I didn’t want this new blog to turn into a complaint–fest like my previous blogging attempts have, but I don’t know how many more cross-country flights I can handle. I’ve written about having to listen to in-flight commercials before, but it bothered me so much on a recent flight, when all I wanted to do was relax, that I would have asked the flight attendant to turn it off if I thought that would accomplish anything. Maybe I was just irritated that they had just announced the in-flight movie was Something’s Gotta Give, a movie that in additon to being for people completely outside my demographic, was released four years ago. Plus I had already seen it.
Perfect post for the “miscellaneous” category
My mother was recently invited to a “miscellaneous” bridal shower. I had never heard of such a thing, but then again I don’t get invited to a lot of bridal showers. Apparently at a miscellaneous shower your gift isn’t expected to fit any particular theme. If I were ever invited to a shower that was explicitly labeled as “miscellaneous,” I would try to bring the most random item possible. Maybe a handful of receipts that I found in my car for miscellaneous items. This is probably why I haven’t been invited to many bridal showers.
There was also no time listed on the invitation. I guess you’re supposed to show up at any miscellanous time. 3:41 is always good.
Wyszonut inside
Ever since my Wyszonut post, I haven’t had to worry about getting in early on Fridays. Donuts just magically appear on my desk. Here’s what I found yesterday:
Thanks, Sophia Steve.
Hey, nerd!
I want to do what I assume is a relatively simple task, but I don’t know how to do it, because I am not smart enough. Here’s the deal:
I have copied the files from my old site, homepage.mac.com/wysz/, to my new domain, thewysz.com, in the /hotw/ subdirectory. HotW is Home of the Wysz, by the way, not Hot W.
I don’t update the files on the .Mac site, so I want anyone who visits one of those pages to know about TheWysz.com. I took care of this a while ago by just adding a link to my new homepage at the bottom of every page. It took about 30 seconds with TextWrangler. This isn’t the greatest user experience, because if the visitor wants to view the newer version of the page he or she landed on, he or she would have to know to replace homepage.mac.com/wysz/[path/filename] with thewysz.com/hotw/[path/filename].
What I’d really like is to get the file path of the page somehow written to the file itself. That way I could add a link directly to the new URL or even do a meta refresh. Unfortunately, due to technical limitations of .Mac, I’m pretty sure server-side redirection is not possible. I think what I’d want the action to be is a find/replace of <head> for the refresh, or </body> if I wanted to just add a link at the bottom.
So how can I do it? I have over 2,000 files to process, so it would have to be completely automated and not require me to open the files individually. I’m on a Mac, and not afraid to type into a Unix terminal window.
Thank you, smart people. And if you, my dear readers, cannot offer a solution, I will be very disappointed in you.
Should women be independent?
I often feel like I know nothing about life, as simple tasks such as laundry can leave me hopelessly confused. But then once in a while I hear a story from one of my friends that reminds me I’m not alone in my troubles with daily life. For example, I now know I’m not alone in avoiding situations where tipping is involved. Many of us can’t stand the awkwardness and lack of standards.
I just read Koklynn’s first blog entry about building a cabinet, and I can’t wait for part 2. Stuff like this makes a guy who cooks soup in a frying pan feel a little more normal:
It said, “Apply some glue and lightly tapping the dowel until 5/16″ visible.” Never mind the bad grammar…what I read was “Apply some glue and lightly tapping the dowel until 5/16 visible.” If you missed the difference, I didn’t see that it was supposed to be 5/16th of an inch. Instead, I spent 5 minutes pulling my hair out trying to figure out why someone would use that kind of fraction for this tiny piece of wood…
Twitter registration
I don’t intend to use Twitter right now (though I agree it is arguably useful/cool), but I like to claim the username “Wysz” on any service that I might want to use at some point in the future. So I figured I’d go ahead and register it on this microblogging thingamajig. It looked like it would only take a few seconds to register (as it should), but at one screen I was about 10 seconds away from giving up and not registering. Here’s what I saw, an option to check if any of my email contacts were already using Twitter:
I didn’t want to give a third party my email account information, and I didn’t want to spam my friends either. So I clicked ‘continue.’
Twitter then told me that I missed something:
Ugh. I had noticed in the upper-right a ‘skip’ option, but honestly I clicked ‘continue’ because it was closer to my cursor. And, in my personal opinion, that should have worked. But it didn’t, so I was forced to find my way to the tiny link to get me past this step:
After that, all I had to do was write my first status update, and that was it. I have enough trouble populating a blog and podcast, but who knows, maybe someday you’ll see constant updates on twitter/wysz.
Grandma’s marinated carrots
A new episode of my cooking show is out. You can now download it in HD or for your Apple TV. The Apple TV version isn’t HD, since for that I’d need to reduce the frame rate to 24 fps, but it’s still higher quality than SD. The podcast version remains iPhone-compatible.
Of course if you’re into instant gratification, YouTube is serving up some carrots as well:
Part 1
Part 2
Cluster computing for Chicken & Ketchup
The most recent episode of my podcast was edited on my new Mac Pro, which is powered by two quad-core Intel Xeon processors. It should be released late tonight or early tomorrow. Since I had the extra computing power, I edited the episode in HDV, instead of DV like the previous episodes. While editing I noticed a huge performance increase: I could work with many more layers in real time, and this was with much higher quality video.
Beyond the lack of performance frustrations during editing, the other big advantage I was looking for in the Mac Pro was a decrease in compression time when I export my final product for the web. The Mac Pro certainly is many times faster than my PowerMac G4 during compression, but, being the status/progress bar addict that I am, I noticed something strange when I opened up the Activity Monitor. The 8 cores weren’t being used to their fullest potential:
So I did 30 seconds of research, and found an article from Bare Feats suggesting that I create virtual cluster on my machine to decrease compression time. Compressor has the ability to split tasks and spread them across a cluster of Compressor instances, which traditionally is made up of multiple computers on a network. But you can also create a cluster of multiple instances on one machine. This is called a “virtual cluster.”
Unfortunately, using this technique I can’t send my Final Cut Pro sequence directly to Compressor. I must first export a movie file, and then send that to Compressor. So, is it worth the extra step for some more efficient use of processor cycles? Let’s find out, with an unscientific test. It’s super-unscientific since I used different clips that weren’t even the same duration, and I don’t know if my sequence was fully rendered before I exported directly from FCP.
But here are the stats, for HDV to 1920×1080 H.264 video:
- Without virtual clustering, sequence with a duration of 8:32 direct from FCP: 50 minutes
- With a virtual cluster of 8 instances, movie file with duration of 7:52: 14 minutes (plus about 2 minutes to export the movie file)
Even with all of the variables I introduced, I believe the advantage of setting up a virtual cluster on a multi-core machine is pretty obvious. Check out the CPU monitor during the clustered processing:
As fascinating as this may be, all of this investigation is time-consuming and often frustrating. And I’m still trying to get this video exported in an HD format that will play on an Apple TV, which is one of the reasons why as of this writing, the episode has not yet been published. So that’s why I’m glad I decided not to become a full-time video editor.
How should I roll?
I first launched Wyszdom without a “blogroll,” which is a list of links to other blogs that the author reads. I like to recommend reading to my visitors, but I’m not sure of the best way to filter my list. I’m subscribed to 69 feeds in Google Reader, so simply publishing a list of all of my subscriptions would be impractical. Only about 30 of these feeds are actual blogs, and I’d guess 20 of them would be blogs that you’re not already aware of. So do I just list this subset of 20, which is mostly my friends’ blogs? Would you, my reader, be interested in that?
Of course if I do decide to go that route, where do I draw the line? Only my best friends, or anyone who can call me an acquaintance? What if I disagree with what they write? Am I endorsing them? I’m not really sure what to do.
For now, I think I’ll stay without a blogroll, and just mention any of my subscriptions as I have things to say about them. Especially if Mike says something exceptionally stupid.
Wysz hates charities!
I just cancelled my newspaper subscription. I’m sure you have two questions:
1. Wysz reads the newspaper?
2. What does this have to do with that controversial headline?
The headline is arguably an example of a sometimes effective, but still undesirable form of marketing, which I call idiot marketing. Idiot marketing is marketing any strategy involving simple tricks covered in Psychology 101 that are designed to get distracted, fatigued, or stupid people to do something. You can find plenty of examples of this on late-night “but wait, there’s more!” infomercials.
I don’t like to buy something when I feel like it’s being marketed towards idiots. because then I’d feel like an idiot.
Examples:
- Sending me a check that when cashed, enrolls me in a service I don’t want or need.
- Sending me a fake credit card, or otherwise marking an envelope as “urgent,” “open immediately,” or “postmaster: please deliver by…”
Charities unfortunately often use idiot marketing as well. This is really a shame, because for people who consider themselves to be non-idiots, it can actually have the opposite effect. Here’s how they use idiot marketing:
- Trying to make me feel guilty. I once got a “personal” (photocopied signature!) letter from a genuine Important Person with language making it sound like he was personally upset that I hadn’t yet made a second donation to his charity. And then there’s the guy who sits at the entrance of my local grocery store with the accusatory “Don’t you care about our veterans?” sign.
- Bringing me into a commitment or relationship I don’t want. Can’t I just give them the money, and then maybe they ask for another donation in a year? Don’t make me a “member” or “partner” in your organization unless I opt into that.
- Coming to my door. There, they are just going to use traveling salesperson techniques and make me feel like a jerk if I refuse or ask for a URL. The worst is sending a kid to my door, claiming that if I sign up for a newspaper subscription, he will get money for college. and there’s “no obligation” and “the check won’t even be cashed” and “you don’t even have to cancel; it is cancelled automatically.” Because that simply isn’t true. My check was cashed, and I had to call to get the money back, after speaking to a supervisor. And don’t tell me I’m a jerk for ordering a newspaper with no intent of keeping it. The way they sell it, they expect and even encourage people to do this. The only people who get newspapers are those too lazy to cancel, and old people who don’t like computers. Idiot marketing gets poor results. And if they want to help those kids go to college, there are plenty of other options.
So what do I want charities to do? Just give me the URL, let me donate, and then leave me alone.
They don’t have to make everyone participate this way, but I, like many people, prefer to donate online. So don’t make me donate, sign up, or otherwise commit on the street. That way, I can easily confirm the legitimacy of the organization (not that I don’t trust people…), and I don’t have to deal with a paper receipt. I’m also willing to donate more money, and have my employer match it, if I can easily do this online. And, if I want to become more involved and not just do a drive-by donation, I can find more information right there, without being forced into it.
Possibly worth another blog entry: I don’t like tips.