The hardest part of editing this was going through the 44 minutes of footage to find the few minutes of interview that I felt was really powerful and told a story. I also wished they had talked more about the history of Sharp-Leadenhall and what happened to them than about parking and the business of running the church which was what most of the interview was. But I still think what of the interview that did end up in the doc was really good, and I used narration to fill in the gaps.

As far as production, my favorite part of the whole documentary is the intro. Which actually came together by accident. I found the effect that I used to give their voices a more “tape recorder” kind of sound when I was trying to put EQ on and accidentally clicked something else and it sounded really cool. And I found the music while searching for blues jazz on freeplaymusic.com, and I wish I had more of that song but the entire piece of music was only 43 seconds long, so that intro is actually the entire song. That sort of mellow, simplistic, blue jazz is surprisingly hard to find.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the way the doc came out and I’d like to go back some time and get to do a more in depth interview about the neighborhood itself.

Listen here:

Note: The background noise in this is from my air conditioner. It really is that loud so that’s not the H4n’s fault.

Programming on the desktop is generally a pleasure. OS X comes with it’s own development IDE, Xcode, and a full set of components with complete documentation. For the most part restrictions are not placed on desktop developers. They are able to distribute and license their application as they see fit.

On the other hand, programming on the iPhone is much the opposite experience. The tools and components are still there but if you want to get your program on the device itself you have to jump through hoops. First, you must pay $99 per year to join the program. Then you have to go through this complex process of generating a security certificate (See HC Episode 9) and if you wave your arms around in exactly the right manner you’ll get it to run on your device. If you didn’t wave your arms right you’ll spend the next 30 minutes trying to track down error messages because you missed setting some obscure project setting. Not exactly the pinnacle of user experience I’ve come to expect from Apple products.

Then there’s getting your app in the App Store. I imagine most people have seen the news stories detailing Apple’s confusing and often inconsistent approval process. There’s the one of the app Eucalyptus that was banned from the app store because of its ability to download the Kama Sutra from Project Gutenberg. Which wasn’t resolved until the furor in the media caused Apple to respond. While many people pointed out the fact that Safari is also able to download “offensive” content and neither one have much control over what users search for. What concerns me more though is Apple’s practice of banning apps that “duplicate functionality.” Such as the Google Voice app, GV Mobile. Obviously being an app that allows phone calls and SMS it is duplicating functionality of the iPhone, and it’s easy to imagine why Apple wants to keep such competition off their device.

Now I’m all for fair competition in an open market, but faulting Microsoft for bundling a browser and a media player while allowing Apple and Linux distros to bundle far more software hardly seems like fair market. It’s not as if Microsoft is only including Internet Explorer and then blocking all other browsers from running on Windows. That I would consider to be monopolistic practices, but merely attempting to provide an offering of features equivalent to your competition hardly seems anti-competitive.

Apple, on the other hand, blatantly blocks apps from running on their device that may compete with their own offerings while their process for allowing or denying the distribution of applications is almost completely opaque. I don’t know of a more solid definition of monopolistic practices than intentionally blocking competing applications from running on your platform. Imagine if you couldn’t install Firefox or Camino on your Mac because they duplicated the functionality of Safari.

The argument that it’s okay because Apple has a much smaller market share doesn’t hold much weight with me. I don’t think users consider market share as a part of their purchasing decision, they look at things like price and features. But in antitrust law it seems merely having market share is considered so much of a boon that it requires removing other competitive benefits the company may have.

As mobile platforms like the iPhone become more and more like portable mini-computers, I think a precedent needs to be set that mobile platforms are not so drastically different from the desktop platform where it would be considered absurd to block users from installing whatever they want; good, bad, or otherwise. And it seems to me odd that in this Web 2.0 era where other companies are often criticized for their closed nature, that Apple’s behavior is often tolerated because they produce exceptional products and because they don’t necessarily have the highest market share.

That said, I won’t be getting an iPhone until I’m not forced to switch to AT&T just to get one. Which luckily may be soon.

Links:
MeGUI – http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui/
ffdshow tryouts – http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/
AviSynth – http://avisynth.org

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View in 480p – Download

This first clip is the full introduction segment:

Next is the story of how the term Hi-Fi for High Fidelity came to be:

This is the story of his favorite recording and how he came to do personal recordings of Rosa Ponselle singing after she retired in Baltimore:

A short clip on the original mechanical Victrolas as well as the first of two records in their entirety:

A clip on the quality of recordings and records during WWII, and the full recording of Enrico Caruso from 1919:

A clip on the origin of stereo and how stereo records work as well as the introduction of LPs:

And finally, the full conductors introduction to the first LP edition of Handel’s Messiah.

by: Kevin Vinck

This first one is from my Audio Production class last semester. The assignment was to take a short story and create and audio drama out of it. We chose Death by Scrabble by Charlie Fish. Enjoy!

by: Kevin Vinck, Brian Debbie, Rachel Stump.

NCR Trail

Yesterday I decided to get out my bike and head to the Northern Central Rail Trail up in Northern Baltimore. I had actually tried to get there twice before but was thwarted by unforeseen circumstances (I couldn’t figure out how to attach the bike rack to my car.)

The Northern Central Railroad Trail runs along what used to be a a railroad track, running 21 miles from Baltimore, Maryland to Sunbury, Pennsylvania. I rode the portion from Monkton to White Hill. Since it used to be a railroad track the trail is very smooth and even so I went a good 10-12mph the whole way.

Click read more to take a look at the video, pictures, and map of the trip.

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First, pick a nice font. There’s something deep within me that like seeing my words, my organic words, typed out on the screen in the regulated forms of a font. Something about taking speech and representing it in physical form.

I need to come up with a story. Or a protagonist. I’m not really sure which comes first. I need to invent a story to tell. So I did the logical thing and asked Google…

What kind of books do you like to read?

Well, I don’t really read much. I’ve been known to read dictionaries, but I don’t imagine that would make a very interesting story. I also read textbooks. I guess the last real actual book I read was Lord of the Rings. I never got through more than the first 10 or so chapters. Oh right, I really liked To Kill a Mockingbird. And Gulliver’s Travels was pretty good too. Incidentally both have already had really well-done movies made of them. So, what genre are they, Google? Ok, so To Kill a Mockingbird is Southern Gothic and a coming-of-age story. And Gulliver’s Travels is satire. So let’s say I like satire, southern gothic, and coming-of-age stories. And I guess we might as well throw fantasy in for good measure.

What kind do you want to write?

Well I guess I ought to choose from the kinds that I’ve identified a liking for, eh? Alright. I can think of a few other Southern Gothic stories I like and social commentary comes with the genre, so let’s do that. I’d like to write a southern gothic story with some sort of social commentary. Now what?

Let’s try an exercise. Write down the titles of your ten favorite [insert genre] stories (or [insert genre] writers). Ask yourself what you like about each one and what they have in common. Then decide what you can (and can’t) learn from each one.

Gah, that’s a lot of steps all at once. Let’s break it down a bit more. Ok, the titles of my ten favorite stories or authors from that genre. Hmm, this is going to take some research, I tend not to remember the titles or authors of my favorite stories so much as they stories themselves. I wonder if I still have my english literature textbook around here… Ah, here it is: Literature. Obviously the editors weren’t the most imaginative bunch of people when it came to titles. But nonetheless here it is. 1,538 pages of writing ripe for the picking of. Oh look, here’s one in my other book. Cathedral by Raymond Carver. Turned out to be a really nice story actually. Enough reminiscing though. Here’s what I’m looking for, the other southern gothic writer that stuck out in my mind. Flannery O’Connor. Ok, so that’s 2 people. Ugh, this is giving me a headache thinking of people when I read so little. Let’s move on. What do they have in common?

Wait a second. I’m noticing a disturbing trend in what I’m liking. We’re supposed to write a backstory for both the protagonist and the antagonist. But none of these stories have a clear antagonist. And if they do, it’s not an actual character, it’s a thing. And I can’t very well right a backstory for a thing can I? Maybe he won’t mind that I don’t have a clear antagonist if the story is good enough. Or he could be like some of the other teachers I’ve had and deduct points for not completing the homework the way they want. I’ve come to find that some teachers, no matter how good the final product may be, will still give you a D if it wasn’t what they were looking for.

This seems to be the impasse I constantly reach when doing assignments, and my productivity drops to exactly 0. Do I continue with what I think will be good, and risk getting a bad grade because it may not be what the teacher wants? Or do I try to reshape what I’m doing to a somehow less perfect but more correct version?