Lewies Blog

What a day. I got up and left for the mall to pick up a journal. I found a moleskine notebook that had graph paper within it. I always liked writing and playing with graph paper, so I went ahead and picked it up.

I got a few things over at SAM’s Club and then headed next door to Wal-Mart. I had a task that I did not want, but I had to go on and get it over with. My task was to pick up some ladies underwear. I felt so out of place. I had the idea in my head that everyone thought I was a pervert. There was a woman with her daughter looking at me as I was trying to find the rite size. For once, I was thankful for the self checkout lanes.

My nephew and niece were visiting when I arrived back home. We played a few games of hide and go seek, and my niece wanted me to take a few pictures of her. She even got in on the action and started taking some pictures of my nephew and I together. We then went inside and played Spyro the Dragon for a little while. I’m still lacking a variety of games for her to play, so I’ll have to look into fixing that problem sometime.

While the two kids went in the back room to play on the Atari Flashback 2, I watched some of the Barbershop shows with my mother in-law and wife. Showtime on demand has nine episodes rite now and we got through three of them. I enjoyed watching the episodes more then the movie itself.

Now that everyone has left, the house is very quiet. It’s amazing how quickly things change when children come and go. All throughout the day I just had this desire to go back to sleep. I think I am going to give in and take a nap.

Yesterday I got in touch with a therapist after a few days of only getting the answering machine. The guy seems pretty nice but he doesn’t have any room for another client. I gave him all of my information and was put on a waiting list with two others. He will try and get back in touch with me in about two weeks.

Later in the evening my wife and I went to the movies. We were going to go and see Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, but decided to go and see Serenity instead. As Angel held my hand and walked in front of me between the parked cars, I noted how she was literally leading me to Serenity. I just had to lead her away after the movie was over. I’ve seen one or two TV shows, but the movie was fantastic. Go see it.

I started getting many of my video files converted to Flash Video with the free Riva FLV Encoder software that I downloaded. I also found some of my old videos where I tried to sum up what happened each day with my web camera. I guess I was into video blogging without realizing it. I uploaded all of the new FLV files when I was done and you can access them through my Video Files Page.

I remembered one of my odd dreams when I woke up today and was fortunate enough to have the audio recorder close by. Go and check out Dreamy Audio #038 on the Podcasts area. This one was about my brother, moving, and picture frames.

Angel had left to take the kittens Red and Blue over to Petco for adoption day. This was the first time that she had gone to do this. She left me with the task of catching Raven, who got out as she was leaving. I felt like I was playing a game of cat and mouse. Everytime I moved towards him, he would move away. I recorded my hunt and you can watch A game of cat and mouse on the Video Files page.

After getting Raven, I soon fell back to sleep and woke up a little before nine at night. Mom called and walked me through preparing the formula for Bandit. Just as I had sat down to feed him, Angel walked in the door and was very cheerful. Angel sat down and started feeding Bandit for me and he took to the bottle instantly.

Angel was successful in getting Red (renamed to Angel) and Blue (renamed to Champagne) adopted out together. The oriental couple made Angel the kittens godmother and she has rites to see the kittens for life. Out of everyone else who had been adopting out kittens, Angel was the only one who was successful today.

I have a very small collection of videos that I recorded through AudioBlogs. When I tried to retrieve the videos, I found that they were all in a format called Flash Video. They all had an extension of FLV. I didn’t know how to view these files.

After searching the internet, I came accross a few players that were free and open-source. I took a liking to one called Flash Video Player. It was easy to install. I just dropped an SWF shockwave flash file onto my website and made a reference to it. I saw my videos play in no time at all.

For most of us, our FLV files will probably be missing some metadata due to an earlier bug with many programs that converted other video formats to FLV. AudioBlogs is no exception. Because my video didn’t have any metadata, the Flash Video Player didn’t know how long the videos were. It would not show the progress of how much video I have watched.

Fortunately, I found an FLV MetaData Injector (free of course). After downloading the files necessary, I pointed the program at a directory full of FLV files and let it go to work. It didn’t take long and after uploading the modified files to my website, I saw that I now had progress bars being displayed with the videos.

Do you already have a few videos in a different format? You may want to consider converting them to FLV format. Statistics show that there are more users who can view flash files then those that can play AVI files. There is free software called Riva FLV Encoder to help you convert your AVI, MPEG, Quicktime, and WMV files to FLV. Good luck in finding something to convert them from FLV to another format.

Last is WordPress. There are a few WordPress plugins going around that let you show off your FLV files. Unfortunately, I have not gotten this far yet. I will do it soon, but I had to at least get this much information out for one of my loyal readers. At the moment, I have a small PHP script that lists all of my FLV files within a specified directory and shows them off when you click them.

I’ve been working with my audio and video files from audioblogs. I’m mostly working on getting a script setup to list all files within the directory. This is simple enough, but I’m also trying to parse the meta data out of those files as well such as the title, comments, artist, play time, etcetra. You can temporarily see how far I have gotten so far over at my Dreamy Audio testing site. In the end, I’ll be able to simply upload a new MP3 file into the directory and everything else will be taken care of as long as I’ve properly edited the MP3’s meta data before doing so.

Most of the parsing is taken care of through an open-source library that I found on the internet. I’ll need to work on refining the RSS feed to sort in the same way. Next is to apply the same technique to my Flash Video files (FLV). I promised I would say something about that soon. I’ll try and get something posted before the end of the week.

For now, anyone playing with PHP and listing file sizes might find this small piece of code useful. It converts the bytes to KB, MB, GB, TB, or PB to make the file sizes more easier to read.

Some say that video killed the radio star, but I think it is going to be podcasting that kills the video star. On that note, Apple came out with the iVideo today. Rumors have been going around for a few months that they were going to do it. We all saw the small changes they made to iTunes with each version in preperation and speculated about it. All the time, Apple lied when asked about it.

So is the hype worth it? I think not. Looking at my habbits of iPod use, I wouldn’t make much use of video. I listen while doing my work, driving the car, or just walking around. During that time, I wouldn’t be able to dedicate my eyes to watching a video. My iPod is essentially the soundtrack to my life.

The only features that appeal to me are the longer battery life, more storage space, and color screen. I could just upgrade to the iPhoto for those features, but I have no desire to spend the cash for an outdated gadget with a heavy price tag. Frugal? Yes.

As I looked at the new iVideo, I noticed a problem. The headphone jack is no longer in the middle on top of the device. Also, the top data-port is missing. Apple has a habbit of making the most incompatible hardware around. There are many gadgets such as the iTalk that have turned up that you can hook up to the iPod series, but with this newest addition, those gadgets will no longer work without that port.

I figured I would have to download the new iTunes version tonight as well. I fired up the software and told it to check to see if there was an update. Nope. The reply was that version 5.0.1 was the latest version. How could that be? I downloaded iTunes from Apples’ website and installed it. I checked the version after the installation and saw that it was now 6.0. I also saw that I now had a Video node in my sources panel.

There are a few short Pixar videos going for $1.99 each. The videos don’t list how short they are and everyone has probably already seen them by now. These are the bonus videos that shipped with DVDs such as Shrek, Ice Age and Monsters, Inc.

I would have figured that Apple would have arranged to give away at least one free video for people to try out. Instead, you get a 20 second preview of each video through the iTunes store. I wonder if they will give full length movie previews for free like we see on TV or if we would have to pay a fee to see the full version of those as well.

On a side-note, I learned how to hack an iPod today to change the images within it. After mucking with different firmware versions with iPod Wizard, I discoverd that my iPod was using IDR_FIRMWARE-10.3.1. The first thing that I did was replace that stupid “Do not disconnect” icon with a picture of … me. The one problem that I forsee is that I’ll have to play with the firmware each time a new version comes out so I can keep my images.

Of course, this voids the warranty. But then again, why am I worried? I got the thing free and I never do those warranty things anyway.

My primary care physician had told me it was time to move on to a psychiatrist for my depression medications. Today I had my first visit. It seemed like a short session until I saw the time when I left. A few things resulted from our meeting. The first being that she is doubling my dosage of Effexor XR to one hundred, fifty miligrams.

The other thing was big, but no surprise. She suggested for me to see a therapist. Basically put, I am very disassociative with people. It is hard for me to make friends. It is even harder for me to treasure and keep friendships at that. It isn’t anything new, as this has been one of the things that has always contributed to my depression.

On a semi-related note, I’ve been thinking about starting a hard-copy private journal of my own thoughts. I have many thoughts to myself that I would like to record on different matters, but they don’t belong here in the public eye. These would be things like how people make me feel, how I felt about situations, my expectations, etcetra. It would pretty much be a diary of sorts.

I just don’t know if I can keep up with it or not since it wouldn’t be electronic. Writing slows me down and my thoughts race at times where I wouldn’t be able to keep up. Also, my print becomes unreadable the faster I am trying to write. There are benefits to writing as well. Sometimes my mind is more at peace to feel the friction of the pencil against the paper.

Maybe I can even get a little creative and write in Futhark or other glyphs to prevent prying eyes from reading it. But then that would slow me down even more, wouldn’t it? I could always tray and learn shorthand to speed things up a bit, but it takes about a year to master.

Perhaps in the end, I should just use Microsoft Word, or install a blog on my local computer. At least then I can seach things. The problem is that I’m looking for something that I can do while “detatched” from my computer. In all bad humor, this image just really cracked me up today.

It appears that I’m rambling to myself, so I’ll close with the thought of simply puchasing a journal and starting out simple. After all, “doing” is the first physical step to any goal in life.

I arrived early for the Dead Can Dance tour in Washington, D.C. and spent a while outside looking out at the park in the surrounding area. The sky was gray and looked like it could rain. The excitement in the air of things to come was building. After a half hour the area was getting flooded with people and I went back inside.

I waited in a very large line before the show started to get a voucher for the live album. The lines were not setup well and many people were complaining. The guy behind me went to the New York showing the other night and he said it was nothing like how it was at this place. He was really upset.

It turns out that the problem was due to how accessable the shirts were to the people selling them. They would spend a few minutes hunting for different sized shirts in different piles on the floor. Many people didn’t know what they wanted until they got to the table since you couldn’t see the products while you were in line. It would have been better if they setup the table on the lower floor so that there would be moore room to get to it, and everyone could see the products from a farther distance.

Many people in line ahead of me left for there seats. I stuck it out and sort of got lucky. I asked for a voucher for the live CD, but the guy handed me two vouchers. I didn’t realize it until after I had walked away and was halfway to my seat. I figured it was probably one for each disk since it was a double-disk set, but that just didn’t make sense. After the concert I took a closer look at what I had and discovered that I did in fact have two seperate vouchers.

I got to my seat and was out of breath. Just as I sat down, the lights dimmed and the show began. Talk about perfect timing! My seat was probably the worst seat that you could get. It was on the very top row and the farthest back. It was a good thing that I purchased the tickets when I did or else I wouldn’t have gotten a seat at all. I still had a good view, but my eyesight is not what it used to be. I still got to get a new pair of glasses soon.

Dead Can Dance put on a really great show tonight. I had to stop myself from moving my toes along with some of the songs. I could hear a few people singing along with a few songs. The concert was a spectical of lights. Along with many classic songs, a few new ones came out. It was interesting to see the excitement from Brendan Perry as he moved with the music while he sung and played different intruments.

While Brendan was playing Severance at the end, he had one instrument that was really odd. It looked like a drum, but had a handle that he would crank on the end. I had always thought that the sound it made was a violin or a reed instrument. He was able to change its notes, but I couldn’t see the details of the instrument itself. It was odd and I am curiouse as to what it is. (Thanks to Jocelyn, I have found that it was a Hurdy-Gurdy.)

In the end, Lisa Gerrard really surprised me with a song that was quite different then the types of songs that she sings. The whole audience was just mezmorized. I didn’t know she could sing that way as well. I think the title of it is Hymn for the Fallen, as it is the last song listed on the advertisement of the live album.

I tried to get some pictures with my camera phone, but the quality was just horrible. I also tried to take a voice memo of the crowd going crazy during one of the times that everyone went off stage and came back on. Unfortunately, I didn’t tell the phone to actually save the memo. Here are some of the pictures:

On the way out, I got a free sampler CD from Asleep by Dawn magazine. Half the bands sounded a bit gothy, but I signed up to get a free subscription anyway. Some sounded a little bit like the Dead Can Dance folks.

My wife will not be able to make it to the Dead Can Dance concert tonight and I have one extra ticket next to my seat.

Seminal ‘80s British art band, Dead Can Dance, is reuniting this fall for a handful of live dates in the U.S. The band’s main members, Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry have been working on solo projects since the mid-‘90s. Formed in 1984, DCD quickly were accepted by Goth fans for their dark melodies, but the band quickly proved to be more musically inclined than the limiting genre, taking their New Romanticism origins and adding Middle Eastern and even African influences, thus built DCD’s reputation as a world music band. As Gerrard has been busy scoring such films as Whale Riders and Gladiator, it has left little time for Dead Can Dance to tour. Brendan Perry has been hard at work selecting songs for Dead Can Dance’s double-disc box set, much of which can be expected to be played on October 10th.

Ticket Information
The Music Center at Strathmore
10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda, MD 20852
Dead Can Dance
Section: UP TR
Row/Box: D
Seat: 33
Event Code: SH1010E

Doors open at 7pm tonight.

You can contact me (Lewis Moten) at 703-585-6883

This past weekend, I have been moving all of my audio and video files from audioblog.com over to my own website. Along with the files, I’ve had to do some research into how to play video files since they were all in Flash video format.

I found a little flash project called FlowPlayer. This open-source project will play both MP3 audio and FLV video files. I have more to say, but it is late and I need my rest. I’ll write more about it after I have everything setup. There is also some information on the site about a WordPress plugin that used the FlowPlayer as well.

For now, here is one of my earlier tests when I first tried out AudioBlog.

(Flash player removed - see Video Files page)

Here is another player called FLV Player (I found here) showing off a video I put together on the 4th of July.

(Flash player removed - see Video Files page)

I like the second player better.

It’s been agreed for quite a few months now that I’ll be getting a new computer for my nephew next month. It may help to offset many of the holidays where I haven’t been able to aford much at all. I still don’t have much cash to spare, but at least I have enough credit with Dell to purchase a new system.

Shopping on the Dell website sometimes requires very much time. They sell so many different systems that you can customize to be the way that you want them. You can make what appears to be two identical systems, but end up paying an arm and a leg for one over the other.

In the end, I found a combination (2.4GHz, 512 RAM, 80 GB HD) for about seven hundred dollars. This is a system for school work as well as a game called Ultima Online also known as UO.

The game is about eight years old, but it is alive and kicking. I’ve been in and out of the game many times and even got to play it during the beta. I picked up the gold edition tonight for roughly ten dollars and created a new account (free for fourty five days). Angel found that we still have access to my brothers account, so I’ll probably change over to it and activate it on pay day. An aged account has some advantages over new accounts such as the ability to receive special items every year and during software upgrades.

Here is a list for all of you hardware buffs, or if you are just interested in what I purchased.