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Thursday,
August 12, 1999 I gather there is a
hate site devoted to parodying this one. I am resisting the
temptation to go look, and I see no point in drawing a crowd for this chap
who seems to have nothing better to do. If he's at all competent maybe I
could hire him to do something useful that I don't have time for. On the
other hand, competent people usually have useful thing to do on their own.
Roberta is down at the beach house
taunting me because I am still up here cleaning up stuff. Fair warning:
when I get the book proposal (Burning Tower, Book Two of The Golden Road,
by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Simon and Schuster, Spring, 2000;
actually, Spring 2000 is the publication date of The Burning City, Book
One of The Golden Road; god knows when we'll finish Book Two, but part of
writing it will be done in Acapulco, Yucatan, Coban, Belize, and points
South; it deals with pre-PreColumbian Mezo-America, 14,000 years ago just
after Atlantis sank) outline down, bash out some work on the book Thompson
and I are doing, pay the bills, get to the Vitamin store, and do the
Techweb broadcast for the week I am out of here, and I am not taking a
computer. There are several books I want to read, and some notes I want to
make about fiction, and not having a modem is just too tempting.
With luck I am out of here tonight, but we'll see.
She also tells me that downstairs on our phone machine there is a
message telling me where I can go pick up my replacement cell phone. I
keep forgetting to look at the phone messages, so she does, then calls me
to tell me about them when she's not here. Partnership...
They are charging Buford with "Hate
Crimes." Shooting children is not enough of a crime? The man is a
murderer. We don't need Washington, the County Sheriff has plenty of
jurisdiction. Turn him off and get it over with.
I have a new Olympus C-2000 Zoom Camera. Not
as nice a form factor for carrying in the pocket as the D-400Z I like, but
this does have 2.1 Megapixels. It has a conventional lens cover, and looks
more like a camera than the D-400Z. I love that Z, though. The following
were taken with the D-400Z Olympus camera.
Kiki Stockhammer of Play, Inc. at Siggraph. |
A bad picture in low light, but there's a reason for including
it. |
Play, Inc. has brought the cost of professional quality video editing
down to something you and I can afford. I took these shots at SIGGRAPH.
The first one shows Kiki, who has to be tied with Gary Seltzer as the most
dynamic high-tech show presentation artist in the business, doing her
thing promoting Play's Trinity box. I include it because the second
picture, which is the important one, is so blurred. It was done hand held
in available light as she was moving.
The point of the picture is that she is against a blue screen. Now, I
know, that doesn't look blue. It's not perfectly flat, and the light
levels haven't been adjusted, and that's the NEWS. Play with BBC has a new
cloth and camera lighting system that allows you to use an ordinary Sony
$2000 camera and this cloth to do broadcasts from your walk-in closet with
the Bay or New York City in the background. Live in the background if you
have a camera aimed at your background and a Play mixing box.
Here it is again, this time a blue background room. This looks just as
good as the two hundred kilobuck blue screen systems your local TV station has set up,
but it will cost you well under 20 grand for everything: Cloth, two
cameras (one for you, one to provide dynamic background), mixing box,
lighting system. Broadcast quality effects and mixing and blue room will
just about total $20,000.
And INTERGRAPH (which doesn't have as photogenic a presenter as Play,
alas) is announcing new mixing and editing technology built into their new
systems that does even more at much the same cost. The Play Blue Room
system with one sheet of the cloth is $1,000 for which you get the
lighting system for one camera and the software.
Exciting times.
And next an historic picture. Or I think so.
It's blurred. It was available light as I stood in the Hollywood Bowl
listening to the Russian Symphony Orchestra play the Russian Federation
National Anthem, having just played the Star Spangled Banner. As I
listened I thought about what I used to worry about hearing. "EWO.
EWO. Emergency War Orders. I have a message in five parts. Tango. X-Ray.
Alfa. ..." It is a much better world when you don't expect that kind
of message.
I have put up an FPRI Report
on the Chinese crackdown on Falun Gong.
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