Click to Play

The last couple of years we’ve been going caroling with some friends during the holidays. We went last night. Twelve of us altogether, evenly split between kids and adults. We outfitted the kids with instruments and sent them to the door while we all sang. I had my little camera with me, so I took some pics and some video. There wasn’t much light, so everything is pretty grainy. You’ll get the idea, though.

Here’s a very excellent video by my buddy Gregg Koskella. This is a link to his original post. Enjoy.

Ran across this poem this evening and it really struck a nerve. It’s copied below, but I found it here.

Six Apologies, Lord
Olena Kalytiak Davis

I Have Loved My Horrible Self, Lord.
I Rose, Lord, And I Rose, Lord, And I,
Dropt. Your Requirements, Lord. ‘Spite Your Requirements, Lord,
I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord,
Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon Intensity Left
For You, Lord. I Have Loved The Frivolous, The Fleeting, The Frightful
Clouds. Lord, I Have Loved Clouds! Do Not Forgive Me, Do Not
Forgive Me LordandLover, HarborandMaster, GuardianandBread, Do Not.
Hold Me, Lord, O, Hold Me

Accountable, Lord. I Am
Accountable. Lord.

Lord It Over Me,
Lord It Over Me, Lord. Feed Me

Hope, Lord. Feed Me
Hope, Lord, Or Break My Teeth.

Break My Teeth, Sir,

In This My Mouth.

I’ve got to write this down so I don’t forget. I spent a bunch of time trying to decipher how to get streaming video on a webpage. It turned out to be relatively simple, once you know the path to follow. It was just tough finding the path. Here’s an example of what follows. The example you see there shows a mov file on amy.pintglass.org. The trick is that the actual movie that plays is located elsewhere on a streaming server. The mov file that you see on the example page is called a Quicktime Media Link. If you download that mov file, rename it to a txt extension and view it in a text editor, you’ll see where the real file resides.

Here’s how to make it work:

1) Once your video is created, take a screenshot for the “poster”
2) Save the video again (using Quicktime Pro) as a “hinted” video. Be sure to pay attention to the size– 320×240 is perfect for the web.
3) Upload the hinted version to your Quicktime server. This is a special deal–not all servers are set up to stream Quicktime. Make sure yours is (ask your webhost, not me).
4) Make a Quicktime Media Link for the version that is on the server. This means pointing Quicktime at the server and running that file, then exporting it as the Media link (qtl file extension).
5) Upload the qtl file to any server you like, then rename the extension to mov.
6) Use vPIP to get the video on the page. Point to the media link, not the actual video on the streaming server.

Done!

Step four can be circumvented by simply creating a new text file that looks something like this (use angle brackets instead of the square brackets you see here):

[?xml version="1.0"?]
[?quicktime type="application/x-quicktime-media-link"?]

Using Quicktime to make the link is another hoop to jump through, but you actually get a few more options (autoplay, show controls, etc…) that you can mess around with. The code above is the basic thing, though. Just make a text file with that (replacing with your actual server and file, of course) then rename the file to a mov extension.

We decided to sell our 1994 Jeep Cherokee. I cleaned it up today, took some pictures and put it on Craigslist. 3 hours, and 5 inquiries, later it’s gone. That’s easily the speed record for any car I’ve sold. Amazing.

And we sold it none too soon since our water heater exploded last night and we had to get a new one (plus installation). It’s pretty much a wash–the Jeep paid for the water heater. 🙂