Interesting
I really have no idea what’s up with #corporate.issue.01, since Visual Disorder is apparently no longer, but I’m intrigued and flattered nonetheless. By comparison, my site design looks positively bleak.
We all have our reasons
As the ‘night of the Panther’ steadily approaches, it’s obvious that we’re all getting a little excited about the improvements and features; a little Exposé here, a little Fast User Switching there. Tonight, though, I’ve suddenly found myself excited less by the big–ticket items and more by the Pixlet codec.
See, I film stuff… a lot. It’s an embarrassing thread of synchronicity between myself and one of my movie–star alter–egos, but yeah, I’ve been filming elements of my life for nigh on four years now.
At first, I filmed every little thing I did; convinced that I’d return after a year to edit it all and produce some kind of me–and–my–friends reality show. Of course, that idea went down the shitter when I realized how much tape I was going through, and how much I hate reality shows. There’s only so much “we’re driving somewhere!” and “we’re sitting on the couch!” footage you can endure before you feel like poking an eye out, so the filming frequency slowed to a trickle. Today, the video camera doesn’t watch me sitting down to breakfast; it comes out for barbecues, birthdays, parties, birthday parties, and road trips… like any normal camera. The plan to edit the whole lot is still in sight, though —in fact, it was one of the driving forces behind my purchase of a Mac (that’s a story for another day)— but the scale is much larger now. It’s a collection of years now, of important events in all of our lives as we grew from fresh–out–of–high–school delinquents into the respectable social deviants that we are today.
Of course, this mean that I have a very, very large backlog of footage from the last few years. It’s all stored on VHS, which means that digitizing the lot of it (for editing purposes, of course) is a massive chore. The chore becomes next–to–impossible, though, when you discover that a single hour of uncompressed footage occupies 13Gb of hard disk space… and my disk just ain’t big enough to accommodate the piles of video cassettes sitting in my closet.
Just recently I started considering DivX as the solution to my problems… an awesome codec by any man’s standards. In preliminary tests, it helped my full–size copy of the Rose video (sized at 720 x 400… the raw product being over 400 megabytes’ worth) down to a very–appreciable 21Mb; roughly 10Mb/min at fairly decent quality. I was about to jump on the bandwagon and get freaky with my video backlog when I remembered Pixlet. Panther is a meager 3 days away… and Pixlet is supposed to be damnably impressive; doing the math, it should (conceivably) compress the Rose vid (which has become my own little benchmark for compression/quality) to a 16Mb file. Yep, 8Mb/min at better–than–fairly–decent quality. And when you’re considering hours, nay, days of footage, this makes me very happy. For that, I am willing to wait.
Sooner or later those cassettes will have to be digitized, sooner or later I’ll have to start editing that shit, and sooner or later there’ll be some half–decent video memories of [cue Bryan Adams’ Summer of ‘69] the best days of our lives.
tha Pizzenny–kizzade
Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins (aka Tycho Brahe and Jonathan Gabriel) have always had a rather amusing enmity for all things Apple, and it’s perfectly respectable given their line of work. They make a living out of gaming, and as a gaming platform the Mac OS has always… shall we say… licked balls. Developers (with the possible exception of Blizzard) have never been too rushed to bring their games to the Mac, and consequently there is a routine lag of about a year between the release of a big–name title on Windows and its port to Mac OS.
That’s not to say anything derisive of Mac OS’ ability to handle games, or even the hardware; it’s just apathy. Who can blame a studio for caring naught when it comes to spending such a great deal of resources on supporting a minority OS? That lack of (timely) delivery on the game front, and the fact that Apple hardware is always premium–priced, keeps Apple in the proverbial hard core’s proverbial bad books… but it’s little things like iTunes may just sway that popular opinion. The fact that I haven’t touched my PS2 since finishing Vice City, nor played any games on PC or Mac since Warcraft 3, is testament to the fact that I’m not really a gamer — and while I’m certainly not predicting that any serious gamer will go out and buy a Mac because iTunes r0X0Rs their S0x0rZ (or whatever they’re saying these days) it’s worth noting that seachange. Favorable popular opinion does any brand a world of good.
To err is human
After, oh, how long has it been… a goddamned year, I’ve finally implemented custom error documents for the site. Not that Apache’s defaults aren’t resplendent enough… they just needed a little pizzazz.
I’m not advocating errors, by any means; I hope you never have to see a single one of those nasty errors on this site. But if you happened to visit http://www.decaffeinated.org/nudemidgets/archive one morning in the hope of stumbling upon my secret stash, the rebuttal is a little friendlier now.