Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Got listening to Chuck by Sum 41 today, I love that album. Kind of regretting watching the last episode of Rock School though (suprisingly I’m not going out, everyone seems to be having a night in tonight else I would have headed down to Fruity and maybe even succeed in reaching Star) as I’ve distracted myself with rock music now. I’ve had Grace (it’s a song I wrote for Seremia, well actually I wrote it before the band was formed) stuck in my head for days now and find myself randomly singing it.

That’s all well and good but I also have the movie making bug, due to a large part to Premiere I think. Editing together the video news updates for xmeltrut.com I got into the editing spirit and wanted to get to work on a new project (I’ve had the movie making bug for a while now actually) so I started scripting an idea together and moved over to my bed to start typing up a script.

I’m a little uninspired though. I’m not sure a horror movie is what I want to be doing at the moment. I feel it’s too generic – it wouldn’t be a generic horror movie but all the movies I have been planning in recent times have been psychological horror movies and I’m thinking I might be better going for something else.

What else can you really do though? Horror movies you can do good stuff with a small budget – look at Blair Witch, Dog Soliders, etc, horror movies have serious potential even at low budgets whereas you just can’t do a decent romance with a low budget. Well you can but I still maintain horror is far easier.

I also need to talk wireless, because it was annoying me. I stuck my wireless network card in my laptop and re-enabled wireless connections on my router and had some nice security on it too. Well that’s over. It kept connecting and disconnecting and I’m not just moaning I mean it was doing this every 3 seconds, not like the odd problem, it was screwed.

I have it working now and with some security on too so I should be ok. I want to test how far my wireless network will go though. That said as much as I would like it to work all the way down in the common room I don’t think it is going to go through so many doors.

Pointless landmark I know but I just noticed that the last post took me up to a total of 300 :D.

Given my expansion into video for xmeltrut.com I decided I needed to get a little syndicated. So I signed up to the Google Video program and have submitted one of the videos to see if it is acceptable. I couldn’t get the format they wanted, I tried but when I tried to play my mpeg-2 video there was audio and no video and that was like 8mb for a 2 minute minute video. If I am submitting all the videos that would take longer than forever to upload them all.

I’m also thinking about MRSS which is media RSS, a format both used and developed by Yahoo so that they could do their whole video search thing. I’m going to try and work that one out and put a feed up on xmeltrut.com so that, that can be spidered too.

I’ll probably have a flick round to see what else is spidering video content too. Suggestions on a postcard. And by postcard I of course mean the comments section ;).

Really starting to get into Adobe Premiere Pro now. It seems to be much simplifed from the older versions which is generally a good thing although I didn’t like the look of the audio mixer when I took a quick glance at it. The DV camcorder control thing is cool though.

The Adobe Media Exporter or whatever it is called is by real bug bare though. It errors out a lot and each time I even want to change the metadata for my video it asks me to save it as a preset name and you don’t appear to be able to update the presets other than typing in the exact name which is just stupid. Hopefully there is a way round it.

Oh also, every time I start a new project it makes the timeline really far zoomed out again which is annoying.

I feel the need to blog. I’m just browsing around random sites and not really sure where I was going with it but I want to start up a new site, maybe for The O.C., maybe just expanding Insterstate.nu, every time I come up with something it leads me on to something else.

What I really want is a community. But a community without a real site isn’t much good as I want a more fully rounded site as a lot of ad networks don’t take community based sites and I want to expand my options rather than being reliant on one or two income sources.

The O.C. would be a good choice as I really do love the show. I got through seven episodes yesterday which maybe wasn’t the best thing to do considering I had coursework that needed to be handed in at 9:00 am this morning but you try tearing yourself away from that show just as the Alex Marissa story arc develops. I’m thinking about getting a remote for my PC but that’s a different story.

So anyway yeah. The O.C. rocks! But there are already some major O.C. sites out there that would be really hard to compete with. The OC Show is now boasting 25,000 members although The OC Forums seems to have fallen to TheTVForums.com. The OC Files is still going strong too.

I have quite a payment coming up late next month though and although it would be useful in paying off the money I’ve blown so far at uni or indeed my on going costs, I really want to invest it in a vBulletin licence for a community :P.

Video news updates are now live! Britney Planet is the first site to benefit from the new feature. Plus xmeltrut.com has a whole new system for posting (including uploading and storing video files) and editing videos (well the information at least) to deal with it. Playlists, etc are all in there too.

This is a result of finally getting my camcorder at Bod which works great with my new desktop which has a proper 6 pin firewire port and even more importantly, it’s frontside.

I also now have Adobe Premiere Pro which looks awesome. It has been redesigned and the tools seem a little wierd at first but I think I am getting my head around it and it has title overlays that can go over video and a whole new encoder, it’s pretty sorted.

I have a real urge to make a film now. I actually missed a film making meeting today but I think I might start scripting a horror movie that I can film here at Bod.

You and me baby, we ain’t nothing but mammels so let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel. To non-Bloodhound Gang fans that is probably all you will know of them but others will recognise classics as The Ballad of Chasey Lane and The Roof is on Fire.

They were playing today at Leeds Met. I only found out a few days ago and reminded on Monday night (possibly Tuesday morning actually, it was pretty late) so I went down to Leeds Met’s union and picked up a ticket, in the rain I might add, earlier today.

I turned up at the gig and met up with Tom and Ian from Grant house (aka, the house I’m in) and Matt from Seton house as well as a few girls that were hanging with them.

The gig itself was billed with two support bands but only on one website, the promo stuff just listed Electric Eel Shock who were the only support band that played in the end. They came on at like 8:00 and played a 40 minute set.

They were pretty good. They’re a Japanise band and all pretty mad. The frontman was entertaining and got the crowd going and the bassist was just wasted. He climbed on top of the piles of amplifers a few times. The drummer was cool too, he started just bashing the drums with his hands then playing the drums with two sticks in each hand.

At 9:00 (probably later actually, maybe as late as like 9:20) the Bloodhound Gang came on and with the acceptation of like a 10 minute break they played through until almost 11:00. They played pretty much everything they had with the exception of The Lap Dance is Better when the Strippers Crying.

They were awesome. They invited the audience to spit on one of the guitarists and to celebrate Leeds being “the binge drinking capital of Europe” (or so they claimed but it’s not impossible as nobody binge drinks like the British and nobody parties like Leeds ;)) he downed an entire bottle of alchol – not one of those alcho-pop bottles, a propper spirits bottle. He later threw it all up over Jimmy Pop’s ass, at Jimmy’s invitation no less.

I spent quite some time trying to get VNC working between my laptop and desktop. Didn’t work. Actually I didn’t spent that much time but with only about 40 minutes to set something up I opted for the Remote Desktop tool that is built in to Windows XP. And it actually worked.

The next step was to get it working in the wider world. IE, configuring my firewall and port blocking to allow the connections. After that step was done all I needed now was something to deal with the possibility of a dynamic IP address. Luckily NO-IP Duc came to the rescue combined with a scheuled task to run the application even if I wasn’t logged on at 8 am, 1 pm and 6 pm every day.

So I got home and tried to test it – it actually worked! The frame rate is of course aweful but that is to be expected. The point is I can log in and access all my stuff which I did last night when I needed to check something and I can even stream music and stuff over it by opening up media player on my desktop and playing whatever. Awesome.

So it turns out my host wasn’t kidding about the IP changes. They cut them off last night as far as I can make out as Branch Planet was working yesterday lunch time and wasn’t working when I tried it today.

I’ve been busy going round and making the changes and I think I have most of them but the reason I didn’t make them before is I simply don’t know what makes connections and what doesn’t. It’s only really now where I can see if a site has died or not that I know if I need to make an IP change and that is going to take me a while to complete the process at that.

I went into Headingly to get a new Serial ATA cable about an hour ago. Looking back I think the old one may have been working but this one is shorter so less messy in the case and Dell says a maximum of 450mm. I think the one I am using now is 450-500mm whereas the old one was 1,000mm.

Anyway so I went into bios and it was picking it up and it was even listed in device manager, it just wasn’t set up. So I downloaded the Seagate DiscWizard thing which does it all for you. It quickly formatted the drive and by the time it had exited the program, it was appearing in My Computer. Now I can begin transfering things over, item one, my music.