Well, i was woken up today by my dad at 7am… Thanks Dad. ¬.¬ you know i don’t have to be at college until 1pm! Grr… So i got up nice and early, and got to see the untouched snow around my house, yay.
I did take some photos (i stuck my mobile out the window and took a few snaps) but they came out all red.
But then once i had woke up a bit and checked my emails scratched myself and turned on my pc i took a few more pics, which came out better, the sun was out.
The road out side house, with snow… and glare.
My Back Garden with snow!
Yea so there is a few pics of Swindon in snow, i was going to take more on the way to college etc, but by the time i got out and about it was all slushy and i didn’t really want to post pictures of icy mush.
I brought Alan Lastufka (of FiveAwesomeGuys & fallofautumdistro) and Micheal W. Dean’s book - YouTube: An Insider’s Guide To Climbing The Charts.
I haven’t yet finished reading it, I am just over a quarter way through it, but it is simply brilliant.
It isn’t how it sounds just a book about getting high on YouTube, it is SO much more, and the title really doesn’t give it justice.
Alan in particular describes many aspects of how to make good video, often to a cinematic level, however unlike most, it is broken down step by step and designed for noobs (me) and provides good alternatives for ALL types of users, from those using crappy web cams to those who can afford the high-tech high-res DV mini cams.
I can honestly say i am reading this cover to cover, and this will most probably be one of the best non-fiction books i have ever brought, and i am sure this will most definitely help and guide me to making better good videos for YouTube, and may just help me to create awesome videos for FiveAwesomeWebGeeks.
This does make me think though, why can’t they teach like this in college? When i started college i also started Media Studies, i attended 2 lessons, and decided it didn’t suit me.
This was mainly because of how it was taught, it seems your taught to pass the course, or how to do it this exact way, which shouldn’t be how media and creative subjects should be taught. For instance Alan describes different camera angles and styles and how to structure the story/video, just these few pages taught me more than the two lessons i did which was supposed to be teaching me just about camera angles and styles.
This book had really made me reconsider my view on getting into media and media production, and i think it could be for me if i can find the right way to learn and develop what i need to; I might have found the base or stepping stone with this book, and of course, YouTube.
I am rambling a little here, but i just wanted to quickly share this thought.
PS. Got rid of most of the Malware, was a pain but i think i got rid of it all
Edit:
Just thought i would add a comment about this. I LOVE the Internet.
This post has been online for around 4 hours (at time of editing) it is already on the second page of google for the title of the book (17th result) AND Alan has made a comment on my YouTube about it. I mean just WOW! lol. Thanks Alan
Im subscribed to this guy, does some good songs… this is what he did if he got over 100 subscribers he got that and 2800 on top, with a little help from SXEPHIL.
Wondered what people think of the new theme im using on D-Blog, i quite liked it and it similar to what i hope to do when i find the time to create my own custom theme, so it will probably be based of this but instead have my own personal images stuck all over the background
Gah horrible day today. Been moving stuff in and out of the loft and trying to get rid of some nasty malware which has got itself on both my Desktop and Laptop
Have to admit, i would love to know what and how it is doing what its doing, this little bugger is changing google results and swapping it with it’s own version, which redirects me to all sorts of crappy sites, and i also have something which causes multiple pop ups when using Google.
Annoying thing is last time i came across something like this it was on a friends PC, and it was just an IE addon, which after finding it, tracking the source and deleting it was pretty easy to clear up, but this clever sod is not to do with my browser, its bigger than that it effects any and every browser i use.
I am dying to find out how its working doing my nut in :/ I think it might be some how directing DNS requests to their server instead of my own pre-set ones (openDNS).
Anyway… its late and i have a nice scanner which looks like it will be running all night on my desktop pc… i hope this guy on this forum can help they seem to know what they are talking about.
1st January 2009, time for regrets (i really ate too much sweet stuff this Christmas, although it was a lot less that previous years) and of course a time for the infamous new years resolutions.
So I will jinx myself and post a few of mine here
Develop video production and presenting skills, this will mainly be done by the shiny new collab channel I have started - http://youtube.com/fiveawesomewebgeekswhich will hopefully get good but i may also do a radio show or podcast, not sure which I would prefer or which would be more beneficial :p
Lose Weight… HA! yea everyone has this :p does anyone ever do it?
Stop wasting time, sounds strange but i have had enough wasting my time with people, situations everything. I don’t care if it seems selfish, I am young and i need to do everything i possibly can with maximum return. Now this isn’t o i will stop volunteering to do stuff or i wont be sociable, in fact quite the opposite, spending quality time with friends, is a good use of my time, spending quality time working for other people is a good use of my time. However at the moment what volunteering i am doing is most definitely not worth while, I am not being given the opportunity to show anything close to my true potential, and that makes it not worth my time, there is simply no point sitting around for a day a week doing nothing productive - If i cant develop or learn, i don’t enjoy what i do and if i am not developing, learning or enjoying something there’s not much point in me doing it. I have alot I can and do do, so why waste that time i have.
Complete some of my projects. I have many many many many projects (last count 34) which i have started and become bored of or just not found the time, so this year i am determined to spend some decent time and get the projects knocked out to a degree where i can publish them in one form or another and get them out there so i can start getting user feedback, and hopefully money.
Do more business, sounds obvious but i would like to get myself out there more and start going for the jobs i have been letting pass me by on what seems to be a daily basis. If i can do it i will do it, if not i know plenty of others which can.
Confidence, get more!! I am often plenty confident online, but i need to build up this skill, throughout all of my work. Confidence in myself that what i am doing is good or at the least acceptable; i have a habit or keeping the work till the last minute trying to make it better and then miss the dead line completely. So i shall try and be more confident and I ain’t takin’ no sh*t this year! Move aside Dan is in the building!
Okay, so I’m an avid YouTube user. I go on it every day watch 10-50 videos a day and use the site a lot. BUT it sucks. And it aggravates me so much that YouTube which is owned and operated by THE biggest and richest Internet corporation (Google) in the world, STILL has a site with “features” which don’t work, are unwanted or are just plain crap. For instance, the blog feature which should enable me to “easily” post a video and text to my blog right from YouTube, which would probably mean i would end up posting tons of videos which i want to share. But no. It simply doesn’t work, from what i read on the support forums - it’s not just me. From other peoples comments it seams this brilliant feature strangely works perfectly find for Blogger (The site OWNED by Google… who also own YouTube) but not so well for others, I was trying to get it working with this blog and also a blog i set up for the Five Awesome Web Geeks (http://geeks.dansgalaxy.co.uk) but neither seems to work. Of course the best part of this story is how its not just one little feature, its all the features, there isn’t much on YouTube which works perfectly, which hasn’t been there since before google brought them out… Another example of the simply rubbish site that is YouTube is the message system. For some reason YouTube just doesn’t want to show me the nice messages telling me that it has failed to post the video and message to my blog for and “Unknown” reason. This just bugs me so much because it is Google, the best and I expect a much much higher standard from this kind of corporation - Google CAN and SHOULD do better and are letting their users down - BADLY! There is so much which i could rant about YouTube at the moment, from the time i walked in on YouTube changing… This was mid change when they played around with the time/title display for videos… … Now me personally, i would have thought YouTube is template based… So why did i see this?! Surly the new template/style should have been done and then a single setting change and its all done? For me the bottom line is YouTube is making a basic mistake, they aren’t testing their features. Is it really that hard for YouTube (like BBC iPlayer and many many other sites) to have a beta option? I mean what would it take for them to set up beta.youtube.com, which had a version of YouTube which included all the latest features, which would allow the users to play and test and then provide feedback and discuss the changes in a decent forum… No google groups is NOT a decent forum, vBulletin is a decent forum and if google got the feedback from its users and its beta testing right everything would improve. Users would get a better experience from properly tested features which have been proven to be WANTED by users, and of course from a publicity point of view YouTube wouldn’t have people like me moaning about the poor service.
Rant Over… You May Resume Normality.
EDIT (31/12/08):
Just had a thought as to the message and possibly other problems, could it be poor co-location techniques? For instance most geeks should know that YouTube is obviously not hosted on one server (in fact is uses Google HUGE server farms on many continents in many countries), and now as soon as you type in Youtube.com you get directed to the local version for me that’s uk.YouTube.com, but even then i know that its not one server for the whole UK, and now i am thinking i need to make my point because i am waffling. My point is that the messages do (eventually) appear in my inbox, usually about 4 hours plus after it tells me i have new messages, so could it be that the site gets the new message information from one server while the messages have not yet been synced to the server i connect to to view the message page?
Personally i think its unlikely, as i would have thought google wouldn’t have this issue… then again some of the bits i pointed out above suggest they may not be running things as best as possible…
Okay now i have to admit, i was kind of wanting to not release yet another blog post about twitter into the void of bits and bytes which make up the Internet, Twitter or a twitter related site or app seems to be mentioned daily on TechCrunch, and well its just over publicised. Of course part of it is the programmer in me screaming… ITS SO FREAKIN’ SIMPLE!!!!!!! in reality almost any reasonable web developer can create a basic form of twitter with a click of their fingers.
Before i go off on a huge discussion (yes a discussion with myself) just a brief overview of what twitter actually is…
It’s a service which allows you to update whatever you’re doing, whenever you’re doing it.
I think the main cause of the huge success of twitter is the extremally easy to use APIs which enable developers to create apps, sites, gadgets and well ANYTHING which can do anything on twitter, which has lead to the explosion of websites which all use twitter.
Personally I use a twitter sidebar gadget for vista, which is okay, but sucks quite a bit from a user friendly point of view and well it does my head in sometimes, which is why i started to redevelop it, and will hopefully end up with my own version. which i will of course release if its any good.
I think that twitter is a great service and would hate to see the day when google or Microsoft realise this and decide to buy it for an unbelievable amount of money. While generally I’m not a google basher, we need more standalone things like this keeps the Internet special
As you might have guessed, I’m a twitter user and some days it seems to be all i do, which is strange as usually i do something and then tweet about it…
Okay first off, YAY Christmas… well not yay, it kinda sucks if i am honest, its cold boring and you have to put up with family members you don’t really like. But still, i got my nice new laptop which i am currently typing on in bed.. so i am quite happy with that
YouTube:
Okay so my plan was, get laptop, install software start making Internet videos… But alas no… i get laptop i install software i click record i do a little dance, i click stop i click done i go… What f’ing read error?!! .. it seems (even after 3 re-installs) the software doesn’t like me and doesn’t want to save my recording, which is a little bit of a pain i have to admit =/
Okay, the above was done in bed, its the afternoon now, and the web cam problem is really annoyed me I having a look and even the movie software which came with the laptop (vaio movie story) doesn’t recognise the built in motion eye cam, and neither does windows movie maker… although i did just come across Web Cam companion2 which was able to record and save without throwing up errors… and now as i type i have just discovered all the failed recording DID save in my documents :/ very strange… so it turns out i can record but i have to put up with the capture program giving errors and crashing, and then have to manually import the files into the software to be edited? Wow doesn’t that sound like an efficient piece of software…
Also been some debating about the name of the new geek channel, and exactly how it will work, i first registered fiveawesomewebgeeks because the whole five awesome… was pretty cool and unfortunately some douche has registered fiveawesomegeeks and the account has been deleted and i still couldn’t register the name… So the other day while thinking up cool YouTube channel names (notice how i use the term “cool” loosely) and i now registered awesomegeeks, awesomewebgeeks, 5awesomewebgeeks so hopefully we will be on one of those channels in the new year! so watch this space.
Also on the note of the Five Awesome Web Geeks (5awg) i think i might have found the 5th geek so *yay* but i guess we shall see, so there are 3 days left to new year and i guess i should start dishing out the login details, and crossing my fingers and hoping the guys who said they would make videos… actually do make videos lol all fun i think Hayley, Lew (the new guy) and I will probably be the main people, particularly as Lew (http://uk.youtube.com/user/papplemanger) seems to already be into making some weird and wacky videos… so yay cant wait.
I also ordered Alan (from five awesome guys) YouTube book from amazon, which i should be getting between Jan 5th and 9th.
Hmm okay, so i have mentioned before i am involved with a local community radio station, and i keep changing my mind about where i think its going; one minute I’m thinking ah this is futile give in and get on with all the other awesome projects im working on, and then again i think no this could be a lot of fun given the chance just a shame that some illogical people are … yea im gonna choose not to finish this sentence.
But yes, i am writing a long wordy email to the station manager, see if anything changes and it starts to be worth my time, as at the moment it isn’t, and I’m not doing what i was told i would be doing in the beginning… and i really don’t like feeling like i have been lied to… So i have decided, i will finish this email, and send it off, if things change and i get to do more of what i love then we are all happy they get to use my array of skills and i get to have a bit of fun, if not i guess i will be making more Internet videos and working on my other projects… yea the ones which will probs make me some money in the end! lol
Hmm just started watching the five awesome teens on YouTube… hmm looks fun now watching them from the beginning lol.
I really should be blogging and vlogging more now i have my laptop, i uploaded 3 videos i did with hayley the other day so check it out -> http://youtube.com/dansgalaxy
For instance, the blog feature which should enable me to “easily” post a video and text to my blog right from YouTube, which would probably mean i would end up posting tons of videos which i want to share. But no. It simply doesn’t work, from what i read on the support forums - it’s not just me. From other peoples comments it seams this brilliant feature strangely works perfectly find for Blogger (The site OWNED by Google… who also own YouTube) but not so well for others, I was trying to get it working with this blog and also a blog i set up for the Five Awesome Web Geeks (
doesn’t want to show me the nice messages telling me that it has failed to post the video and message to my blog for and “Unknown” reason. This just bugs me so much because it is Google, the best and I expect a much much higher standard from this kind of corporation - Google CAN and SHOULD do better and are letting their users down - BADLY! There is so much which i could rant about YouTube at the moment, from the time i walked in on YouTube changing… 
This was mid change when they played around with the time/title display for videos… … Now me personally, i would have thought YouTube is template based… So why did i see this?! Surly the new template/style should have been done and then a single setting change and its all done? For me the bottom line is YouTube is making a basic mistake, they aren’t testing their features. Is it really that hard for YouTube (like BBC iPlayer and many many other sites) to have a beta option? I mean what would it take for them to set up beta.youtube.com, which had a version of YouTube which included all the latest features, which would allow the users to play and test and then provide feedback and discuss the changes in a decent forum… No google groups is NOT a decent forum, vBulletin is a decent forum and if google got the feedback from its users and its beta testing right everything would improve. Users would get a better experience from properly tested features which have been proven to be WANTED by users, and of course from a publicity point of view YouTube wouldn’t have people like me moaning about the poor service.
Okay now i have to admit, i was kind of wanting to not release yet another blog post about twitter into the void of bits and bytes which make up the Internet, Twitter or a twitter related site or app seems to be mentioned daily on TechCrunch, and well its just over publicised. Of course part of it is the programmer in me screaming… ITS SO FREAKIN’ SIMPLE!!!!!!! in reality almost any reasonable web developer can create a basic form of twitter with a click of their fingers.