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Massive Mayfly hatch up north this weekend. If you listen carefully, you can actually hear their wings humming in the air.

Created this in about 30 minutes in iMovie HD. Viva la Flip. Music Source

A follow up to the previous post: Netflix sent me a form letter telling me that I'm probably not going to get a response. Nice. I'm not going to bother to post it, because it's just a crappy canned form letter telling me to call their assy support service.

It suddenly occurred to me that I could try running IE as "Administrator" might give the netflix Drm component installer the ability to stick it's dcik in my PC and come up juicy. Bing Bang, boom. Vista's all sexed up and can play videos again. ANd might be pregnant. You never know.

DRM does nothing to prevent piracy and hassles the rest of us. I do believe that content creators deserve to be paid for their work, however, I don't think the front line consumer should have to pay for the brunt of it. This is a debate for another day. I'll just say this.

It was me, and not any sort of caring on the part of netflix, that has restored my ability to stream netflix movies on demand on my windows pc.

Thanks for nothin, Netflix.

One of the coolest things about Flickr video: 90 Second limit. This has really helped my think about the people who watch the video (my audience) and keep the whole idea of "being fair" to them when I'm editing video footage.
With the Flip's generous storage (1 GB, about 60 minutes), it would be far to easy to just let the camera roll for minutes and minutes, but keeping the 90-second Flickr Video limit in mind makes me conscious of getting the shot I want and moving on.
I have always been a fan of video, you know, ever since my middle-school days stealing time on the linear editing decks from the school library, and Flip Video plus Flickr video has invigorated my desire to create moving pictures.

This video started with exactly Flickr's description of the "Moving Photograph" concept in my mind. I wanted to shoot something that would be inherently more interesting if it could move. A still photo certainly could have captured the same sense of isolation and indifference the ramen feels toward Pick 'n' Save shoppers, but without the stream of people walking by in the background -- people painfully indifferent to the way the ramen hates them -- would the Ramen's rage have been as potent?
Oh, yeah. And then there's the music.
Maybe Flickr should do some kind of mix tape service?

Over the weekend I bought one of those Flip Video Camcorder. I've been having so much fun with camera built into my laptop, and with what little clips I can record on my digital camera. I've always wanted a camcorder, since I moved away from home at 17 and left my mom and dad's big crazy VHS shoulder recorder behind. At $150 for an hour's capacity of 640X480 nearly NTSC quality video, the Flip Video is the right tool at the right price for farting around with video.

So far, I'm very impressed. The built in USB dongle makes getting at your media a snap, and although the bundled software tries to manage your movies for you, you can safely ignore it and move your data around via whatever tools your operating system provides.
And the video and sound quality is decidedly not bad. Better than most $300 digital still cameras, but not as good as a $700 digicam.

But here's where a strange quirks come. Because the camera uses a wacky, proprietary codec, (3vix) you're at the mercy of the codec's implementation. (And, reading between the lines on 3vix support forums, 3vix isn't supporting Flip Video-inspired questions.) Frankly, in OSX, the 3vix Codec doesn't play so hot with Quicktime, and requires you use the 3vix "Dvix Doctor II" and a couple of wacky AC3 audio codecs to turn the movies into Quicktime files before they'll place nice with the iLife apps. (And, for what it's worth, 3vix isn't supported without conversion on the PS3, either.)

On Vista and XP, the videos came off the drive and played just fine after I installed the 3vix Codec. On OSX 10.4, the videos rendered images but not sound without additional tweaking.
But, I'd still recommend the camera to anyone who'd like to dabble with video.

So far I've posted two videos I shot with the Flip.
This iMovie edited movie called Free Zoo Day and a Windows Movie Maker edited "Virtual View" of the view from my desk today as the ice comes off the lake. Don't compare the video qualities. It's not apples to apples. (The Zoo movie was uploaded as a much higher quality video.)

Edit: Oh! An important note: I forgot to mention that even with the Codex installed, It is my experience that movies will not render from iMovie 08. I had to use iMovie HD in order to get the Zoo movie to output a file.