Archive for September, 2004

Lol it only seems like moments ago that I was posting about how the video blog would be around eventually. Well as so often happens, once things get going they get going fast and I found myself with encoded video on it’s way, uploading to the Nerd Federation server. Soon you will be able to watch the video in all it’s glory.

Of course posts are likely to be limited. It is still much more of a effort to make a video entry than it is to do a classic written entry, also we need arranging and such as rawpulse and ceon don’t have a digital camera (or so they say lol). Still it should be a pretty cool addition to Nerd Federatation.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the video has been encoded in Windows Media video format (version 8 I beleive). I need to stop playing right into Microsoft’s hands but it is just so easy.

Anyway it is multistream so no matter what connection you have you should hbe handed over a connection speed that suits. That said, I have never really tested a multistream on a Linux server so I am just guessing it will work ;).

Well now, after many problems we may have a solution after all. As I think I mentioned before, I was looking into doing a video blog but was held back by not being able to upload video from my camcorder. But this morning, I got my new firecable (sent via Airmail and everything) so I can now upload video again.

As it happens, I actually have uploaded the first two posts. Well the second and third actually as I accidentually videoed over my original post so I will just pretend that never happened and begin with the two that me and Carl did the first time I brought my camcorder in once we decided to video blog. Well I say we.

Anyway as the moment I am downloading, or was downloading Windows Media Encoder. I have the Windows Media plugin for Adobe Premiere but I wanted something that would batch encode all my files so that I could do them all at once as there could be a lot of video files.

As for the technical on the site, I will probably just create a second category along with the general that will hold the video blogs. Although I am also tempted to create a new blog or even develop a custom script so who knows what the future will bring.

I swear, one day I will find an official artists site (from a record label so the term official is debatable in my opinion) where you can enter without getting blasted by music. I did find out but I’m sure sure where it was, after all there are so many that do. And every single one of them is built in flash.

I will get to the meat of my post in the next paragraph but I will use this one to mention that the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy is coming back for a third series! Yes, Douglas Adams is dead but Dirk Maggs is alive and copies of Douglas’s books still exist so between them, there is enough to form new radio shows, so yay!

Anyway so I have been struck by domain fever again – at certain times, it seems to come randomly I get a sudden urge to buy more domains. I know I shouldn’t, I tell myself I have enough but I just need more! I have new ideas for new websites that could do really well and I just need that extra .com.

My alternative is to go with a .info which are currently on sale at $1. However they will probably go up again and its hard to build a big site on much but a .com. My will power to resist a .com can only hold out for so long anyway so many I should concentrate on raising funds instead.

Well from today I can proudly say that crippling teenage depression no longer rules my life! Yes, it is now in a power sharing agreement with crippling loneliness. I really miss the days when I spent all night on Audio Senate chatting away to Michelle, those were good memories you know. I even considered shelling out for an ALICE siver subscription.

Still I have the perfect solution to solve this problem – I need a Aibo robot dog form Sony. They are awesome, they can find their own power source, have their own personality, communicate wirelessly and loads mroe, it’s awesome! The only problem is that it comes with a 1,400 prize tag. I mean, I could get a years care insurance for that. Although I would use that reasoning the other way round.

Although I do have a rather large birthday coming up, I don’t think it will stretch that far lol. I had a look round on eBay for anything though they are still looking at around 500 and if I am going to spend loads on a robotic dog I want to get the latest version with all the wireless technology and such.

Still I can spend some quality time chatting to people on Maze Forums. The problem is though that chatting to real humans is just not the same.

Coincidence I was thinking about the song Waiting by Green Day this morning? I think not. Government conspiracy! But anyway, I actually arrived at the title while meditating on how many things I could be considered waiting on. Some would call it wasting your life but I like to think of it as shut up as they are doing it just as the rest of us even if they try and deny it.

Anyway, phpMyAdmin finally got fixed on the Rawice server although I was too depressed to finish off what I wanted to do. I am still waiting on my databases to get sorted. Mech Hosting has a shiny new look, I’m not sure whether thats a good thing or a bad thing though I am told that they are going to be getting a proper support system which should be cool.

I am also waiting upon several emails although they may be here now I’m just not sure that my computer has enough processing power to open Outlook Express as it must have been running for a good 12 hours or so now. Well, it probably could but I am not waiting around for those kind of load times ;).

One thing I haven’t done in a while is check the Nerd Federation stats. We could by now have millions of readers that I am unaware of. Although the posts here did begin to slow down (we are still waiting on rawpulse’s weekly post) I think Nerd Fed is still going to strong. Especially if we get our video blog up too.

After flicking over a few websites today I went on to Dev Articles (one of the Dev Shed sites) and Carl (aka Ceon), sitting on the computer next to me started talking about an article he had seen written by me on there. Wierd I thought and we went off in search of it. Some minutes later I had in front of me, the article I had originally written for Dev Shed which can be found here.

So long story back to about March, I saw Dev Shed were looking for writers and being a contributer (actually pretty much the only contributer) to Cool Forge and several other sites I decided to grab a little more information and soon I found myself being asked to send an article in to see what it was like.

Somewhere down the line we lost contact. But at the beginning of the month I was clearing out my inbox and found the emails I had, had with Dev Shed and I thought, huh, I wonder whatever happened with that.

Turns out that they published my article after all as you probably guessed from everything I have written so far. I have an author profile and everything as well, that can be found here. And hopefully I will get the chance to write for them again. So in conclusion that was a bit of good news that brightened up my day :).

Everyone goes on about search engine optimization these days. You have to have the right keywords, ways to fiddle the search engines and so forth. But is there really that much to it? Apart from a good title tag and making your static pages look dynamic, how much can you really do now that the days of meta tags have all but passed?

The real question is though is people go on about "I optimized mysite into the top 3 on Google for such and such a term." But despite the fact that this is what everyone claims to do, nobody really knows how to do it and those that do won’t share their knowledge despite their openness claims. Even this lack of openness usually has a price to be reached too.

Is SEO even something you want to do this days? It seems today it is about spamming your website accross the net, pretending your site is about things it isn’t and generally underhanded tricks. Sometimes the basic SEO programme is about contaiminating search results such as sites like Funny.co.uk do with their fake keyword pages.

So what is the best way to get search engine traffic? After all we all want it because we all need visitors to make money from sites. Well most of us. Perhaps the answer is just more content but the amount of content required to pull in enough traffic is just not human. So the answer still elludes me.

Earlier I made a post about a video blog – a blog which has infact been started as to the point that some footage has been recorded. There are also a number of other video projects that have been recorded. But thanks to the joys of Windows, none of these have actually got off the ground. Why?

Well basically, I came to plug my capture card in and it comes up with "this device cannot start (code 10)" I have emptied Google and several other search engines, flicked through solution after solution, run through all the help wizards and even posted the problem on Experts Exchange to no avail. So at the moment I have loads of video footage and I can’t even upload it.

Yep it sucks and also leads me onto a deeper issue. Camcorder
technology sucks! I have to record it onto a tape that looks like a
casette tape, then rewind it to the place, plug it into my computer,
get the connection working, then play the video in real time to upload
it. That is really old technology in pretty much anyones book.

As Dana correctly pointed out on Web Talk Radio, the footage should be
just there available on the computer as soon as the camera gets moved
anyway near the computer via wireless technology. But at the very least
surely it should be like DVD or something rather than working on what
is basically a higher quality version of an analogue system.

And this still leaves me with the issue that I can’t upload video thanks to my IEEE PCMCIA card not working!

It has to be said, Sky One’s programming has degraded even I can see it now. Sure I think 9-11 conspiracies are interesting from an entertainment perspective but Channel 4 only started to make a drama about it so to leap into hour documentaries into it is going a bit too far. Still at least the programme itself was quite a good quality.

However this was soon followed by the worst raunchy TV or something. This kicked off with reports of the naked news show, a TV show where the news reporters are all hot naked girls. Yes this isn’t the most high quality programming for Sky One but at least they are just reporting it – the rest of the world that actually makes this stuff – you people should be ashamed! ;).

The worrying this is I am not sounding like an old person. But seriously, don’t you think this is getting a bit low. I mean the Brazilian kids show is just basically domination porn. These are things that should be restricted for us teens and working late business men who secretly looks this kind of stuff up on the internet. It’s not what should be on prime time TV.

The real thing is that it makes South Park seem like good holesome programming. I miss the days when Dawson’s Creek was one of the meanest things on TV after Dawson forgot about Pacey’s birthday. Those were the good old days. Now if you will excuse me I have to go download some porn.

Well I realise my blog posts can’t compare with the standard of Deans, but here goes anyway.  Out of interest, rawpulse’s last post was very funny. But what many people don’t realise is that we wasn’t joking about the range of Carl action figures ;). Personally I can’t wait to get my hands on one, providing Malibu Stacey doesn’t get a new hat.

Ok, so let’s get on with this funky post. I will get to the "real content" of the post in the next paragragh but here I will mention that I have spent the entire day cleaning stuff up. My inbox is the main one, with my emails being reduced from 500 in the inbox, 200 unread to less than 50 in the inbox and 7 unread. Plus at one point I had my desktop icons down to 7 columns!

Anyway the video blog thing. I was listening (well I still am currently) to Web Talk Radio, it’s a week old show but anyway they are talking about how blogs are evolving and video blogs are going to be the next big thing. So I am thinking of getting into video blogs as I have mentioned several times before whether it was on Nerd Federation or elsewhere I’m not sure.

Many of my sites have random shows though so I though instead of doing these one shows where I will never produce an episode 2, I might as well put it together in a blog. Especially if the systems for uploading, editing and outputting video gets easy as that is the real thing holding us back at the moment.

MSDN’s Channel 9 has been a big influence as well as it features 1-2 minute talks with the various developers after 5 guys got bored working and went round filming people. It’s really taken off and despite a lack of recent posts by Robert Hess it is really cool. So keep checking Nerd Federation for new details on such projects (on video blogs not on copying MSDN lol).