I’ve finally gotten my boys interested in video. Tony’s been checking his viewer stats all weekend, hoping to surpass the 800+ hitcount of Andy’s video. There’s no telling how long they’ll stay interested, but they both want to start vlogging. I’d rather they play with video than video games, seeing as how the former is not only more social but also a skill that could benefit them later in life. Spielberg started making movies when he was quite young, so who knows?

The thing is, their world is rather small so it’s mostly just them running around the house. In addition, their video is rather raw (backlit and motion sickness-inducing) and they don’t seem too interested yet in vlogging in English.

What are your thoughts? Should I continue putting their videos in the main feed? Should I create a sub-feed the way my main feed is currently spit in to podcasts/videocasts/everything? Should I create a completely new blog & RSS feed for them?

Instead of subtitling their videos, it would be much easier for me to do a director’s commentary kind of thing. Which way seems best?

• Put the video audio in the left channel, put my simulaneous translation in the right. That way you can pull out the plug of your earbuds just a bit, listen to it in mono (try it, you’ll see what I mean), then rewind and check your comprehension with the commentary.
• Publish each video twice, the second one with a voiceover.
• Do the voiceover as a separate podcast, with extra commentary explaining what’s going on so I can finally stop alienating the blind listeners who used to enjoy my podcats. I feel really guilty about that, you know.

Maybe I’ll do one of each and we’ll see which way works best.

Maybe I should have said tremor. I’d say we get one a month on average. The one yesterday was a bit stronger than usual. No worries, no big deal.

In high school I lived in Quito, Ecuador for a year. Lots of tremors there too. I’m quite used to the ground shaking from time to time. It’s just like part of the weather. Seems like those of you from places where the earth stays still picture major devastation when you think of earthquakes.

There was a nasty earthquake about two minutes ago. The strongest I’ve felt in years. Luckily it was short. Hopefully there won’t be any more.

My bowels are sufficiently loosened now.

It was a 4.8 on the Japanese scale and the epicenter was Tokyo Bay.

Last night I stumbled across a used Sony Handycam HDR-HC1 Mini DV camcorder for roughly $650 and bought it on the spot. Even though it’s last year’s model, it’s still available from online stores for between $1,300-1,600. It included all the original accessories, three free Mini DV tapes and a blank Sony 1 year warranty card. And yes, I made sure the serial number wasn’t scraped off.

I can’t believe I own this camera. I took it to bed last night like a teddy bear. It has nearly every feature I ever wanted but thought I could never afford: high resolution, external mic input, records to tape not hard drive, backwards compatible with standard DV video, can be used to convert analog video input to DV, and the lens thread has the same diameter as our old camera so I can continue using the wide angle adapter I already own. The only thing it’s missing is the ability to shoot in progressive scan mode at 24fps, but that can be emulated easily in post-production.

It seems like all new model consumer grade DV cameras are moving to solid state storage with built-in 3GB hard drives. My golden rule for buying geek toys is to never go digital until it surpasses current analog technology, and storing video digitally isn’t there yet. I want to be able to shoot tons of video then cheaply store it in a shoebox until I’m good and ready to edit it. If I were to use a camera with a built in hard drive, I’d end up not only shooting less but also clogging up my PC drives with unedited video.

I WILL get some video edited soon. I left work early yesterday (6:30) to go home and work on the beach babe video, but at the last minute decided instead to window shop in Akihabara. No regrets.

P.S. Be sure to check my eBay auction for one of Andy’s adorable little kidneys. The reserve is set at $650.

I have a new motherboard, CPU and C: drive. The closest store that does repairs wanted to charge 8000 yen and spend a week to figure out what broke. It goes without saying, but since my current mobo and CPU weren’t bought within the two weeks, they’re both obsolete. So not matter what part is fried, I’m going to have to replace the whole shebang.

So I saved myself 8000 yen and spent a little extra to buy a motherboard that can take a Celeron D today and a Core Duo later. I’m spending this beautiful summer Sunday to reinstall Windows and all my software.

Can I end with a little bit of geek bitching? This newfangled mobo only has one IDE bus. Like we’re all supposed to throw away all our IDE drives and replace them with SATA. And no onboard firewire either. Both problems can be resolved by buying PCI boards, but most new mobos only have 3 PCI slots. Is it just me or were older motherboards more user friendly?

In the end, none of the cheap and easy solutions worked. I tried:

• clearing the CMOS
• replacing the mobo’s battery
• detaching everything not needed to boot into bios

I wish I knew if the old mobo is OK. Someday I’d like to put together a PVR for the living room.

Tony broke my PC. He won’t tell me how it happened, but the symptom of the problem is that although the fans and drives power up, the BIOS won’t boot.

I can’t test what’s broken because I don’t have any spare parts. Should I assume that the motherboard is fried, or could it possibly be the CPU or memory? I’m guessing that since BIOS won’t even boot, it’s the motherboard, but I don’t know the symptoms of bad RAM or a bad CPU plugged into a perfectly good mobo.

Here’s why I’m asking: we went on vacation to Izu over the weekend and I want to edit the video of incredible Japanese beach babes. The way I figure, there might be a man or two in the audience who might be willing to help me out with some advice so I can get to the job at hand.