Watch Me Live with Comic Boxes

Just to make this even weirder I’m going to try embedding the Ustream widget right here on the blog as I unbox and try to assemble some comic drawer boxes. What could be more fascinating?

Update: The experiment seems to have gone fine. The people watching the stream got to see lots of shots of my dog trying to be helpful and licking the boxes as I was trying to assemble them. I’m going to redo this again tonight for the vlog since I’m pretty sure my footage from the camcorder was useless.

Thanks to Derek Coward for actually providing me the information the directions lacked on how to assemble the second end of the shell. I ended up getting a little stuck and Derek bailed me out from the chat. As a side benefit, a guy whose been my friend for pushing 25 years joined in the chat and we talked afterwards. Good times!

Streaming live video by Ustream

Converge South Video (for real)

Had I known it would be five days before it was actually available, I would not have made my previous post announcing this. Sorry, folks. I thought it would be at most an hour or three when I posted that. I guess I can no longer pretend like I had anything to do with Videoblogging Week if it has been over this long before my piece goes up, so it’s just me doing my thing.

My Converge South Video walks the earth! Oh no, there goes Greensboro, here comes the video!

Converge South Video

My entry for Videoblogging Week 2006 has been posted – theoretically. I uploaded it to OurMedia around 5 PM, but 6 hours later it says it has received it but it isn’t accessible. That should change soon (I hope). [Update – OK, it is now Friday and it has finally shown up. Wow.]

This is my video from Converge South 2005. It’s got everything – Dave Winer eating grits, Jimbo Wales getting bbq under a tent in the rain, Amanda Congdon at a wing place, Jay Rosen being Jay Rosen, shots of Greensboro and NC A&T, music and dancing and what have you. I like how it worked with the music, both songs are from the headliners of the music events I saw each evening.

I could have posted it yesterday, but my brother suggested that my original edit, which never used the ambient sound from the camera, didn’t adequatly communicate the vitality of the event. I brought in some of that sound, tried to improve the titles and generally tweaked the edit this morning. Now you get to hear David Hoggard chopping pork butts and fun stuff like that. Here’s a little bit of triva about the sound the party scenes. The chopping noise lines up with the video, that really was happening at the time. However, all the conversation was from a different scene that was too blurry to use but had better audio. I extracted that audio and overlayed it, all the sounds at once. I thought it might make the crowd noise too much, but it worked out perfectly. Even though video editing is a pain in the ass, it’s really fun when it comes together.

Thanks to the Murray Street Band and Alana Davis for their permission to use their music. They each rocked my little house, and I bought CDs from both.

And with that, and 25 minutes to spare, I have just barely managed to participate in Videoblogging Week 2006.

New Videoblog

I have finally published a second videoblog, this one not about the gizmos. It is some simple footage of lizards in my backyard. The music behind it rocks, and although it is CC licensed as No Derivative Works, I asked for and obtained permission to use it. It is by Monk Turner from his album In a Barn.

I’ll take my camcorder with me on my business trip to Raleigh and hopefully get some footage of me crashing parties at the Duke podcasting symposium in the evenings. I have other techy stuff I have shot, like my podcasting setup but I wanted to publish something that wasn’t a behind the scenes machine video before I did another one of those.

If you want to subscribe to my videoblog feed either with FireANT or any of the podcatchers that handle video like iPodderX or whatever, the videoblog RSS feed is here.

Windows Friendly version of the CVS Camera Video

I’ve gotten sick of people (all on Windows as best I can tell) telling me they can’t see the video of my CVS camera film, so I reencoded as MP4 and uploaded it. I deeply apologize to anyone that subscribed to the RSS feed and will get two copies of it. I don’t know any other good way to do this. I don’t want to take down the original, so I’m just letting it ride. If you had problems with the other one, try this one and let me know if that fixes it for you.

Video is Up

OK, I just decided to stop fighting it and go with OurMedia for now. The video of me hacking the CVS camera is now posted. I know it is too long, the camera work is shaky, but it’s the first video thing I have ever done and the first time I have ever worked a camcorder. Subsequent ones should be better. Let me know what y’all think.

Update: You can subscribe to the RSS feed of my OurMedia account. Fire it up with iPodderX or FireANT and all will be well.

Update #2: I waited all day to tell folks about this to make sure OurMedia didn’t take a dump, but it seems to have right as MAKEZine linked here. Here is a Torrent of the video as well. To answer a question in the comments, this is in H.264 format or codec. I would have to learn more to know diddly squat about video codecs, but that’s the one I used.

Update #3: OurMedia seems to be back.

Update #4: For those having problems with original, there is a more standard encoding available now.