- I bought a 30GB iPod yesterday to replace the one I lost. I also bought a new pair of Sennheiser CX 300 earbuds ($40 and they’re the best I’ve ever owned). With the store points I collected from that purchase, I picked up an expensive and beautifully crafted and designed leather case for a mere 45 yen.
- For the first time in ages, tonight I’m having dinner with my best friend and her cousin. That might not make you happy, but it sure makes me happy.
- The book publisher for whom we’re going to produce a podcast is mere centimeters away from approving the budget. Boy, will you be surprised when I can finally announce the company’s name.
- As previously mentioned, my home computer is fixed, and I didn’t lose any data.
- I’m going to take the kids to the International Tokyo Toy Show over the weekend, and the above-mentioned best friend and her daughter might come along. I think I’ll be able to bribe the kids into helping with a videocast, on the condition that I let them do it in Japanese.
- Life is boring, repetitive, lonely, soul-draining and tedious for me lately, but it won’t be that way forever, and things could be a whole lot worse. I just need to make an effort to crawl out from under this rock.
Category: General
So disgusting that I have to share it
Yesterday on the train ride home I was smooshed up against a middle-aged man with a head full of dandruff the size of corn flakes.
But that’s not the gross part.
The rotating ceiling fan was blowing them off his head and onto other commuters. I was this close to shrieking like a little girl.
Fixed!
Nothing too interesting here, but I managed to fix my home PC this morning. I guess the C drive is starting to crap out intermittently. It probably got stuck or overheated, and when the machine rebooted the BIOS couldn’t find it and promoted the next drive on the list to startup. All I had to do was designate the correct drive as the boot drive and it worked.
I warned you, not interesting.
Speaking of not interesting, lately I’ve been spending all my weeknights in a Starbucks somewhere, reading the Japanese translation of Catcher in the Rye. Had I not lost my iPod I probably wouldn’t have bought the book. I use my retro-cool Sony Clie as an electronic dictionary (it kicks the Nintendo DS’s ass eight ways into next Thursday) and footnote all the new words and phrases in red pen. On the train home (usually the last one) I re-read everything and try to think of ways I’d use in daily life the phrases that are new to me, so that I’m “owning” them instead of just trying to memorize them.
The company I work for is in negotiations with a major international publisher to produce a podcast for them. One of the biggest publishers in the world by far, but you’ll never guess in a million years which one, and when I can finally tell you you’ll smack yourself in the forehead. I can’t even give you a hint. I won’t be the voice, just the producer, and when you find out who the publisher is you’ll understand why. If all goes well, it’ll start in July.
I need some computer help
Booting my home PC by using an Ubuntu live CD shows that all my drives are OK. The problem is that Windows XP isn’t booting, as if either the C drive’s boot sector is toast or the system directory is somehow corrupted. All I see after the BIOS boots is a black screen with a flashing cursor.
Does anyone know of a utility that might be able to fix the problem?
Disemvowelling: I love this idea
Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame wrote about ways to prevent trolls from destroying an otherwise tranquil online community in an article for InformationWeek. One of the strategies he mentions is to remove all the vowels from hostile posts. To me this sounds like a good way to let people know you disapprove, without being too heavy-handed.
Every so often–more often when I’m actually putting out content–someone decides to drop by here and leave a steaming pile of bile. Whatever their problem in life is, they had it before they came, so I don’t get too bothered by it. What does bother me though is it feels like having a gathering of good friends in my living room crashed by someone whose attitude problem pollutes the atmosphere. I know how I’ll react, but I don’t know how others will, and that worries me a bit. The next time it happens, I’m going to give disemvowelling a try.
Someone recently had a toxic reaction to the mouthcam video I made while playing frisbee with my kids. I can just picture this teenage kid in his basement, trolling Google for videos of a dick’s eye view of the inside of a scaly crackwhore’s mouth but instead finding frisbee with primary school aged boys and lashing out because his wee little pecker lost its boner. Life’s tough, wanker.
Learned the hard way
Inscribe your e-mail address on the back of your iPod so that if you, say, accidentally drop it when you get out of the car, the person who finds it might be kind enough to return it to you.
I’m totally iPod-less, and I feel utterly naked without it. And my home PC died. Again. Luckily, I only had my system and programs on the C drive that went. On the bright side…gosh, I can’t think of one. I’m too broke to replace either of them.
OK, on the bright side, now my kids can’t fight over who gets to play on the computer.
I probably shouldn’t mention this…
…but I need to get it out because I have no one to to talk to about it. Last week a young, beautiful, intelligent, and very capable coworker of ours took her own life. Someone I’ve worked with for years. None of us had any idea she was depressed. Her funeral was last Saturday, and her replacement started work yesterday. I think about her and her poor, grieving family a lot. She really was a wonderful person, and we all miss her, but life has to go on. She was a half-Peruvian, half-Japanese woman named Arisa, fresh out of university.
So what’s new with me?
I’ve reverted to my natural state, a self-absorbed hermit geek trying to force myself to grow a bigger brain. See, I’ve got this anxiety problem ever since childhood. It’s rooted in the mantra, “I have to, but I can’t,” and it can be applied to many situations in life. It’s the thought pattern that stresses me out more than any other.
Our company has five websites for the six organizations–some of the for profit, others non-profit–that we run out of this office with fewer than ten employees. (My boss redefines the term “workaholic.”) I’m the IT guy. Just me. Anything more technical than browsing the web and accessing your email? That’s my job. I’m also the maintenance man, tightening screws, fixing doorknobs, and changing light bulbs because I’m also the tallest. I also get to haul out the heavy garbage.
Did I mention all our websites are also bilingual English/Japanese? That’s an extra challenge, and a big one, because there’s a technical aspect to it in addition to the comparatively simple task of keeping the contents in each language in sync with each other.
Is the stress getting through to you? Can you tell I’m stressed? I’m not done yet.
Our three main sites need to be overhauled. Site #1 was developed in 2000 in Java by the guy who had this job before me. I don’t know dick about Java, which means I can barely understand the concepts behind servlets, containers, Jakarta Struts, Tomcat configuration files… Whenever something has to get tweaked under the hood, I get that, “I have to, but I can’t” feeling, and it stresses me out. Our business model has changed since the site was developed, so the way the site fundamentally works has to be changed. Overhauled.
Site #2 is the ugliest website I’ve ever seen. It was written in Perl sometime in the mid to late 90’s. It’s my duty to humanity to tear that eyesore down and start over from scratch.
Site #3 consists of completely static HTML pages, but should be database driven with an easy-to-use backend so our non-technical staff can update it. In both Japanese and English, remember.
So the boss wants this all done like, two months ago. Oh, and site #1 (and possibly #2 and #3 also) needs a mobile interface so people can read it on their cell phones in Japanese, which means the view for phones has to be in Shift-JIS while the web version should be in UTF-8. Do you understand that? I’m the only one here who does. It’s a lonely job. Whenever I try to explain something technical to my boss or coworkers, it takes half an hour of excruciating patience on both sides.
So that’s the gist of the situation, and here’s the problem: I suck at programming. I can tweak already written code or write little snippets of code that work, but God forbid I’d ever have to figure out what they do six months later, or even worse, have to make any major changes or additions. The temptation to do things the quick and dirty way is strong–like I said, the boss wants stuff done when he tells me to do it, not half a year later. That’s reasonable, and I really do feel for him. He’s a great guy and works harder than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s got real guts. He gets things done.
Here’s my major personal issue: I feel like I’m the albatross around his neck because I want to do things right. I don’t want to paint myself into a corner or get tangled up and tied to a solution I hacked together in a rush. But I also have to deliver. I don’t get paid to just think and do research.
But that’s exactly what I’ve been doing the past few weeks (and over Golden Week), learning the very basics of Java Servlets, object oriented programming in PHP, XHTML, CSS, and researching the multitude of PHP frameworks available.
I gotta get back to work now. But I’m leaning towards using Zend Framework to redevelop our websites. I discovered it at 3am this morning (slept on the office couch) and at first glance it looks good because it has support for internationalization and localization built in instead of being an afterthought hack someone hobbled together with gettext and spit.
I wish I could use Ruby on Rails. It’s an awesome language and the available documentation is superb. But deployment of Rails a application to the web is a huge, huge, fickle bitch I wasn’t expecting to have to cross swords with. PHP on the other hand is industry standard and supported by default on 99.9% of web servers. So I’ve got to learn some serious PHP kung-fu from now just to be able to do my goddamn job. It’s not all bad, seeing as how I’m being forced to learn stuff I should already know.
So if you don’t hear from me for a while longer, at least now you know why.
P.S. I’m also the audio-visual guy. The skills I acquire in audio and video editing here get applied to work when the need arises. My boss also wants to get into multimedia in a big way, and I’m the one who has to do it, and do it right.
P.P.S. My wife resents me for not doing more to help her around the house.
The old dilemma, back again
I have to disappear for another week or two until I get some other things done. I wish I didn’t have to, but it’s only fair to the people who depend on me. I have a todo list long enough for two or three people.
“Hello, my name is Richard and I have a time management problem.”
You know, this hobby of mine would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to do everything myself.
Apple wants our bandwidth; I want your thoughts.
OK folks, what do you think of this? Should I start encoding/re-encoding my videos at 640×480/360? I’m thinking “no.”
Advantages: Maybe Apple will pay attention to me. Yeah, right.
Disadvantages: That’s a ton of extra bandwidth, multiplied by a few thousand viewers, and that’s just my podcast. Besides, does anyone out there in Internetland actually have an Apple TV?
Greetings from the iTunes Podcasting Team:
Apple TV is here, and podcasts are making a big move into the living room. We want all of them to look as good as possible, so we have three video formatting recommendations for you. Also note that we have just posted a revised and expanded technical spec. Finally, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is coming up. There’s a major focus on developers of content in addition to developers of software.
Recommendations for Formatting Video Podcasts
1. If you’re encoding your video podcast at 320×240, please increase the resolution to either 640×480 or 640×360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). Why? Because video podcasts at this resolution look great on Apple TV and still port to video iPods. Lower resolution podcasts might also work on both platforms, but they don’t look nearly as good on a widescreen TV. As always, make sure to test any encoding changes you make to ensure device compatibility. QuickTime 7.1’s “Export to iPod” function will ensure that a video file is encoded at a width of 640 and is iPod-compatible.
2. It’s best not to create two different podcast feeds for different resolutions. By doing so, you dilute the popularity of your podcast and reduce exposure in our charts. It’s better to have one feed high in the charts than two that are lower.
3. If your source files are 16:9, stick with that aspect ratio. Don’t add letterboxing to make them 4:3. By doing so, you prevent the video from expanding to fill a 16:9 widescreen TV and instead end up with black space on all four sides. Also, your original source files should be at least 640 pixels wide.
Of course these are just recommendations. We understand that there are good reasons for 320×240 (bandwidth bills) and 720p (looks fantastic). Do whatever makes the most sense for your show. For more information on formatting video, see the recently updated spec:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html
To see a sample of excellent podcasts that also look great with Apple TV, check out the Apple TV Podcast Showcase.