Oh espresso machine...

how happy you make me.

Your smells and sounds

fill me with glee.

The tasty beverages that ensue

are full of flavor and delight

from the bellows of  your body

and keep my eyes alight

Of steamed milk and espresso

mixed with a touch of flavor

Vanilla, Almond, Mocha, and Irish Creme

I love you all...

Yes...I am indeed a nerd.  Did you ever have any question of that? What were you expecting? A regular post with paragraphs? And yes, the last stanza doesn't rhyme.  Deal with it.

Hmmm...maybe not so much busy, but interesting for sure.  My week seemed to be incredibly slow up until Wednesday, then suddenly the speed picked up.  I'm so thankful it's Friday though.  This weekend is the first weekend I have nothing incredibly pressing to do in a while.  I have a little freelance, but other than that, I plan on watching movies and doing some personal work.

What did happen for me this week? My body crashed on Tuesday night.  I was so exhausted that I fell asleep on my couch at 8:30 in the evening.  I thought maybe I'd take a short nap and wake up to get some work done.  Yeah right. With me, naps are generally between three and four hours.  Following that pattern to a T, I woke up at midnight.  I was still so exhausted that I basically just washed my face and went to bed.  I slept until 8:00 am.  I felt fantastic the next day.  It was a long day too.  I had an electrolysis appointment Wednesday night.  So it was a good thing I had gotten rest.

I was very excited to get my podcast out there and available to view.  I'm not going to lie, it was a pain in the ass.  Remind me never to shoot my podcast with my webcam set at its native resolution.  Whenever I tried to export it, it had huge problems processing through the video.  To put it in perspective...the podcast video was about 4 mins and 40 seconds.  I've rendered out full high definition, half hour length programs in faster time than my podcast would render out.  (Render being the technical term for essentially letting the computer put together the video in its final form).   Long story short...it's good to have the first one done. I'll be doing the second one this weekend.

My friend Mike was a great help to me this week.  He was excited about me doing a podcast and wanted to see it.  He's addicted to podcasts.  He listens to them constantly.  So he offered me some tips on how to improve and formats to use.  I'm going to essentially approach my podcasts from now on like their a full out program.  I'm going to produce them like any other show.  So watch for an improvement over the last.

I guess the other news in my life this week is that it's effing cold out!!! My apartment is 66.2, which is a lot better than the last cold snap we had.  I've managed to prepare my apartment for the cold this time.  There's no extra wind coming in the windows anymore.  That means I can walk around my apartment without a blanket and feel ok.

OK, only a couple more things.  I wrote an e-mail to Jenn this weekend asking her if she'd like me to mail her books back to her.  It definitely doesn't bother me talking to her anymore.  What does bother me is her...professional tone...I guess.  There is really very little hint of her desire to maintain a friendship in any of her replies to me.  I've made some attempts to strike up an e-mail conversation by mentioning something funny that I know she's interested in, and often times I just get back something like "Yeah that was funny.  Thanks.  You can mail my book back to [address].  Have a good day."  I dunno. A part of me just wants to ask her if she even wants a friendship.  Another part of me just wants to move forward and not look back.  What do you think?

Also, Chris has been incommunicado all week.  I haven't been able to get a hold of him on either his house or his cell.  My thoughts are that he's at a conference this week, but I don't know.  I haven't really been able to talk to him since like...a week and a half ago.  I just hope he's ok.

Anyway, watch for a new podcast soon.  I'm going to attempt to make it weekly.  Happy weekend!

It's finally ready! There's a big story surrounding this inaugural edition of the podcast.  Yes it says TransLife.net podcast, but that's because I own that domain, and I plan on syndicating it.  So enjoy!

[podcast format="video"]http://www.jessicajaniuk.com/podcast/translife_podcast_ep1.m4v[/podcast]

The real title of this post should be "Frustrations - a tale of a video podcaster", because that's how I feel.  I spent all day on the damn thing.  Took me a while to get the idea for the intro.  Then I had to dig up the footage.  Then I had to cut together some music for a theme.  Then lower thirds, animated background, and credits.  It's just after midnight, and I'm waiting for the final render. For some reason, it's taking forever.  I'll spare the technical details.

At one point during my search for a theme song, I considered writing one in garage band.  I thought it'd be neat to lay down some drum tracks and found info on how to get my rock band drum kit to work with my mac.  That's actually pretty neat.  Unfortunately I have no brass or strings included with garage band to compose with.  So I gave up.  Who wants a song made up of laser synths and single note acoustic guitar?

Despite getting this thing done, I feel like I've gotten nothing accomplished this weekend.  I wanted to spend some time on my resume, work on the website I have to work on, maybe expand on the database structures, look at my book chapters, watch a couple movies...wait I did that last one.

I saw two films this weekend.  I saw Hancock and Tropic Thunder.  Both were decent, Hancock was much better in my opinion.  I'm afraid that watching Tropic Thunder with my parents here really blew the film for me.  I had them over for homemade pizzas and movies.  They enjoyed Hancock, but I get my pickiness about comedies from them.  Usually I find films funny that they don't, like the Austin Powers movies and Life Aquatic.  However, for me, comedy is strongly influenced by who you watch it with.  If the group I'm with isn't laughing, I don't either.  My parents weren't.  In fact, they decided to go home middle of the movie.  It was late and they had to be up early.  If the movie was good, they'd have stayed and finished.  Oh well.

I finished watching it tonight.  I enjoyed it, but it wasn't great to me.  I thought the acting was great.  I just felt the humor was lost on me.  I got the satire.  Maybe it's just the war movie thing.  I dunno.  Maybe I should re-watch it with different people.

Hancock was great, but is anyone surprised I liked it? If it has anything to do with a superhero, I'm all over it.  It was actually a lot better than I thought it'd be.  I very much related to Will Smith's character, and Charlize Theron is always gorgeous. The sadness in Will Smith's eyes is something I've experienced personally recently.

Anyway, the long and the short of the news, the first edition of the podcast will be posted later today.  Oh and my friend Jessica deserves credit for giving me the idea for the next one.  Hopefully that one will go smoother.

I'm currently working on my first ever video podcast.  I'm excited about it.  It'll be focused on gender in the media.  I watched a video yesterday that just got me angry.  And now I feel like I need to say something about it.  So I'm producing a podcast.  It's been fun so far, but I'm not sure how I want to handle it.  I've got one camera, and it's the one that's built in to my iMac.  To use it for podcasting, there's a lot of crap I have to go through.  Plus, anyone who knows me knows I want to put out a nice looking production.  So I set up a portable blue screen and after recording it, did a chroma key on the footage, which worked better than I thought it would.  However, the video taken off the camera has to be rendered by final cut, which takes forever.  Also, I have no decent mic, so I have to use a rock band mic to get decent sound.  Essentially what I'm saying is that it's a pain in the ass to do right now.  I'm hoping to change that as time passes.

I've been looking tonight online for cheap digital video cameras that may be used.  Unfortunately, no one on ebay is selling for less than 100 bucks.  Plus, craigslist is just as bad.  These cameras are old people.  They don't sell MiniDV cameras anymore unless you look for them.  So...don't expect me to pay $100 or more dollars for something like that.  A flip camera in standard def sells for $130.  If I had a choice between a tape based camcorder that's old and used vs a tapeless web video camera with decent video that's brand new, I'll take the brand new one.

Unfortunately this argument is moot anyway.  Anyone who's seen my budget knows I cannot afford either.  If it was a 30 dollar estate sale, I might be able to swing it and write it off as a business expense.  Otherwise, I'm fucked.  Anyone have a digital camera that they're willing to donate?  I'd say even an old school Hi8 or something, but unfortunately I have no way of bringing that footage into my computer.  So it has to be digital.  It'd be so nice of you to donate it.  :)

All joking aside, it is frustrating not being able to shoot even a podcast without having to go through a pain in the ass process. Boo!  On that note, check for the podcast this weekend. :)