Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Stardate 60564.17 - Vacation, Video, and Food

I have not posted anything for a couple of days because I shot a really cute video of Loren helping Cheryl fold laundry on Sunday and have been waiting for Google Video to "verify" it. "But videos are approved instantly on Google!" you may be thinking. That statement is only correct for videos less than 100M. Since mine was 60 seconds long it is 118M and I had to use their stand-alone uploader and not the web interface. So I am in verification hell, waiting for some drone at Google to watch the video and decide it is not porn or copyrighted.


In the meantime, I'll talk briefly about Sunday. We were originally scheduled to go out on the NYHRC Yacht on Sunday with two friends for a dinner cruise. But it was raining with thunder and lightning early Sunday evening and the thought of being tossed about on the East River while being crammed below decks on this yacht was not appealing to most in the group, so we aborted. Instead we went to dinner at les enfants terribles at Canal and Ludlow streets in the East Village.

The food was good, although the portions were small. They did fill the bread basket an extra time for us. The mixed drinks were outstanding. The dessert was also very good. We sat under an awning on a small deck while it rained and it made for a pleasant meal. Thumbs up. Cheryl did have an issue with her steak being too rare and had to send it back for a few more minutes of cooking, but then it was fantastic.

Cheryl may post more specifics in a comment.

And stand by for this great video - if it is ever verified.

And now, a rant.

Can blogger suck any more? I tried 10 times to post a comment yesterday morning and it kept timing out. Just now I have tried 5 times to post a picture to this post and it keeps timing out.

Blogger - You suck. I'm tired of all these issues, and until you get your crap together I am no longer recommending you to any friends who ask me what blogging software/site they should use. I have pimped for you for the last time. If you want my loyalty, then fix your damn problems. If you want to start charging people I have no problem with that - as long as the shit works. But I am getting sick and tired of trying to post a comment or make a template change or post a picture and having it time out. You suck.

P.S. It is more than 24 hours later and I finally got the picture to load.

NYC

2 comments:

Unknown said...

A couple of things...ordered in order to maintain order

(1) Three words for putting video online: compression compression compression. 60 seconds of video doesn't need to be 118M! For example, when I send video to YouTube I use a quicktime compression algorithm set to DSL/High when gets an 8 minute video down to about 60-70M. I use Final Cut Express on the Mac, but PC options like Pinnacle should do the trick as well (and there are probably some cheaper shareware options as well than will do the conversions.)

(2) YouTube takes at most 30 minutes to get things up. The Google wait is much too much for me.

(3) Blogger is terrible, and I would not pay more than I do for it (and if the domain salemfood.com were available I'd be done with them in a jiffy.) My biggest complaint with Blogger is that in comment emails it doesn't tell you which post the comment is from, which for salemfood is an issue because it has almost 200 posts and it's not unusual for someone to post a comment to an old post.

We've got WordPress on our hosted blogs and once you get up to speed it's pretty easy to use. It can be frustrating at times (you need to know html to get it to do things sometimes), but overall it's a far more powerful interface than Blogger. I like to use the SAS analogy for it -- it has a high learning curve, but once you master it you are set to do whatever you like.

JamesF said...

60 seconds of video doesn't need to be 118M!

Seconded! I was going to suggest you run it through M$'s movie maker (free, can't get cheaper than that). I would think even at better than average resolution one minute should equate to about 12 meg.