Michael Verdi

What The Hell?

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:46:15 +0000

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Hey check it out! It’s another cat video on the internet. In fact, it’s a video of a cat watching a cat video. How fun is that? I know, right.

Anyway, the reason that I made this was to show Jay how I edit iPhone video in Final Cut Pro. So, if you’re interested in that (plus how I compress the video), download this -> iPhone to Final Cut Pro.

1&1 messed up my websites [Flickr]

Michael Verdi — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:51:55 PST

Michael Verdi posted a photo:

They keep telling me that the permissions on things have not changed - that I must be mistaken but their own damn tool says I'm right. It is taking weeks to get this sorted. I'm done with these guys.

Hwy MPG in my Mini Cooper [Flickr]

Michael Verdi — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:45:21 PST

Michael Verdi posted a photo:

I got 43.5 mpg on my drive up to Austin this morning for DrupalCamp.

Sequence 47

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:58:57 +0000

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This video is part of a game that a bunch of us are playing this month. The idea is that each day, someone different makes a 90 second video, inspired in some way by the previous day’s piece. This video was inspired by Heath’s video and tomorrow Mike will make one somehow based on this one. I’m collecting all the videos over here.

In case you’re interested, here’s the chain of though that led to this video. I started by writing down some things that interested me in Heath’s video. One of those was the closeup of his eyes. That made me think of the scene in 2001 where David Bowman goes into the monolith. I’ve been listening to The Flaming Lips a lot lately and I thought the end of Silver Trembling Hands and the beginning of Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast would make a cool alternate soundtrack. My original idea was to have Aren (the robot from Talkbot.tv) just say something funny at the end but I’d been listening to the Glee soundtrack all day and I thought it would be better if I could somehow work in one of those tracks. The best one is their version of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing which, I realized, is the song that they used in the last scene of The Sopranos. And that fits perfectly with the Walt Whitman poem that Heath used. All of that happened in my head in about a minute after not coming up with an idea all day.

Update 11/20/09: I finally implemented Ogg video on my site in the new HTML5 video tag. If you are using Firefox 3.5 you’ll get the ogg video when you click play. If you are using Safari or Chrome you’ll get an mp4 file and if you are using IE6, 7 or 8 you’ll get a flash player. I’m using javascript to replace the thumbnail image with the video player because the poster image attribute isn’t supported yet. Also having the image displayed first makes it look better on my iPhone.

Embryonic

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:30:33 +0000

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I’ve known of The Flaming Lips for a long time. I vaguely remember seeing them play in Oklahoma in the fall of 1986. Fast-forward twenty-something years and Last.fm is constantly telling me that I need to listen to them. So about 4 months ago I downloaded a few of their albums and totally fell in love. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is so fucking good it instantly became one of my all time favorites.

So here I am, all excited about The Flaming Lips and as luck would have it they were about ready to release a new album – Embryonic. They even had 3 of the tracks already on iTunes which I purchased right away. Then I listened to them. WTF? This didn’t even sound like the same band. On top of that, unlike the beautiful recordings with special headphone surprises of their last few albums, these tracks sounded like they were recorded badly, on a 4-track , in a garage.

Soon after, they started promoting the new album and had the whole thing streaming on the web in a few places. So I gave it a couple of listens but I was still disappointed. My friend Steve says that the first album you really like from a band will usually always be your favorite. I find that’s mostly true. Rarely does a band reinvent themselves and it makes you like them more – after all, you fell in love with the old version. That said, Radiohead certainly did it with Kid A.

So here’s the thing about Embryonic; in my opinion it’s not really a collection of songs. It’s more like one 70 minute epic. Right after it came out 3 weeks ago, I bought it, put it on my iPod and went out running with it. That’s where it finally made sense to me. Once I was able to focus on it and listen to the whole thing – none of the tracks out of context – it began to reveal itself. Now, something like 3 dozen complete listens later, I have to say it’s brilliant. I love it more each time I hear it. It’s without a doubt my favorite Flaming Lips album so far.

I shot this video on my phone yesterday as I drove over the favorite part of my usual running route. “See The Leaves” came on and it felt perfect. I thought I’d try to share it with you.

And yes, I would love to have the special furry fan edition of Embryonic!

Kids

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:42:16 +0000

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I can tell you right now that I’m not doing the 30 videos in 30 days thing. But seeing that NaVloPoMo is happening I took a look through some of things I’ve shot on my phone and found these. Over the last year a lot of new kids have moved into the neighborhood. This is what they look like from in front of my house.

Cabaret of Flames

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:01:04 +0000

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My friend Poid is big time into Burning Man and it’s virtual equivalent (sort of) Burning Life. This year she made an installation in Second Life based on her experience at this year’s Burning Man. I made this short video to help document/promote it all. You can read more about Cabaret of Flames over here.

Running and Thinking

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:56:09 +0000

For me, running is a perfect time to do some thinking. Sometimes I can plan out in advance what I want to work on. I’ve come up with lots of ideas for Talkbot that way. Sometimes no matter what I “want” to think about it seems my brain has it’s own plan. That’s been the case on the last few runs where it seems my brain has wanted to do some thinking about running while running. Maybe it’s trying to tell me something as I think this stuff applies to more than just running.

If I don’t set a goal it’s very likely that I will do what’s easy.
If I set a goal and give myself permission to quit early I will almost certainly quit early.
I reach my goals to the extent that I can keep my word to myself. This is mostly a mental game that I must play with myself.
On the way to reaching a goal, I will feel bad, want to quit, have problems, get bored and put up just about any roadblock that my mind can invent.
It’s only when I reach a goal that I have the ability and opportunity to surprise myself by doing more than I thought I could.
The more I run the more I am able to run.
Rest days are necessary.
Some days I can’t wait to run. Some days running is the last thing I want to do. The trick is to learn how to get myself out of the door.

90

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:32:49 +0000

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“See at 90, you have no limit.”

Rebecca’s grandfather turned 90 a couple of weeks ago. I’m hoping to follow in his footsteps.

Dog, Cat, Cows & Airplanes

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:28:40 +0000

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A few clips captured with my phone.

Redesign

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:56:33 +0000

Check out my new digs. I’ve been working on this redesign for about a week now. I’m sure there will be bugs for me to fix and I still have about 3 years of old posts to update but I think the vast majority of the work is done. I’ve been inspired over the last few months from attending Design4Drupal in Boston, working with Jen and reading (at her suggestion) Handcrafted CSS by Dan Cederholm. So this site doesn’t look exactly the same in all browsers. I’m using some fancy CSS3 stuff so if you’re using IE8 or IE7 you won’t see rounded corners and shadows anywhere. And if you are using IE6 you’ll see a completely unstyled site! I just can’t waste any more of my time making things work in IE6.

I also wanted to get away from all the special video apparatus I had installed over the years. I’ve always hated feeling like I’m at the mercy of whoever is maintaining my plugins. I’ve decided to go with just the blip.tv player all over the place. It makes a super simple and, I think, effective solution. It also fits right in with my workflow since I’m already hosting the videos there. I just copy and paste the embed code in my post and wrap it in div with a style on it. Piece of cake. And I can drop the embed code into the “excerpt” section and use them to make these cool archive pages.

Not A Video

michael@michaelverdi.com (Michael Verdi) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 03:50:20 +0000

I was talking to Ryanne this afternoon and the subject of fewer and fewer videoblog posts came up. It wasn’t a big long discussion but we did cite a lack of excitement almost 5 years down the road plus a constant connection to far flung friends via Twitter as factors. We also noted that it’s not a lack of excitement for creating things as we both still do that regularly; it’s that we’re excited about making things in other places.

For me, videoblogging about my life started as an exercise in storytelling using the subject matter that’s always present. Now that I spend much of my time directing my creative energy elsewhere, what I’m realizing is that I really grew to like the idea of documenting my life. I don’t want to give that up. This is a tiny experiment in figuring out a way to integrate that back into my life. So I’m writing this post on my iPhone as I lay in bed watching TV. Maybe I’ll do this once in a while between videos.