We visited Mt Hamilton east of San Jose yesterday. There are at least 4-5 big telescopes/observatories at the peak, belonging to the Berkeley university. Cool stuff.

I shot a bit of handheld video there, and when I came back home I took a shot with the Sony Vegas 7a Platinum. Well, it’s a pain in the ass to use that application, I am just not happy with the amount of polish it has (or lack of). For example, it won’t scene-detect HDV (while it does for plain DV, I had to use an external tool after the fact), its external capture app won’t do HDV at all, if you don’t specifically tell it to use transitions there is this ugly black screen between the shots (you can see those in my rough-cut video below), while the application uses lots of RAM when you simply add more media files on the Media placeholder (I am NOT talking about the timeline, that’s extra RAM), and finally, it is extremely slow playing back HDV when previewing (even in low quality setting — it is the only NLE in the market that is so slow previewing HDV video).

And when exporting, its dialogs are stupidly terrible. I have widescreen video, I want to export as widescreen in low-res, but it won’t let me have a custom resolution and set the anamorphic bit or not, it HAS to be QVGA anamorphic, which plays well on WMP/VLC, but other players and YouTube fuck it up and they render my 1.333-proportioned video as 1.000 (so it looked out of proportion on YouTube before I re-uploaded with the new format). It is an utterly ridiculous situation and re-enforces my opinion as to how much software sucks in general (update: I tried to force letterboxing as it won’t let me pick a custom resolution and that trick worked better, although their usability designers should definitely look at QuickTimePro’s UI for letterboxing).

iMovie, while it only has 1/20 of the features of Vegas, it is a joy to use (for its limited feature-set that is). Its UI just MAKES SENSE and does what the user EXPECTS (including the export settings). And no, the Vegas problems are not because of the too many features or because it was supposed to be a “pro” app, it is because it’s written and managed by idiots with no vision and without a sense of what’s LOGICAL. It is an incoherent app, it’s as simple as that. I have literally spent only 1 hour with Vegas using it since I installed it on Thursday (and I didn’t even write about my adventures on their support site trying to find updates), and I found (and confirmed by googling) what, 4-5 usability/technical problems already? How pathetic is that?

I am telling you people: software sucks. And when the software engineers don’t actually suck, the usability engineers do. Either way, most of the time users are screwed.

We watched “An Inconvenient Truth” tonight. Highly recommended for every human being on this planet. If you haven’t watched it and its update as found on the DVD release yet, find a way to do so — even if that might mean that you will have to pirate it.

“Children of Men” is an amazing movie, great directing and camera work.

But as I write this, Sci-Fi Channel broadcasts this. Terrible acting, terrible directing, terrible dialog, terrible CGI. Possibly one of the worst movies ever created. I am pretty sure it didn’t cost more than $200,000 to produce, but when you think that great movies like El Mariachi were produced for just $7,000, it makes you wonder. Why is Sci-Fi Channel even bothers with these tele-movies?

In other news, our Netflix queue gets bigger and bigger, at around 100 movies right now… We will be busy for a year. I don’t think we will be visiting a cinema any time soon, Netflix and our 55″ TV does the trick for us as it also saves us money and time.

Update: Download this free, just released, sci-fi short movie, created by two twin brothers filmmakers, great job — especially for their budget.

I just checked out Banter, a next-gen C# colab tool with video-chat support, looks very interesting. I met one of its two main developers, Brady Anderson from Novell, at a party last week too.

For those who know me, or have visited my living room, they already know that I love sheep.

However, as a personality, sometimes I resemble more that of a dog rather than of a sheep. For example, when JBQ comes home I feel like a dog that sees his master coming back home: I jump up and down and I run in his hug. I am very dependent but also very loyal to him. And when JBQ takes me in his arms and hugs me, I can’t stop making small happy noises and taking fast breaths while my tongue is half-out (no, nothing sexual/gross about it). If you were to record me, you wouldn’t know if it is a human making these noises or an over-excited dog. And I do all that without thinking, but subconsciously & naturally.

And of course, when I am angry, I can be a real bitch.

“An Italian town’s mayor hopes to shame men into not using prostitutes by photographing cars that pick them up and publishing the details in local newspapers.”

The funny thing is, that according to most countries’ laws, this is not illegal. Pictures taken in public places are free to be published/scrutinized. Ingenious plan.

“A proposed amendment to the current copy protection license governing DVDs would completely ban all DVD backups, and prevent DVD playback without the DVD disk being present inside the drive.”

Dear Congress, or whoever the hell votes for that shit, I want to be able to use my media in our family without DRM, region-coding or other such silly restrictions. Give me the benefit of the doubt.

My beloved JBQ bought for me –and arrived today– a fluid tripod head, filters and 52mm adapters for my Canon HV20. Next, we need to get a few more filters, a mic-to-line-in adapter, and the wide angle lens. Isn’t that romantic?

In the meantime, Sony Vegas 7 and its book arrived today, while I am still reading through the Rebel DV bible and “how to shoot a music video” Vegas tutorial. By the end of July, I should be the master of film making (not really).

I am also trying to setup a date for Dan Dennedy (the primary DV Linux developer, known for DVGrab, MLT framework and Kino video editor) to come over and test my Canon HV20 so he can add HDV support for Linux (currently, there is none). Dan only lives 25 minutes away, and it would be very cool to meet him.

Did anyone notice the Nokia 770 featured a number of times in the Fantastic Four sequel? Talk about product placement… Anyways, a review of the FF sequel I wrote is here.

There was a time that I looked nice. Ah, not anymore. This picture is from August 2000 during my first visit to US (I was living in UK at the time).