Halloween Rant

I decided that it would be more fun to do a Halloween vlog than a Halloween blog. So, instead of doing a blog post for Halloween, I did the video here.

So much for synergy ...

Oh well. Based on the comments ( or lack thereof ) on the blog since my Old School Blog vid, and the relatively small numbers of views on the video itself, I guess this whole blog/vlog synergy thing isn't working as I might have hoped. In any case, I know I have an audience of at least one ( Thank you Shweta! ( especially if you are reading this during your valuable procrastination time! ) ), so I will do my best to keep this blog moving along.
I feel like my YouTube channel has started to get bit stale lately ( I guess I'm too focused on the election to be too creative, but I'm definitely going to have to come up with some new material after election day ), but I have an idea to shake things up a bit. When I find the time ( probably this weekend ), I'm going to do an entire video playing a character. I've done one video with characters before ( 4 Hour Erection ), and that went pretty well, but that vid was more communitychannel-style, where I'm myself for most of the video, and then transition to a scene where I play multiple characters. I'd like to try doing a video where I play one character, and stay in character for the entire video. I've already written the script for it, and for being a loyal blog reader, I'll give you two hints about the content of the upcoming video.
1) The video will be a response to Natalie's recent "Maxim models" video.
2) The character's main prop is a hand mirror.
I just hope I can actually pull this off. There will be a very fine line between "funny" and "grating" for this video, and to stay on the funny side of the line, it's important that I really sell the character well. I'm going to need to keep a straight face and avoid breaking character for even a second. I think I'll be able to pull it off eventually, but I hope it doesn't take too many takes ( The "Scone" vid took me 17 takes before I got it right ).
Anyway, I hope do to a quick Halloween blog tomorrow.
Rich

Michael Potter

If I'm going to post pictures on this blog, I might as well start with a good one ( My wife took this shot of Michael yesterday ).

You(Tube) get what you pay for.

YouTube is free, and I guess you get what you pay for, but I'm getting rather perturbed by how often YouTube fails to synch the audio and video properly on the videos I upload. It's gotten to the point that I now always load the video as private first, so I can check the video before I make it public. More often than not lately, I need to reload the video. I had a new video of my kids ready to go yesterday, but I haven't been able to load it properly yet. I'm trying to load the video of the kids in HD ( because I'm a proud Daddy ), but every time I try to do it, the video and audio are out of synch. It looks like I may just need to load it as a low resolution video. :(

( Geez, I really seem like a cranky old dude in this post. It's really not that bad. It's just that as a computer programmer, it's really frustrating when something technical goes wrong, and you are helpless to do anything about it. I really wish I could take a look at the YouTube code that converts uploaded videos to YouTube format. How hard could it be to convert a Quicktime file? )

Rich

Scalia

With the US Presidental election rapidly approaching, I feel compelled to make at least one more political YouTube vlog before the election. I feel inspired to make a video which reminds people about the huge impact the next President will have on the Supreme Court. I don't think the US can afford another President who would appoint strict constructionists ( like Antonin Scalia ) to the Supreme Court (John McCain has made it clear that he would appoint strict constructionists ). The challenge is going to be to find a way to do the following in just a 10 minute video:
1) Explain what strict constructionism is.
2) Explain the implications it has on our everyday lives.
3) Explain why the strict constructinist judicial philosophy is flawed and dangerous.
It's not going to be easy to do this without boring half my viewers to tears, but it will be fun to try.
Well, that's all for now. I'm off to read a few Supreme Court descisions.
Rich

Need a new laptop

This blogging stuff could be fun, but if I'm really going to get into this, I'm going to need to get a new laptop. I let my kids play with the laptop a lot, and they've done a bit of damage ( Well, most of the damage was done by my 3 year-old son Peter. Michael ( who turned 5 on October 15th ) loves to play math games and watch YouTube clips ( he is very Internet savvy for his age ). Peter loves to watch his brother, and plays a few games of his own ( mostly SpongeBob games ). However Peter also thinks it is fun to pull keys off the keyboard. As a result, several of the key don't work too well. Almost every time I type a paragraph, I notice that "o"s, commas, and spaces are missing. It takes quite a bit of time to do a blog post that way ( in this sentence alone, I needed to retype the space key twice ). I do have a desktop iMac that works fine (I do my YouTube vids on that iMac after the kids (and usually my wife ) have fallen asleep ), but that's in the bedroom, and I don't really want to retreat to the bedroom to do blog posts. I rather do quick blog posts in my living room in-between playing with my kids.
This laptop is on its last legs anyway ( all sorts of problems the last few months ), so it wouldn't be a bad idea to get a new one. When I bought this laptop 2.5 years ago, I got the cheapest Windows laptop in the store, because I figured I'd mostly be using the iMac ( I just wanted the laptop for web browsing. I almost spent more on the wireless router stuff that the laptop ). I'll get a slightly better laptop next time, and I'll let the kids play with the old one.
In any case, this post was just a boring long-winded way of saying that I probably won't be doing lots of blog posts ( at least not long ones ) until I find a new laptop ( and that could take weeks, because I hate to shop ).
Rich

20 years too late

Part of me wishes I could have started a blog about 20 years ago. There was a lot more drama in my life back then, and it would have made for a much more compelling blog. Now, there's not so much drama.
Of course, I was also miserable most of the time back then. I guess it's true that suffering does help the creative process. Not to toot my own horn too much, but back in those days of misery, I was a pretty damn good poet. However, my days as a good poet effectively ended at the age of 21, when I started to date the woman who would eventually become my wife. Oh, I certainly did write some love poems to her back then, but looking back at those poems with an objective eye, I now realize that they were total drivel.
However, as seductive as the idea can be at times, I'm not really one who believes in "suffering for one's art". Sure, folks like Sylvia Plath ( suicide ), Anne Sexton ( suicide ), Emily Dickinson ( generally miserable ), Van Gogh ( the whole ear thing ) and Henry David Thoreau ( not really solitary by choice ) produced works of timeless greatness, but I wouldn't want to trade places with any of them. If given a choice between "suffering for one's art" or simply not suffering, I'll choose to forgo the suffering.
Still, if one has to suffer ( as most of us have to do at some point in our lives ), then you might as well produce some good creative stuff while you are suffering. In that respect, being born too many years before the advent of blogs was somewhat of a lost opportunity for me. Though, now that I think of it, I actually did participate in a kind of low-tech blog when I was in high school. Sure, this "blog" involved pen, paper, and a high school locker rather than laptops and web servers, but from a social aspect, it was almost identical to the blogs of today. There's a good story behind all that, so I think I'll make a YouTube video about it sometime soon. I also think I'll use that video to introduce my YouTube subscribers to my blog ( And that kids, is what they like to call "synergy" ).
Rich

First Entry

So it begins ...
I don't see myself writing too much in this blog- but I said that about YouTube 88 videos ago.