You might have noticed that some of the video bloggers on YouTube have a custom banner and no 10-minute-per-video limit. There is nothing you can do about this, unless your videos are popular and have been “featured” by YouTube employees at some point. However, what you *can* do is use a custom channel icon.

I want my Channel page to have a picture of me, because that’s what I do for all my forum/site accounts: I always use a real picture. I don’t hide behind weird icons that don’t represent me. Only on IM I use an icon with a sheep just because some protocols can’t handle more than 48×48 pixels so it’s not visually distinct to have a real picture of a person in such a small size. Anyways, the way you create a channel icon on YouTube right now is to select which one of the RANDOM frames youtube’s engine has grabbed off of your videos. You can’t set your own picture. Now, the problem is that I am never in front of my camera. I am always behind it. And so there is no frame to pick as channel icon that has myself in it.

So, I had to devise something to go around this stupid limitation of YouTube. Here’s how I did it:

Open a photo or image editor. Create a 320×240 picture with it using the picture/logo you want. Save it as PNG. Open Vegas (or another video editor), and load the PNG picture in the timeline. Here’s how your project settings must look if you are using Vegas or anything similar:

Make sure your video is at least 4 seconds long, otherwise YouTube won’t accept it. Now, render the video using the 320×240 MP4 template from MainConcept’s encoder. Upload to YouTube. Within minutes, you will see your video here exposing the desired frame. Click on “Make Channel Icon”. Now, edit that video and make it “private” (or remove it). That’s it. You now have a custom channel icon!

The only problem is that YouTube creates a 130×97 channel icon image, but the image is forcefully squashed or cropped via CSS on your Channel page at 100 pixels width, and on your separate video pages at just 43×43. YouTube’s web developers should clean up their act and create channel icon images at the right size each time, depending on the needs of each page, otherwise quality of the channel icon is really bad because browsers use as-fast-as-possible algorithms to resize pictures on the fly, and a fast algorithm is not as good as let’s say, bilinear or bicubic. That’s true for my new channel icon too. But it’s better than that stupid duck I was forced to have before anyway.

Discussion between JBQ and myself today:

Eugenia: I found an ant in the kitchen today. Obviously a scout. Don’t worry, I deleted it.
JBQ: You did what?
Eugenia: Erm… I mean I killed it.

Damn computers.

Medication I got 3 weeks ago helped my health, enough to go to Ukiah with JBQ in our weekend vacation. After finishing the medication (10 days, 4 pills a day), I am sick again. In the past, it would take me a month to get back to the “sick level” after medication, but this time it seems that my body learned how to go around it and relapsed faster.

I can’t take of this anymore. I am in pain all too often, it keeps me from living a normal life, let alone planning for having a child. Sometimes I do think of taking me out to find relief for good.

And it also makes me think how the medical sciences are still in a medieval phase — not being able to find the real cause (instead of treating the symptom) and just labeling it “a syndrome”.

Opera Mini continues to show its teeth compared to other mobile browsers. While it’s not a native solution and its server-side nature creates problems with Ajax, it still is the most downloaded J2ME application ever. New features on beta 2 include: landscape support, fullscreen support, SSL, smaller fonts and more. A good deal.

At the Venice Film Festival for a special screening of his seminal noir thriller Blade Runner, Sir Ridley said that science fiction films were going the way the Western once had. “There’s nothing original. We’ve seen it all before. Been there. Done it,” he said. Asked to pick out examples, he said: “All of them. Yes, all of them.”

What a whole lot of bull. While I do not disagree with the fact that studios are not very interested in producing too much sci-fi anymore (especially space-based sci-fi), I do disagree with the notion that “we’ve seen it all before”. We haven’t. We’ve seen everything it can be done with porn, but not with sci-fi. The whole point of sci-fi is to create non-realistic situations and carry you as far as your imagination can go. And some of the stuff we have seen, were not always well-done and can always be made better (e.g. this which I mentioned on the second part of my blog post here).

Of course I was aware of CDBaby for years now but only tonight I took the time to visit their artist’s site, cdbaby.net (instead of .com). Apparently CDBaby is an amazing deal for artists. Not only they sell their CDs online, but CDBaby takes care of CD distribution in 2400 music stores throughout the US, plus they take care of digital distribution with many online stores (including iTunes) so you don’t have to. That’s a heck of a deal, considering that they get less than 10% of the cut (while labels ask for 80%). The only things that labels are still useful are for marketing and international distribution. Everything else can be done for cheap (including shooting a video clip).

This is not surprising, neither “stealing”. I said it many times in this blog: the future is touchscreen, you like it or not. I went as far as predicting that Nokia’s S60 4.0 operating system will be touchscreen-based too. It seems that I was right.

At our home we eat shellfish regularly (from shrimp to full crabs), but this was the first time we bought and cooked lobster. In fact, it was just my second or third time in my life that I had a lobster tail. It was pretty good, but the price still seemed steep ($14 each). Here’s how I cooked it tonight.

Ingredients (for 2)
* 2 lobster tails
* 1/4 cup olive oil
* 1/2 cup lemon juice
* 1 medium onion
* paprika
* salt

Execution
1. Wash the lobster. Get your cooking shears and carefully cut and discard the semi-hard membrane along the belly of the lobster in order to expose it for easier cook-through.
2. Peel, and then cut the onion in small pieces. Place the pieces in a large bowl.
3. In the same bowl add the oil, lemon, some salt and a generous amount of paprika. Using a fork mix everything well.
4. Place the lobster tails there too and let it marinate in the fridge for one to two hours.
5. Preheat the broiler for 10 minutes. In a grilling oven dish place your lobster with the hard shell facing down and pour half of the marinating sauce on it. Broil for 4 minutes.
6. Turn your lobster tails so the hard shell faces up and broil for 7 minutes.
7. Turn again, add the other half of the marinating sauce and cook for 3 more minutes. Enjoy with spicy tartar sauce and vegetables.

We went over to Brian’s last night (Drist‘s guitarist) to drop off the (bug fixed) final cut of the video interview I shot for the band the other day. I burned a CD with the 1080p h.264 version of the 10-min video (10mbps, 640 MBs), as the idea was to play it back on his 1080p TV via his PS3.

JBQ and I liked the result so much that on the way back we discussed getting a PS3 — failing a better AppleTV. I mean, come on. Here I got an expensive HD camera and no way to play back my videos on our big TV other than through the error prone, arcane & archaic DV tapes.

In our good (?) fortune, Amazon was running a deal today: a PS3, plus 8 Blu-Ray movies. So we went for it, JBQ just ordered it. We went for the 60GB version of the PS3 instead of the 80GB one because the 60GB version does PS2 simulation in hardware instead of software emulation (which translates to better compatibility for our 100+ PS2 games in our collection).

I am personally interested only in the Blu-Ray drive and the H.264 capabilities of the PS3 of course, but JBQ will love playing the new Grand Turismo in there, that’s for sure. I already changed our Netflix profile too and it now includes both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD titles in our queue.

It’s 99% certain that this guy has been casted as “Jacob” for the upcoming “Lost” season. I must say that while I don’t know if the guy can act, he looks every bit as I envisioned Jacob. Great casting! Update: Apparently not Jacob. 🙁