Ham, cheese and tomato

So. Good. Toasted or not. *is particularly enjoying a sandwich for no apparent reason*

Pricy Vistas?

I seem to recall a lot of people whining about how expensive Windows Vista is. I didn’t pay a lot of attention at the time because it seemed a long way off (for me, it still is — I’ll probably sit out until the second service pack before spending money on it) but kind of accepted that it was going to be horrendously expensive when the time came.

And then today I took a look at OEM pricing of it (incidentally, I was looking for something else) and wondered what on earth all the fuss was about. Vista Business is $190, and Ultimate weighs in at about $250. It occurred to me at that point that those who had been complaining have probably never paid for software in their life. Newsflash: XP Pro OEM has cost around $200 for the last couple of years and I don’t hear anyone whining about the cost of that.

Maybe I’m getting older and grumpier, but it seems like a lot of the Internet’s self-professed geeks really don’t have the foggiest sense of real-world perspective.

Home piracy for kids ministry

TACKLES is back again for another year next Sunday and we’re gonna try and sell parents the end of year video we made (yes, at the end of last year) for $5 a copy when they come down to rego for the year. Accordingly, the more reliable DVD burner here (it’s — surprisingly — a Sony, the other drive is a Liteon that plays up quite a lot) has been spinning nearly non-stop from about 5.30 til now. All done, though.

DVDs and so forth aside, it’s shaping up to be quite the exciting year. We’re kicking off with four weeks looking at why Paul wrote letters in the New Testament part of the Bible, which should be good fun. Will probably post more as the term progresses.

Magical files and computer butt kicking

My computer has done some amazing things this last 24 hours. It’s incredible what a spot of good software can do — I’ve installed Premiere Pro trial to tide me over 30 days until I have to pay for it (I’m hoping for some product announcement about version 3 software… it’s probably a long shot, but I’d be supremely annoyed to buy something that expensive only for it to be rendered — excuse the pun — obsolete within a week) and am revelling in its video processing power. How anyone can find this software complicated is beyond me: it is, simply, one of the most intuitive pieces of software I’ve used in a long time. It’s not quite as drag-control friendly as Photoshop is just yet (a few dialogs here and there seem to be not-quite-yet updated in this regard) but apart from that… polished. Brilliant.

Even, it seems, when it comes to locating files on disconnected network shares. There’s some seriously weird project file caching thing they’ve got going, but whatever it is, I like it.

I’m yet to figure out the Multi-Camera edit thing but until such a time as that starts working (it may be disabled in the trial?) I’ll just be editing the Gandevia’s (!!! That describes both Eddie and Hannah now!!!) wedding video the old fashioned way (no tape splicing, though).

And, oh yeah, that was yesterday. I had three cameras going and assurances that the cathedral’s vision stream was being recorded (to VHS, of all things, so I should’ve known better)… they lied. Well, probably not intentionally, but I scored a wonderful blank video tape for free out of the whole saga. So this could be an interesting wedding video when the safe camera stops working — it was a bloody DVD camera, which sucks. If you buy one of these things you should be shot. Not just because you can’t use them for editing, because most people don’t care about that, but because it’s damn near impossible to get hour-long DVDs for them, the quality is worse than miniDV, and the media costs more anyway!
I went out of my way to locate hour long blank media but it carked it at 40 minutes… must’ve been set to a higher quality setting by accident. Still looks (relative to a crappy little DV Canon and an XL2 which I was carrying) like absolute rubbish. But it was a wide shot of the room that would’ve saved my butt if the Cathedral’s thing stopped working. Ironically, they both did.

Hooray for multiple technology failures!

FlasKMPEG

FlasKMPEG is quite the butt-kicking video converting software. Especially from VOBs. So easy, free & open source (yes kids, even on Windows), and pretty quick to boot. Big thumbs up. (Like I had any little ones)