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April 15, 2010#

RIP iPad, I barely knew you…

Today, was a day from Hell…. Started off OK, but slowly went downhill.

This afternoon I had a video shoot that started off very well. There was a slight hiccup when we noticed that we forgot 1 half of our wireless lavalier mic across town, but somebody went and grabbed it with 2 minutes remaining before the main focus of the shoot that we were hired to do started.

After two hours of shooting, I looked at the second camera and noticed some green banding across the image…. basically meaning that the footage from the second camera was now unusable. Because of the time limitations of shooting DSLR, for corporate presentations, we run a two camera shoot and offset the start times so we can deliver a seemless video file covering the entire event.

After seeing this image, I was very distressed.

Notice the Green horizontal banding across the image?

So this means that we are going to have to send a camera off to Canon to get repaired, and I’m going to have to work some major magic in Final Cut Pro to deliver this video.

10 Minutes after this, I received a phone call that clouded my head even more.

After driving back to the office, I thought that it would be best if I took the cameras back with me and apply the new firmware update and see if I could resolve this green banding issue.  When loading the camera case into the car, I put my iPad on top of my car.  THIS IS SOMETHING THAT I NEVER DO!!!

Driving home, I heard a rattling noise on my car, and looked out the rear view the and saw something black fall from my car.  It took a few seconds but then I pieced it together….. IT WAS MY IPAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I stopped the car, turned around to pick it up, got out of the car just in time to watch a pickup truck run it over.

It was truly one of those “NOOOOOOOOOOO” moments.  The thought actually crossed my mind about running out in front of the truck, but it all happened so fast.  Hoping for the best… my heart sank as I picked it up, and turned it on to a white screen with coloured lines.

.

I honestly think that the iPad did survive the actual fall from the car, the apple case i bought does provide some protection.

The back of the unit is very dented.

So, the perfect end to the day.

I really did enjoy having my iPad, even for 12 days.  I guess lesson learned, NEVER put anything on top of your car!

March 7, 2010#

My Oscar Picks 2010…

I just made my 2010 Oscar Predictions! Make yours with the Official Oscar iPhone App.

Music (Original Score): Up, Michael Giacchino WON
Animated Feature Film: Up, Pete Docter WON
Costume Design: Nine, Colleen Atwood NO
Writing (Original Screenplay): The Hurt Locker, Written by Mark Boal WON
Actress in a Leading Role: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side WON
Visual Effects: Avatar, Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones WON
Cinematography: Avatar, Mauro Fiore WON
Film Editing: The Hurt Locker, Bob Murawski and Chris Innis WON
Sound Mixing: Avatar, Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and Tony Johnson NO
Art Direction: Avatar, Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair WON
Best Picture: Avatar, James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers NO
Actor in a Leading Role: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart WON
Documentary (Feature): The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Fisher Stevens WON
Sound Editing: The Hurt Locker, Paul N.J. Ottosson WON
Makeup: The Young Victoria, Jon Henry Gordon and Jenny Shircore NO
Actress in a Supporting Role: Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air NO
Actor in a Supporting Role: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds WON
Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon, Germany NO
Documentary (Short Subject): China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill NO
Music (Original Song): The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart), from “Crazy Heart” Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett WON
Writing (Adapted Screenplay): In the Loop, Screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche NO
Directing: Avatar, James Cameron NO

itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id354102052

February 17, 2010#

From the archives…

Back in 1997, my band ‘reel’ did a show “Live” to the internet.  In 1997, this was no easy task.  There was no UStream or any other service like it, and our connection was dial up.

What we did was, using a logitech quickcam, we took a picture of the live performance every 15 seconds, then uploaded the pic to our webserver and ran a javascript to refresh the image every 25 seconds.  For the audio, I had to contact a company in California to let us use their RealMedia streaming server.  This fed the webpage with the audiofeed that the user first had to download real player.

Here is our original blog post about the event:

February 14th: Johnny’s Rocket Room. Our live show on this web site. This show had a couple of new events for the band. The first being the debut of the newest song to the reel live set, “I hold crush” and the second being reel’s first live show on the internet. We would like to thank the following people who helped make the show happen: Nick Linedecker at Kern Internet Services in Bakersfied, CA, Copyland Systems for supplying the hardware to make the show be broadcast. We would also like to thank the following people who helped to promote the show: Chris Gordon and Karen Murray from 103.1fm “The Hawk” for having us the program “London Live”. Janice Zolf at BBS Communications for the spot on Entertainment Desk on TV-London. And last we would like to thank all the people who came out to the show and tuned in on the internet.

The blog post on WayBack Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/19970422164648/www.execulink.com/~reel/reelnews.htm

Here is the CFPL news coverage:


Sometimes, it is nice to walk down memory lane….

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