Technical Problems and a New Blog Renter

My video host, Blip.tv, is having some technical issues today. That's why there are no thumbnail images for any recent vids. But fear not, the videos themselves are still there for you to watch. Just click the "Play Quicktime version" links to watch. Despite this mild annoyance (and even more annoyance if I have to re-upload my thumbnails and then modify the code of each post), I am really liking Blip as a video host over YouTube. The quality is better, the interface is better, and they have much better terms of use. I notice that about half of the traffic I've been getting lately has been searches about "how to delete your YouTube account." I don't know how to delete the account. I still have my account there because with director status, I've gotten over half a million video views, and I don't really care if they want to use any of the stuff I've uploaded. But as for a video blogging/podcasting platform, they aren't even in the same ballpark as blip.

I also have a new blog renter today. Don't let the generic title of it, "Personal Blog," fool you. It's full of delicious recipes. Hit that Featured Blog button in the right hand column and check it out.

Too cute for this vlog

I am a very proud dad of an adorable 5 month old girl named Stella, but you might not know it by watching this vlog. She has her own blog where I post pictures and videos for our friends and family across the planet to see. I tend to think that these little family videos wouldn't be of much interest to people outside of our families and friends, and I also don't think that the tone of this vlog should be all cutesie. But this video that we shot last night was too damn cute not to post here.

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Another Meet the Vloggers, and some psychedelic jellyfish

So there's going to be another Meet the Vloggers at the San Francisco Apple Store (Fri, Aug 11, 6PM - 1 Stockton St) and I'm going to be presenting this blog again. I went to the last one and learned a great deal about how to bring my videos to a much wider audience than I have been just by doing a few things a little differently.

So I get to show another one of my videos and I'm wondering which one I should show. Last time I showed A Guy Walks Into a Bar. I can't use anything more than 5 minutes or so long. If you've been reading and watching, I'd love your suggestions.

And now for another video, here's some footage from the Monterey Bay Aquarium that I shot when Anne and I visited last Labor Day.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 2

Here's Part 2 of Washington Interns Gone Bad, my first and so far only attempt at feature filmmaking. If you haven't already seen part 1, you probably want to start there before watching this.

This was a very fun scene to shoot because a great deal of it was improv. We wanted to capture an afterwork party of Hill staffers. Some of the folks there actually were at one point staffers, but most have at least been around them (they're kind of hard to avoid there) and seen how they socialize. This was originally written to take place in an actual bar on Capitol Hill but we had heard that it was very difficult to actually get permission to shoot in those establishments (sure, The West Wing had no problem, but they had a budget and insurance and proffessionalism and all that stuff). So we wound up using the back balcony at 942 Westminster, near the U St Metro where several cast and crew members lived at the time. We used practically every inch of that house to serve as a variety of locations.

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Ween - Sorry Charlie

In honor of me finally becoming the owner of an iPod, I thought I'd post some music. I was doing some freelance work for my old job and my old boss asked me what it would cost him to have me fill up an iPod with some music that he could then just stick on shuffle and use as his on-hold music for the phone system. I told him that if he ordered two of them and I got to keep one, he'd have a deal. So I am the proud owner of a new iPod Shuffle and I have no idea how I've managed to live this long without one of these things.

So, as promised, here's a musical post. Just days after getting my camera, I took it to the 9:30 club in DC for a Ween show (5/22/00). Here's one they don't play too often in concert, Sorry Charlie.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 1

Here's the first episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I've already posted 6 of these episodes here, but that was before I stopped using YouTube for hosting and started a podcast feed, so chances are if you're reading this vlog now, this is new to you. As I post new episodes, I will offer some behind the scenes insites about the making of this movie.

I've told this story a million times, so for those of you who have heard this, just scroll on down to the video. In the fall of 2000, I joined a band with Adam Kroloff. We rocked the DC area for almost 2 years before he upped and moved to Pittsburgh to get married to the amazingly cool Mrs. Paradox, Sarah. I met Sarah on a Ween usenet group, they met at one of our gigs, and then I had to do some social engineering to make sure they were both at my place so they could get to know each other a little better. That's a whole story unto itself which I won't get into here. So anyway, besides being a singer/songwriter, Adam is also a very talented actor, and while we were in the band and also working a shitty job at a cellphone store, we came up with the idea of making a short film called Captain Paradox vs the District Manager (and trailer for its sequel, Captain Paradox vs Scotland). These never happened. But I still had the filmmaking bug, and without a band to take up my creative energy, a screenplay was soon to follow.

The other bit of info you need to know in order to understand my mindset when I wrote this film was that I had worked for the Democratic National Committee during the year leading up to the 2000 election fiasco. I quit in disgust 2 weeks before election day. As far as I'm concerned, that was Gore's election to lose and he blew it so spectacularly in so many ways (which is also another story for another time). And if my distaste for both political parties wasn't strong after working for the supposed lesser of two evils, it was absolutely cemented by the political climate just after 9/11.

That's more than enough for now. I'll have more details about the pre-production with the next episode.

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Coming soon (again)

OK, so I've already posted several episodes of my political comedy, Washington Interns Gone Bad, on this vlog, but now that I've gotten everything all set up for podcasting, I'm starting it all again. So to kick things off, here's the trailer.

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The Czech's in the Mail... and on the map

I enjoy social networking sites, some more than others. Lately and after resisting the urge for a very long time, I've been pimping my videos on MySpace (here and here) despite the fact that it is the sleazy underbelly of social networking and owned by Rupert Murdoch. Years before I jumped onto Friendster when it was still in beta and quickly got bored with it and tired of their crawling servers. Then when we moved to San Francisco, Anne has found a similar site called Tribe.net which was something like a combination of friendster and craigslist with the bulk of its users being hip Bay Area folks. After a while, we started making friends on tribe, and seeing a wide array of interesting characters and alts of the like who were not allowed on friendster. Perhaps the most interesting of these alts is a little clairvoiant Romanian doggie named Madame Gonzaga. She types in a Romanian accent and has a very interesting way of saying things, and she never ever ever drops character. So when one of Anne's friends invited us to a party at the house of the woman behind the Madame, we just had to meet her. The rest, as they say, is history. Shortly after that party, I had made a short film with the Madame and several other Tribe characters.

So now the Madame is working for a new upstart called Platial. It's still in its early stages, but I like the idea. It's a personal mapping tool, like Vlogmap, but it allows users to create custom maps and then attach video, pictures, or ratings for businesses, and it also allows comments. The Madame has some maps, and the one that everybody reading this should check out is "San Francisco Treats." If you go clicking in the Sunset, right around 30th & Irving, you'll come across the following video, another short that I did with another Tribe pal.

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, czech republic, tribe.net, social networking

Shine On, Syd

Syd Barret died today. Syd was the original creative force behind Pink Floyd, took way too many psychedelic drugs, went over the deep end insane (giving Roger and Dave plenty of songwriting subject matter for years to come), released a couple of great solo albums, and then went into a life of seclusion for years.

So what does my demo reel have to do with Syd Barret? I've edited more than one piece of video to Pink Floyd since their music is so freakin' cinematic to begin with. But this is the only one so far that I've edited to a song from the Syd Barret era.

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Meet the Vloggers SF 7/7/06

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So on Friday night I was one of the presenters at the Meet the Vloggers event at the Apple Store. It was fun and informative. In fact, it was so informative that I found out that I pretty much need to completely re-do the whole back end of my vlog. I had a major panic about YouTube when one of the other presenters said that once you upload to YouTube, they own your intellectual property. Before I got hasty and deleted my whole YouTube account, I went back and read the Terms of Use which of course have non-exclusive rights to show my content, but I still retain ownership. So while I still plan on uploading my videos to YouTube to help me to maximize exposure to my videos, I will be using Blip.tv to host the videos on this vlog. The advantage is that once I get all the right back end stuff going on, the feed for this vlog will be a video podcast. So stay tuned over the course of the next few weeks for a whole bunch of exciting new changes.

Happy 4th of July, WIGB Ep. 6 and News!

Just in time for the 4th of July, here's another episode of Washington Interns Gone Bad (below). I am blitzing YouTube and MySpace with the 4th of July Political Comedy Marathon.

For any fans of this vlog in the San Francisco Bay Area, I will be doing a short presentation at the next Meet the Vloggers event at the Apple Store in SF. It's at One Stockton St on Friday, July 7, 6-7PM. I'll give a short little talk about this vlog and show a video. It should be a good networking opportunity.

Anyway, here's the latest episode of Washington Interns Gone Bad. This is the infamous "beeyotch" scene. Elizabeth berates Becky on the topic of idealism vs politics. This was a very personal thing for me to write as I saw so much of what I truly believed in be compromised by working for the Democratic party. Enjoy, and have a happy and safe 4th.