Sputnick, salmon, high speed rail
Okay, I lied. I did watch Obama’s State of the Union speech. In fact, I’ve watched it over and over and over tonight.
See, I was going to make you a nice little YouTube highlight reel, but I just couldn’t grab a clean copy. Sometimes I managed to download video but no audio. And sometimes I got video but it juddered horribly. And sometimes…oh, fuck it. You get the idea. I gave up in the end. Clearly I have some things to work out, videographically.
So what did I think of the speech? Honestly? I didn’t think it was as bad as people are saying.
I mean, it was a mess philosophically. The Sputnik metaphor doesn’t work at all, and — oh, dear god! — high speed rail?! Really? That one’s older than I am. It was a muddle, but it was a low-key muddle.
He didn’t flip anybody off. He managed to look reasonably gracious congratulating Boehner. He didn’t come across as too stuck up or madder’n hell. He didn’t look like he was sucking a lemon.
I was terribly disappointed.
January 26, 2011 — 11:18 pm
Comments: 22
On her last day in office, Nancy Pelosi crashed my new computer
Oh, man. I’d been working all afternoon on a video, when the software crashed. Hard.
I’d load the program, it would sit there for ten or fifteen seconds. Then Windows would pop up and say, “there’s something wrong with this thing — seeya!” and shut it down.
I guess it’s an improvement on the Blue Screen of Death. I mean, the program didn’t crash anything but itself. But it sure was off-pissing.
Anyhow, I finally figured it out. There was something in the Nancy Pelosi folder that was freaking it out. When I moved the folder out of the default spot, it worked again.
Spooky.
I wanted to do a lot more with this, but spent most of my free time trying to fix the computer instead. Still, here’s my little goodbye to Nancy Pelosi on YouTube.
G’bye, Nan!
January 6, 2011 — 12:44 am
Comments: 34
Planning for Retirement
I made a short, stupid movie about the 112th Congress (click the pitcher, Sherlock).
I have a love/hate relationship with video, leaning toward hate. I had to work with it a bit back in the day, and I was always screwing up some codec or frame rate or something. The technical side makes me crazy. But the graphics side was pretty fun.
And now that I have an extremely good machine, I figured I’d poke a toe in the water.
January 4, 2011 — 7:08 pm
Comments: 31