Wired Sage

If you haven’t heard, the next big WAVE in computing has hit.  Google Wave, that is.  I got my invitation this week and jumped in.  I found several of my uber-techie friends had also been invited and were already there, active, in my contacts list.  It’s amazing what they have done.

Check out the link which describes what Google Wave is.  And request an account from Google — you’ll be glad you did.

My wife, mother-in-law, and children took a ten day vacation and flew to Washington state to visit my kids’ great-grandparents, my wife’s grandparents, and my mother-in-law’s parents, Art and Betty — and all the other super-fantastic Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, Brothers, Sister-in-laws, second Cousins, etc., etc.

With my fear of flying, and the convenient excuses of work, mergers, corporate red tape, limited time away from work, etc., I weaseled out of the trip. Actually, the flying part really did me in — if I never fly commercially again, it’ll be too soon. I do want to go visit my wife’s family in Washington State, I’ll just have to take four weeks off and make it a road trip. Although, if I go across country for a trip like that I’d want to do it in style, like alone on a chromed out Harley Fatboy, with a leather holster for my shotgun and maybe a few more mean looking tattoos… But, I digress.

I dropped my family off at the airport, rushed home, and completely emptied out my office. Everything. Books off the shelves on the walls, all the furniture, the piles of papers on the floor… everything! I tore the wallpaper from the wall. I painted the walls. I ripped out the carpet. I purchased and put down a floating laminate flooring system that looks like a hard wood floor. I hung more shelving. I purchased a corporation sized, industrial filing cabinet. And I hung thermal drapes and shades in the newly renovated office.

I destroyed and recycled several hundred pounds of papers. I know the recycle guy wanted to hurt me. My recycle bins weighed at least 150 lbs each on two separate recycle days. I watched him curse me from the security behind my dinning room blinds.

I also organized the garage and fixed the master bathroom toilet paper holder — that’s really the important fix I made all week, it was all floppy and falling off the wall prior to being fixed. Definitely the repair I was most happy with.

But back to my office, this story is about my office. The clutter was so bad, I couldn’t take a before photo. Or maybe I was too embarrassed to take a before photo? Or maybe I had to clear out half the room to be able to get in to take a photo? Or I had to clean the room to find my camera to take a photo? Which excuse is more believable? Would you believe I was just so excited to start the project that I forgot to take photos until I needed my first break?

I do have a few old photos that might suffice as before shots.

Notice the stack of crap on the floor.

Well, it doesn’t look that bad because I tried to manage the image by framing it so it didn’t look too bad. It was after all, a photo of my dog. Not a photo of how messy my room was. Trust me, it was messy. There was a goat path through the room.

I’m not sure what the next photo was about. It might have been a misfire, hitting the shutter release on accident, but it does show the floor under my desk.

The sleeping bag under the desk doubled as a foot rest.

The official photographic record of the project can be found here. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise to Leslie. And to her family’s credit, they kept a fantastic secret. They would all make an excellent spy network. She commentted, “How did this go from being the worst room in the house to the best room in the house?” She also loves the fact that we no longer refer to my office as “the pit of hell”.

Special thanks to Bryan, who helped me with much of the renovations. It would have been a failed, nightmare without his help.

Here’s the finished product.

The Finished Product

Now I wonder if my wife will leave on vacation without me more often, or if I will never be left unsupervised again?

I ran across a quaint little collection of quizzes on the net the other day. One of which is linked here, “Are you a Mac Fan( boy || girl )?” Don’t get me wrong, I love my iMac. I really do. By far it is the most functional computer I have ever owned and/or operated. The interoperability of hardware and software is far superior to anything around. It makes getting things done so simple, so easy — whether it is creating a BLOG entry or capturing video footage, editing it, and turning it into a polished, professional looking DVD for friends; it’s as easy as 1-2-3, apple pie, or at least it was.

Yes, you read that right. It was that easy. Was being the operative word. Like the hypodermic needle above shows you, I’m not an Apple addict. I’m not a mindless apple drone. I got this machine to get things done and although it was flawless and perfect to begin with, one upgrade later I’m blogging and questioning the wisdom of Apple.

I recently upgraded to a new HDD camcorder. I have been using the camcorder a lot. I really like it. JVC did a fantastic job. It’s small, powerful, awesome picture, no tapes, super optics, great resolution, tons of record time, superb all around. I can’t say enough great things about it. And with all things new, I had to upgrade to iMovie 8.0 to support the new technology. Sure, fine, that’s expected. What I didn’t expect is the crippling differences between iMovie HD and iMovie 8.0.

iMovie 8.0 boasts some major improvements over iMovie HD in the way you edit. It’s intuitive, next generation, easy, fast, clean, fun, etc. As I used it to edit out the not so perfect video work I did, I really fell in love with it. The two together — JVC HDD camcorder and iMovie 8.0 — created a HUGE TIME SAVINGS. Importing the footage was faster than real time. Editing the footage was streamlined and lightning fast. I was in heaven at first. This was going to mean I could produce polished videos faster than ever before. I’d have more time to maybe produce more videos, cure cancer, work on world peace, end poverty, or stop global warming.

Do you grok how great that was? Again, was being the operative word in that last sentence.

I had captured and edited three separate projects in record time. I was now ready to burn some DVDs. So, in iMovie 8.0 I chose the menu option Share and … what? Where was iDVD?

iDVD missing from the Share options in iMovie 8.0.

I expected the iTunes and .Mac share options. O.K. and I’ll admit “You Tube” was a nice addition; but, not at the expense of iDVD! Wilco Tango Foxtrot Batman? What moronic intern at Apple made that decision? Can you say, Bone-Head?

So, I had the Microsoft-ish task of figuring out how to fit a square peg in a round hole. Annoying.

Google is your friend. Search the net. I’m not the only one to have this problem am I? Nope, lots of people have complained and posted about it. Good. Only, there are no good solutions. Damn it.

I’m beginning to think that Apple has been infiltrated by Microsoft engineers in an effort to make Apple suck more like the Seattle based computer-suck-megacorp. But that belongs on a conspiracy theory website. I have no proof.

So, in iMovie HD, when I had edited a project and was ready to do the next logical thing (output to DVD), I only had to choose the iDVD option and presto-change-o! I was cooking with gas.

iMovie HD links seemlessly with iDVD.

Now I had to export my iMovie 8.0 project with the “Export using Quicktime…” share option, save the movie to DV stream, import the DV movie into iMovie HD, add chapters (another bone-headed-omission in iMovie 8.0), share with iDVD, choose a theme, tidy up my menus, burn to disk image, load the image in Toast, and burn to DVD. This is just like the crap I had to go through with my old XP setup. I bought the Mac to get away from stupid crap like this.

Why the omission? What was Apple thinking? And more importantly, when is Apple going to fix it? I want a patch. Now!

My Everio HDD video camera.

I’m the kind of person who waits until a crisis to act. It’s a trait I’ve always had. My mother called it procrastination. I like to think of it as acting with complete clarity. With no choices left the option at hand is what must be done. There is no second guessing. Is there?

Maybe. I knew my miniDV JVC camera was acting up. It completely failed on me at the Winter Program at VHAC. But I thought I had worked through the glitches. I was ready to validate the tape was loaded properly before using it. I was ready for… nothing.

I taped my youngest daughter during her holiday performance and even knowing the current state of the miniDV camera, I could not get it to function properly or reliably.

So, I reached my crisis. I’m convinced that if I kept trying to use this camera for recording, I would lose memory after memory. Once is a fluke, twice is the start of a pattern. So, after this second heartbreaking camera snafu I had to act. And act decisively I did. I picked up a 30Gig HDD JVC everio GZ-MG130U camcorder on sale at Best Buy.

The camera is pretty nice. Simple interface. Just a few buttons. But still surprisingly complex, robust, and feature rich. It can hold seven (7) hours of video in the highest quality setting on the internal hard drive. And honestly, that’s the only setting I’ll use. It fits into the palm of my hand. And the most compelling feature, you ask? Well that would be faster than real time (RT) capturing.

In video editing RT capture was the norm. You couldn’t get faster than RT. It was like trying to go faster than the speed of light. Couldn’t be done. Crazy talk!

Well, now it can. Really! No more firewire. This camera has a USB 2.0 connection and mounts on my iMac as an external hard drive. Using iMovie ‘08 I can batch import all or a select portion of the clips on the camera, convert them for editing, and do it all faster than RT.

Read on young Video Padawan. This was not figured out in minutes. I had to work very hard at this. You see, the camera only comes with Windows based software. Inside the manual it states that you can purchase software for the Mac separately. Doesn’t that make you feel loved? But based on the reviews, I didn’t want their substandard software anyway. All the reviews I saw said, “Great camera! Crappy software.”

So, I tried working with the raw MOD files straight from the camera. Backing up the files to my iMac via the USB 2.0 connection. I then changed the file extensions to MPEG which allowed me to view them in VLC and other Mpeg-2 players. But iMovie ’06 would not edit the MPEG file. So, I worked out that with MPEG Video Stream Editor I could convert the MPEG file to DV and then import it into iMovie ’06 and use it. The only problem was that all these steps combined were not a batch process (I’d have to automate them, no click-and-walk-away-steps without a lot of hard work), and all of these steps were approaching RT just to get it into iMovie to start editing it.

I was seriously thinking about returning it for a Firewire miniDV camera and saving half of what I spent on this camera. Until a friend pointed me to the iMovie ‘08 upgrade.

Apple had listed some everio cameras from JVC as being compatible with iMovie ’08. Mine wasn’t on the list, but it was worth a shot. I have iLife ’08 already, I just hadn’t let go of iMovie ’06 yet. But it was time. After the upgrade I chose the “Play on Computer” option on the camera, and viola! The movie clips batch imported into iMovie ’08 in half the time they took to shoot. In my book, that’s a 50% time savings and I’ll take it.

I’m keeping my camera, I’m keeping the iMovie ’08 upgrade, and I’ve put together a little christmas video.