Got stock video?

If you’ve got stock video (random karaoke crap useless for anything else but mixed ambient visuals — OR — people footage from videoclips that are missing plots. Which basically means rap videos I’d say.) and wouldn’t mind lending me the CDs/DVDs for a day (preferably in Quicktime/MOV format, compressed as little as possible, no crazy codec variants) AND would be free for me to grab them tomorrow afternoon, send me an SMS/get in touch leaving a comment/whatever.

I can have plenty of fun with realtime vis from video inputs, but depending on how much light there is in the room it’d be nice to have stock to fall back on.

The occasion is nothing too serious… it’s an end-of-studycamp party for a Crusaders camp, so my ambitions are entirely my own and hardly out of any great need to impress… toy lights do a good enough job of that without video’s help. Just pushing myself a bit for kicks. I picked up a vision mixer a few weeks back for cheap that doesn’t have inbuilt TBC but can fade one source and has a positioner on black (well, positioner on another layer if you’ve got genlocked sources) which will hopefully perform okay. Despite it not having TBC it will say when sources are in sync, which is kinda nifty. I’ll eventually invest in a decent vision mixer but at the minute they’re still a little out of my range. If it’s not a horrendous failure, I’ll report how it works out :-)

Lighting will be lame party gear that I’ll hopefully mount significantly off the ground (there are four places in the room I can use) at least in part and then probably have one or two larger fixtures in corners/on a T-stand. Lighting, as always, will be largely forgiven by copious quantities of fog. Projection should improve matters in the room somewhat (in terms of visual quality) BUT will probably be rendered ineffective by the fog. If it’s too bad then I’ll just switch to visualisations, which is totally not a big deal at all… I just don’t get to be quite as creative *dreams of a plasma in every corner instead of a sole projector*.

So yeah, I am mildly excited. Will be staying up there overnight unless I’m feeling particularly energetic and in a driving-mood late that evening… the camp is at Galston which is slightly north of Hornsby. Doesn’t have to be a particularly long drive, and it’d undoubtedly be less susceptible to peak-hour traffic if I went back that night instead of Friday morning, but still… it’d be late. We’ll see.

Anti-Ubuntu-user quote

I stumbled across this on the web today sometime.

Ubuntu is an African word meaning “I can’t configure Debian”.

It’s funny coz its true :) I got a new (new for me, it’s a Geforce 3 that has VIVO ports) graphics card today and am having a not-fun time trying to get TV-out working for tomorrow evening (!). Ah well. Mostly just coz I’m rather seriously capped right now, having done about 18GB last time I checked (it didn’t start shaping until probably 18.5 or 19GB, so definitely happy this month!)

It must be coz I had exams and was home more, or something.

SMH: Video piracy’s new battleground

In an article entitled “Video Piracy’s New Battleground“, addressing the rise of an Australian copyrighted-material indexing service (much like, I gather, The Pirate Bay but for linear web content, not P2P nets), comes this delightful passage:

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), which was instrumental in launching legal action against file-sharing network Kazaa in recent years, declined to comment this week on any specific threats presented by video portals.

However, chief executive Stephen Peach did say: “We are always concerned where it is the case where people build businesses around other people’s copyrighted music.”

At this point we must all nod our heads sagely: there is indeed something wrong with the recording industry’s business model — at last, they admit it.

p.s. First person to make a wise crack about how artists don’t actually own their own copyright a lot of the time gets a punch in the face :-)

Click

Maybe I’m just a sucker for time/alternate-reality-based pseudo-didactic slapstick-protagonist-redeeming films, but I actually enjoyed the movie Click (2006). This one makes Adam Sandler bearable, as Eternal Sunshine did Jim Carrey. The ending, admittedly, is crap… but I can quietly tell myself that they only stuck it on so they could market it in good faith (if such a notion could be said to exist in that industry) as a comedy. Walk out of the cinema the moment you think would be a good/profound place for the film to end and don’t be disappointed. Or, stay and mentally cut it to suit, as I have.

Shockingly, amazingly, astoundingly, I enjoyed this and am actively recommending it to pretty much all audiences. Yes, it has Adam Sandler in it, and no, I haven’t lost my marbles.

“Why every Australian family needs the internet”

I just had the misfortune of reading possibly the worst digital-divide article ever written. It’s a classic case of damned lies and statistics. Abounding in percentages, unsurprisingly devoid of actual figures, and omitting essential details wherever convenient to blow the problem out of proportion. Yes, there is a problem, yes, it’s bad, yes, it’s systemic and needs addressing at various levels (here’s a hint: throwing resources at people isn’t the solution), and yes, it does exist in Australia. Distill your sensationalist crap down to something as simple as that and I’ll be happy. Until then, go talk to someone who is susceptible to your utterly uninspired pseudo-journalism (presumably because they haven’t been using a computer since age 2, which apparently is crucially detrimental to basic essential numeracy skills).

And don’t start me on the subeditor’s blatant disregard for the Internet’s proper noun-status in that appalling headline.

I’d love to write a provocative, angry, right-wing, insensitive, realistic, statistically-sound, arrogant, and moderately concise book on the digital divide in Australia some time. But, strangely, I can’t be bothered and don’t think I ever will be. Mostly because I know that people are more likely to read articles like that one and do absolutely nothing about it, or carry on doing whatever futile things they were doing before. At some point in time (I ambitiously hope), I’ll be in a position to influence these things as an educator rather than an angry (but relatively well-informed) observer.

Ah, subversion, where would I be without thee?