It’s a slow, rainy weekend, so I’ve spent a bit of time today getting back to some VHS archiving/digitization, a project I paused due to the move a year ago. I had to watch quite a lot of this to figure out what it was, because there was a lot of disjointed B-roll, and then a looooong stretch of me (and this is back when I had some hair, man) doing what sounds like a video letter to someone describing my job. Read More
Okay, so here’s the thing. I used to do post-production for a living, albeit for a local TV station or four in one state or another. So I know, intimately, what kind of phone call *somebody* almost certainly got at 11 o’clock Pacific time last night to start the process of editing a Starbucks cup out of existence in a scene from Game Of Thrones. I know that call too well. It goes a little something like this:
“Hey Earl, you’ve got some free time between now and ten, right?” Read More
When we toured the house in Utah that we’ve wound up renting, the first glimpse of the basement – an area as big as the living room upstairs, but in a decidedly unfinished state without even so much as drywall in most places – there was talk of contractors coming and going for the first several weeks that we were there until the room was done.
Having come from a house that had, for several years, had bare concrete floors, I took one look and said we’d take it as-is. I saw exposed beams and rafters from which lights could be hung, places where a camera or two could be mounted, unfinished walls where I could put acoustic foam to make the space a better recording studio, and the floor was nothing new to me. I saw the studio that this space could be. Read More
Ah, the imprecise voodoo of advertising on the web. Too much, and you lose people. Too little, and your site is running at a loss financially and then people lose you because you can’t afford to keep the domain name locked down or exceed your site’s monthly bandwidth or… you get the idea.
And then there’s the current trend, which is to have something which detects ad blockers and throws up a smoke screen to keep you from making use of a site, either partially or fully. I’m not installing anything like that here, ever. I hate that shit.
Still, I have been forming partnerships here and there to bring some new advertisers and affiliate programs to the site. This keeps all the eggs out of one basket (which proved disastrous when Amazon kicked all of its Arkansas affiliates to the curb about 10 years ago), diversifies what’s on offer (while still keeping it very much in theLogBook’s wheelhouse), and hopefully, will eventually add up to the site being financially self-sustaining again in the near future. Read More
…is basically like creating a profile on a dating site.
I applied for a graphic design job which required – REQUIRED! – me to post a “passion video”. Fortunately they described what they meant – sorry, I charge extra for doing O faces on camera – and then I realized…oh wait. I’m doing this during a break at my present job. Um…how to do this without attracting attention? Read More
I’m declaring it Cyan Saturday. Not sure why, but it flows off the tongue way better than Black Friday, doesn’t it?
First off, I want to introduce a new tradition, wherein I point you toward books written by several of my closest friends. Somewhere between common interests and all of us being writers at heart, an awful lot of us have written and published books in the past few years. A fair few of the books fall into the same wheelhouse, subject-matter-wise…but not all of them! Anyway, peruse this fascinating list of Books My Friends Wrote and add their works to your bookshelf or the bookshelf of someone who needs a gift this holiday season. You really can’t go wrong – I vouch for all of them as writers and as people.
And my own books? They’re now available through a nice new digital delivery gateway right here at theLogBook.com, a long-needed improvement that finally happened thanks to a little bit of digital drudgery undertaken by my oldest. The new system is really neat, and unlike the old one…it just works. And to celebrate the “grand re-opening” of that component of theLogBook.com Store, I’ve added a couple of crazy bundle deals (they’re the ones with green buttons) that’ll save you…well…a bundle.
Books. They’re what’s for dinner. Go getcha some.
So, for the first time in over 10 years, I’ve gotten myself a video camera.
Technically speaking, there’s been one built into my phone all along, but here’s the thing: I have to take great pains to make still photos from that same phone come out not looking like crap, and…it’s my phone. Yes, I use it to play music, surf the web, and catch the odd Pokemon or two. But…it’s a phone.
The camera above set me back $18, and weighs nearly nothing. I’m still having a hard time, on a gut level, accepting that the above is qualified to be called a camcorder. It records to SD cards that, depending on where you get them, may cost you more than the camera. Read More