SamuraiBlog.com

These are some pictures I took traveling back from Montana. The first one, a happy accident taken through a window with a UV protection screen at the top.

Out of all the places I’ve been in my life, next to the Bluegrass festival in bumfuck Hamilton, MT, San Francisco is the most invigorating. It has such a great vibe to it. You can’t seem to do anything in the city without running into a really dynamic selection of people. The people all seem to have energy. There are a lot of artists in the city, and this is a serious part of that energy.

You play guitar, don’t you? Everyone in San Francisco plays an instrument.

I took that picture out the window driving on the 101, still across the bay from San Francisco.

I’m back in it.

What I didn’t think was going to work out, ended out working with a lot of help from my parents. I’m moved into an apartment in San Francisco with two room mates in the inner richmond district. Two room mates: JUSTIN MARCUS and CHRIS MULKEY. They dig on movies and shit too.

As it turns out, I did not get more posts in last year than the year previous. Like I had hoped to. Which is fine because I wanted to only write when I felt like it.

Yesterday was the day I went in for a hiring event at the Apple store. Not so sure about the Apple store anymore. The place gives me the creeps. The people there… I’ve never met a group of people so extremely happy with the fact that their brand, in the past 10 or so years went from a 5% market share to… 7. I knew they existed… but I didn’t know they were real. Like, real people that you can touch, and not just weirdos on the internet. Imagine corner of the store filled with 35 digg-reading, macrumors-creeping mother fuckers biting at the chomp for a job. It’s competitive too. One guy had the gall to say he out-qualified everyone there, without a doubt.

Christ, I’d pop my head like it were a zit, working there. Though, you never know, I still might.

What I really want is a job at Revision3, which I’ve just submitted a cover letter and resume to, pointing them to my new SamuraiFilms website. If you’re reading this, and aren’t using a browser that sucks (you know who you are), then check it out. It’s not all the way finished, but I think it gets the point across. The point of the website is the video, so I designed, basically, a video player application. It’s designed for people with big monitors, or at least decent-enough resolution, higher than 1024×768. It’s also designed for people with new browsers (I don’t even know if IE7 works…), Firefox 2, Safari 2+ and a fast connection, 1.0mbps or more. I figure that’s most people who’ll be looking at the site. Also, blip.tv sucks. Their flash encodes are way jumpy and drop a ton of frames. Fuck blip.tv.Also, it seems that Safari’s javascript is quite a bit quicker than Firefox’s, because the animations and such are way smoother on Safari.

I think I’m going to make a film very soon. Perhaps another mob-themed sort of film, or maybe a horror. My apartment is cozy.

I flew back to Montana yesterday (I will be driving back down to SF with all my shit, to move into an apartment, very beginning of next year). It turns out my dad recently got a Cannon 400D which is a pretty sweet camera in my opinion. I took this photo with it, of my dog, Bella. You can click on it for a full sized version (actually, a very scaled down version, boo on flickr).

So for school I did this film. Turned out good. Shot silent on Super 8 in 3 hours – staring friends from San Francisco. It’s not a film for dumb people: you have to pay attention. I hear people like the pacing and mood.

Check it out:

You may have noticed I’ve been fleshing out this site recently with some of my works. When I got started doing this I thought I would scout out the best video sharing site for professionals or just people who don’t want their videos to look like shit.  So far I’ve tried YouTube, Revver, Veoh, Brightcove and Blip.tv (and that’s where I stopped).

You see, it seems video sharing websites are all out to get ‘cha. They get bumpers at the end of your video, overlays, special buttons and what seems to be the whole 9 yards when it comes to usage rights. The video quality is bad. Your uploads can not exceed 100 MB. They’re allowed to play your video in desecrate desktop applications and server advertising along-side.Whoa! No thanks.

What I’m going to do is just run down the list. Each site has its drawbacks but ultimately sucked, save one.

YouTube

YouTube is the traffic king. Yes, we know that and every other comparison out there puts them at an advantage for that. Well, fuck YouTube. The picture quality of the youtube flash transcodes are absolutely horrible because they use a very low bit rate for the re-encodes. They do this, it seems, so they do not have to drop frames as all other video sites I’ve tried seem to drop frames from the video and create a jerky feeling to smooth animations and forget about pans. YouTube videos also have relatively decent (compared to all but Blip.tv) audio encodes, but they still sound like no more than 64kbps, perhaps less, and still on a mono track.

The video I uploaded to YouTube turned out looking pretty shitty. The words in the titles blend together due to artifacts. The motion is nice as it seems full frame rate was preserved and audio was almost acceptable.

Veoh

Veoh – I don’t have much to say about Veoh. Their video upload process is not a nice single page interface like most other sites, in fact taking 3 pages. Like Revver, they tell you your video is ready to watch somewhat quickly but it usually still takes another 5-10 minutes. The picture quality is decent, and without scaling the videos look pretty clear. Even so, the frame rate is drastically lower than the source video, making the animations jerky. The audio quality was horrible, ditching 2 channels for 1 and using what sounded like like less than 36kbps.

The video I uploaded to Veoh looks decent. It’s way more jerky than the source footage. The titles and their edges are clear. If I had to choose between YouTube and Veoh I’d choose YouTube. Using Veoh would make me feel like a whore. They pretty much get to do whatever they want with your video, including whore it out to other video sites, like MySpace, YouTube and Google Video (primarily).

Brightcove.tv

Originally I picked up Brightcove because I perceived it as having the best video quality. I saw Garry Newman over at garry.tv go through this same process a few months ago. He eventually settled on Brightcove so I thought I’d give it a try. Their video player is really nice. The interface is clean and subtle. Not surprisingly, the video quality is half-way decent, relative to other flash video sites. I would put its video quality on the Veoh side of a comparison between Veoh and YouTube. Despite that-they drop a high number of frames to maintain that quality and the audio is terrible. The interface to their website also kind of sucks after you upload the video. The uploading process is nice, but the so-called “dashboard” is not.

The video I uploaded to Brightcove must be in some sort of limbo right now, possibly being reviewed for copyright infringement or something like Revver does.  Regardless, it turned out decent but with poor audio and low frame rate.

Blip.tv – the winner, surprisingly

After all this uploading and waiting, I finally choose Blip.tv. I did not expect to choose Blip when I started on this journey, well, because of it’s name. It sounds like another bullshit rip off video site (like Veoh, Revver or Metacafe). That said, they have the best interface, best upload process, quick processing, no ads, allow direct downloading, will transcode your video into multiple formats, and as far as I can tell there is no upload limit. Their flash video player is really clean and lightweight, and blends in well in white-background sites AND supports 16×9 videos.

Despite dropping frames, the videos look really good. The transcodes seem miles ahead of all the other video sites. The audio is damn near true to the source footage, with, get this: TWO channels, encoded at what sounds like 96kbps or maybe a little more.

The video I uploaded to Blip.tv seems a little washed out (more so than the source) and is a bit jerky with good audio. You already know the story, I won’t patronize you with the details. Instead I want to show off this feature which I think all the other sites try to do with “channels” and such-but executed horribly. Blip.tv calls them “shows” but none-the-less, its just a group of your videos-executed the right way. Check it out, my “show” on Blip.tv. It gives you a large video area with a small browser and information area-exactly how it should be. There seems to be built in support for serial episodes of whatever you like, and it automatically creates video a video podcast for you. Fucking sweet!

I’ve been asking people if they’ve heard of this music yet and I’m fucking surprised so few people are on the up-and-up. Slightly Stoopid, fucking awesome shit!!!

[xspf]_start(‘Slightly Stoopid’);[/xspf]

Their MySpace page (more usable than their actual website, it’s that bad, but there’s more music, CD information and stuff all in once place). The music I’ve posted is from their very early album, Acoustic Roots and Live in 2001. Their newer albums have become very sophisticated and include brass and many different percussive approaches, and the music-is generally on the pop end of the spectrum of reggae music with a very heavy blues influence though newer albums (especially Chronchritis) feel almost Reel-Big-Fish-inspired.

iPhones. I hate iPhones. I hate typing the word, hearing it spoke and seeing it in headlines.

But I live in San Francisco, and hating iPhones in San Francisco is like hating faux-fur-bootie wearing hussies: they’re everywhere.  The city is swamped in flick-happy pretentious fucks, and their faux-fur-bootie-wearing hussie girlfriends, who also have iPhones. So I generally keep to myself on the issue, but I have a blog now!

The problem with iPhones is this: They inspire this giddy sense of entitlement. The very fact that people are carrying around a $600 phone allows someone to believe they can pick it up and happily “flick” the interface with a bright outwards inclination. All that is required to operate the interface is a mere swipe, a motion of your finger and nothing else, like someone may do with a similarly-equipped, but not-as-expensive and not-made-by-Apple device. However, you don’t operate iPhones by “moving your finger” you have to tap and flick through.

Your finger, simply by using an iPhone, gains one half inch of lift toward the end of your swipe, or movement, and secures your ass in iPhone ownership. The finger continues beyond the border of the device approximately an inch and your flick is complete. Now, because you have no album covers, yet you insist on browsing your library of music that way, another 10-20 flicks in various directions is required before you can put your phone back in your messenger bag…

Hop off the bus…

And put on that prestigious Starbucks apron.

Dear tourists of San Francisco. I saw you walking by the Cafe Bean shortly after 4:20 PM  on December 07, 2007. At the time I saw you, I was leaning out the window to release a particularly large lung-full of Strawberry Cough, with a small, smoldering hand pipe and lighter in my left hand.  Out of the two of you, the one with Sunglasses noticed my position and activities first. Despite you wearing sunglasses, I noticed due to the crook of your head your awareness of the situation.

I returned gaze and held it without shame, partially out of curiosity, to see how long it would take you to get uncomfortable. Not long, it seemed, until you pointed me, my activities and my gaze out to your friend, who then also partook in contemplating this spectacle that I had become, a piece of San Francisco landscape. Now, I am both not offended at you looking, and not ashamed of my actions. So as you took your sunglasses from your forehead to get a clearer picture, I smiled and and waved an unabashed peace sign in your direction.

Two men on the sidewalk: I do not know why this seemed to offend you. Obviously, from my apartment window, I couldn’t get a clear grip on your conversation, nor do I pretend to know your background or opinions of people like myself. Though I still do not fret. Perhaps some day toward the end of your life, you will look upon this moment and learn to appreciate it, and hopefully smile, at that fucking long-haired hippy on Sutter & Jones.