Being the proud papa that I am, I would be remiss if I didn’t post Clara’s latest feat: crawling! If you count the army crawl, she’s actually been crawling since around Christmas, but she has always been hesitant to get on her hands and knees. Given that she also know like to walk while holding hands, we thought she might just skip crawling all together – but she proved us wrong!
New Drum Cover–Blood On The Leaves
A few weeks ago I posted my second drum cover to YouTube, but neglected to post it here.
I particularly had a lot of fun with this cover, as it gave me the opportunity to come up with my own interpretation. I also played around with some additional camera angles, but I’m wondering if all the angles started to get annoying (especially when one of them was just a blown up standard-def angle).
I’ve also learned some painful lessons about the Copyright assertions that the record companies can exert over my video. After uploading it, much to my dismay I realized that my video can’t be played on mobile devices, tablets or Xbox. Like my first video, I posted it to Facebook, and I believe that the lack of mobile availability has really hampered the number of views – I guess “mission accomplished” if you’re the record company, trying to prevent views.
I’m still learning the ropes with this “drum cover” effort, so any feedback is definitely welcomed!
Facebook: crappily copying yet again
For Facebook’s 10th birthday, it looks like they decided to give everyone a gift of a little gift and make a little video montage of your Facebook moments. Just like anything on Facebook, it’s going viral and my news feed is littered with all of these videos. This is a cute little idea, except for one problem: it’s not theirs. Google came up with the “let’s convert everyone’s pictures into a video montage” last month. To make matters worse, not only did Facebook copy the idea, but their video is lame and limited. All the video does it tell you when you joined Facebook, show off some random pictures and then displays your “top liked” status updates and pictures. It ends with a montage wall of some of your random pictures.
I wish I could show it to you, but Facebook won’t let you post it outside of their walled garden. Luckily, Google + allowed me to download my video and post it back to YouTube:
I realize that neither company came up with the concept of making a video montage out of photos, but if Facebook is going to be the second one to implement it on a wide scale, they could at least match the creativity in what they’re copying. Some of this may be that I’ve been a lot more deliberate in the photos that I’ve posted to Facebook. Before Clara was born, I hardly posted anything to Facebook – so they may have had slimmer pickings. However Facebook’s lack of quality photos is due to the fact that they’ve given me less reason to trust them with my photos. Over the years Facebook has been so convoluted in their privacy controls that I’ve been extremely hesitant to post anything. Google, on the other hand has at least given me the impression that I have control over my own privacy. When they implemented their auto-backup of photos, those photos were private by default. While I know both companies profit off collecting my information, the value proposition offered by Google has been greater.
Part of me wonders if Facebook intentionally did not make the videos better. People have become a lot more leery of the information they’ve provided to Facebook. For me, Facebook knows when I started my job, when I got married, when my daughter was born. Maybe if they included more specific details, it would have the reverse viral effect and people would have the hell freaked out of them. Perhaps they didn’t want to tip their hand on the data they’ve been storing.
I’m not some Google+ apologist. The truth is that their social network doesn’t really have any scale, thus they don’t offer much to me. The thing that bothers me the most however is that people on Facebook are acting like Facebook has delivered a great original idea, when they don’t realize that they’re getting a sub-par copy of another’s innovation. This is just the latest idea that Facebook has stolen from someone else and have used their scale to make this appear like some great breakthrough – just like they did with hash-tags, @-mentions, and trending topics.
Facebook, if you’re going to steal, do a better job.
Update on Craigslist-Feedly: It’s Both of Them
A lot of my recent traffic has been due people searching for the Feedly/Craigslist problem, and I’m happy to learn that Feedly has finally responded on their blog:
Update Regarding Craigslist Feeds
It sounds like – technologically speaking – both sides aren’t playing nice and the behavior of Feedly polling is overloading Craigslist. Hopefully this issue is as Feedly describes and both sides can get a resolution soon. Far be it for me to make assumptions – but reading between the lines of the blog post tells me that Craigslist isn’t really responding to Feedly either. Not to pile on Craigslist again, but I don’t get how these big web site companies can be so inaccessible. I know having a large support at Craigslist isn’t feasible, but come on – would it kill you to check your email or monitor a Twitter account?
I’m not holding my breath. While I love Feedly, my Craigslist feeds are over at Newsblur right now.
My First Drum Cover
January has been a month with not much free time, but for a glimpse of how I’ve been spending what little I’ve had, check out this video below:
Yes, I’ve finally recorded my first drum cover, using #41 by Dave Matthews Band. I’ve been excited to get into doing drum covers and open up a new chapter in my drumming. Not only do I get a chance to apply my drumming towards some fun songs, but also this gives me a chance to learn about recording and video production.
For Christmas my family gifted me with a set of drum mics, along with the stands, mounts and cables necessary for recording. I then got an audio interface (specifically a Tascam US-1800) to connect everything to my laptop via USB. After getting a passable sound, I was eager to set out and record my first song. #41 is one I’ve always enjoyed playing and made a fun one out of the gate. I set up a couple of mixes of the song: one with a click track identified, along with a mix with diminished drums – of which I found out was more difficult to make than thought. It turns out that it’s tough EQ’ing drums out of a mix without making the song sound empty. Ultimately I tried to get the bass drum out of the mix, then diminish the rest. I think the results here were mixed.
I then set out to do some takes. My goal here was to get something out quickly, so I did sacrifice a little bit of quality in terms of my playing and the ultimate mix. If I were recording original music, contributing to a final drum mix, I would have spent a lot more time to do more compression and EQ’ing to get that perfect sound. For the purpose of these the video, I was pretty satisfied with the sound of my drums.
Next up was the video. Using the Nikon D7000 that we bought for Clara last year, I mounted the camera on the tripod and used it as the primary camera. The video quality on the Nikon is pretty impressive, especially when stationary. I then mounted a little web cam on a lamp to capture an overhead angle, outputting the video to another laptop. For my next video, I’m anxious to try some additional angles, as well as a different overhead angle. In this one, I didn’t like how my face was cut off half of the time. I also learned the embarrassing lesson that I need to clean my room before recording again.
This process taught me a lot, and after doing some mental trail-blazing, I’m anxious to give another song a try. I’d definitely welcome any suggestions or feedback.