And He Blogs

It’s about time I blogged this, so why not go with New Year’s Day, 2009. This post could also be titled, “What to do while waiting for a Blur Reunion”. I had every intention of posting this in June after seeing Monkey: Journey to the West at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. Busy weeks followed and summer came and went. At the end of August an album was released of the music from Monkey, and it was a surprise hit in the U.K. Should have blogged it then. Next, the trials and tribulations of buying a new house and now here we are at the beginning of a new year. So it’s time to tell you about this wonderful experience called Monkey.

I went with my wife and son and the first few minutes things are loud and everything is coming right at you – and we were in the front row! My then 5 year-old son wasn’t sure what he had gotten himself into. Things settled down a bit after the initial excitement. The story is fairly easy to follow, even though the dialog is in Mandarin. There were subtitles for the show, but for us to see them we were almost literally looking straight up into the air. The show was so compelling that it truly wasn’t worth the pain of craning my neck.

A fine synopsis of the show can be found at Wikipedia, but it’s a classic Chinese folk tale that has been told numerous times. In England, in the late 70’s, Monkey was a TV show that Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett loved to watch. Kind of the equivalent of the Kung Fu series here in the states, Monkey Magic memories are what gave Albarn and Hewlett the impetus to work on the opera. Albarn is the musician behind the real-life band Blur, the animated band Gorillaz, and the superb one-off work entitled The Good, the Bad, and the Queen. Hewlett is the animator of the afore mentioned Gorillaz as well as the cultish Tank Girl comic.

As Manchester International Festival (where Monkey debuted in 2007) director Alex Poots points out, the original meaning of the word opera means “works”, meaning different art forms coming together. This is like no other opera you have seen. The unique nature of this show is what has earned it rave reviews. Aside from the one stateside run, the show has mostly played in the U.K. A film version of the production has not to this point been confirmed, but if it ever materializes, I couldn’t more highly recommend that you see it. Certainly, if you have a chance to see the live opera, do not hesitate to get tickets.

In addition to the trailer from the show above, I recommend you take in Damon and Jamie’s Excellent Adventure available after creating an account at Blurcast.tv or you can watch the aggregated YouTube videos located in an experimental site with a working title of YouTube Documentaries. Happy New Year!

A little over a year ago I posted Embed YouTube Video in PowerPoint Offline using various tools to allow the embedding of YouTube videos in PowerPoint presentations. In the mean time, YouTube has added a bazillion more videos, and some new tools have become available to make it much simpler to use that wonderful resource to enhance your presentations. If you didn’t click the link above to my previous post, I used a website (at Techcrunch.com) to download a YouTube video, and then converted the Flash video file to an mpeg file using Riva FLV Encoder. It wasn’t all that difficult a procedure, but it had it’s clunky moments.

Now, short of PowerPoint directly supporting the use of Flash video, which it still does not, there is now a much simpler way of accomplishing the YouTube embed. The basic difference from the previous method is that this approach is more streamlined. The download of the video is accomplished with a Firefox add-on, or plug-in (instead of a website), and the video is then converted to a Windows Media video file (instead of mpeg), which retains more of the original quality of the YouTube video. Converting it to Windows Media also allows the side benefit of the ability to further edit in Windows Movie Maker.

Starting with the add-on, called Video Download Helper, we take the approach of having the tool available wherever the media is, instead of having to go to YouTube, copy the URL of the video, and then paste that URL at another website. What Video Download Helper does is “discover” any videos that are associated with a given webpage. An icon will then animate in the toolbar of the Firefox web browser indicating that it has found one or more media files. Clicking the icon will reveal a drop-down menu showing the file(s) that are available. Selecting a file will begin the download. It will download the file with the .flv extension included, something the Techcrunch tool did not do.

Now with the Flash video on the computer, it is time to convert it to Windows Media format. A free, open-source tool called WinFF comes to the rescue, as previously the only way to accomplish the conversion with a free tool was using the VLC player/converter. Every time I have ever used VLC to convert to WMV it left a few seconds of what I’ll call “compression garbage” at the beginning of the video. With WinFF, that garbage is gone. WinFF is just a simple GUI interface on top of the FFMPEG program, a dreaded command line program, and not for the faint of heart. A few clicks in WinFF and your YouTube video is soon converting and ready for inserting into PowerPoint.

Watch the screencast Embed YouTube Video into PowerPoint.

This is just extra special news for me personally. I’ve known about the possibility of this reunion for a few weeks now, but seeing others in my Twitter network tweet about it makes it very much more real. Blur, one of my recently discovered favorite bands, are getting back together and doing at least one summer ‘09 concert. I’ve especially been on a Damon Albarn kick for the last year and a half, having seen his Monkey: Journey to the West opera in Charleston S.C. this past June (more on that in a future post). This is some damn fine news!

Here’s a great argument for implementing Creative Commons in the sciences. This video, directed by Jesse Dylan, explains that those information silos that we speak of exist in spades for scientists. Of course, the best line of the video is that “scientists are the ultimate remixers” - cool since I consider myself a scientist at heart.

The Science Commons has been around for a while, however, this video has the potential to go viral, at least for the scientific community. Another video on the Science Commons site further explains the ramifications of the Scholars Copyright Project.

Finally, to nicely wrap up the issue, this article from February 2005 in Scientific American properly frames why Science Commons, and Creative Commons more generally, is needed in the first place.

Word is getting around that YouTube is in HD and some videos have the “Watch in HD” link allowing viewers to see the Hi Def version. No official word from Google/YouTube yet. Maybe they don’t want a bandwidth surge? Who knows.

Anyway, using footage that I shot from the beginning of the semester, here is my brief entry in the HD category. I’m trying to do justice to our beautiful campus. I’ll keep working at it.

It’s nice to see that WordPress 2.7 is available, at least on WordPress.com. Having attended a great WordCampEd conference at George Mason with the UMW crew last month, I feel like I own version 2.7 a little more than previous versions. I got to sit in on a “user experience” session with Jane Wells from Automattic where we provided her with some feedback and we got to hear about plans for future WordPress releases. A whole new media management redesign is planned for version 2.8. So congrats to the WordPress team, and as soon as it’s available as an automatic upgrade (a feature that will be built into the WordPress back-end from now on), I will install it on all my blogs.

No official announcement yet that YouTube has gone HD, but I did notice this today.

There’s a little “Watch in HD” link below the videos that are available in high definition. To find some examples, just search for “HD” at YouTube’s site.

What? You haven’t heard that YouTube has HD video? Well, then this post will serve two purposes. First, the news is not officially out of the bag yet, but you can watch videos on YouTube in a true HD format! That would be a 1280×720 pixel video in glorious h.264 quality. YouTube has also gone widescreen, but that is all that has been officially announced. Now, you can only watch HD video if the source was uploaded in HD, and you’ll be watching a scaled version of the movie. It will be something like 640×360 pixels.

So what do you need to do to watch the HD videos? When you’re watching videos at the YouTube site, look for text just below and to the right of the video that says “watch in high quality”. Click that link and if there is a high-def version, you’ll see it load up. It will take longer to load than the standard flash version that is the “normal quality” version.

Another way that will allow you to go directly to the HD version is to tack on “&fmt=22” to the YouTube URL, for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=22

That will send you directly to the “Where the Hell is Matt” video that is served up in high-def. You can also embed these videos in your own site by using a specially modified version of the the embed code.

The normal code would look like this:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

To embed the HD quality code, try this:

<object width="630" height="380"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&;ap=%2526fmt%3D22&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&;ap=%2526fmt%3D22&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="630" height="380"></embed></object>

The key is adding &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to the end of the URL in the code.

So the low quality version looks like this (click the play button to see the video):

And the HD version looks like this (click the play button to see the video):

So now we’ll embed another example of HD video:

For the second purpose of this post, now that I’ll be embedding widescreen HD video into my blog, I’m going to need a new theme to accommodate the bigger videos. I’m using the Paalam theme by Sadish Bala, creator of the famous Misty Look theme, among others. Now to record some HD video and upload it to YouTube!

UPDATE: The second movie that I had embedded in this post was removed from YouTube so I have inserted another. It was made before YouTube made the high definition videos available, so that’s why the guy in the video says “Oh my god, YouTube is in HD! Well, not really.” Well, now, yes, really!

For the last several weeks, I’ve been trying to make a dream, reality. I had been seeing this bird house in my dreams, and as of October 30, 2008, I now have it behind my new home in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. So now that it is over (well, almost – as of this writing we still have a small truckload of stuff to move yet) I can apologize to my DTLT colleagues for being such a basket case the last few weeks. Alright, more of a basket case than usual. I made the classic mistake of falling in love with a house that I wanted to buy. I was also bucking the trend in these poor economic times of going forward with this major purchase. However, along the way I learned more about my determination and more importantly about my friends and family, to make this one of the most valuable processes I’ve ever gone through. This post is to remind me for the future, when I re-read it a year from now, or 5, 10, or 20 years from now, the value we put on things versus the value we put on people.

Now as for a bird, I don’t know how much thought is put into whether a given bird house is in a good neighborhood or not. I don’t know whether the contemporary design will lead to higher resale, or how the previous owners kept the place, but the one pictured above looks like a pretty nice unit. I wonder also if a bird flying in from high in the sky sees this house and wonders whether it’s still on the market. Do they get disappointed if it’s not available? If it is occupied, do they rationalize that “I guess it was not meant to be”?

This was a refrain that I heard from my wife numerous times as we went through the hurdles of buying a “short sale”, which previously I thought meant that the process of buying the house somehow is an abbreviated/quicker version of a regular sale. Boy, was I wrong! A short sale is one that “shorts” the bank who has the mortgage and they agree to sell it instead of foreclosing. The owners of these homes owe a considerable amount of money, so many times these homes are great bargains for the future buyers. We knew the house that existed in front of that bird house was a bargain – but was it meant to be OUR home? When things looked like we weren’t going to get this house, my wife said, “well, maybe it isn’t meant to be.” I said bullshit! (thankfully, I’m able to express myself this way to my wife, and she can be heard to express herself this way to me).

I have the answer to the question for everything as to whether something is meant to be or not. Whatever happens, is what happened. Period. Meant to be? Stop it. There is no plan and the sooner we realize this, the better off we will be. The fact that there is no plan is what’s great about life. If I had listened to my wife about maybe it wasn’t meant to be, then it wouldn’t have been. I would have given up. Now, some amazing things did happen to get this sale done. The title company said that it was the shortest (or at least one of the shortest) amount of time that they ever finished a closing. My real estate agent wanted this to happen as though we were her children. Let me also declare my unpaid endorsement of Virginia Credit Union for all your banking and mortgage needs! People made this happen because lots of hard-working people wanted it to happen. Other things, and people, were merely obstacles to be overcome. Many of the obstacles we encountered had many options for ways to deal with them. We got creative and I/we did our research to maximize our options.

Now, I have to question why I wanted it to happen. It’s a nice house to be sure, but is it better than our old one? There are many memories that we experienced in our old home, not the least of which is that it’s the only house my son has ever known. A few times I got emotional about leaving it. However, something in my wife and me said it was time to go. OK, so I wanted a place to build a new home theater. I wanted a bigger, flatter yard with less trees. I wanted a gas fireplace in the family room and a bigger, more up to date kitchen for my wife (she’s the better cook in the family, just so we’re clear – it’s not because I expect her to be in the kitchen). Of greater importance, though, were things I wanted for my son. A flat place to learn to ride his bike, and more kids his age to play with. I also wanted sidewalks for him and me to walk on, as well as woods (behind the bird house) we could explore together. And maybe, just maybe, there is one more little Rush to come into our family in the near future.

So there. It’s out of my system. I (and others) made it happen. I will invite the many people who were working for us, and cheering us on, over for a big celebration. Time to get to back to work.

New media humor for the day. If only it were Blu-ray, it would be a good deal.