambivalent about this one; it was nearly three hours long, ended at least three times and is the first film I've been to that required two "bio breaks". (Note to self: a 10 liter cola is not helpful when watching epic films.) The plot verged on nonsensical and the acting was generally way over the top. The special effects were painfully obvious. BUT... the star was really the Australian landscape, which was beautifully captured and little Brandon Walter's performance as a "creamy" half white-half aboriginal boy was fabulous. Writing this crystallises my thoughts: I have to vote Australia off the island. If you want to see the subject of historical Australian prejudice against half-white children dramatically presented rent the film Rabbit-Proof Fence.

Politics: Stephen Harper is so freaked out due suddenly realising that a minority government has to get support from other parties, who have a constitutional right to propose an alternative government that doesn't include him, that he is going to address the nation tonight. This should be interesting.

Listening to: Hate to Say I Told You So by The Hives from Veni Vidi Vicious.

The Big Picture

I've been loving this web site, The Big Picture from the Boston Globe newspaper, for a while now. Today's set of high resolution images have been gathered from Baikonur, the Kazakhistan city used by Russia for their space program. So nice to see a well-selected and large series of images on a topical subject. Death to thumbnails!

Listening to: Belfast Child by Simple Minds from Street Fighting Years.

Scene of the Crime

I took Sheryl's dog Barkley to the dog park this morning. While he was sniffing around oblivious to lifeforms that weren't human or canine a Golden Retriever was on the hunt. The dog spotted a squirrel a hundred or so feet away that it thought it had a chance of getting and took off. He got it all right... There was a terrible thrashing and some desperate squeaks. It was over in about ten seconds. Everyone was upset and the owner had a hell of a time convincing the dog to drop the poor squirrel's lifeless body.

In less awful news I discovered a neat web site yesterday that creates a configurable "word cloud" from a block of text or the text of a web site. The link is wordle.net and here is what this blog looks like, today, when viewed through the Wordle filter. Click on it to see a larger version.

Oh yeah, the Olympics have been underway for the better part of a week... I didn't watch the opening ceremonies but I have been watching some of the sports coverage. Obligatory anti-pageantry comment: why did China spend so much effort extolling their cultural history when in reality they are so busy paving it over? I suppose the question is the answer.

The swimming always attracts my attention; it's been amazing watching Michael Phelps reel in the records. I wonder if he'll gather the eight golds everyone is predicting? I've also been enjoying the gymnastics. The men are amazing, but for some reason the women's performances are more compelling. Maybe it's because they seem so young to be under such pressure. It looks like we'll have to wait for the rowing to see any Canadian appearances on the podium.

I'm off for an easy run now, a week and a half until Ironman Canada!

Listening to: Monkey Gone To Heaven by The Pixies from Doolittle.

Someone is WRONG on the internet!

I've been enjoying the xkcd web comic for a while, it appeals to my inner nerd. This particular recent entry explains me to myself at last, and earns xkcd a spot on my "Series of tubes..." sidebar.

In iPhone news, I have recovered from "bricking" my iPhone by unwisely installing an update. A hack emerged a week ago that let me return to iPhone bliss and my broken Motorola Razr, the one that can't navigate or even dial "9", has been retired again... Lesson learned.

Here's an iPhone photo from the lake shore last weekend when Chris and I visited my parents. We could hear the howling wind and pounding waves and just had to investigate!

What's happening in my tiny world of endurance sports? I'm training for the 30K "Around the Bay" race in Hamilton at the end of March and riding my tri bike on a CompuTrainer once a week at a new facility called Absolute Endurance. They're in the building that since my childhood has housed a thrift shop. Funny to walk into it again after all these years!

Listening to: Stacy's Mom by Fountains of Wayne from Welcome Interstate Managers.

Going with the Flow

After my late Friday night on The Shopping Channel I was up and out the door with my Cervelo triathlon bike shortly before 9:00 AM. I got to the meeting point a little bit late, so I rode with one other latecomer. We covered 60K in two hours on the country roads around Newmarket, under sunny warm skies. Nice. There was a bit of wind though, which made for some hard sections. The last leg had a tailwind which felt great. Note to self: Body Glide isn't just for races. Apply liberally to areas that will be in contact with bike seat before all long rides...

Back in town I met Sheryl for lunch at the Montreal Bread Company in Yorkville. Afterward I was going to help her shop for a new car (she sold her old one last week), but I ran out of steam. I tried to fix some things on her computer, but then I had to head home for a nap before meeting up with a friend.

My friend David had invited me along to a charity concert for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, called Mardi Gras in the Beach at the Balmy Beach Club. David plays harmonica with the R&B band Three Chord Johnny, but was last night he was sitting in with Roadhouse. I thought the evening would be sittin' and drinkin' but Louise, one of Sheryl's best friends, happened to be there too so we spent a lot of time dancing and chatting. Louise works for an ad agency and most of her company had come out. David's day job is freelance copywriting and he may have scored some work with Louise's agency. I also may have landed some work, modeling suits and jackets, as the result of a conversation with an art director. Never pass up a party!

Sunday morning was supposed to be an early start like Saturday. I had planned to head up to the Running Room for a 20K run. Didn't happen... Something told me that a sleep-in was what the doctor ordered. Instead I went for a swim at noon.

Speaking of "going with the flow", there's a free online game I discovered a while ago called Flow. Try it out!

Listening to: Domino by Van Morrison from His Band and the Street Choir.

Ratios

I just checked my e-mail inbox(es), the ratio of spam to real mail was 25:1. This is with filtering active on all my mail servers! Maddening.

Some bits of news that caught my eye this morning: A German paraglider in Australia was caught in a storm that swept her higher than Mt. Everest with temperatures dropping to -40C. She encountered hail the size of oranges and passed out from lack of oxygen. As she glided down again she revived to find herself coated in ice. What a tale to live to tell! A Chinese pilot caught the same way by the storm died.

There was a conference on Canada's Bill of Rights this week, according to the news. Canadian Supreme Court Justice Ian Binnie presented the widely held Canadian philosophy of interpreting the Charter to reflect modern society's values and protect minorities. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia extolled that "what democracy means is that the majority rules", apparently suggesting that minorities should shut up and do as they are told. Regarding extending rights, Scalia is of the opinion that judges aren't to be trusted. The only acceptable route is to explicitly change the constitution. He also said that he had "not seen a case where I thought there was the slightest doubt about the person's innocence". Scalia's words say more about his own vision than they do about justice. The list of wrongly convicted, even wrongly executed, Americans is long, and I don't think America's hallowed founding fathers had the faintest idea of how their society would change (thank god the American constitution was written after the whole witchcraft thing was set aside).

Listening to: Blue Sky Mine by Midnight Oil from Blue Sky Mining.

Minding Your "P"s and "Q"s

Late last night I tried to log into the web site I manage for my triathlon club to update some news. There was bigger news though... Our domain name registration had expired. No web site! I'm not the contact for the club's domain name, so I had no idea we were running out of time. I called/e-mailed everyone I had contact details for to make sure the problem was (hopefully) corrected quickly, things were back online by 9:00 AM. Luckily the domain name wasn't particularly desirable. I think that expired domain registrations are "protected" for a month or so after they expire as well.

I caught some entertaining TV yesterday, watching the opening episode of the 14th season(!) of Survivor, set in Fiji. I watched Survivor regularly the first few seasons but eventually got disgusted by the entire "reality" TV genre. I think it was Temptation Island that did it, a show where couples went to an island resort and the producers tried to break them up.

A friend of mine wanted to watch while I was visiting him, so I sat through the episode. From my "elevated perspective" the show was hilarious. It was like watching someone stick a fork into a toaster. What did you expect to happen? The producers are going to spend the whole season jerking your chain and making you jump through capricious hoops. Suck it up and bask in your 1.5 seconds of fame... Having said that, I enjoy this kind of competition when it's friendly. A number of years ago an acquaintance organised a big party on her farm and divided everyone into teams for a scavenger hunt. "We" won and I was able to solve about half the puzzles myself. It was a very satisfying combination of mental puzzles and trail running.

I found a new TV show to watch today too, The IT Crowd. It's a new British comedy about the I.T. department of a corporation... They seem to have nailed the stereotypes pretty well. Too bad its not on the air here, the episode I saw had been downloaded from the intertubes.

I've been meaning to mention this for a little while, but I found a neat Mac OS X utility for making audiobooks from MP3 files last week. I've got a number of "books on CD" that I've copied to my Mac, but they end up as a bunch of individual songs in iTunes, which isn't that useful. Audiobook Builder joins them together, lets you set Chapter points and import artwork, and tells iTunes to treat it like an audiobook. Nice.

Listening to: Plush (Acoustic) by Stone Temple Pilots from Thank You.

A Favicon!

I was poking about the intertubes the other day looking for a better home page. About ten years ago Excite was where the cool kids went to see the day's headlines, check stocks, weather and such. I was cool, so that's where I went too. Well it's 2007 and Excite hasn't cut it for a long time. It's too slow to load and covers way too much screen real estate with ads or links to their search engine. And no cool kids go there now.

The two big local ISPs, Rogers Communications and Bell Sympatico, provide a home page that anyone can use and configure. Rogers' portal is Yahoo-based and has too much Flash and too little info. Sympatico is MSN-based (stop right there!) and drips with banner ads. Neither site is very satisfying.

I did find a couple of interesting "independent" portals though. Pageflakes looks neat but doesn't work in my preferred browser, Safari. Netvibes looks interesting too, but doesn't seem as versatile. I'm trying out Netvibes for now. Let me know if you have a recommendation!

In the course of this portal-play I decided that I needed an icon for my blog. These things are called favicons. You've probably noticed lots of web sites will have a custom icon that appears in your favourites or bookmarks. What should I use? I decided to take a slice of my blog banner's graphic of Mars. (What, you thought that was a red Moon? You're crazy.) The process is straight-forward enough. Make a small square image, save it as an Windows ICO file, name it favicon.ico, drop it into the "top" directory of your web site. You can also do somethings in your HTML to make it happen. Done, but it doesn't seem to be visible sometimes. Hmmm.

I got out for a run this afternoon, just 8K in 37 minutes in the cold and snow. No-one along side to push me! Wish I'd remembered my heart rate monitor so I could have compared the effort to last Sunday's run.

Listening to: Intergalactic by Beastie Boys from Hello Nasty.

This Just In

News flash: America is not winning the war in Iraq! This is straight from George Bush's lips. According to George though "not winning" is not the same as "losing", so don't get too worried. Heh. Looks like someone in the White House has stopped focusing on nicknames and realised he can't just make it up as he goes along. Time to fish out the old thinkin' cap!

Speaking of foul-smelling things that need to be tossed out, I've been much more aware of my kitchen wash cloth, which has a tendency to lie beside my sink for weeks at a time, since my father's recent visit. He mentioned (in a non-critical way) that he'd learned that dish rags are actually the biggest source of bacteria in the home. I now try to change cloths every few days, but I had always thought the kitchen sink was the worst spot. The expert advice is to hang your dish cloths over your faucet to ensure that they dry, which prevents bacteria buildup and to microwave them(!) for a minute before use.

Turning to "local" news I read that NASA has teamed up with Google to make their satellite imagery of the Earth, Moon and Mars available, including some real-time content. This is good news for me here on Mars, because even to us locals one damn sand dune looks like another. Perhaps with Google Mars I'll eventually be able to find my way around...

Listening to: This Could Be Anywhere In The World by Alexisonfire from Crisis.

Hard-wired

As every blogger knows, keeping spam out of comments is an on-going battle. (Except in my case, because my blog rarely gets comments...) One way to prevent spammers from dropping unsolicited commercial e-mail into your comments is to display an image of distorted numbers and letters and ask the commenter to type them back into a text field. Not hard for the human brain, but tough enough for a computer to make the effort too "expensive". There are a number of systems based on this principle, called CAPTCHA, that bloggers can use. I use the built-in Blogger version just for the hell of it.

Recently a system called Hotcaptcha appeared that shows nine pictures of women and asks you to select the three "hot" ones. Or you can switch to men and pick the hott (is that enough "t"s?) guys. I tried it out and using women's photos I'm able to detect the hotties almost every time. Switching to men, my detection abilities dropped to about 50%! I suppose that tells you something about me. The hottie seen in this post is Desiree Ficker, a top-ranked American triathlete. Wow!

Listening to: Heterosexual Man by the Odds from Bedbugs.

The Mythical Man-Month

Ah yes, the mythical man-month. This is the belief that a project can be completed twice as fast by assigning twice as many staff to it. Generally speaking this is wrong, wrong, wrong. Beyond a certain point adding staff decreases productivity because of the spiraling effort required to communicate and coordinate.

This comes to mind today because I see a technology blogger has called Bill Gates out with a $10,000 bet over his recent statement that the next version of Windows, now called Vista but once know as Longhorn, has an 80% chance of shipping by January 2007. Vista was originally supposed to ship in late 2002 and a large number of core features have been dropped...

In my own life Sheryl and I enjoyed a $35 Summerlicious dinner at Thuet on Wednesday. All I can say is wow! Tonight we're going to Era Ora, which is just around the corner from Sheryl's place. I also ran across this remarkable excerpt in the Globe & Mail's morning obituaries:

July 14, 1911
An estimated 300 people died when a huge forest fire swept through the Porcupine area near Timmins, Ont. The blaze was fanned by high winds until it became a fast-moving 40-kilometre front. In places men in mining camps who heard it approaching escaped only by running as fast as their strength allowed for a lake or river. Some who made it to safety arrived with clothes burned off their backs. Hundreds of people in settlements who also went to the lakes were drowned, pushed into deep waters by the crush of late arrivals. A young bank clerk who had conscientiously emptied the vaults before running to the lake guarded the cash throughout the night with a loaded revolver, alone in an open canoe. The fire left more than 3,000 people homeless and destroyed 2,200 square kilometres of forest, taking with it the mining communities of South Porcupine, Cochrane and Goldlands.

The Toronto International Film Festival is also approaching. I spent Wednesday and Thursday evenings helping at the recruiting sessions down at Roy Thompson Hall. Why not join us? Check out the volunteering opportunities here.

Listening to: So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry) by R.E.M. from Reckoning.

I may already be famous

I found the web site MyHeritage through another blog today. It's a geneology site that lets you post a photo of yourself (I used the one here that a photographer friend shot for, uh, my portfolio) and lists the "celebrities that you look like."

Apparently I'm the spitting image of George Clooney, Enrico Fermi, Sean Bean, Cary Grant and... Yasmine Bleeth! And a few others. Who the hell is José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero? Oh, the President of Spain.

Why the portfolio shot? Well I've got a bit of time on my hands and my photographer friend tells me that my salt-and-pepper hair might get me some catalog work. Personally I'm hoping for a juicy GQ cover so all my old girlfriends will know what they're missing...

Listening to: Kiss and Tell by Bryan Ferry from Bête Noire.

Sorry, I was just Googling

I was having a late-night talk with Sheryl and slowly dropping off to sleep last night. She accused me of being asleep, so that became our topic. Even when I'm almost asleep I can summarise the last thing said to me. It's like I have a 15 second tape loop in my head for defensive purposes.

I explained that when I'm tired I don't zone out of the conversation (as I was being accused). Instead I go into a kind of free-association state where I hear the other person and I'm aware of the thread, but follow paths of thought that branch off from the topic. So if I'm dozing off while talking about a friend's relationships I might start thinking about a business idea he mentioned a while ago, or a different friend's situation. It's not as good as staying focused on the actual conversation, but it's not a sign that I'm ignoring it...

Sheryl said "So you're Googling in your head." I guess she's right. We all know how Google searches can bring up strange matches. Maybe my mind just clicks "I'm Feeling Lucky" when it's tired.

Listening to: The Reasons by The Weakerthans from Reconstruction Site.

Tech Music

Recently a web site I like to visit that discusses new gadgets, called Gizmodo, held a competition. Hitachi had posted some MP3 files of the sounds (normal and 'sick') their hard drives might make, presumably for diagnostic use by technicians. Gizmodo's spin on this (Spin. Get it? Spin!) was to see who could make the best song using only those sampled sounds. A hundred entries were received.

The winner, James Postlethwaite, used extremely tiny snips of sound to build tones and then laid larger chunks on top to construct a melody. The result was a beautiful (to my ear anyway) chill track. You can hear it at the Odeo music archive web site. Too bad its just two minutes long...

Oh, there was a football game today too. The rust-belt team beat the tech-town team.

2006/05/14 update: The song is gone from Odeo. Fortunately I saved it: Noriko Version.

Listening to: Hitachi Hard-Drive Project - Noriko Version by James Postlethwaite.