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My wife and I flew to Seattle April 14-17 so we could go to a concert.  :-)  We went to see Paul Simon as he kicked off a new tour, and we went to the first concert of the tour.  It was at the WAMU theater, which is part of Qwest Field in Seattle (Qwest Field is where the football team Seattle Seahawks play).

The old way of raising money to make a film consisted of one or a combination of all of the following:

6 years ago my wife and I went on a great vacation to New Zealand.  I took my video camera (a Canon GL-1), and shot lots of video footage- about 3-4 hours of raw footage.  We were there for 10 days.  It was great.

While in film school I was taught video editing on three different software products: Adobe Primier, Final Cut Pro, and Avid.  Out of all of them I liked Final Cut Pro the best, and felt most comfortable in it.  So, back in 2004 (the same year that we went to New Zealand) I purchased a Mac Pro tower and Final Cut Pro (academic version).  And I imported the footage and began editing it near the end of that year.  Since then I've gotten rid of that tower and now have a 20" iMac and have the latest version of Final Cut Express (it is better than my old version of FCP from 6 years ago).

I just "finished" editing it this summer 2010!  Whew!  I put finished in quotes because there are things that could still be improved, but I'm not going to worry about them any more.  It is time to move on to another project.  Now that the editing is done, I need to put the DVD together for it.

One of the main reasons it has taken me so long is simply that it hasn't been a top priority for me.  And I also find that when I'm editing, I want the final result to look professional.  When editing my own vacation I try to imaging someone else who is not familiar with me or my wife watching it and edit it so that it would be interesting to them.  I mean, at some point I expect my children to see these videos and I hope the videos stand on their own without needing to be explained.  Is that over kill?  Perhaps.  But it means that I'm not ashamed to show off my work to any one.  Even if I look ridiculous in parts of the video, the video itself tells a story in an structured way.

So lessons learned?  I'd say, when editing vacation videos, make it a higher priority to finish them within a year of the trip.  Next time.  :-)  What else?  Definitely I learned a lot about audio levels.  Things sound totally different when on the computer versus on the tv.  Any music on the sound track needs to peak somewhere around -17db and dialog captured from the camera should be between 0db and +7db depending.  Audio was a big time consumer for me.  I hate to have to adjust volume on the tv when watching something, so you need to do all the normalizing when editing.  But it pays off if you can hear everything when watching it on the tv and don't need to touch the remote at all during it.  Any other lessons?  Perhaps one more- migrating a video project from one computer to another, and from one version of video editing software to another can be risky.  There was a time when I nearly had to start all over again when I got my new iMac.  The lesson learned- it is better to complete a project on one platform than to let it languish and have to be migrated onto another.  The risk of something going wrong and chances for headaches are pretty high.

I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now and quite like it. And when I saw they had released 10.04 I was excited to upgrade. The last two releases I did an upgrade-in-place with their upgrade tool and I didn't run into any major problems. So I did the same thing for this release. But that's where this story begins.

First I noticed that I was getting warnings and errors related to my X.org config. This was very alarming since I've never seen that before and I don't run any thing unusual in my x.org config. I tried a few different things to address it but could never really solve the problem. Then I noticed that rhythmbox was always crashing on me. Like all the time. Oh and my startup applications would never start up as they were supposed to. And compiz wouldn't work due to complaints about in correct driver even though I did install the correct one.

So after complaining about it for a week to my coworkers they suggested that I back up all my important stuff and then do a fresh install. Complety wipe it and install from scratch with 10.04. So I bought an external hard drive (500G) and did that. The fresh install was soooo easy and quick. I then carefully restored data back to my home folder. If you are doing this be careful not to copy back .gnome2 or .gvfs or anything .g* or at least be very cautious in doing so. Those could break things on an upgrade like this.

Conclusion- the fresh install worked beatifully. Ubuntu 10.04 works great and i'm not seeing any of the problems I had earlier. In fact it also fixed a completely separate issue I was having with my wireless card. So I'm definately still an Ubuntu fan.

I haven't written for a while, but I have gathered several ideas to write about.  Here are a few of them:

• My SageTV setup, and why I chose to go with SageTV versus MythTV, or TiVo or others.
• Controltier.  This is an automation framework for deploying and managing software.  It is a bit complex but can be very powerful.  I use this at work.
• My presentation at Postgresql Conference East, entitled "Postgres Administration for Sysadmins".  This presentation covers basics of configuration and running Postgres and monitoring your database.
• An updated how-to for Virtual Box- setting up several servers and getting them to talk to each other.
• How-to on getting CUPC (cisco's chat/video thingy app) working in Virtual box vm.
• Snippets of some of my screenplays (works in progress).

As you can see, I actually do have things to write about, now if I could only make the time.....

I've found that is it hard to keep up your blog if you don't keep up your blog.  Sounds silly when I write it out like that, but it's true.  If you don't make time for something, then it probably won't happen on its own.  Enough said.