Redemption

today i both started and finished a video i had meant to do last friday, which can be seen here. it's my home movie featuring the week before i left california, up to and including the awesome two-night goodbye bash my sister and a few others threw for me. hooray! for those wary of clicking, or those who didn't watch because it's almost ten minutes long: it has craziness, beard shavings, crazy old men dancing, cute little babies dancing and copious amounts of annotations.

it also has a little thing i like to call flava.

since i dropped christin off at work this morning, i picked her up after work [with the dog] on foot, which was some great exercise. it took me 28 minutes to walk, which isn't too bad for 1.6 miles with a monster in tow, and it took us 32 minutes on the way back. there are some pretty freaky twists & turns on the road to our house, so it makes walking a bit more difficult. as soon as we find a good deal and have the money, we're going to buy a kayak or two. it would take less than 10 minutes for christin to get to work by kayak. interesting, no?

i had planned to do some schoolwork today, but i ended up just responding to a couple of posts that were interesting to me and thinking about school. i need to read two chapters tomorrow and do my quiz from last week, which i'm confident will get done. today's goal was to actually edit that video, and i accomplished it though i'm not too happy with mediacoder at the moment. super to the rescue! i had them both, but here's the dilemma:

mediacoder runs great and has very few errors, but always spits out files that i can't seem to get to work with my editing software, which is sony vegas pro 9. super is a pain in the ass to work with and crashes all the time, but always turns out usable material in a reasonably short amount of time.

today, super ran perfectly. running 1-5 file queues seems to be the way to go, as my poor system doesn't deal well with large lists to encode with super. for the record, i am talking about making proxy files for editing, because i can't edit 720p h.264 .mov files on this little 2.0ghz core2 laptop. ;-P i make tiny little 240x180 mpeg2 files that preview quite smoothly and aren't too much of a pain to render down and replace. but today's video had 31 video files [2 gigs raw, 36:51 worth of footage] so it was a bit more tedious than usual.

as far as videos go, since i've got the time and this apartment has great lighting, i'd love to do them more regularly than i have been in the past. inspiration must strike! i have a lot of ideas that i've been kicking around in my head, just got to get them on film. all in good time. school and wife are first! well, wife and school. but wife time isn't prioritized when wife is at work! anyway, i suppose i should stop blogging now and get some sleep. i get up early now. weird, i know.

since it's past 9pm on the west coast, i can probably post this now: i'm very excited that they've chosen to put ben on the 'good guys' side. he's always been my favorite character. stoked. locke was my other favorite, and he's turning out to be a pretty badass villain. i'm glad jack isn't still a whiny little snot this season, and he's starting to get a bit of redemption going as well. tonight's episode of lost was probably the best this season. keep it up, guys.