Man vs. Machine

Too busy to post?

2008-05-12T18:10:00.001-07:00

Yeah, the big move, the new job, the househunting... And a new blog, of course. All have taking up a lot of my time - and taken me away from being able to post here.

And I have great new stories to tell you, too: hotel electronic key cards, my wife's GPS navigation system, my hand-held GPS, my new work technology.... But I'm going to have to put this blog on hold for now until things settle down I think. Same goes with my website, which needs updating in a serious way since the job and residency changes....

Could this be the way it begins? I get to "busy" to do about this stuff? Now, in ten years, will I realize I've been too busy for so long that I'm out of the loop? Maybe I've reached my adult-life tipping point...

Long time, no post: moving via internet

2008-04-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

Yeah, long time no post. We're in the middle of a move, though. Not much going on there except I've been frustrated on multiple occasions with websites that promise easy interaction and reservation / customer service capabilities (I'm looking squarely in your direction, PODS and uHaul). Instead, they simply ask you to fill out a lengthy form and then tell you to call the 1-800 number. Or, better yet, how about the uHaul customer service chat? After taking the time to log in, wait in line to chat with someone, and then finally sending over your question.... you literally get a LIVE CUSTOMER SERVICE PERSON telling you to call the 1-800 number to talk to another LIVE PERSON. Wha?

Tracking visitors and blog hits: Feedburner and Google Analytics

2008-03-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

With nearly 50 posts on my blog, I got to wondering if anyone was actually looking at it. Not that that is the point - the point is simply to get into the practice of using Web 2.0 applications and, like the subtitle says, "keep up with new technology and the evolving web." But still, it'd be interesting to know, right? And, investigating how to do it is a learning experience in itself.

After a bit of searching around, I put my blog into Feedburner (another Google aquisition). While I was at it, I also added a bit of HTML code to my www.ericbolstridge.com pages so they can be tracked by Google Analytics. My GoDaddy hosting already supplies decent tracking and report stats, so I don't know how useful that will be, but I signed up for it anyway to see if it would provide any additional information.

Since registering with Feedburner, by the way, my Blog has one hit (and I think that was me).

Follow me on Twitter!

2008-03-17T08:09:00.001-07:00

My sister turned me on to Twitter several months ago, but I found it to be pretty dumb and impossibly difficult to update. But just a week or so ago, my old buddy Mike Bush started using it. And then I read that it was possibly being hailed as "The next Facebook." Looks like sis was way ahead of the curve after all.

So, in keeping with the goal stated up there at the top of my Blog, I'm going to start updating my Twitter feed. I'm even delving (yes, delving) into the world of texting (you can update your Twitter feed via text messages). This is definitely a place I'm lacking, anyway, so I'm kinda getting into two things at once. I thought email from my phone was close to texting, but yesterday I read an article in the Washington Post Magazine about evolving technology that included a quote from a teen: "Yeah, I still use email if I'm trying to send a message to an old person, like my teacher or my Uncle." Ouch.

Texting is the way to do it, or, even more current, "broadcast texting" using something like Twitter. So, I suppose in some ways, I'm leaping over "regular" texting and getting right to the new thing.

I added the Twitter app to my Facebook page, too. Follow me on Twitter!

How to crash your computer with iTunes

2008-03-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

I've had my iPod for a week now, and yesterday I went into iTunes again to update my podcasts, check on my music, and see if I could find a couple more things to pull in for my iPod. Since I had only used up about half of the 8 GB capacity, I figured this would be no big deal.

I subscribed to two more podcasts, Movies You Should See and NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Then, I went ahead and told iTunes to "GET" a bunch of other episodes of some of the other podcasts I had subscribed to. This should fill up my iPod nicely, I reasoned, and I let the computer chug away at downloading and went to bed.

Well, sometime the next day, my wife yells at me from the living room, "What did you do to the computer?!" Turns out I had totally filled up our little 4-year old PC to its digital gills with data, and it had something like 140K left on the hard drive. Oops.

Well, being the technological brains in the family, she sits down and fixes the whole thing, moves stuff around, and generally gives me a mini-tutorial about how to use iTunes (and not make duplicates of all my podcasts and not accidentally delete all my music - two things I recently did).

So, since we're not quite ready to commit to a whole new computer yet (I think a beefy iMac is going to be the '08 family Christmas present), we're headed off to CostCo on Monday afternoon to get a big external media drive. The plan is to transfer all of our music and everything iTunes is pointing at over to our new drive (500 GB for $129 says the website). That should hold all the video, movies, music, podcasts and whatever we want. And plenty of room to grow (hopefully).

Arlington County is a YouTube Partner!

2008-03-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

Well, it all seems kinda shady like a back room deal or something, but I got an email from tha Virginia State Government person today telling me that Arlington County's YouTube account had been upgraded to "Partner" status. I didn't even have do anything since my previous posting where I said I would apply - I guess she just emailed her contact at YouTube and got it done for me. That's great, but at the same time it seems weird that it works that way.

So, now I'm working to design the banner and logos and such that I can add to our page - there's a new section on the Account Management page for "Branding Options." Hopefully I can get something thrown together and put up there soon. The other awesome benefit (in addition to that auto-play that started this whole thing, of course) of being a partner is an increase in the max upload. As a partner, I'm still limited to 1044 MB per video, but there isn't a time restriction.

Joining the iPod club

2008-03-09T19:32:00.000-07:00

Hooha! I got an iPod for my birthday! I was hinting, but it was still a surprise. It's a green 3rd generation 8 Gig iPod Nano. The third gen nanos have video, too!

I've already gotten into iTunes and pulled in all my ripped CDs. I also subscribed to a bunch of podcasts (some favorites that I was simply pulling off YouTube, some I had downloaded directly from their host websites).

My sister got me an iTunes gift card, too, so I was able to buy some songs I found out about from Pandora (there's only one MC Chris song on iTunes!! Lame!) I also pulled in two Mitch Hedberg Comedy Central tv specials. I've yet to get my own videos on there - that's something I'd like to do, and I'll updates here as I figure that out.

But, overall, I'm totally digging my iPod. I'm finding iTunes and syncing up my iPod to be an easier process then I thought it would be, and I have no complaints about the click-wheel or using the iPod interface (two things I've heard other people complain about). I am definitely seeing how one could get lured into the "listen to my iPod everywhere all the time" thing - it's awesome having so much music so easily available in such high quality in such a small package. I can't believe I actually worked out in the garden last summer with a Sony DiscMan clipped onto my belt...

Using Labels in Blogger

2008-03-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

I just realized that all of my tags (or labels as Blogger calls them) weren't working. The labels are the "key words" that appear below each post, which will basically help you, the reader, browse my posts by subject. Anyway, I was just typing them in when I would post - but apparently they need to be separated by a comma.... Ugh, so now I need to go back through all my posts to fix them. Seems stupid that it wouldn't be smart enough to separate them by itself or at least prompt the user a little better as to the preferred format.

YouTube Partners

2008-03-04T09:29:00.001-08:00

So, I've found out a lot more about the whole YouTube Partners thing. Apparently getting the extra features a partnership can provide can be as simple as applying to be a partner! This doesn't seem to be heavily advertised by YouTube, but there are instructions and loads of YouTube video bloggers talking about it, like this guy.

I think Arlington County should qualify - I've uploaded about 100 videos and we generate original content on a regular basis that is viewed by thousands (well, cumulatively maybe). I'll go through the application and we'll see! Heck, my personal YouTube account gets hits in the thousands, too, so maybe I'll see if I can be a partner on that side, too...

The YouTube "in crowd"

2008-03-02T04:27:00.000-08:00

I found out that the state (er, Commonwealth) of Virginia signed up and has started posting videos.

They don't exactly have the whole thing figured out yet it seems, as some of their videos are unsynched and aren't quite YouTube "friendly," but whatever. The thing that really struck me was how when you go to their channel page, the main video plays automatically. Funny thing is, I was just talking to John Lisle, the PIO of Arlington's Police Department about this exact thing - the ACPD has a YouTube page of their own and John was asking me about how to make the video on the channel page play automatically (like the VA state channel). I didn't think it was possible, but now that I saw the VA state page doing it, I knew there was something to what John had said.

As any good internet researcher does, I turned to Google. I typed in "auto-play video on youtube channel page." This got me some good hits and basically what I learned is this: YouTube will work with celebrities, large companies, politicians and any other big powerful organization and give them a "super" page that can have its own fancy background, an auto-play video, and a couple other features. It's not something mentioned on YouTube's pages, in any of the account settings, or even in their help. Interesting....

So, I sent a friendly message to the VA state folks (linky on their channel page, of course). I offered a suggestion about encoding their video to help with the synch issue and inquired about the auto-play video... all in the interest of inter-governmental partnerships, etc...

I got a reply back, and long story short it is indeed a big Google who-you-know thing - the whole VA YouTube thing came out of a meeting between Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Governor Tim Kaine. Within two days, the VA YouTube page launched.

Goozex

2008-02-27T20:02:00.000-08:00

Goozex is a video game trading site I discovered recently after yet another frustrating craigslist experience had me down on the whole idea of trading video games with people... Seems interesting. I've signed up and put my "library" of games (actually just three games I don't really want anymore anyway) out for trading. But I don't need to explain how it works. You can read it for yourself.

My kid's online... I have no idea how that works.

2008-02-26T10:05:00.000-08:00

So I was talking to someone and they mentioned their 9 year old's DS and how he had lost a piece to it. I asked if he lost the stylus, intending to suggest a good replacement brand.

"The what?" she replied.

"The little pen thing," I explained.

"Oh, I don't know what it does. I have no idea how it works." And the conversation ended.

And that's kinda okay, I guess, but then later on I overheard the same person talking about their son to someone else. "Oh, yeah, he connects it to the computer and plays games on there with his friends."

Wow, so you don't know how your 9 year old's game works, yet he's going online to play Pokemon with strangers? Awesome.

Link to my early post about buying a Nintendo DS

Sony XD Cams and proxy video possibilities

2008-02-06T04:07:00.000-08:00

So we got our new Sony XD cameras in at work (HD, woo-hoo!), along with new decks and lots of other fun new gear. Looking at the gear and thinking about what other bits 'n' pieces we might need, I suggested we get some big flash drives.

The idea that I had was that we could shoot on the XD cams and use the proxy video to do some cuts-only editing with the free Sony software that comes with the cameras (and is available online). The proxy video (low-res versions of the video files that are stored on the Blu-Ray discs that the camera records to) would fit nicely on a big drive, and then we could do some editing at home on our personal computers.

I was thinking specifically about some of our simpler programs and promo stuff, like the Adopt-A-Pet show. That show is mostly cuts-only, with a layer of graphics put on top for lower thirds and transitions. It'd be easy to do the first edit at home, bring in the EDL (edit decision list) and the proxy video, and then have our AVIDs at work reconcile the full-res video and build out the HD timeline. Basically, I'm hoping we'll have some tele-commuting capability as a result of having these new cameras. Not so much consumer technology, which is more the topic for this blog, but it's cutting-edge stuff just the same. Cool!

Hacking the Nintendo DS

2008-02-01T10:15:00.001-08:00

My buddy Dave came by last night and we started talking about my wife's new DS.

Anyway, he reminded me about how I had asked about getting cards for a Nintendo DS that is pre-loaded with games and we set to work together to discover exactly what and how that was possible. Within a couple of searches we found out most of what we would need to do: Get the R4 file transfer card. Then go to a site like NDS-Roms and download whatever game you want.

Very interesting indeed. But are ROMs legal? How does that side of things work? They are so prevalent and easily available (just type in Super Mario Bros. into Google and you can play it online) so could they really be "wrong?"

New GPS receiver

2008-01-29T18:44:00.000-08:00

My old handheld GPS, a Garmin Geko 101, stopped working (okay, so I left it in my pocket and it got washed, but the point is it stopped working). So, I spent some of my saved up Christmas money and bought a new one: a Garmin eTrex Summit. I bought it from Wal-Mart.com for $175 or so.

I'll be able to do all kinds of wacky stuff with it, since it has connectivity that my old one never did - I should be able to download routes, maps, and all kinds of wacky fun stuff from www.geocaching.com (if you don't know about geocaching, check it out - it's way fun!)

Skype is the future!

2008-01-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

So our microphone arrived for our home PC and the wife got it hooked up yesterday. So this morning, instead of our usual phone call, I got a ring on my work computer - and I got to wish the family a good morning face to face! Easy! And it's very fun when folks walk by my office - "oops, sorry, didn't realize you were on the ph- What!? Are you doing video chat? Wow, that is awesome."

More Skype

2008-01-19T18:39:00.000-08:00

So I've installed Skype on my PC here at work and it's working like a charm. Trouble is, I can't run my webcam on ericbolstridge.com at the same time as I'm doing video chat with Skype. You'd think that software would be smart enough to split the signal or whatever. So, I think this will create a problem of some sort, since I will be using the webcam more for Skype now and the website won't have a feed. I think I might change the "webcam" page of ericbolstridge.com to a simple invitation for folks to call me on Skype... but that's not really the same as the anonymous looking that a webcam allows...

Anyway, Skype works great, and I even got a microphone working, too. So now I can video chat with my friend down the hall (who is in reality so close I could simply shout, but that's not the point!).

My wife also downloaded Skype and installed it on our home PC. Her webcam is working, too, so now we can see each other with a much much better frame rate then we could using Yahoo! Messenger. I need to get a microphone hooked up at home, still, though. It's a little cumbersome to use, but overall, I say "Yay, Skype!"

Skype & video chat

2008-01-08T05:04:00.000-08:00

Back when we were doing our podcast and we were taking calls through the phone, we would make fun of other podcasts that were using Skype to conduct their on-air interviews because of the marked difference in audio quality. But, at the same time, I had never myself tried Skype, so in a way, we were using "old" tech on our show, since our production process was more from what we know - traditional on-air radio. In fact, we didn't even record the show on a computer - we recorded it directly to CD and then uploaded it.

Anyway, my buddy at work is from Great Britain and his friend over in England has turned him on to Skype as a fun and free way to keep in touch with his ol' mates back home. He was telling me about it and explaining how one of his more 'net-savvy pals was even doing video chat. We went into his office, and there his friend was, chatting away like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, in alarmingly clear and quick video. It looked way better then my webcam can produce over Yahoo! Messenger.

So of course, I realized that here was another thing to try to tackle. Together, we set to work trying to get a camera hooked up on my co-worker's PC so we could video-phone back to his friend. We played around with trying to get a Canon digital still camera and a small DVCam to perform as a webcam for a half-hour or so before giving up.

But I was truly impressed with the frame-rate of Skype's video chat... Much better then what I've seen using AIM or Messenger... Maybe it's time for me to switch...

A lecture from a Senator who doesn't LOL

2007-12-04T18:07:00.000-08:00

I was driving around the other day and landed on a public radio station that was airing a speech by Joe Lieberman. He was going on about the shameful content in video games and on the internet and all that stuff like he always does, so I stopped to listen.

After he finished, a woman Senator came on (from Minnesota, I think). She opened her remarks by relating a story about a talk she gave at a college recently. She said she was discussing the internet and kids and whatever, and a smarty-pants college kid asked her "Do you even know what LOL means?" And she admitted to him that she didn't. After the talk, her twelve-year-old daughter explained what LOL meant and told her mom she was sooooo embarrassed by her. Hahaha, she laughed and made it out to be a cute story, and then continued her speech.

Well, she eventually got to a part in her speech where she started admonishing parents for letting kids access inappropriate content online. And she talked about how parents need to watch out about what video games their kids are playing, spend time on the internet with your kids, know what they know, etc (all stuff I'm trying to do).

So, I guess the point is just how ironic it is that this woman was going on about being involved in our kids' high-tech world and literally saying how we don't spend enough time understanding or relating to our kids in regards to the internet and modern video games... when she has already admitted that she doesn't do any of that - she doesn't even know what LOL means. Wow.

Scrabulous on Facebook

2007-12-01T15:18:00.000-08:00

So, I'm digging my Facebook page a lot lately. I'm regularly updating my Eric Bolstridge is... tag, Playing Scrabulous with a bunch of folks (okay, mostly just my wife), posting my Pandora stations and songlists, and even playing around with cutesy little Fluff friends.

So far I've found about half of the silly applications you can add to your Facebook page to be dumb or only only fun for the first time you set it up. But the other half are actually kinda fun!

Wif-Fi and the Nintendo DS

2007-11-26T04:19:00.000-08:00

I've been looking into possibly getting the wife a Nintendo DS for Christmas. The mini-games are fun and she likes the Brain Age and other "adult" games. I think she'd like Nintendogs and cute games like Drawn-To-Life, too. So, with this, I've been checking into the features of the DS and how it works. I know you can play wirelessly, you can download demos and such from stores and at McDonald's, and I know you can even do basic chatting and access the internet for content. And that's really what I'm interested in: the Wi-Fi and online capabilities of the device. Why is that important? Because while I don't know how to do those things, my 6-year-old neighbor does...

And don't laugh and say "Haha, but he's just a kid! Who cares about their silly games?" Because those kids will become teenagers and then adults - growing up as the technology grows with them, and anyone who doesn't keep up will just be another clueless old person to them. And tech-savvy kids have no respect for clueless old people. I know, because I was one of those tech-savvy kids.

Modern example:

In checking out the DS's online capabilities I discovered that Nintendo actually discontinued their Opera-based browsing software for the DS a month or so ago. The reason they discontinued it is that parents were buying it without realizing what it was and then discovering that, to their surprise, their kids were going online with it (um, duh). So, with parents screaming that their kiddo's Nintendo DS suddenly had become a portal to the evils of the internet, Nintendo went ahead and stopped making that "game" and it's now becoming somewhat a rare find in used game stores.

While I think it's funny that a parent would buy their kid a game they don't understand, I have to admit that I don't understand how the DS gets online. What games work online and what is the extent of the file sharing and online gameplay? Other then my Blackberry, I've never owned own a single web-enabled device, let alone set up or accessed a Wi-Fi connection.

But with their lil' Nintendo DS, even the lamest 8 year-old has. And why not? I defeated bowser and saved the Princess at 7 years old - why shouldn't the average kid be able to master the full capabilities of the current Nintendo product in the same way I did?

So, getting a DS and keeping up with modern gaming isn't just a bad idea for a Christmas gift, but it's also a good idea from a parenting perspective: my oldest kid will no doubt have a next-gen Nintendo of his own one day and I think it's important that I not only understand how it works, but maybe even be able play with him.

Video update

2007-11-16T05:39:00.000-08:00

I've been doing lots with YouTube and such lately, so here's an update: a while ago I realized it was clunky and messy to embed YouTube videos right on ericbolstridge.com. So, I simply put a link to my my YouTube account and another link to my Arlington County videos.

We've been cranking out content at work, so eventually the Arlington County YouTube account page was getting cluttered, and it was way too hard to find videos or expect anyone to see the "good stuff" with 70 or 80 videos spread over 6 pages... So, I dug into YouTube a bit, figured out Playlists, and set up a bunch to keep things organized. Now, I point people here at work (and on ericbolstridge.com) to the Arlington County Playlist page instead. Ooh, organization! How nice!

The webcam returns to ericbolstridge.com!

2007-10-16T11:05:00.000-07:00

Hooray! The webcam is back on ericbolstridge.com! Thanks to my devoted wife, who found me new and improved FREE webcam software, my web-cam is back online! I'm using YawCam, from www.yawcam.com. I needed to go back into my GoDaddy account to remember the right way to type in my FTP server address, but that was no big deal. Simple install and the webcam is back! Woo-hoo!

Camperino.com goes online

2007-10-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Most of my friends and family like to camp, and back when I was in college I had a Geocities website called "The Camperino Website." I would post stories about camping trips that me and my pals would take and I used the site to semi-coordinate trips with people. Many new friends were made and many adventures were had. But that was
literally 10 years ago.

So, I was talking to one of my best buds about bringing the Camperino website back into existence. Maybe branching off my ericbolstridge.com page. Well, he would have none of that! (this friend does website junk for a living, btw) So, he reached out and grabbed his laptop off the kitchen counter and with a few deft strokes on his keyboard and a mouse click or two, Camperino.com was born!

I think we'll set it up much like the old Camperino website, with blog-type entries, trip announcements, etc. Maybe we'll let anyone post trips and invite folks to come along. Should be fun. I think we'll definitely have it up and running for the 2008 camping season. Yay, internets!

2007-10-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Yup, I just got a LinkedIn account, too. So now I'm on there. Seems like a lot of stupid social networking crap to me, but what they heck, isn't that the point of this blog? I'm getting too bitter about technology and what folks are doing that I think it's crap? Yeesh, and on top of that, I'm using the word "folks."

Facebook.com

2007-10-10T08:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I have a Facebook account, but never really put anything on it. It's nothing more then a basic replication of exactly what MySpace is, but I've heard that it is supposed to be more mature / professional / whatever. Anyway, a couple of my "real" friends sent me invites over the past couple weeks, so I went ahead and put some very basic content on my profile, a lil' photo and a link to my website.

I love Pandora.com!

2007-10-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

My wife turned me on to this great online radio station / music website, Pandora.com . You tell it what music you like, and it then picks songs for you, playing them back to back without interruption. You help it learn what music you like by giving songs a thumbs up or thumbs down (or nothing to be neutral). I've been using it for a few weeks and it's fairly refined, almost always playing music that I really like (across multiple genres even!).

It'll play bouncy fun music like They Might Be Giants, then go to some nice J-pop, then to something like Primus or Soul Coughing or even Prodigy... but always something good! The feedback system is simple and fun and you can query it to find out "why" it is playing certain songs.

Web Cam software expiration

2007-09-06T10:10:00.000-07:00

So, my Web Cam software, Biromsoft Webcam, was downloaded on a trial basis. It works awesome, automatically linking to my web server at GoDaddy.com and uploading an image every few seconds via FTP. Works great! So, of course, when the trial period ended, I clicked "Buy It!"

I paid my $29.99 via paypal to a company called ShareIt!, which I now know is a middle-man company that accepts payments on behalf of independent developers. So, they got my $29.99 and allegedly notified the Biromsoft folks that I had made the purchase. According to ShareIt! I was to receive my verification code by email within 24 hours.

Well, much more then that went by. So I emailed ShareIt! and I emailed Biromsoft. No response for over a week. So, I clicked through PayPal's "Resolution Center" thingy that sends another email... The next day I called American Express and had them retrieve the money.

Thankfully, AMEX is awesome about this stuff, so I got my money back with limited hassle, but I'm pretty grumpy about the whole experience. Here's this great software that I was fully willing to purchase, but because of some glitchy something or maybe just bad customer service, I don't get to have a web cam and they don't get my money. Such a lose-lose. Ah, well.

Web Cam on EricBolstridge.com

2007-08-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

Hahahaha! Yeah, it's been a while since my last post, but it was worth it. I downloaded a couple software applications to see if I could get one to solve my webcam question, and I got this one from Biromsoft to work! It's set to my cheap Labtec cam and is uploading straight to my server that I have through GoDaddy! After getting the image uploading (the frequency of the upload is variable), I then had to get the HTML in there to refresh the page. That kinda sucks, because it's not a true streaming feed - it's just refreshing the webpage automatically ever few seconds.

Also, I have a slight concern that I might exceed my "upload" capacity or something like that, but since I'm not actually adding tons of images and only overwriting the same one, I don't think it will be an issue with my account limitations...

Anyway, what fun!

MySpace.com is stupid

2007-07-10T10:10:00.000-07:00

So, I killed my MySpace page. I was getting spam and invites from random pron people. Plus, their services are redundant considering I have a blog and website elsewhere...

Maybe this is an admission of how much I actually don't get it, but I'm not into the whole online social networking thing, either, which would be the only other reason to have a page....

Google Reader

2007-06-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

After asking around, I realized that I didn't necessarily need to download something new to start enjoying the splendor of RSS feeds - Google has it built in to their suite of apps. So, I signed up for Google Reader, added a handful of RSS feeds from my favorite sites, and I'm rollin'.

I read a comic strip, check bargains, get a couple blog feeds, and even have Snopes.com sending me their feed. Not bad. I'm a fan of the RSS, but it doesn't work well if the site owner doesn't have their feed set up nicely. Like for Snopes, you get the headline of the story and the content, but no photos or handy "genre" icon. But for everything else, I'm no longer going to the original sites at all, just checking the content on my Google Reader. Wow, I'm so mod-er-in.

GoDaddy automated payment

2007-05-30T05:21:00.000-07:00

My GoDaddy account is still auto-billing me $7 each month for hosting ericbolstridge.com. I decided I'll bite the bullet and pay for a full year to get the couple bucks off. I'll see about calling them this afternoon to make the change (they are surprisingly nice and very helpful over the phone). But I'm always a little scared of anything "long-term" with internet / phone / whatever stuff. They always seem to come back around and bite ya in the ass...

What is an RSS feed?

2007-05-29T05:15:00.000-07:00

The topic came up at work, and I knew the most out of the three or four of us that were chatting together. I knew it was "some sort of subscription thing where you'll get automatic alerts when there are updates to a site or a podcast or something." So, I felt kinda okay knowing that much, but of course, it made me realize I really don't know about RSS feeds.

So, now I do! A little research, a little checking things out, and now I know that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and you need a "feed reader" or an aggregator to use them. I asked around and looked into what those are, and I'm making it my goal this week to download Mozilla Thunderbird so I can get on board with pulling in RSS feeds, as well as possibly accessing my Gmail accounts through there. My buddy was telling me that he uses an aggregator for his IM, too, so maybe I'll ditch my Yahoo! Messenger and go through Thunderbird for that as well (if it has that capability... We shall see).

iTunes download

2007-04-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Long time since my last post, I know. But that's a good thing, I think - there's less for me to "find out," right?

Anyway, the wife got an iPod shuffle from her mom, so we got the ol' iTunes on the home computer. I tried iTunes on my work machine and it wouldn't install properly - either a work firewall thing or my pc here just sucks, I dunno. Anyway, at home, we got it downloaded okay and had to go through a nice two days purge / conversion of music that we had on there. In the end, we both played around with it enough to create some playlists, some "special" playlists, get music to her iPod and even burn a stack of CDs. I'm going to see if I can subscribe to a podcast or two to figure out the whole subscription and RSS thing, too.

Google Snippets Redux

2007-02-27T05:16:00.000-08:00

Ah, well. I thought I had solved my http://www.geocities.com/ericbolstridge problem, but when I Googled "Eric Bolstridge" this morning it came up as the fourth result (behind ericbolstridge.com and this blog). Last night I posted links to some items I sent out to my Freecycle group. The links were to photos that I was hosting on my geocities page (since they have the oh-so-easy upload). I'm guessing that the few people that hit those links made my geocities site jump up in the ranks. So my brilliant "No Snippet" Meta Tag didn't work after all.

Looking into things, I'm now theorizing that Google is getting the site from Dmoz, the open directory. I listed my geocities pages with them way back in the day. So, I sent a correction to them, asking that they remove the site from their listing. We'll see what happens.

EricBolstridge.com

2007-02-20T04:31:00.000-08:00

I now have 19 videos up on my website, thanks to YouTube. The quality is satisfactory, I think, so I don't think I'm going to bother with uploading and embedding Quicktime videos hosted on my site. Pretty sweet. The website is still fairly ugly, just barely past acceptable, but at least all the links work now, even though most lead to an "under construction" page. Perhaps in the near future I will find some excuse to spend a week with Dreamweaver to create a page that is actually good looking.

Converting video for YouTube: SOLVED

2007-02-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

I figured it out! A little more research, a little more testing, and I've discovered the best codec for creating video for YouTube. A Quicktime H.263 for a faster output from my AVID (slower upload to YouTube), and H.264 for a slower output from my AVID (but a faaster upload to YouTube). H.264 is apparently much improved over the previous, but I see no difference in quality once it's converted over to teh flash of YouTube. Check out some of my YouTube videos! I have two accounts - one for work and one for my own stuff.

Web Cam on EricBolstridge.com?

2007-01-31T09:48:00.000-08:00

I did a redesign of my website, EricBolstridge.com. All I really did is change the font and background, but hey, it looks a lot better and now it has several pages that I can add content to as I get around to it so whatever. I went ahead and added a page for "Web Cam," too. I'm going to look into how (if) I can stream images to the site from my desktop webcam here at work....

Embedded video and automatic charges

2007-01-29T07:17:00.000-08:00

A couple updates for ericbolstridge.com:

First, I finally changed ericbolstridge.com to have my lil' demo reel on the main page. I was having some trouble getting into the FTP client from home, but no problems from work. Must be the uber-security the wife has set up at home. Anyway, I also added dead links to what will eventually be a page with my resume and more video samples. I also put CoasterRadio.com on there, just for kicks. I've been doing some reading about embedding video on websites, and it seems that the way to go is to build 'object' tags for embedding Quicktime and not use WMVs at all. So, I think I will try to get my videos all over to Quicktime and re-upload them.

Second, I got an email from GoDaddy that they automatically charged my credit card for another month of hosting! I know I definitely did not sign up for an automatic renewal, so I investigated a bit. I couldn't find any setting in my account to turn this off or preventing it form happening again, so I guess I'll have to live with paying the $6.99 a month until I decide to investigate hosting options. I'm fairly satisfied with the whole having a website thing, so I will eventually look into a long-term hosting plan with someone.

Google Snippets

2007-01-16T18:33:00.000-08:00

A big part of this whole getting myself online thing was a motivation to get my old college Geocities website out of the top spot when people Google "eric bolstridge." Well, I've definately done that with my new pages, this blog, as well as updating my IMDb profile. But what really did it was simply going to Google and looking into how to force the solution.

Google bots troll the internet grabbing snippets from sites, and it doesn't update those snippets too often for unpopular sites. That's why my old Geocities page still had the old description. So, I added a tag ([googlebot metadata=nosnippet] or something like that) to my geocities page that would make the bot not list the site. Then, I requested the Google bot please re-scrape my site. A couple days later, the site is gone from Google. Yay!

MySpace.com

2007-01-04T12:41:00.001-08:00

Hey, I'm on MySpace now. See my page here. I got my site name, added a video, a couple pictures, got a song on there, whatever. Tom (a friend who MySpace controls and you automatically get on your page when you join), has Mickey Avalon's song Jane Fonda playing on his page (featuring lyrics like "f- me f- me, you know you want me"). It's somewhat interesting to me that MySpace is fully accepted by mainstream society despite its explicit and easily accessible content.

On the www.ericbolstridge.com side of things, I activated my webhosting account and should be able to upload a bit of content.

ericbolstridge.com

2007-01-03T12:49:00.000-08:00

I bought a year of ericbolstridge.com from GoDaddy, as well as a month of web hosting. All together, it cost me like $9. If I can figure everything out well enough, I'll sign up for a longer period and get a reduced price on a long-term agreement.

That was about a week ago. Since then, I haven't done much to get my website actually doing anything. Today I played around with writing something in straight HTML (a skill I used to have way back when), but I didn't really get far. I made a lame template using the Yahoo! Geocities Page Wizard, but that just sucks. I'll see about getting that up on there for now just to practice uploading and making my webpage "live." I suppose having something ugly up there will be something of a motivator for creating something better.

I was able to get the Sonic Roxio MyDVD software working how I wanted it to, by the way. I made a "real" DVD today, with chapter markings and music on the menu and everything. So that's pretty cool.

GigaSize file sharing

2006-12-28T15:40:00.000-08:00

I put a couple high-res WMV files on GigaSize to see if it was a viable alternative to putting videos on YouTube (which makes them look like poo).

I was thinking that maybe putting links to GigaSize will be a creative way to save money on hosting space for when I get my website up and running. This is kind of a sucky solution to getting videos online though, since there's no online viewing - you have to download the file to your local machine. But, it's better then nothing - and it is kind of cool that there is a free biggie sized file sharing solution out there...

Anyway, that's the way this kind of "large size" file sharing works. So, feel free to follow the link to download and watch a short video I edited about absentee voting:

Absentee Voting PSA

DVD burning

2006-12-28T14:14:00.000-08:00

I got the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Regional Emmy Awards call for entries in the mail today. Looks like they've decided to leap forward with technology themselves. Entries this year are only accepted in DVD-R format, which means there's a new thing on my list of things to figure out.

So, I went on my AVID at work and got to it. I've been able to make straight records to DVD for a while, using a stand-alone DVD burner that's connected to a video player. That's lame, though, because it's always been that dumb blue menu with no chapters and all that. Not much going on today, so I decided to dig into the SONIC program that I got with our AVID install. Within only a couple hours of playing around I was able to make a fairly decent DVD! I had a nice menu with an animated background, six little chapter buttons with video running in little thumbnails, and all of the chaptering and whatnot seemed to work fine. The video quality was not what it should be (I used Sorenson Squeeze - I think that compressed things too much) and I couldn't quite get music on the menu for some reason.

These should be easy things to fix - I'll just export from the AVID differently and I should be able to figure out the menu music... Anyway, I'm generally pleased with my results, so I'm confident I will be able to get a DVD made for the Emmys before the January 26 deadline. Plus, I'll be able to send out completed programs and work samples on DVD now, too.

YouTube attempt

2006-12-27T11:02:00.000-08:00

Well, I uploaded a video to YouTube using the settings they recommend and it turned out kinda crappy and the audio is all out of sync. I checked out a couple forums and such and seems there's lots of theories and explanations for both problems. In general, motion and "video information" are not handled well by the conversion to Flash (the format that YouTube presents videos in). Anyway, as another step in learning a bit about YouTube, here's an attempt at posting an embedded YouTube video:

Cool. In other news, I took a DreamWeaver 2004 class a year or so ago, but I've forgotten a lot of it. Next on my list is going to be to buy my domain name and see about getting a website up. I should be able to figure out how to get some hi-res videos on the internet for all to see that way.

Why I have a blog

2006-12-20T06:49:00.001-08:00

I was in a meeting yesterday and we went off on a tangent about online networking and one of the older folks in the group was all confused and said "what's Friendster?" No big deal, right? Well, after some friendly quizzing, we found out that they were completely bewildered at the very concept of most of the web 2.0 sites. Myself, as well as a couple of other people in the room under the age of 30, tried hard to not be condescending in our explanation of things. As the conversation continued, some of the middle-aged guys in the room remained suspiciously quiet and a couple working moms chimed with comments like "yeah, my 14 year old daughter is on her MySpace all the time! I have no idea what that's all about" and "is it like AOL?"

Is this me in ten years? I think it could be. I'm paying attention to the new stuff, but I'm not quite participating. Whatever it is, it's time to play catch up to make sure that I don't start down that slippery slope to being totally out of touch. Time to take an inventory of things. I'm not too far behind on the curve - I've kept up pretty well: I have a Blackberry, I own a Yahoo! group, I use PayPal, I dropped my Hotmail account for Gmail account back when it was tough to get Gmail account. But this is stuff that's been around for years. Heck, I've been on eBay since 1998.

I need to get on board with the new stuff. I need to jump on this web 2.0 stuff. I don't understand iTunes. I need to buy my domain name, create a MySpace page, get some videos on YouTube, and of course, start a blog.

I don't want to be clueless in 10 years - my kid is going to be zapping pirated media back and forth to his friends and the new guys at work will be laughing at my inability to use the new websites or files or gadgets... I'm not sure if it's a scared of being old thing or a scared of being clueless thing. Maybe the older you get the harder it is to understand this stuff. I guess I'm about to find out.