Catching up

Posted on June 6, 2005

My, my, I just turn my attention the other way for a bit and all of a sudden there’s a gap of more than 10 days in the weblog…

Well, I’ll just make a quick recap on how things are going, then. I have a feeling this can potentially turn into a rather long post so I’ll try to keep it short and to the point, in an itemized sort of way.

First off, the Perl Flickr API is just the same as it was when I last wrote about that. Some other stuff has gotten in the way. I do have a deadline I’d like to respect for it, since I’ll be going away on my summer vacation in a couple of weeks and I don’t expect to do much coding or to even have any sort of connectivity while away. So expect to have the first version up on CPAN by then, followed by a nice two weeks’ silence from me.

I’ve been a bit swamped at work which has bit into my personal time and has thrown me off the track with both the Flickr API project and all the stuff I have to get ready for DVDLX as well.

Other than that I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently. I’ve discovered the TechPodcasts network and with it a lot of great podcasts to listen to. Thankfully this can be multitasked with doing other stuff, otherwise I’d just have no time to listen to all of it. So now I’m trying to reduce the number of podcasts I listen to from the huge number of potentially good ones I found there, but it takes time to listen to two or three shows from each source and then decide wether it is worth keeping or not.

One podcast which I did find out about (not from the TechPodcast network, though) is Tips From The Top Floor (RSS feed here). This show is just awesome! Everyday, simple tips for digital photographers. Not extra-advanced stuff, for sure, but just simple stuff which are incredibly useful and which I can use to be reminded of or learn about. It is also short enough to listen to on my commute which is a big plus. Kudus to Chris for a really excellent show.

Something else that got my already too thinly stretched attention is video blogging or vlogging as people sometimes call it. I’ve taken the easy way into this and just downloaded FireAnt and looked at some of the feeds that come in the default config. Now I don’t think I’ll get much into it since it does take up more time than blogs or podcasts, simply because you can’t multicast it (at least no so much as the other two), but there is definitely some interesting stuff going on there. Then again there is also a lot of trash, but that’s just the natural order of things, I guess…

And, speaking of video, my father want’s to get in on the desktop video-editing stuff. He has had a DV camera for a while now and shoots tape after tape of my nephew (as any self-respecting granddad should, of course) and being the intelligent person that he is, he knows no one is ever going to watch hours on end of Diogo sleeping, Diogo trying to eat his tows, Diogo crawling around, Diogo eating and so on and so forth. So he want’s to edit all that stuff and just make some cool DVDs with it. Since he and mom recently got a god laptop they now have all he needs to tackle it. Except for the software and the know-how.
Enter me, who has zero experience with video editing, trying to learn as much as I can about it (strictly beginner level, of course) in order to get dad up to speed and running with it on his own. Now the good thing about this is that I know that if it takes to it he’ll do a great job and we’ll have great family video stuff to watch from now on. The dark side of things being that I’ve always resisted entering the digital-video arena and now with all the studying and trying out of the tools I’ve got in order to help dad I hope I don’t get caught into yet another time sink.
Must resist the power of the dark-side, even if we both could run the family-video galaxy as father and son.

Which reminds me, I must go see episode III again!