Purdue Hello Walk

Description to come...

Figured out how to get good Evo 4G HD Video

So I have been having problems with getting reliable frame rates from the video's my Evo 4G phone was producing. Being a computer science nerd type, I had modified the system software and tried different flavors of Android, but nothing changed. I recently had an epiphany that maybe the read/write speeds on my Micro-SD card were too slow and that bottleneck was causing the whole process to be lossy. I switched to a new memory card from another manufacturer and, voilà, my video quality and frame rate increased twofold.

I originally filmed the Boilermaker Express and had to scrap the project from these technical difficulties. :-/ Always best to do a equipment check first.

Voice Overs

I had recently purchased a copy of Band Hero (the one with the guitar, drums, and mic) and just realized that the mic is connected to the XBOX via USB and decided to try it in my computer to see if it would get recognized. Interestingly enough, the mic was automatically installed and is an excellent voice over recording device. Audio quality problems solved... now if I can just get my upstairs neighbors to stop "squeaking" her bed so I can record it the voice overs without the distracting background noises.

How to Make Money on Blogs (I've not forgotten)

On Blogger, it is really easy to get ads on your blog. See as Google is the dominant ad provider on the internet, it is fitting that its like this. In the back-end view, there is a "Monetize" tab which gives you access to all the ad options. The first option is where you want them to appear. The default is in between posts and on the side. You can configure ads to appear inside your posts, on the sidelines, in between posts or on the top and bottom of the page (or any combination). After you select where you want the ads to appear, you need to sign in (or create) an AdSense account, which is Google's advertising (for selling and buying) of ads. They will require a social security number and some information about where you live (for tax purposes). Overall it was pretty simple. You also have to agree not to abuse the system (like click on ads yourself or tell your friends to do so on your behalf - yes they will figure it out). You can follow a lot of statistics after you add ads, including click through rates, page impressions, viewer origins, referring sites, etc... When people start visiting your blog and clicking on ads, you will start to see your money totals going up. It isn't too lucrative until you get some real traffic to your site. Over the course of the semester, I have about 400 visits and have earned $3.03. If you could get like 1000's of visits a day, it would only come to be like 10-30$ a day and wouldn't sustain anybody. If you can gain really substantial traffic (like 100,000 views a day) it would be more like $750 a day. Which is a lot nicer.



I computed some figures for the amount of money you'd like to make (based off my own figures):
To make the same as an entry level computer scientist = 24,000 visits a day
To make as much as a (Carmel) teacher = 15,000 visits a day

To see some (VERY INTERESTING) statistics for the top 500 websites, visit here.

There is great power with Google's advertising engine. You can substitute in your own ads and select categories of ads that you don't want to show up on your site. All their ads are relevant to the content of your site, so sometimes it can be a little interesting if someone comments about sex and then you have sex ads appear on your baby picture blog... but Google gives you the ability to block that. You can also select the sizes for the ads, the colors they use, if they are pictures or text, and much more. I would invite everyone to try and play with it.

To summarize, the only way to create a feasible website (which is financially sustainable) will require unique and quality content that people will want to see (also a plus if someone can't reproduce it).

What I've Been Up To (Part 1/2)

I thought it would be appropriate to tell everyone of my job escapades over the past 2 weeks, since that has been taking a lot of my time recently and was why I wasn't in class on Thursday this week.

Tuesday (16th) I had a really full day. I had a final test in my sales class (where we had to network with industry professionals and then attract a buyer and sell to them. It was a four hour long process and was quite stressful. I had to dress in business formal (suit and tie) which was particularly interesting for me since I have no such wear. I ended up borrowing a roommate's suit which fit pretty well and more or less wore something from each of my roommates (boots from one, shirt/pants/suit from another, tie from another, belt from myself (yes!)). After this whole process of selling (which went pretty well - ended up getting a 96% on it which was 45% of my total grade), I was picked up by a stretch limo. On Wednesday, I had an interview planned with a company that I had worked for a few years over the summer, Beckman Coulter. They treated me very well. I had the limo completely to myself and it took me to an Embassy Suites in Indianapolis. I of course had a suite to myself and it was very well furnished. I had my own office, king bed, patio, 2 TVs, etc... For any who don't know, I'm completely new to this kind of life/treatment. I have only flown twice (round trips) the past 8ish years, never really stayed in hotels and if I did, only the cheap ones. I have never been in a limo. I've lived pretty cheaply. Well, the company left me some goodies that were waiting for me in the room, including a nice Purdue hat, a ton of junk food/treats and a card welcoming me to Indy. I got up the next day at 6:30 AM and went down to have an omelet prepared for me. I made sure to PT (work out) especially hard the night before since I never get up that early and needed to wear myself out to be able to fall asleep. At about 7:30, a limo picked up the candidates and took us on site. The building they have is completely new and very well furnished. We started with a tour of the building and saw some pretty awesome things. My favorite was the "command center" which is the central hub for customer service for Beckman. In this roughly 2 basketball court sized room they had a wall covered with about 40 by 20 LCD monitors which create a central, huge display. It had a map of the United States with heat maps for problems and the locations of service personnel. It also had three news stations and a list of servicemen and their current status. Apparently all the servicemen have GPS trackers which update their maps in real time. In front of this massive display, they had about 70 terminals for call operators, which had computers with a trifold array of monitors. It looked like something out of NASA's command center and was really impressive. The place had a ton of break rooms, fun things to do (puzzles, ping pong, wii's, huge gym, "DNA" cafeteria, etc...) and nice lab space. I was shown into my office, which was to be my "interrogation" room for the rest of the day. I was given more treats to help me through the rest of the day and waited for my first interview. I had in total about 7 interviews, each about 45 mins long and with two people quizzing me at a time. One of the interviews was a strict technical in depth knowledge one, another was a "how do you think" technical interview, a middle level technical interview, a user interface test, a personality test, HR company interview and any others I have forgotten about. We had catered lunch (BBQ!) and got finished at about 3PM. A limo took me back to campus and I got to wait for a call back. ....... This week, on Thursday (18th), I got a call from the college relations engineer and was given an offer to work there. I have the official paperwork in the mail to me, but I know the salary (which is pretty competitive). It's going to be weird making money. I'm so used to being in debt after paying for all my schooling. I'll finally be able to pay it all off in about half a year, which is going to be a great burden taken off my back. The job would be a 2 year rotation before settling down at a site. It is a tour of the company's locations and jobs in Florida, California, Minnesota and Indiana (among some others maybe). I will be working on half year projects and mostly in computer science. One of the jobs will be in something else (marketing, sales, service, etc...). Its going to be interesting figuring out if this is what fits me best in terms of my future and how it compares to my other offers.

(Coming up: Aprimo Interview)

New Media Timeline

Here is a very complete and interesting time line for new media since 1969, which I didn't know would go back this far.  This is probably a great resource for everyone who is working on their final reports.  They link to many primary sources and have detailed statistics for different years.  Almost information overload, but better too much than too little.

Where does your privacy stop and everyone's safety start?

UPDATE: A 3 year old gets searched while screaming



Recently, there has been a lot of news about more intensive scans and pat downs at airport security which has brought on many accusations of sexual assault and caused a lot of people to question what they are comfortable doing for the sake of security.  Recently these full body scans have leaked online, which makes us question if they should even be done if we don't want the world looking at us naked.  Some bring to question something that Benjamin Franklin said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". With this logic, wouldn't we say that the terrorists that attacked up on 9/11 have won?  There is clearly a great difference in opinion and it provides for a very lively debate. 

For example, here is what the Drudge Report is featuring today:

TSA XXX: NAKED BODY SCANS LEAK ONLINE  

UPDATE: TSA to investigate resister...



BIG SIS SEES ALL: Scanners and pat-downs upset passengers...

'If people want to travel by some other means...'

Republicans Take Aim at TSA Screening...

'Naked' scanners fooled by creased clothing...

Nature Montage

I got outside and took some footage of squirrels and used for the first time the HICKS Cannon camera.  I got the tripod and the mic kit for it too.  I spent about an hour looking for footage and got about 20 minutes of footage.  Going into the DLC, I spent 5 hours getting the computer to read in the tape and compiling it.  I spent a majority of that time trying to figure out why the quality was terrible for an HD camera and after trying multiple programs and encodings, it still sucked, so I went with my best combination which was iMovie and a Windows Media 9 encoding.

Thanks Vets!

Look at this video/story.

All Vets deserve our support, go thank one today!

Photo Story

Here is my photo story which gives a glimpse into the life at our apartment.  For those who can't tell, all my roommates are in a combined diet and exercise routine and I wanted to capture a bit of that to share with everyone. I took a variety of shots and tried to mix up the angles, lighting conditions and subjects to keep everything interesting.  I picked my favorite 7 photographs out of about 60 pictures and arranged them in an order that felt natural to me.

I talked with my girlfriend and after discussing things, we made some interesting contrasts between video and photo shooting assignments.  The biggest difference for me is in the workflow of how you should produce a photo story over a video piece, which is opposite.  In a video piece, a good video producer will take time to plan out their shots, imagine what things will look like, work with subjects to get it to look a particular way, organize how they want the order to be and imagine voice overs for B-roll.  For a photo story piece like this, she said to forget all the planning and just work with what I had and improvise, don't worry about the story arc or how things should develop.  I originally was thinking the only way I could tell a story through these pictures in any sort of arc was to start with a typical day, from beginning to end.  What I ended up doing, which I like better, is pick my favorite (or the image which sets the tone for the story) to be the first and group the rest of the pictures in groups.  This worked out very well.

In the process of picking what pictures to use I had to pick between an action (motion blur) or emotional type of expression in the push up picture.  I wanted the motion blur to give some life to the image, but I also wanted to see the emotion of the subject (me) in order to have the audience empathize and connect to the picture.  I also had an interesting time with the alarm clock shot in terms of the lighting.  I wanted to get a night shot so after messing with filters and trying to dim lights (and place paper faux-diffusers on them), I decided it wasn't good enough.  I then turned off all the lights and took out my roommates red LED headband which illuminated the scene barely and in red, but gave me an excellent night feel.  In editing, I decided the red color made things look too military and turned it into a B/W photograph.

I used my cell phone camera for these shots (Sprint HTC Evo 4G - 8MP Camera) and compiled the video photo story in Windows Photo Story 3, which is free for Windows XP and up users.  It took care of all the cropping, ordering, color correction, effects, transitions, music, captions, voice overs, and animations for me.  I decided that adding music/voice/silly transitions would take away from my product's intended effect, so I left it pretty simple and plain.

The tool is getting to be about 8 years old, which is interesting how it can still be pretty unsurpassed in its functionality still, but there were a few lacking areas.  The most important of which were for the captions, which didn't have an option to darken the background, so I had to choose the best contrasting color for the caption.

Midterms (Elections, not tests)

I am so glad I voted early after seeing the lines today.  I could take my time, didn't have to wait and didn't have people waiting on me.  Well, in terms of the coverage of the elections, I mainly stuck to the cable channels.  I switched from Fox, MSNBC, CNN and C-SPAN... and without trying, WTHR (which interrupted my shows).  I checked out Real Clear Politics, Fox News online and Drudge.  I mainly was looking for interactive maps online, but found that TV coverage of the events was the most efficient way to get information.  In comparison of the networks, I liked Fox's style of reporting best.  It was certainly the most interesting. I found that MSNBC and CNN kept bringing in boring interviews (at least while I was doing this on and off around 6-10 PM) while Fox was rapid fire between their panel and primary video.  Fox has a new website that I didn't know about (not a frequent visitor) that is a lot easier to navigate and an interactive map, which is a 6/10 in terms of usability/coolness.  RCP's map is concise but too dense for me to analyze it well.  Drudge kept posting news about the races I was interested in, which made them easy to track since I follow this news fairly closely, but not well enough to be able to dial into a map and read it for myself.  C-SPAN was too boring and I missed the pundit opinions while watching.  If I was a super political geek, I think I would prefer the raw data from them for my own analysis, but I didn't have that background this election cycle.  I did enjoy the passion for the news Fox was able to deliver.  It seemed that the other networks just gave the news in a robotic tone and people were fiercely debating their analysis on Fox.  I think my biggest take-away from this experience is pretty simple, report information in an efficient manor, give some perspectives and make it interesting.

UPDATE: I also did not know the official name was "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" ... which wasn't successfully changed last night to "Rhode Island" via a ballot initiative

Cool 3D Photo Gallery

Hilarious Typical Video Report

Game Day

Today is election day and I am pumped for the excitement in media and the electorate.  I plan on monitoring the news stations (Fox, MSNBC, CNN) and will watch Drudge Report like a hawk all day.  The races I am most paying attention are CA-Gov, CA-Boxer Seat, NV-Reid Set, KY-Rand Paul.

I'm going to be looking for how the media uses new technology, like connected services, touch screen panels and the like to convey their information.

I'm also going to attempt to get some people who I know are registered but not voting (or planning to) out to vote today.  Let's hope I'm successful.