2009
- Made the stingers 5 seconds long. The first ones were 7 seconds and just a little too long.
- I added the Creative Commons license information that I apply to my videos so it is clear what terms apply to reuse of the video.
- My first stingers weren’t as high-resolution and didn’t look as good in HD.
- I made sure the aspect ratio defaulted to widescreen.
New Video Stingers (v2)
A little over a year ago I created a handful of stingers to use on video content that I create. The stinger serves a bunch of purposes. On the practical side it gives the movie player and data stream to get going. I often notice that in the first couple of seconds of video there are some breaks and with a stinger that happens before the content starts. Also, you can name your site and show what license terms apply to it (the later is something I forgot to do in my first stingers).
I decided to redo them and improved a number of things:
Several of my friends asked me how I create my stingers. It is really easy actually. I use Keynote to make the stinger itself, using transition effects that are on a timer. I then export the presentation to a Quicktime movie. I import the Quicktime movie of the transitions into iMovie and do trimming as well as adding audio. I then export them out of iMovie and re-import the completed stingers into iMovie to use in other videos. It sounds more complicated than it is. If you would like to use my Keynote file to start with go ahead and download Video Stingers v2.1.key.
For fun, here are the five new stingers.
Convergence
Flip
Zoom
Fade
Spinner
It’s hard to make these go both on the web and on a large television. I might have to make everything bigger and thicker on these.
Update: I did a recut because I didn’t like how the video looked at very small files. I also made it work better with 4:3 aspect ratio as needed.
If you are thinking of going to BC Liquor to get remaining Surly Brewing Darkness, stop. They have none. Only had 24 bottles.
Unix Lesson for Today
Learned after much difficulty today that find doesn’t actually spawn a shell, and as a result trying to use backticks doesn’t work in a find exec parameter. However, you can tell find to invoke a shell to get around it. This works.
find . -name "*.DBF" -print -exec sh -c 'dbf2mysql -h localhost \
-d mydatabase -t $(basename "$1" ".DBF") -c -v \
-P password -U username $1' {} {} \;
Video: Open Internet
This is a really great video that explains in plain language why Net Neutrality is so vitally important.
Surly Darkness
Haven’t tasted Surly Darkness yet, but I was lucky enough to get a
bottle into the house. 
Would love to be at Surly Brewing Darkness Day but not going to stand in line for 4 hours. :-/ Will see what line report is at 11a.
Tempted to go to Darkness Day and try for my shot at 6 beers. Surly Brewing says 300 in line. Quandry.
Unauthorized Transactions
This morning when I checked my email I found many more unread messages then typical. A bit concerned, I found many PayPal messages.
That isn’t a great way to start the day. You see, I have no idea who “NC Interactive, Inc.” is. Additionally, I can tell you that at that time I was fast asleep getting a good nights rest. Ugh!
It seems that someone got access to my account and decided to buy some credits for an online game. Each transaction was between $39 and $59. There were 16 transactions totaling nearly a $1,000 of fraudulent charges.
After seeing this I immediately changed my password as well as my secret question answers. I filed these transactions as fraudulent and I’m assuming that this will be easy to get PayPal to reverse. However, they say it will take about a week to get it resolved.
I wonder if the criminal just stopped using it after $1,000? The charges stopped a couple of hours before I noticed it and changed the password. They didn’t seem to do anything further in my account either.
In years of using PayPal, and generally just doing commerce on the web, this is the first time I’ve gotten hit with any fraudulent activity. I guess my luck ran out.
Happy Birthday to Microsoft [Windows 7]!
R.I.P. Thawte Web of Trust
Still saddened that the Thawte Web of Trust system is being shut down by the new owners, Verisign. Anyone surprised since Verisign offers a pay product that Thawte did for free? To make matters worse, I had become a Thawte notary a few months ago. It’s crazy that while they have sent emails to everyone the Web of Trust website doesn’t indicate anything about it going away. They are still happily letting people sign up? Huh?