Wow. These plugins for Final Cut Pro by chv-electronics really appear to be a great value, especially the Text Collection. I may have to place an order.

With the seasonal theme of "haunted" for this week's WeeklyDV.com assignment, I (hopefully) took a unique approach. Once again, I roped a co-worker into helping me get the thing done and Coby did a great job as "the girl." Watch the video: Girl Haunted or go on over to the main moonpost page or visit WeeklyDV.com -- see for yourself all the other entries, too!

I got invited to attend a sneak preview of the new Eddie Murphy-Owen Wilson movie "I Spy" this evening and I went into it with an open mind, a blank slate, no real expectations or knowledge about it (except that I do like Owen Wilson)... now perhaps you should be thinking, hmmm, wonder why he even bothered to mention all that... well, the movie wasn't good. There, I said it. I hate being negative about movies, but this movie just kinda felt like it had been sitting out of the 'fridge for a few days too long, if you know what I mean. It seemed more like a proof-of-concept or rough cut than a finished piece about to open on Friday. Truly. To be fair, though, I did laugh -- three times, I think -- but in all, the movie was only worth the price of admission (it was a free sneak preview). In fact, it was 100x funnier to notice, upon exiting the theater, that my friend Adrienne had a completely blue mouth and teeth from drinking a blue slushie during the film. And that was free, too (the laughs, not the slushie).

Bjork fan? Sure you are. Read this: Profile: Bjork

Perhaps you've seen the ads and trailers for "Bowling for Columbine?" I highly and earnestly recommend that you find a theater playing this movie and buy yourself a ticket and sit down and watch. You will laugh, cheer, clap, wince, gasp, and probably cry. This is a simple yet powerful movie and it will make you think. Please see it.
There were lines to get in last night, a Sunday night in frigid and almost-snowing Minnesota.

I am shocked... word is coming in right now over the news sources claim that a plane crashed in northern Minnesota a short time ago and it was the plane chartered by Senator Paul Wellstone. I hold on desperately to the hope that it did not contain Sen. Wellstone, but all news sources are saying he was on the plane and all eight passengers were killed in the crash. His wife and one of his three children were on the plane as well. This is such sorrowful news - I just don't know what to say or think...

One of my co-workers today was talking to his wife on the phone and she had to get off the phone during the conversation, saying she'd call him back in one minute. He was paged about a minute later to pick up an incoming call and answered it by saying "Hello, this is John Doe... how can I lick you?" ... dead silence ... uh oh... finally, the person on the other end said "Hi John Doe, this is Jane the company salesperson..." Ha! Luckily she has a bit of a sense of humor or things could've gone very bad.

Go get your new version of Transmit (FTP) for OS X from Panic -- it is very nice and well worth the price (gotta remember to send in my dough). I beta-tested it a for a short time (although I feel bad for not using it as much as I should have during that time) and it rocks. Some great features such as sftp, remote editing, remote previewing, automatic reconnections, etc. Yeeha!

I worked my little butt off to accomplish the assignment in the allotted time and came up with this: Dirty Steve (the topic was 'germs'). Enjoy. Comments appreciated.
How did I make this video?

I shot all the video with my Sony TRV-11 DV camcorder. I shot a high-res still shot for each freeze-frame zoom with my Sony DSC-P71 digital still camera. The germ animation (such as it is) was made by creating a texture in Photoshop 7 and then making variations of it. It is only seven frames put into a loop. I created the microscopic overlay (the green part) in another Photoshop document. Everything was composited and edited using Final Cut Pro on a Power Mac dual 1 Ghz G4 tower.
There are only two tracks of video (hardly necessary) and up to eight tracks of audio (2 stereo DV, 2 for sound effects, 2 for narration and 2 for bed music).
The audio on the narration is a bit echo-y as I used the built-in microphone on the camcorder. Should've used an external mic. Locations were my house and my place of employment. "Dirty Steve" is one of my co-workers. The camera sound-effect came off of a royalty-free sound effect library, which I then tweaked to make it shorter and higher pitched. QuickTime Pro 6 was also handy. Oh, and I did some basic sound editing with SparkME and QuickTime 6 as well.
Thank you, WeeklyDV.com!

The corporate honchos came in to work today to 'rally the troops' and explain the current situation. It was about what I expected and was overall a good meeting. They confirmed a few things, revealed a few things and committed to a few things. Very beneficial and reassuring. I was quite skeptical going in but am no longer. It will be interesting to find out where (officially) the departing guys are going as all rumors agree already on destination.

Not a lot of concrete information from over the weekend re: the boss' departure, although I did hear all sorts of stuff. Most people seem to be in agreement with the rumors relating to the competition, but I guess we'll find out more at the big corporate dog-and-pony show at 1:00pm tomorrow.

Good morning. Look at that... it is ever so subtly snowing out right now. It appears to be more a mixture of tiny ice crystals than pure snow.

Pfff! My friend M. got this email yesterday while I was over and it cracked (no pun intended) us up. What an amateur spam! Had they been serious about attracting visitors, they would have included the word "toothless" in their pitch.
Coalition for degeneracy? Puh-leeze. Jerks.

...everything goes to hell. Sort of. I took the day off yesterday (we get a 'free' vacation day for our birthday each year) to just kick back and relax and hang out. Last night I went out to dinner (great Thai food) and then watched "Death to Smoochy" (not at all as bad as reviews make it seem) with friends. Got a call on my cell around 12:30am this morning with an important message -- the president of my company resigned yesterday! This is a huge event. Apparently the former-president and the head of sales (who resigned a week prior) are in cahoots and going elsewhere. A huge shock to all. We never expected this sort of thing. Corporate HQ reps are coming to visit on Monday and I'm sure it will be a very... uh, interesting meeting. And word on the street is whispering about the competition... hmmm...

The weather forecast is calling for snow showers for the next two days. Yuck! There was some sort of snow or frost-like substance on my vehicle when I left work tonight, too. Hmmm... but when will there be enough of the white stuff to actually support snowboarding? Not for a while, I'm guessing. These in-between times, where it gets sloppy and mucky, where mud and snow and cold mix into the perfect downer, just aren't fun.

Ok, get on over to Kite Aerial Photography Panoramas and check out the coolest panorama shots I've seen! Awesome stuff. Now I want to go spend a ton of money on kites and cameras... The resolution of the panos is really nice, too (zoom in and out).
Link via boingboing

Today saw the release of a new version of ImageRodeo, a sleek and fast little program for Mac OS X that helps you make awesome web gallery pages. It just so happens to include my popular PolaFrame template which I originally created for iView Multimedia. I've tweaked it into a 2.0 release and it will soon be online to download for iView and another hugely popular program. I just want to do a few more slight modifications to make it work even better... Check the main moonpost.com page for updates.
I am not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I guess I can make something people can use to express themselves and give back to the internet community in some small way. Enjoy. And I'd love to take a peek at your galleries.

This morning I awoke from a most amazing dream: instead of developing a light-rail transit system here in the Twin Cities, we developed a Floom* transit system! I awoke breathless and excited and just a bit scared.
Constructed along the major highways were elevated water channels for the public transit floom system. Commuters would get into the large log boats throughout the Cities and travel (float swiftly) into the downtown area. At the very edge of downtown the water would boil, tumble and splash violently -- the lip of the descent! Now these elevated channels were quite high, maybe 25-30 stories up. You would know exactly what was going to happen when you shot over that last lip and be hurtled down the very steep pitch (60 degrees at least!), producing the most amazing block-drenching splash at the bottom. Yet no matter how many times you rode the floom system...

...your breath would catch in your chest and your heart would be pounding throughout your body, thumping madly in your ears, the moment you reached the last 20' of the level portion and then, just at the moment you were hanging mid-air before the rushing water released you downwards, all things would stop for the briefest moment and you'd panic. No matter -- into the hands of fate, screaming down towards the pool and the city core. Fa-loom! Spa-lash!
It was a great transit system (in my dream-land) as it was so much fun, always thrilling due to the speed and steep final drop, and what they found was that the downtown workers were extremely productive each and every morning due to the increased adrenalin levels in their bodies!
Who do I deliver my proposal to?

*What is a Floom? If you've ever been to Valleyfair you'll know. I'm sure they have them at other theme/amusement parks under other names, but it consists of a water-based ride and people get into a large 'carved-out log' which bobs along the watery route, under small water falls, through tunnels, etc, and eventually the 'log' gets hauled up a steep hill and released into the hands of gravity, zooming down the incline on the other side and into a pool of water at the end, producing great splashes of water. An amusing ride, to be sure.

Impressive. Wired News has a new redesign and a new backend -- all fully W3C compliant. Nicely done.

As mentioned the other day, the weeklyDV.com site has posted the first results of assignment #1: Orange. Some pretty good results. I liked "Orange Meets Blue" the best out of the bunch. I didn't have time to paticipate this round, but will try to get one for next week!

Like digital video (DV)? Produce stuff in DV? Just curious about DV? Head on over to Ken Stone's Final Cut Pro pages and get schooled! Looks like an invaluable resource.

Do you ever get really surly at the behavior of other people? Like when there is a perfectly good resource which they could take advantage of, they are 100% fully aware of it, and yet they don't use it or only a mere fraction of it? Ok, instead of being surly, how does one go about steering these people (short of a cattle prod) to take advantage of what they have? They are doing the 'work' anyway, just not where it would get maximum usage/exposure. Hmmm... Books? Sites? Help?
I guess that is why I am not a manager/executive.

I got a great little package of goodies in the mail yesterday for my birthday. Wow. Fun stuff and all things I wanted - a book, a DVD and a game. Thanks!

Ok, there was a new version of MovableType released today (version 2.5) and that means I can once again post pictures into my photolog! Yippee! What a relief! I've been struggling for weeks on end since I moved this site to a different server and just could not get the image portion of it working again. Today I was able to get it functioning thanks to the new version's added support of other graphics modules! This makes me a happy little computer geek.

Today is my birthday - 33 years of age. Hmmm. Read a nice book this morning, finished a little video project for my sister, hung out with a friend, had dinner at my sister's with my brother-in-law and my awesome little niece. Nice calm day. Partying will come later in the month... just have to decide on the theme...

Yesterday was my friend Anita's wedding down in Winona. I somehow managed, through my own distraction and procrastination, to be almost 20 minutes late for the wedding (although the glacial staff at Subway didn't help during my lunch stop). Good thing it was a traditional Catholic wedding! I snuck in the back and saw the remaining 30 minutes. It was great and fun and I worked up quite a sweat dancing like a spaz. They even had vegetarian meals (eggplant) at the dinner. Met some cool people from Boston (Hi!) and saw some old friends whom I haven't seen in many years (Scott, Jen, Rob, Darla, Steve, Lisa, Ed, Ethan, Monica). I am very happy for Anita (she rocks) and Rick. I feel that they'll be a great and happy couple.

This site, Modern Living, simply has to be fully explored. Amazing and out-there. Impressive. Funny. Dark. Found via boingboing.

Mister Jason Zada announces the new weeklyDV.com site. you are invited to participate. crank up that DV camcorder and get making films.
check out his site for some great little DV shorts made in very short order.

No, Warren doesn't live here and thank you so much for yanking me from my pre-consciousness state of bliss at 7:00am.