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!

Stairs and toddlers

My son is just getting to the stage that he's regularly using the stairs (supervised that is) and to be fair, he's pretty good at it.

The only problem we have is that sometimes... he's a bit lazy.

Especially when he's just got up in a morning, and the procedure is that we go downstairs, we pop some cartoons on, change his nappy, give him a drink, and let him wake up a little with a cartoon or two.  The when he's up to speed we can play a bit and then start thinking about breakfast.

Now the standard way to go down the stairs is that I go in front, holding his right hand while he holds the bannister with his left hand.  Sometimes to make things a bit livelier we'll count the stairs as we go down them. (we have 13 stairs from the ground floor to the first floor landing by the way, if you don't count the fact that the landing is actually on two levels)

But, if he's feeling lazy, he wants to be carried.

Now I've often only just woken up at this point and not necessarily fully up to speed with his needs and desires.  So I may try to encourage him to descend the stairs in the normal manner.

In which case he jumps at me.

He hurls his fragile toddler body at my side, requiring me to grab him before he falls past and tumbles down the stairs.

To be fair it's fairly unlikely that he would tumble past me, but even so it's a way to get your heart pumping in a morning!

What have I been up to?  Well I've been continuing to play Birth of the Federation - for those wanting an update since my last post, my Ferengi Alliance is now one of the largest empires in the galaxy and we're busy pounding the Klingons into dust.  The Cardassians have conquered the Romulans, and are busy fighting the Federation.  We're nominally friends with both the Cardassians and the Federation, making us a huge amount of cash, despite the fact that both parties pretty much hate me.  I don't really care as long as they leave me alone while I finish off the Klingons, then I'll turn my attention to them.  I really want to test my fleets against the Cardassians as they are the biggest threat to me, even so I can't really think that they could win.  But it's huge fun to play anyway.

I'm mucking about with videos as well, I really need a half decent video editor, once I've got what will hopefully be the first of a series of videos I'll get it out there for people to look at.  I've had what are (I hope) ideas for vaguely funny videos - you'll be the first to know, I promise.

I'll finish this post by saying that if you haven't experienced Adam Hills, check him out.  He's an Australian comedian who is hilarious.  His website is at http://www.adamhills.com/ and there's tons of videos of him performing on YouTube as well.

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.

Cake and head flicking

Firstly, I made a new video!

Recently I've been around my other half's mums house for a few evenings, washing clothes as our tumble dryer is temporarily out of action (belt snapped).

Anyway, I saw some cake and had to make a video about it.  You can see it here.

Or just watch it below.

Apart from that, I have this habit when I'm excited of kind of flicking the hair towards the back of my head with my fingers.  I haven't done it for ages but while I've been watching some TV at my other half's mums (Hornblower is surprisingly good) I've caught myself doing it at the end of a couple of TV shows.

Anyone know why I do it?  Very odd.

Temporarily not thinking about myself for a minute, it's seriously scary what's happened in the US with Hurricane Sandy.  I know that I'm not prepared sufficiently if there's an emergency around here, despite this part of Hull being hit with flooding only 5 years ago - and North Hull being hit with a flash flood only about 2 months ago.  Must do better.

Let's finish the post with a picture of my son standing on his head.

For the observant folk, that's a book by Marcus Brigstocke in the bottom left corner of the picture - or M-A-C-U-S B-I-G-S-T-O-C-K-E if my son's reading it.

The guy will just have to leave the R's out of his name until the little one can say them.

My son, Marmite, and YouTube - I'm tired and not up to creative titles...

The little one hasn't been too well today, not sure 100% what's up, I suspect a bad cold or possibly an upset tummy because he's eaten little and drunk virtually nothing all day, until just before bed he starting having a bit to drink at last.  Bizarrely he wouldn't touch rice pudding (one of his favourites) but couldn't get enough crackerbread's to eat, go figure.  On the plus side I got some squeezy Marmite today so I'm back on Marmite on toast.  It's really weird, I don't like it but then I miss it when I run out?!?

I have a YouTube channel to recommend, What's Up ELLE - http://www.youtube.com/user/whatsupelle - I came across Elle's channel because she made the Baby Gangnam video, and she's actually done a load of cool stuff, her and her two clones.  Elle's not afraid of looking silly and has made some cool videos.  Plus her smartphone goes "Bing" every time someone subscribes, so go subscribe to her channel.

I wonder if I repeatedly subscribe and unsubscribe and subscribe again if her phone keeps binging.  It might get really annoying.

But fun to do :)

Farewell Ceefax!

Tonight a mark of culture ends.

The Ceefax signal is finally being switched off, after being launched some 38 years ago.  I remember as a teenager surfing Ceefax and Teletext on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 channels.  I remember before that, a little kid watching Channel 4 early in a morning where bizarre artwork made out of blocks was shown (apparently it was called 4-Tel on View)

The 4-Tel man with the logo all crumpled up into a floating ball. Yeah.

Back as a teenager, I remember playing Bamboozle on Channel 4.

The Bamboozle guy was kinda freaky.

And getting the latest gaming news on Digitiser.

It's probably hard to explain to younger folk who probably didn't really ever use Teletext or Ceefax, but it was kind of the Internet of its day.  You went to certain pages by typing in a three digit number, and I remember typing in random numbers to see what came up. The 700s were usually pretty interesting simply because they were pages that didn't have the normal stuff on eg news, weather, sport.

The text services was great for broadcasters who, at that time, hadn't gone into 24 hour television shows, and filled the night hours with news, weather and the like (not to mention the infamous Teletext adverts!)

For more teletext remembering go check out http://www.mb21.co.uk/ as well as the websites listed at the end of this post.

I have to mention that the latest episode of the Guild is out - go see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpDCq2rifbs&feature=plcp


(Thanks for the above pics to:
www.gamesasylum.com
www.tvwhirl.co.uk
cultsoftware.blogspot.com)

Labelling

I've just popped into the oven a Birds Eye cod fillet - very tasty by the way.

And to keep me safe, Captain Birds Eye decided to pop a little warning on the back of the packet.

It read, "Contains fish."

I don't have a problem with Birds Eye for putting such a ridiculous warning on their packet, I blame the culture that makes them feel that they have to.

But I can quite see why they did. Obviously there's a need to tell people what ingredients have been used, so that they can avoid allergens.  And therefore stop them from suing the Captain and having him thrown in the brig.

But we already have something that does this - it's called a list of ingredients.

They've tried to make it easier for people by highlighting common allergens, but the trouble is in the world, there will be someone allergic to the thing that you make.

Off the top of my head, I can think of people allergic or intolerant to milk, wheat, nuts, garlic, and water. Yes, water.

So, as much as I understand the intent behind warning me that my fish fillet contains fish, it is a little bit overkill.

It would be much more helpful if I had something that warned me of the contents of my son's nappy.

Hang on, I do - a nose.

It's this culture that makes signs like the below exist:

Grapes on the floor can cause accidents?  I don't blame them - they've been ripped off a vine in some lovely warm country, lobbed in a ship and brought to Hull.  If I was a grape and was free to roam I'd cause some chaos too.

I currently have a 150g bag of sweets in my hands.  The dietary advice tells me how much fat, carbohydrates, sugar, salt and saturates are in a "portion", which is 37g.  Does anyone divide their bag of sweets into portions consisting of 24.7% of the full bag?

Before I go, for anyone interested in writing I strongly recommend a blog I came across by a chap called XJ Selman.  His blog posts are very insightful and well worth a read.  His blog can be found at http://xjselman.wordpress.com/

Good evening folks

I've not blogged for a few days, not entirely sure why - thinking about it I guess I've been somewhat tired on an evening.  I remember reading somewhere that your creative juices flow best in a morning - and I tend to blog on an evening - so perhaps that's why I've not been that creative.

Anyway, I've been playing a lot of Call of Duty Modern Warfare lately, numbers 2 and 3.  I particularly like the Survival mode in MW3 - for the uninitiated, you face progressively harder waves of enemies, but you also gain money for the kills you make, allowing you to buy aids such as a Delta team task force or an air strike to back you up (or more mundane items like ammunition).  I feel vaguely guilty that I've not been playing Pandaria, but for whatever reason some mindless violence appears to be satiating my gaming needs at the minute.

I finally saw the first episode of Red Dwarf X last night, and it's a return for form for the Red Dwarf crew.  Personally after season 6 I went off Red Dwarf - the episodes seemed to be more about the crew doing missions and actually being quite heroic, when really they're a bunch of misfits that somehow have survived through the extinction of the human race and should really be spending their time mucking about and generally being a bit silly.  I actually laughed out loud at one point so I'm looking forward to getting half an hour to watch the next episode.

The only thing that does distract me from the show is the fact that the guys (with the exception of Kryten obviously) have got wrinkles!  Don't get me wrong, I love the Red Dwarf crew, they are seriously ace, but the actors are now around the age of 50.  The series started 24 years ago!  This sort of thing makes me feel old (and I know I will now receive many comments from people older than me).  I don't know what it is, but I seem to have trouble spotting the passage of time.  Perhaps it's not just me.  I heard today that Girls Aloud are getting back together and releasing a greatest hits album of the last ten years.  Again, I had no idea that it had been ten years since they got together.

I suppose I should take from this that time passes too quickly and we need to make the most of it.

Right - I'm off to bed, I have a day's gardening ahead of me tomorrow!

What constitutes vegetable?

I'm making tea at the minute, and this is to be cottage pie (warmed up) with vegetables.

Do you think a bag of chips will cut it?

By the way, hello to any Raven customers that visit my blog - the address was mentioned in the latest newsletter. Remember Raven for all your Halloween goodies!