Archive for September, 2008
Shooting my new movie
Image via Wikipedia
My first ever ‘semi-professional’ video was created last March sometime. It was a college trip to microsoft. Although it was by no means ‘professional’ in the ‘polished’ sense of the word, it was professional in that it took hours and hours on end plus a hell of a lot of filtering through rubbish and overlaying tracks to music, getting titles right etc…
I created that using Ulead Video Studio on my 3 year old laptop. 1gig RAM, single core processor etc… so you can imagine the pain i had to go through 
This time around, things are different. I’ve got two dual 20″ monitors, high end graphics card, quad core processor, 4 gigs of RAM etc… so things will be much easier for me. I also have Adobe Premier Pro Cs3 & After Effects Cs3 which open up a whole new world to me in terms of video editing.
We’re filming a Dragon’s Den parody as part of a college project and although the main aim of the project is to work in a team, we’ve got other ideas and hope to turn this in to a real masterpiece 
I am of course a Dragon’s Den fan along with the others, which makes it all the more interesting for us… it WILL be hilarious – that i guarantee you but a lot of it comes down to the editing and how well i do it. Hopefully i’ll have something to show you guys within a month… an unpolished version… i might ask for some feedback and then react to that as this will be presented in front of a few lecturers and students, possibly more so it’s important we get it right!
It’ll be a lot of work for me in particular…. i’ve no doubt i’ll be the one spending the most amount of time on this but i’ve no problem with that as it’ll help to get used to premier pro & video editing in general. Although some will see it as the worst possible / most demanding role, i’ll enjoy that as i’ll be learning as i go along and picking up some valuable tips and tricks when it comes to video editing. Bring it on 
We’re now in to the last few days of my charity skydiving contest. It’s flown by and although i’m nowhere near my $1000 target, i have raised over $200 thus far which is respectable.
This was just one idea i had and i’ve learned a lot from it all. My strength was in finding people to sponsor prizes… the fact i’ll be printing a t-shirt with my sponsor’s logos on it went down well – that helped secure prizes.
Actually getting people to donate cash was / is the hard part. Not as easy. I wasn’t overly aggressive marketing this but then again it is all for charity and the last thing i want to do is (a) spend all of my time focusing on this (b) get to the point where i push it so much, it damages my rep.
But i’ll not be simply ‘giving up’ here… i may not actually be completing the skydive until next spring due to a variety of reasons (i’ll go into them once the competition ends), but i’ll certainly be flexing my creative muscles online again for more fun and games in relation to this skydive.
As things stand there are about 25 entries in to this competition with over 35 prizes so if you’re not in, you’re missing out 4 x $50 cash prizes up for grabs remember + a whole bunch of other webmaster goodies.
All you gotta do is comment on this post to have a chance of winning something! If you’re feeling extra generous, why not donate a $1 or two 
The competition draws to a close on Tuesday September 30th and on October 1st i’ll be revealing a full list of entrants and their assigned numbers. On October 2nd i’ll record a screencast of me generating random numbers and assigning the prizes to people – no catches – all above board
Have a look at this page. Nothing strange, no big deal you say… just a video promoting a new game.
Well, if you take the time to watch the video right through to the end, you’ll notice youtube starts to fall apart quite literally
Very clever advertising and great use of flash… the guy who came up with it deserves a pay rise
I’ve been back at college 3 weeks now and you’ll have noticed a real drop in my work ethic online. Whilst some of that was due to slow connection speeds and none at all at times 
most of it has been down to the fact i’m using much more of my brainpower at college and burnout in the evenings.
There’s a mountain of stuff i’ve learned but some of the more interesting stuff includes;
- OSI layer model
- basics in javascript
- how to form questionnaires and get accurate results
- pings / ip’s / subnet masks
- routers / hubs / switches
- how memory works
Then i pick up on some nuggets of unrelated stuff like why airplanes turn off all lights when coming in to land, how/why a CPU is powered by a quartz crystal, how electricity is made, what you need to become a lecturer…
That’s just the stuff i can recall off the top of my head and i’m fairly well up on it all now. You could give me an exam in any of that i’d pass. So i am much more focused on college this year… i set my stall out to get an average of above 70% and so far so good. 9am or 4.30pm, it doesn’t matter – i’m alive, alert and absorbing information. Last year, i’d be done by 2pm (mentally), and i’d be thinking ahead of what i’d be doing that evening when i got home.
Online, i’ll be glad to get this skydive competition done and dusted. It doesn’t look like i’ll hit the $1k mark this month, but i’m sure i’ll come up with more creative ways of raising some cash
This ALWAYS happens, but ironically, this month has been pretty good for me in terms of revenue online. Although i haven’t done much and it’s probably been my worst month in terms of work rate this year, i’ve made $60 in affiliate earnings and another $150 in ads on this blog (some of which was put in to the charity skydive fund).
Typical So if you want to make money online, you just gotta stop working and focus your attention on offline stuff – worked for me this month
Over the past couple of days, i’ve been fascinated watching the US presidential campaign. I’m not in to politics, never mind foreign politics, but we can all learn something from the sort of mind games that go on between Obama and McCain.
So McCain announced he was postponing his planned presidential campaign stuff to focus on the current economic crisis. In other words, he was trying to show he has the interests of the country at heart above his own personal interests to become president. He was also trying to show leadership plus he called on Barack Obama to put off his campaign stuff too.
It was a very clever move… almost snookering Obama. If Obama did indeed call off his addresses and meetings and what not to focus on the economic crises, he’d look like a follower so it would be a victory for McCain.
However, if Obama chose to ignore McCain and carry on, it could perhaps have left Obama out on his own and losing some friends as he could be seen as selfish and putting his own needs first.
So it was a real catch 22 for Obama and it forced Obama to come out and say something and take sides – i’m sure McCain thought he had Obama snookered as i myself thought there’s no way Obama can come out of this looking good.
Then, Obama comes out and says (in a nutshell) – “sure, we’ll focus on the economic crisis, but a good president can multi task and do several things at the one time – that’s what is required on a daily basis at this level. So i’m gonna run my campaign the way i want and i’m also gonna help solve this economic crisis”.
So what started out as a McCain attack on Obama, ended up with Obama dodging a bullet and firing it back at McCain
You just know these two guys have an army of advisors and physchologist and gurus around them so it really is fascinating to watch how they (a) attack and (b) defend.
