Clint Sharp’s Blog an’ Vlog

Watch out for those baggage screeners!

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A reply to Ryanne’s post A Gift. Our dog, Maggie, really seemed to like her. You really need to see this.

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The video has absolutely nothing to do with the message, but unfortunately I’m working with castoff footage from last week until the camera comes back on the plane with my wife :). Still, I think an important message to be shared, and another friendly reminder from typhoon.org :).

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So this is pretty much in a day in my life. I spent several days editing this trying to get it to where I liked it, and while I’m still not 100% happy with it, I decided it was best just to get it out there. Now that this is finished maybe I can move on with a couple of other ideas for stuff. I’m kinda limited this week though since my wife has the camcorder with her in Arkansas…

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Jeff Sandquist posted on his blog two days ago a position for a technology evangelist on the Channel 9 team. How cool would that be!? Basically, they’re looking to hire another Robert Scoble. The job description:

Technical Evangelist
The first job is an online technical evangelist to join the Channel 9 team. In the past year the site has grown in both traffic and content. As a result we are looking for another unique individual who has both the passion, the knowledge, and the skills to help us tell the Microsoft story online using video.

We are looking for a rare bird for a new kind of evangelism role at Microsoft. The ideal candidate will be well versed in the current wave of Microsoft developer technologies, industry trends, and competition. Experience in software development is preferred but not required. Strong digital video filming, editing, and compression skills are required as the team shoots, edits, and produces its own video on site.

You would be a member of a small team responsible for the care and feeding of this unique community. An active passion for connecting with customers and sharing your passion for Microsoft products is required. Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills are required. Roles and responsibilities change quickly so flexibility and fast decision making abilities are a must. Experience with blogging, wikis, and social software technologies a plus.

What would be exciting about that job would be the ability to not only evangelize what Microsoft does well to the outside world, because they do do a lot of things well, but also evangelize what they’re not doing well back inside the company. I can’t think of a better job than one which gives you the ability to effect change, and the ability to effect change in a company like Microsoft is definitely about the top in my list of cool jobs. I’ve applied.

Video says it all.

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OK, so I think the Vlogger community should really get together and do our own iPod campaign. So, we’re putting ourselves out there, we’re starting it all up, lets see some more! (Yes, we know we’re horrible dancers, that’s sort of the point).

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So here’s another one. This is Mel and I driving home from the Grocery store last night. I spent about 5 hours editing this up. All the vocals and other noises etc are me attempting to do a re-mix kinda thing over the trance. iMovie has some bugs with the Fast/Slow/Reverse effect that will cause it to generate a fraction of a second long of extraneous audio. This is really annoying, and I couldn’t fix it, and since I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the video effect it’s still in there. Sorry. However, I think this is a good take on what has become a standard vlogger driving video. Let me know what you think, I’m a comment whore!

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So, here’s another videoblog post. This one’s a couple of thoughts about Christianity and religion. If you’re not interested in my views, or if this is somehow going to upset you, please don’t watch. Now, to be fair, I don’t say anything I think anyone would find offensive, but some people are not very open to people who don’t believe the way that they believe. However, I think it’s a good piece. I cut down over 10 minutes of video to 3, so it’s sort of a best of my coherent thoughts.

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I’ve been watching the last couple of Eric Rice’s videos from his vlog. He does some really cool shit. I’m just starting out in this video thing, but I’m coming to realize:

# There’s a lot of skill involved here
# There’s a lot of time involved here

Eric, if you’re reading this, you’re doing some cool shit. For instance, you’ve got access to either some equipment or some software I don’t, because I’m pretty sure with a my camcorder I couldn’t get shots that show only my face and a black background without being ridiculously grainy (it would help if I had a 3 CCD camcorder, but alas, need mo’ money). Maybe it’s simple, and you used a black backdrop? Maybe there’s an effect in your software I don’t have? I don’t know, I’m just too new to the video thing. The other stuff I think I could do with effects from iMovie or third-party effects (or maybe I need FinalCutPro?), but I’m just amazed at the quality of stuff being produced by videobloggers. I’m assuming most of you are amateurs, but I think maybe my assumptions are wrong.

Anyways, I feel honored to be entering into a community that, along with just sharing your thoughts and feelings through video, also contains a crew of skilled members that can produce video content on par with what you’d see on Television or out of Hollywood. It’s so exciting!

So, based on my wife’s demands, I this weekend went out and purchased a Panasonic PV-GS31. This is a middle-of-the-line low-end camcorder. It uses MiniDV (so it’s small). The only drawbacks to this cheap of a camcorder is that it has only one CCD, so the image quality, especially in low light, is much poorer than a 3 CCD model. I’m willing to live with this because I saved over $200 from the cheapest 3 CCD model, although I could see us upgrading sometime in the future if we end up doing a bunch with this. So, the result of buying this camera is our first videoblog entry. Enjoy:

Except for a couple of problems, we’ve moved all our services off of Brent’s old box onto the new box at “redwoodvirtual”:http://www.redwoodvirtual.com/. So far I’ve been pretty content with the service. All I should have to do tonight is get majordomo setup (hungover is down for the moment), get hypermail setup for the archive and get an rsync backup setup to my new MacLinux box.

So, I’ve also got the Mac booting into “Gentoo”:http://www.gentoo.org/ 2005.0 now. I’ll post up some screenshots of it booting in the next few days.

If any of your mail to me bounced, sorry, I had postfix misconfigured for a few hours last night. So far everything with the move and Linux on my G3 project has gone smoothly.

To give you an idea of what I did:

* Backed up Mel and I’s wordpress databases
* Copied the public_html directory from typhoon.org over to the new box
* Restored the databases and got the blogs working on the new server
* Changed the DNS on globe and stage to point typhoon.org over to met (the new box)
* Setup postfix, spamassassin + razor, pyzor & dcc to relay incoming mail
* Copied Brent, Mel, Doug and I’s email over to the new box
* Setup a global procmailrc for Junk mail filtering
* Ran mb2mh as all users individually to convert their mail from mbox format to maildir
* Changed DNS for mail.typhoon.org to point to met
* Setup irssi and screen so I can IRC from the box

That was about it. It was about weekends worth of work. Quite an enjoyable project for the weekend :). I’m sure I’ll have something more exciting to write about tonight.

So I’ve come to the realization it might be best to move typhoon.org. Ash has got business customers setup now on stage (the box hosting this website and our email etc), and our interests have started conflicting. I’m going to start helping out with Wordpress-Pg I think, and I need the abliity to willy nilly install different versions of PHP, Apache, MySQL, Postgres, etc. Also, I’m looking to move off of Sendmail and UW IMAP to Postfix and either Courier or Cyrus IMAP to fix my concurrent access problem I’ve got now, and I can’t do these things while our box is supporting production users.

So I think I’ve determined the best way to do this will be to move off of stage and move onto my own box. I’ve considered getting a new box together and running Xen to give us all a virtual machine, but right now I don’t have the time or the hardware. So while I’m searching around for stuff today, I stumped upon Redwood Virtual, which offers UserMode Linux virtual machines for $10/mo for 64 Megs of RAM, 2 Gigs of Space and 20 GB of transfer. This seems like a pretty kickass deal, so I figure at $10/mo it’s worth trying out. I’m also looking to get a box together running Xen that Rob would provide for Dan and I. I guess I’d provide either the install, the admin work or cash in the deal, since Dan’s worked out the bandwidth with Schnur down at FastQ. Who knows, but there’s some viable solutions out there, and I think this’ll be the best for all of us. Maybe if we can get the hardware together I’ll keep the stuff in Arkansas but move it all to virtual machines, who knows.

Anyways, so the other project for the day is getting Gentoo loaded up on this Beige G3. From my initial research, it appears I’m going to have to boot into OS X and run BootX to load up the Linux kernel. This isn’t that bad I suppose. Oh well, I’ll let everyone know about how that proceeds. I need a development environment to play around with and I don’t want to muck with doing PHP, Python and other misc web development on OS X. I’d rather have a box I can trash if I need. Should be an interesting experiment. Need to do something with this hunk of metal that’s been sitting on the floor down here.