I forget who forwarded the link last week, but someone's assembled a GMap of all the filming locations used in The Blues Brothers. The bit where the cruiser carrying Troopers Daniel, Mount, and John Candy's character flies into the box of a semi truck? That was filmed on IL-53 just north of Dundee Road, a half-mile dead-end segment closed to traffic. I always thought it looked familiar, but assumed it was closer to the site on Rand Road where the State Police pile-up was shot (near IL-176, as it turns out,) which I'd passed on several occasions on day camp trips to Sunny Hill Beach in Wauconda (one of the concert announcement scenes.) Nope, it was a spot I passed much more frequently when we headed for Woodfield.

A whole bunch of years back, I bought a Sony digital camcorder, in the Digital 8mm format. It seemed like a good idea at the time, my folks had an (old, mono, low-bandwidth) 8mm, I figured the tapes must be interchangeable, we'd been happy with the quality, and hey, it's digital! FireWire port and everything! The thing's worked quite well. The picture quality smokes the crap out of even high-bandwidth 8mm, it imports painlessly into iMovie. The tapes aren't *completely* interchangeable... you have to use the metal oxide media in the D8 hardware. But they'll play back both standard and Hi8 tapes, digitizing them on the fly, so they import over FireWire just as easily as digital source material does.

About five years back or so, our basketball coach decided to invest in a camcorder for the program. We ended up with a moderately-priced Hi8 unit. The D8s were still much more than he wanted to pay, much less the MiniDV that was becoming very prevalent. I've never been really happy with the image quality, but I didn't care to leave my own unit in the hands of my coach. I had work I wanted to do with it, and I didn't trust it would be taken care of. Besides, the tapes only ran 60 minutes. He couldn't bother to get the JV kids he usually stuck with camera duty (at the last minute and with no instruction) to do the job right. Most of the time, they never paused the tape, and if it ran out, they were just going to walk away instead of changing it. As it was, they walked away without packing it up and bringing it to the bus. (No penalties for that. Then again, "no discipline" was our biggest problem.)

Since then, our JV coach was promoted into the head job. Last year, he thought about upgrading to new equipment. We looked at MiniDV stuff like the football program uses, but ended up not buying anything. This week, I started looking again, just to see what features and prices have become. Damn, things sure changed... last year, you could get MiniDV cameras for under $500, but a lot of nice features had fallen off them. No infrared remote controls, no LAN-C recording remote jack, and often, USB2 but no FireWire. Now? Breast Buy doesn't even sell MiniDV cameras in their stores. NewEgg lists very, very few. The HD and high-end SD cameras all record to hard disks or (SD) directly to mini DVDs. The low end is disk or flash, either built-in or SDHC cards. No infrared remotes except for the high-end HD cameras, no FireWire, and no LAN-C--so no tripods with the controls in the pan/tilt handle, which isn't a problem for basketball, but it's a deal-breaker for football end zone cams.

What's really laughable about the consumer-level cameras is the blatant mislabeling. Several had "H.264" stamped on them, and used the term in their literature. H.264 is the codec used in MPEG-4. You find it in Blu-Ray players, the PSP, iPod, iPhone, and many other consumer portable video players. I was curious what kind of file formats the cameras used. Could I just stick the SD card into my iBook and drag the files into an iMovie H.264 project? That would sure make for faster import than today's real-time FireWire setup. And SD cards are sure easier to carry around than videotapes. So I stopped at Breast Buy this morning with a 2GB SD card, and took some test recordings from a JVC Everio GZ-MS120B and a Panasonic SDR-S26. The JVC claims to record "MPEG-4 AVC/H.264". The Panasonic didn't say anything on it, but Newegg lists it as MPEG-2. I get the card back to my office, and I find it full of .MOD files from both cameras. They're both recording MPEG-2.

Well, that kills iMovie, but it does make the whole process scriptable. If I go this route, once I ID which files are the start of each quarter, all I need to make DVD images is dvdauthor and some shell scripts. If I can figure out the timestamping properly, maybe I can write a scorekeeping app that can generate subtitle files to merge onto the DVD. Turn on subtitles, and you get a scoreboard display. If I need to actually edit, maybe MPEG Streamclip will do the job for me.

Buffy Summers... Edward Cullen... FIGHT!

Current Mood: amused

"Hi Dave... when I was 14, my mom told the school board and the newspaper that I was too much of a pussy to handle a book whose characters talk about sex acts and use naughty words."

I'll be heading out at lunch to find a copy of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

From a Tribune story on a new state law going into effect concerning children in foster care:

In Illinois, by age 19, about half of the females had been pregnant; by age 21, 44 percent of the males had been incarcerated, one-quarter of the youths still had no high school diploma and 16 percent had been homeless,

This is just appalling. Children whose parents fail to raise them, handed off to a state that fails them again, in spades.

James Parker over at The Atlantic wrote a piece on the Harry Potter series, in loose anticipation of next month's theatrical release of Half-Blood Prince. He opens with a point I hadn't thought of:

Personally speaking, my difficulty with Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry has always been the girls. Because at my elite British boarding school, you understand, there were no girls; gray cloisters and shadowy halls, yes, and ringing bells, and triangles of cold toast at breakfast, but no girls.

Well... are British boarding schools still largely single-gender institutions? Not having lived there, I honestly don't know. What few we still have in this country appear to be mostly co-ed (Exeter, Andover and the like,) or at least have a boys school in close proximity with a girls school (the academies in Culver, Indiana.) If that's so, then how does this go over in British culture? Do some take it as an indictment of that system? Do others take it as wishful thinking, or some suggestion of what could be? I just don't have the referents for it... in my day, Loyola was a boys-only school, but as a day school, there was still the possibility of girls after-hours. But when you live there?

There’s the paralyzing obsession with bureaucracy, for instance: hearings, edicts, exams, disqualifications, issues of procedure, administrative reversals … Can you think of another children’s story-cycle that features so many frigging committees?

*laugh* It's so true, but how many people are bothered by that? I've noted they've trimmed the scale of most of these down in the movies. That kind of pacing does not work in film. But I can't say I know anyone that's bitched about it in print. We get too much of the story there, and that's how real life works anyways. Your friends aren't always with you, so they don't share all your experiences, so you do spend a lot of time verbally filling them in later, over meals, or hanging out at home or in dorm rooms.

On Voldemort:

None of the movies so far, invested as they all are in his spellbinding badness, has quite caught the vulnerability of this character.

I wonder if we'll see more of that in this next movie, since the book spends time on the first meeting of Dumbledore and Tom Riddle. While they're never fully explored, it's very clear that Tom is riddled by some awful insecurities born of his racist extremist family and his subsequent orphan state. This boy didn't fall fully-formed from a vat of pure evil, the dude has issues. He's the kind of kid you see on an episode of Law and Order, where we get a scene of him and Dr. Skoda, and Skoda walks out with one of those expressions that says "I could spend years and not get to the bottom of him."

The real kicker is the portrayal of Muggle, non-magical life:

Because the ordinary, unmagical human race, as presented in the Harry Potter books, doesn’t appear to have much going for it. [...] Decent, non-supremacist wizards are supposed to stick up for Muggledom, but these people are ghastly. They live at Number Four Privet Drive, and go pottering off in their car to the Best-Kept Lawn Competition. They hate magic. They hate Harry. Rendered doubly grotesque in the movie adaptations (Richard Griffiths hissing and squealing like a large, pink kettle), the Dursley household is little more than a boot camp for anarchism.

Rowling shows us where Harry comes from, and where Ron comes from. But Hermione? Not at all. We get the barest introduction to her parents. What's that family like? How did they handle the revelation that their daughter is a witch, and how are they handling what stories they hear from her about school? Surely Hermione isn't telling them everything, but what does that do? Are they upset that she's secretive? How much do they know about the Voldemort-driven intrigue, and how do they handle the subsequent concerns about their daughter's safety? In a normal school, the kind of involved parents that produce such a well-adjusted child as Hermione would be burning up phone lines demanding of school officials just how seriously the threat is and what they're doing about it. And then what are the summers like? And how the hell does she handle the cultural schism? You can't tell me a 12-year old child of two dentists in 1992 doesn't have a Walkman. Since technology allegedly "fails" around places so thick with magic as Hogwarts, what the hell does she do? I would be going out of my bloody mind without mine.

http://www.facebook.com/jlindquist

fortune kicked this out when I logged into my machine at home:

A Severe Strain on the Credulity

        As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the
highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the
multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt...
for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its
flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the
charges it then might have left.  Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in
Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not
know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something
better than a vacuum against which to react... Of course he only seems to
lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

                -- New York Times Editorial, 1920

T-shirts relevant to our interests.

Actor David Carridine, 72, found in his Bangkok hotel suite, apparently a suicide.

Surely, there's a Yellow Book crack to be made here...

Backstory: I've been using a dedicated Linux box as my personal DVR for several years now, running MythTV. It's been an adventure, for like my TiVo, MythTV (using Hauppauge PVR cards with tuners and hardware MPEG-2 encoders) will record in the same format used on DVDs. Unlike the TiVo, the act of extracting video and building a DVD is fairly painless. Also, since MythTV has much more available in terms of RAM and disk resources, not to mention a totally open architecture, it has a very nice web front-end so I can manage recordings and schedules from somewhere beyond my living room.

Around the 0.18 or 0.19 release, the MythWeb module was heavily rewritten. It became a lot more powerful, but the side effect was that it broke compatibility with the reverse-proxy module in Apache 1.3. It would still work, but you had to mirror the MythTV's web server directory tree structure in the firewall. The 1.3 proxy modules could only rewrite HTTP protocol headers. An Apache module, mod_proxy_html, exists to rewrite links inside the body of an HTML document, but it was only compatible with Apache 2.0 and later. I didn't get around to upgrading from 1.3 until I was forced to rebuild the services/firewall host this spring when the original box began to die. The solution works very nicely, but I had a couple of speed bumps worth documenting... ( -- More -- )