New Cloning Successes

I've been very excited to get this latest news of a new breakthrough in cloning - some form of new process that allows the cloning of inanimate objects!  See in the photo below a successful test.

I understand that the scientists hope to go on to try their process on other objects, such as tables, sofas, beds, and gold.

Particularly gold.

Random Websites and new video going up

Well, I pretty much spent yesterday creating stuff, and it felt great.  I recorded the material for four new videos, and wrote two guest posts for blogs.

Since then, it's been a long slog to edit the videos.  I've got two rant videos which are pretty much ready to go as recorded, but the two others are comedy sketches and need a lot of cutting and editing and effects and all sorts of stuff.  Cloning yourself on video is theoretically easy, and can be done really quickly.  With the video I've been editing though, I've had some major problems, namely:

a) The lighting in the room changed as I recorded the video, so you can see one half of the video is lighter than the other.
b) I must have nudged the video camera in between recording Mike and recording Joel, so I had to muck about to make the cut between the two not be too obvious (and even now if you know where you look you can see dodgy bits in the final edit)
c) For one of Joel's lines I didn't give enough of a gap before to allow Mike to rant, so I had to muck about stretching time on a video clip to make it fit.  This alone took an hour to fix.
d) I totally forgot to record one line.
e) Another line I just could not get to fit.
f) In between the clips there were really obvious gaps where the background sound dropped out for a split second.

As a result the video is really not as good as I'd hoped it would be.  Nevertheless, it's been made and I've learned some stuff from doing it, which isn't the worst thing in the world.  The video is about Mike and Joel playing an online space shoot-em-up together, and it is going to be available in a few minutes at  http://youtu.be/GNFWn75aPxc so if you want to check it out, head over there.

Otherwise, if you have time to kill, why not check out http://randomwebsite.com/ - this site basically takes you to a totally random website.  A lot of the time the website you end up on may be not of interest at all, but you never know where you'll find yourself.  Obviously a word of caution - it is random so you may wish to restrict kids from using the website.  But it's surprisingly good fun.

Joel is here!!

Finally, my new video is up!

Here's the video of me introducing my evil twin, Joel.  The quality admittedly isn't as good as I'd like, but I'm sure as my camera and editing skills improve future vids will be better.  I do have some excellent ideas (thanks to a few folk) for future videos, stay tuned!

Birth of the Federation update - My mighty Ferengi Alliance has defeated the Klingon Empire, technically there are two systems full of angry Klingons that I haven't actually conquered, but as they rebelled and left the Klingon Empire, they can't actually do anything except stay there.  The Federation has taken a heavy hammering, and I've finally started to get to grips with the Cardassians.  Only slight problem is that they do appear to have somewhere in the region of a 150 ships ready for a fight, fortunately the computer AI is not playing them very well and instead of laying waste to my own colonies their fleet seems to be busy guarding the far north of their space (while I busy myself conquering the south)

Ultimate Ferengi victory is expected soon.

Don't forget if you really want to you can subscribe to this blog (and for that matter to my YouTube channel too), I haven't got a blog subscriber yet, perhaps if you do you may get your own video (and yes Kirsty, I know you're still waiting for yours - sorry!)

Cloned - coming soon!

Tomorrow I should have a new video up on YouTube, introducing my evil twin Joel.  I've been playing around with my new camcorder, and after a lot of mucking around, firstly with various freeware video editors (none of which I found were up to the task - sorry!) and then with a trial version of Adobe After Effects CS4 I've succeeded in cloning myself.  It's a bit of a new departure for me, I do have a tendency to go for the quick solution but I've had to learn some new stuff and be patient to get this done, and I think it's good overall.

A taster of what is to come!

The actual quality of the video isn't fantastic, do be aware, but the cloning effect itself is pretty good and it isn't too obvious where the join is.  I hope to improve with my future ones as I learn how to work the camcorder and the software.

Anyway it's going to take about 3 hours to upload to YouTube so I'm going to do it when I go to bed, I'll post the link tomorrow.  Or if you can't wait, check out my YouTube channel in the morning.

Birth of the Federation update - the Federation and the Cardassians were a bit silly and declared war on me.  Since then I've crushed both the Klingon and Federation fleets (admittedly losing almost all of one of my fleets in the process, but the ships that did survive are now very experienced in combat and therefore even deadlier and tougher to kill) and given the Cardassians a bloody nose.  The Klingon homeworld is under my control and I'm finishing them off before I turn my full attention to the Feds and Cardies.  Long live the Ferengi Alliance!

Peace and Harmony and video editing

I was watching Peppa Pig with my son the other day, and it was a brilliant episode called International Day.  Basically all the kids at Peppa's playgroup dress up as different countries and start fighting.  Madame Gazelle breaks up the quarrel, saying "Stop quarrelling! Do you think this is how the countries of the world behave?"

I can't help but feel there was a hidden message in that one somewhere :)

It's Halloween (or Samhain indeed)!  And I have a bowl of chocolate in my hallway.  It's been really hard these last few days to let those packets of funsize chocolate treats go uneaten, but we've largely managed.

And now we've only had four kids!  Shocking.  I guess I know what I'm having for breakfast.

(Actually I'll be having marmite on toast I expect - I got a squeezy jar of Marmite at the weekend, it is wonderful!)

After watching What's Up Elle's YouTube channel, I've been really keen to try some of her trademark cloning for myself.  Being a cheapskate - sorry, being someone wanting to achieve value for money - I'm trying to work out how to do it with free software!  I've got half an idea so far with an old version of Windows Movie Maker (Microsoft basically took out a load of features from Windows Movie Maker when it was updated to Windows Live Movie Maker, so the old version is actually more powerful) but I've been messing about with it for quite a while now and I want to get an hour of Birth of the Federation (with the All The Ages mod) in before bedtime.

Currently I'm playing the Ferengi and I've got a nice little corner of the galaxy in my command with a load of minor races under my belt, I've only encountered the Federation so far who are behaving themselves, probably because if push came to shove I think I could take them.