Today isn’t my lucky day.

1. Friends came by to take me to lunch over at Google, while I was 100% sure that our rendezvous was for tomorrow, Friday. Not only that, but I had told JBQ that it would be Friday, so he was not expecting us at work until tomorrow! Sorry Brent, Amy! I screwed up, I really need to read emails more carefully!

2. A reader asked me if he can license one of my articles (which he linked to his email to me) for his newsletter, and I gave him authorization for a completely different article! Again, I didn’t read my email straight.

3. There’s a good chance I am going to shoot a music video clip for a local indie band soon, and I made some tests locally. The idea was to have the audio sped up 25%, shoot a video lip-syncing to the sped up audio, bring the video to Vegas and slow it down to the point that it lip syncs to the original non-sped up version of the audio. Thing is, when I told Vegas to slow-down the video, I told it to do so at 0.750 rate (75% of the 1.000 playback rate, right?). Well, it wouldn’t sync. I emailed Vegas support, only to come back to me, looking like a buffoon to them, and reply to me the obvious: that the video rate should be 0.800, not 0.750. I suck at calculations.

I was watching “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” tonight, and there is almost no background blur in the movie. At least, not more than the HV20 can deliver without any extra 35mm adapters. The magic is all in the color (easily reproduced with Cinemode/Neutral, and color grading), lighting (that’s where your money should go), and composition (only your artistic genes can help you here). I don’t think the camera they used had much more dynamic range than the HV20 either. The lack of background blur didn’t stop the movie to be voted the 4th best movie of all times on IMDb.

There was this live Madonna show I wanted to see, a early peek on her new tour. MSN was broadcasting it live, online.

So I go to the main page, which had a big Madonna picture in there, and a countdown counter to the show. So I go there 5 minutes before the show starts, just in case there was a limit of how many people can watch at the same time.

So the countdown goes to 0, and it resets to the NEXT show. But on the big Flash placeholder there is no show showing. Apparently, I have to press “watch now” (bad usability). So I press “watch now”, and I gets me to another page that resizes my browser. God how I hate that.

So, I watch the 32 second ad, but then nothing loads. It says that the broadcast is not available to watch. I thought, I was too late, too many people are logged in for that shit. However, the ads were keep loading one after the other, but the concsert was a no-show.

Then it hit me. I should try to watch that with IE instead of Firefox. And then it worked! But I already lost 5 minutes of it.

Excuse me, but if you are not going to support Firefox, at least give an error message that makes sense and instructs us what to do instead of saying that the “broadcast is not available”. Besides, all ads worked perfectly with Firefox! So why not the show?

And to top all of that, there is a 1 second delay between video and audio, making it unwatchable. IE or not.

I hate these modern bras that you now find everywhere in the market. They have this, I don’t know, piece of metal around them that HURTS. Sure, it makes your breasts look like floating devices, but that’s just too much. I am not willing to put up with the pain associated with it. So in the past few years, each time I would buy a bra, I would remove that metal from inside it.

I feel the same way about stiletto high heels. I don’t mind to have some heels on my shoes, but I don’t see the point of the stilettos. I find them laughable, along with the women who try to look ultra sexy for no apparent reason — especially when they are already married.

And what’s the point of wearing $10k earrings either? You can buy a car with that money. Or help your less fortunate distant family members.

There’s a point where someone could look good and sexy and comfortable, and I like that and I am sure more husbands would like that too. But look-modification via painful bras/stilettos/piercing/mud-baths and expensive jewelry is not something I support because I don’t see the point of it.

Yup, as a teenager, my girlfriends stopped asking me to go shopping with them because I was their worst nightmare. I have had these opinions since I remember myself, not because I am older now or try to excuse myself. I am a pragmatist to the bone. I always was.

Or party-pooper. Depends how you see it.

* Some Lesbos residents are suing a gay group for using the word “lesbian”. How pathetic and stupid. Someone needs to teach these people about how language evolves.

* Pidgin is getting forked for not listening to the users. I thought that this was long overdue. I never liked that project and the way it ran. Its main developer had the audacity once to tell me that no one cares about video IM and video iChat support. A few years later, and Adium (which sprang out of Pidgin) is actively work on it.

* Are you into a new PC for your video editing needs? Here’s a good deal (ends soon). Just make sure you spend the extra $20 to get the faster 800 Mhz RAM, and add $30 for the firewire port if you own an HDV firewire camera.

* Five nice, free, and legal, mp3 songs:
- “Fire” by AlibiTom (amazing song)
- “Beyond the Door” by 13ghosts
- “To Be Gone” by Anna Ternheim
- “C’mon Baby Say Bang Bang” by Jane Vain and the Dark Matter
- “Oh Yeah” by Morning State
- More legal downloads here (”Cat Swallow” by Royal Bangs found there is great).

* A sneak peek from the new “Lost” episode tomorrow.

NYTimes say that they don’t use these dreaded WYSIWYG HTML editors for their site. Good for them. A good text editor is all what anyone needs for HTML. You might need a helping auto-complete tool for CSS, but it stops there. I am personally more interested in hand-optimized HTML markup than “validating” HTML. You see, these WYSIWYG editors can create validated markup, but that doesn’t make that code more compatible or faster.

…at least email me on the right email account. Don’t email me on my Gmail account. Hotmail is my main email account, and it has been since 1997 (long before Microsoft bought the service). It’s a curious thing when I clearly show on my contact page that Hotmail is my preferred email address why everyone keeps emailing me on my Gmail one, which is only mentioned on the IM section. Now, send me some email love.

As you might have heard, Coldplay is giving away this week a song from their upcoming album, called “Violet Hill”. All you have to do, is supposedly go to their web site, give away your email address and postal code, and get in return an email with the download information.

Astonishingly, I never received their emails. When my first effort (much later after their “site crash”) yielded no results, I entered once more with my hotmail account and once with my gmail one, but I never received any emails from them. No, the emails didn’t got stuck in any spam folder, I made sure of that. And no, their form page didn’t fail. It clearly said that they received my info and that they sent the emails out. But I never received anything, and that was 8 hours ago already.

So, if they aren’t able to employ webmasters who can pull their shit together, then they deserve the piracy. I had no alternative but search on blogs to download the mp3 file directly.

And I did pay for that. With two of my email addresses and thrice the spam when they decide to send marketing email out.

I am really bad at conserving power, as I have so many gadgets hooked up at all times (some of these older PDAs will lose their memory if they run out of battery).

So I decided to at least turn off the secondary 28″ 1920×1200 monitor of mine. It was used daily only with an XGA Firefox window in it, wasting over the half of the resolution of that big monitor with emptiness. So I thought, I should try to move my Firefox window on my primary monitor, and turn off completely the big secondary monitor (and only turn it back on when I do video editing).

Right now my 22″ 1680×1050 primary monitor is a bit crammed with an SVGA Firefox window, WMailLive and Trillian, but I think it’s usable.

Now, I need to get rid off of all these old gadgets that eat power for no good reason. It’s not that I use them anyway…