yelyah - “cold pool 20111103” piano improv
I flipping hate daylight savings time. All day I’ve been running around feeling like I don’t know which way is up.
For the record, I’d be thrilled to drop timezones in general as well. We’ll just all move to UTC and then our days just will start at different times rather than say, the tradtional 8a.
DEAL WITH IT.
Wow, up to nearly 50,000 felt-it reports on the USGS for the 5.6 magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/events/us/b0006klz/us/index.html
I wonder if that’s some sort of record for responses.
For a comparison, a recent San Fran quake had 2,667.
yelyah - “too damned cold 20111102” piano improv
Because apparently it was too damned cold that day.
Yet another reason I should really catch up on the uploads.
yelyah - “binary days 20111101” piano improv
Obviously, I need to catch up on the uploads because it’s weird having to clarify that, it’s not the first, it’s the fourth.
And my bad Friday streak is back.
Granted, last Friday wasn’t as bad as the 4 bad Fridays in a row, but combined with today’s whopper, it represents a new streak.
Someone stole my credit card number (just the number, not the card) and racked up nearly $350 in iTunes purchases. It makes me wonder why they stopped there. Maybe at $500, it ends up as a felony.
I have a guess as to where the number got compromised based on the time of one online purchase versus when the first of the iTunes purchases came in, but mostly, I’m trying not to agonize over it because the cat’s out of the bag and all I can do at this point is just start checking statements religiously to ensure it gets caught if it happens again.
Frankly, in some ways I’m surprised that this is the first time I’ve ever been identify thefted given how long I’ve been using credit cards on a regular basis.
I have to hope that everything goes smoothly from here in fighting the $350 in charges. I’m definitely going to be looking into virtual numbers going forward. Not that it would’ve prevented this problem, but it would’ve at least made it way easier to tell where the compromise came from (unless I was thefted by someone who temporarily had access to my physical card).
Yeah. I’d say it hasn’t been my month, but October wasn’t my month either. Nor was September. And so on and so forth.
There is a conclusion I’ve come to about everything. In the same vein of “if you want something done, give it to a busy person”… “if you want something to hurt less emotionally, give it to someone who’s already overburdened with misery”. Because, there seems to be a limit to how much misery you can feel. After a point, it just kinda all blurs together.
Enjoy the haze.
yelyah - “tax day is coming 20111031” piano improv
On the 31st, I was touched by the thought of how close the tax deadline was.
Yes, that’s the f*cked up American tax system for you. It can tense you up a whole half-year in advance.
Because, every year, it’s the same. Procrastinate procrastinate procrastinate. Holy flip, it’s nearly tax day. Throw stuff together at the last minute. Done.
The IRS can go sod itself.
yelyah - “deadlines ahead 20111030” piano improv
How prescient.
It’s the 2nd here and my daily November goal already has driven me to staying up until the wee hours of the morning.
I’m attempting to do a screencast a day in addition to the weather screencast. A deliberate screencast, if you will. So things end up getting slightly scripted, things get post produced.
Let me tell you. It’s far far easier to just do it off the cuff, even when that means starting over several times.
Day 1’s screencast (that got uploaded this morning) already has created a todo list of its own of things to fix and then upload again later. But at least one of them is online. It’s how to make a karaoke album from the command line using sox.
In reality, it could’ve been a 30 second screencast. Here’s the command, boom, you’re done. But for good or bad, I keep coming up with these short screencast ideas that just blossom into, “well, what if I did this. And that. And that too.” And suddenly I’ve spent probably 8 freaking hours on something that would’ve taken like probably 30 minutes at most if I’d just stuck to the original idea.
And there’s the sad thing. I probably did spend at least 8 hours on it. It plays for less than 5 minutes. The thing I have to keep remembering is that I learned a lot in those 8 hours. And it will be way quicker the next time.
And of all the things, audio on the video is driving me nuts. I fell into the loudness wars and was trying to match the overall volume of other common youtube videos I listen to, since the original video was way way quieter than everything else I compared it to. But by doing that, it really brought out the “shouting informercial voice” that I apparently had that night. I still haven’t really figured out how I’d take care of that.
But time to wrap this up, because I have to do another screencast before I go to bed (see, for me, so long as I finish it before I go to bed, then it’s not really tomorrow yet).
yelyah - “yam sandwich 20111029” piano improv
This post is a lie. It’s the 31st here, not the 29th.
November is gonna be my month though. Getting sh*t done. Like catching up on my mp3 uploads by implementing amazon s3 support in my scripts.
See, unlike most of the population, I get 12 New Year’s a year because I often look at the 1st of every month as a blank slate.
So November is gonna be a GSD type of month for me. I often say that though.
Nanowrimo baby. I wish I were still writing fiction. Dayum, I miss that part of my life (to be more specific, I miss who I was more so, as I no longer feel compelled to write fiction these days). I’m thinking of spinning the nanowrimo challenge into a 1667 word/day challenge either on one major effort or trying to write random content that totals up to 1667 words/day.
But really, my big goal is to put together a screencast/day. Well, in addition to the goofy daily weather screencast I do. The screencasts are supposed to be tutorials for the most part, with some focus on post production (as compared to the weather screencast which is done in 1 take with zero post production).
A couple of weeks ago, I really wanted to learn web design. This week, it’s video production.
In my eyes, I dream big.
It’s just that the dream keeps changing.
yelyah - “roll with the punch bowl 20111028” piano improv
What the networks don’t seem to understand is they’re not really competing with cable/OTA access providing a service for people who forgot to watch a show. They’re competing with piracy.
Let’s see:
Some of them have sites and media players that are downright hostile.
Visit Fox’s site (without even loading a show) and they automatically play a commercial. Any site that auto plays anything with sound should be shot. Playing an ad with sound and you deserve a special place in hell.
Commercials that are way louder than the content. I’m pretty sure there are laws against this for actual broadcasts. Apparently, the networks don’t think they should have to do this online.
Playing the same commercial at every single commercial break (Parvati Shallow: I have no idea who you are, but I already hate you).
Constantly kicking you out of fullscreen mode (I remember ABC’s player used to (and maybe still does) do this). CBS kicks you out of fullscreen if you dare pause the video.
Heaven forbid you should need to reload a video on CBS’ site. First, it doesn’t remember where you were, but worse, you get to sit through several different commercial breaks since their player isn’t smart enough to realize that you just fast forwarded, ergo, you shouldn’t have to rewatch every single commercial break again.
Fox, who are you kidding with your 8 day delay?
Hulu is the only site that’s gotten anything right, though they themselves are subject to the networks’ stupid delays.
I’m done with CBS. Their media player is a POS and my time and patience are more valuable than the entertainment value I get out of their shows (The Good Wife being the only exception).
For me, despite how easy piracy is, the networks are actually competing with my laziness. Streaming means I can give random things a try because there’s not much to lose. Downloading something means I have to deliberately decide to watch it. For me, this generally ends up meaning that I don’t watch the shows at all (or I end up waiting for it to come out on DVD and snag it for free from the library).
Writing this, also reminded me that I had once ranted about the total destruction of “Harry’s Law”. And it made me realize that I haven’t thought about that show ever since I wrote the rant. So when I say I’m giving CBS the boot (cough, good wife), I probably mean it.
Bye bye, CBS.
yelyah - “not enough sun 20111027” piano improv
I’ve been trying to come up with ideas for screencast tutorials that are short.
Basically, because I don’t want to work on something overwhelming at this point.
So I end up coming up with these ideas that seem like they’d take about 30 seconds. And then once I start thinking about actual content, all of these little ideas pop into my head. Ideas that would be great if it weren’t for the fact, that I just want short-short stuff right now.
Like a tutorial on the mac’s “say” command. Surely, just enlightening some people as its existence would be enough (which would take 30 seconds). But no, my brain comes up with “hey, let’s do a song where the computer is the singer. Oh yeah, and let’s see if we can autotune the computer too!”
So suddenly it’s no longer a 30 second tutorial, but instead something that would probably take a week to put together (like, currently I have no idea how to do the autotune effect on speech). So much for making it under whelming.
yelyah - “red mist parade 20111026” piano improv
Ideas are just so much better UNrealized, aren’t they?
Actually work on them and they start to fall apart.
Me here, I’ve fallen in love with Bad Lip Reading and would love to do one of my one.
Unlike the BLR guy who’s bad at lip reading, I’m finding I can’t even bad lip read. I just can’t lip read at all.
I shouldn’t be surprised, I’ve never been able to lip read up to this point. Of course, I haven’t really ever practiced it either. But 15 minutes of looping parts of this video back and forth, apparently wasn’t enough time to magically give me any lip reading skills.
Part of the problem might be that I know the source material. So that clouds my ability to see alternate words.
If you’d like to try this on your own, here’s the advice I can offer:
And of course, take all of this advice with a grain of salt as I can’t even figure out ONE SINGLE LINE using this method.
