New albums out from some bands singed at the Friendly Fire Recordings. I like this indie label, as it’s very careful as to whom they sign up. New free and legal mp3 downloads from Camphor, Whitsundays and the Faunts. Faunts had a very nice new video clip too (downloadable from the previous link), while Camphor shot theirs entirely using Playmobil and posted it in HD at Vimeo instead. Looks good!

I’ll be 35 in 1.5 months. God, I am old. Good news is, I’ve been thinking of a present (I got nothing for my name day and Christmas), but I can’t decide as to which one to get.

The first idea is to get a 35mm adapter for my HV20. I was hot on the idea of getting a cheap one from TwoNeil and be done with it, but JBQ wants me to use his EOS lenses, so we are now thinking of getting a vibrating adapter from my co-moderator at HV20.com Worley. I just want some background blur damn it. Using HV20’s manual focus is an exercise in patience, while masking on post is a major pain in the butt (like I did below), especially because Vegas Pro has no automatic tracking like After Effects does (and Vegas Platinum doesn’t even have masking). Plus, it looks unnatural, or “green screen’ed” at best.

The second idea is to get a special Vegas keyboard from Bella. It’s the only affordable keyboard that has a Jog/Shuttle Controller and that’s a cool idea, although such a keyboard won’t really change much the speed of which I edit. Truth is, I am concerned about the quality of their drivers. They still don’t have 64bit driver support, not even Vista support! This is usually a good indication of sucky XP drivers too and not enough attention to detail. None of their marketing/PR emails work anymore either.

Taylor Gillespie posted a number of very artistic videos on Vimeo. He uses a Kodak V1253 12MP digicam to capture his 720p videos (review). These Kodak cameras are not very good in quality and they offer zero control (not even exposure compensation or white balance). But you know, a person with a vision can deliver.

Others, will tweak their most expensive hardware to death, but that doesn’t guarantee worthwhile video. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn’t.

There is no more purer, objective, truth about a product that the first reaction of a random user who doesn’t really care either way. Case in point my brother in law, Vincent, who is currently visiting us, and two families of products: TVs and feature phones.

Vincent bought a 46″ Sharp LCD HDTV a few weeks ago. He obviously had some fun time with it. Then, he watched our Pioneer plasma 50″ HDTV. No comparison he said. Plasmas are far superior.

Vincent had been playing with my iPod Touch and iPhone the last few days. He liked the interface a lot. Then, today, while I was showing him some of my other gadgets in my office, we got to the LG Viewty, a phone that LG put out there to compete with the iPhone. He played with it for a short while and then I mentioned that LG goes against the iPhone with that model. He spontaneously laughed, and said “what?”. He placed the phone back to its box. Again, no comparison with the real deal. Especially in this second case, I could even see a genuine surprise at him: there is no way the LG junk software can compete with the iPhone’s.

Some interesting new releases from SubPop Records. Two songs from “The Helio Sequence” (one, two), and one from “The Grand Archives” (a spin off band from “Band of Horses” who also have two free tracks). All tracks are free and legal to download, released as promotional tracks by the label.

Lately there is a lot of talk on the internet about how unrealistic the Nielsen ratings are, as many people are now using DVRs, or they simply choose to pirate the episodes for one reason or the other. I think I have found a pretty good indicator as to if a show is successful in the 18-49 age group (which is the demographic group that advertisers care about). And that’s IMDb’s comment section. It is not by any means an accurate ratings reading, but I personally find it a good indicator. Younger people are more likely to use the internet to converse about their favorite series. So over the last year I was doing my own little research on the matter, right after a new episode was airing (I got free time in my hands).

According to IMDb, “Lost” is the most popular series, with new comments occupying its comments page every 1-5 minutes when a new episode has just aired (Nielsen reports between 12-14 million viewers per episode). “Heroes” is second with about 5-8 minutes apart (Nielsen: 10-12 million viewers). “Battlestar Galactica” (BSG) is at around 50 minutes (Nielsen: 2 million viewers). “Jericho” never did better than 1 hour, which is still pretty good (Nielsen: 7 million viewers). “Prison Break” was close to 1 hour too (Nielsen: 7 million viewers). Pay close attention that while BSG is only barely viewed on SciFi Channel, in reality it has a huge following, mostly because of pirating — a clear indication that this is a kind of show that needs to explode in the internet rather than in more traditional media.

In contrast, the most watched show worldwide, “CSI:Miami”, needs 1.5 hours to recycle its IMDb comments page, and yet, it’s averaging 17 million viewers in the US. Other much-watched series like the rest of the CSIs, and “House” are similar too. This leads me to believe that these shows are much more “traditional” in a sense and are watched mostly by an older audience. Older audiences are not of much interest to advertisers though because they don’t buy whatever they see on TV as easily as younger people do.

So networks have to face the dilemma: Cancel the shows that have millions of viewers but advertisers don’t care as much, or cancel the shows that are low on ratings but high on 18-49 demographics and with more following in the internet? So far, networks are following the easy solution of canceling low-rating shows, no matter if they are actually of more interest to younger people which is the group their advertisers care about. To solve this transitional mess, in my opinion, networks must debut show episodes on the internet 1-2 hours before their TV debut, and be free for all viewers regardless of geography. Otherwise, the networks will lose the advantage of advertising because of piracy. By doing that they can measure how many times a show was viewed on their site and compare.

So, this is the next big thing for those who can’t give up religion: “I see God’s hand at work through the mechanism of evolution”, says Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute. So basically, if you are religious and you can’t give it up, and at the same time you can’t refute evolution anymore, that’s the next big argument: God chose evolution.

I guess now Jews didn’t plant the fossils in the 1920s for the scientists to find, and the world is indeed older than 4,000 years? Wow.

We have guests from France this week in our home, my brother in law, and a couple. We went out for a walk, and I got some pictures using the Kodak V1233 (review).

Thom’s post yesterday about his missing cat reminded me of my first pet cat: Sebastian.

It was 1984, and I was 11 when Sebastian visited our home in the mountains for the first time. Sebastian was a nice cat, but he wasn’t our cat. He belonged to a family about 400 meters away from our home, but he was not getting much love (or food) there, so he was dividing his time between the two homes. Once, the owners came with a sack to take him away, but he returned to us the next day.

The time came in 1985 that we had to move to Louros, a nearby town, just so I didn’t have to travel 2.5+ hours a day to go to high-school and my father could find new jobs as a house builder. We came back to visit our home in the mountains a month later. Within the hour, we would hear from far away a fade “miaou, miaou” and we would soon see a fast approaching cat (literally running towards us). Sebastian wouldn’t stop for over 5 minutes: “miaou, miaou, miaou, miaou, miaou, miaou…”. If he was a human, he would be crying hard and ask us where we’ve been and why we left him behind.

But two days later we had to leave again and go back to Louros. And we couldn’t get him with us as he wasn’t our cat and we were not allowed pets in our rented apartment. I never saw him again.

In the ’90s, and while my father finished building our own home in Louros where we could have our own pets (but not living with us inside the house), we had a multitude of cats in our home, but most of them were poisoned by a specific neighbor of ours. The two most notable cats I had was Miaoulis and her son, Bobo, both beautiful all-white cats. I found Miaoulis half-dead as a kitten in the wild and I took care of her (her mother left her to die, as she was born ill and didn’t want the rest of her kittens to get ill too — good survival instinct). Miaoulis got her name not only because she would “miaou” all day, but also because of this Greek hero. Bobo got his name from DJ Bobo that I had a crash upon at the time. 😉

NBC unveiled a fall lineup today. Problem is, TV is not exciting anymore (well, except “Lost”, and partly “Battlestar Galactica”). From the last year’s lineup, only one new series made it through with acceptable ratings (“Pushing Daisies”). Everything else either barely survived, or was already canceled (“Jericho”‘s ratings were terrible, give it up Jericho fans — web views don’t count because there are no expensive commercials on the web to support expensive shows, while DVR views were not THAT many).

I am sure that a lot of people in the industry will blame the web for the state of TV show success, but I think the problem is mostly originality. I mean, last year we got remakes over remakes (from “Bionic Woman”, to “Terminator”, to “New Amsterdam” which is a Highlander ripoff), and next year we will get more: “Knight Rider”, “Dr Jekyl and Mr Hide”, to “Fringe” which is an X-Files remake.

I mean, come on. I know that being original is difficult (chances are, someone else among the 6bn Earth people already thought of your idea), but it doesn’t have to be so obvious. Where are my space-based sci-fi shows for example? How about creating something like this too, a’la Lost-mystery?