The Daily Procrastinator

Sometimes you may want to show a Youtube video, but don’t have a reliable connection. There’s a very simple way to download the videos now so you can store them on your computer, or on your mobile device in either FLV format or MP4 format. Simply add “pwn” to the URL. For example, let’s say you want to download the “Try2OnChase” video, that at the moment of this writing, has 5,120,577 views. Simply follow the steps below:

1. Go to the video over at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4ZryYqFmoc

2. Change the URL to http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=o4ZryYqFmoc (Text in bold to be inserted in the address bar of your favorite browser)

3. Download the video in the format you want.

That’s it.

It’s real and coming soon to a bookstore near you! Why didn’t I think of this?

From Chronicle Books:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

In the world of digital audio, few names are as respected as Edirol. In December, I started recording with their latest field recorder, the R-09HR, and I can honestly say that I now understand the fantastic reputation that the Edirol family of products enjoys. This particular recorder is designed to be a small, portable recording option for events outside the recording studio. It’s about the size of a first-generation iPod, but slightly thicker. It can be used to record meetings, band practices, interviews, and even concerts. I use it primarily for the latter.

The Edirol R-09HR is a device which is designed to record MP3 and WAV files directly to digital media, in the form of SD cards. A 512 MB card is included with the recorder, but it can accept cards as large as 8 GB, which is what I use. The R-09HR can record files ranging from relatively low-quality 128 kbps MP3s to 16-bit 44.1 khz WAVs (CD-quality sound) to 24-bit 96 khz WAVS, which are the highest-quality sound files for which anybody could have any reasonable use. At 128 kbps MP3, the 8 GB card can hold 7980 minutes of data, while 24-bit 96 khz WAV allows the card to hold about 220 minutes. I use CD-quality options, which affords me 720 minutes.

The device features a line-in option for recording directly from a soundboard. It also has a microphone-in, for the use of a range of external microphones. Most impressively, though, it features on-board stereo condenser microphones. I was skeptical of the quality of these on-board microphones, since the price of high-quality external microphones can range from several hundred to several thousand dollars. Upon taping my first concert from the audience using the on-board microphones, I learned that the R-09HR makes outstanding recordings without the use of external mics. Certainly, one could improve the quality of the sound by adding a high-dollar microphone to the setup, but the on-board mics created a warm, clear, natural-sounding recording. My only complaint is that the on-board microphones are not directional, which means that they capture sounds from all around the recorder. In effect, if the recorder is close to loud or talkative fans, their voices can become an annoyance in the recording.

When recording from the soundboard, the R-09HR makes recordings as crisp, clear, and true-to-life as I’ve ever heard. I have recorded two concerts from the soundboard, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with the results. I gave a copy of one of these recordings to the musician, a friend of mine, and he intends to release it as a live album. It sounds that good. The clarity of the R-09HR’s recordings is partly due to its Isolated Adaptive Recording Circuit (IARC), which prevents any kind of digital clicks or pops from reaching the final product. The device also features no moving parts inside, so the hum and hiss which can be produced by analog recording equipment is totally avoided.

The R-09HR runs on two AA batteries, which will last through a surprising six or seven hours of recording. It has an adaptor for AC power, which is included. Also included is a cable for high-speed USB 2.0 connection to a computer, which makes data transfer quick and simple. A small external speaker allows the user to review recordings in the field, and a headphone jack allows even closer listening. In fact, the user can even load MP3s onto the R-09HR and use it for a portable music player. While the functionality of this feature is acceptable, the interface is somewhat awkward.

The only problem I’ve had with using this recorder is with the buttons which govern the input levels from the microphones. The device allows me to adjust the input levels while recording, in case the music is suddenly louder or softer, or in case I’m able to move closer to the speakers. I made use of this feature at one concert I recorded, but pressing the buttons caused loud, audible clicks in my recording. While listening, I realized that these clicks are actually the sounds of me pressing the buttons. Luckily, this situation is remedied by using the remote control which is included. When the input volume is adjusted with the remote control, no clicks are introduced into the final product.

Other features include toggles for limiter, automatic gain control, low/high mic gain, low cut, and plug-in power for external microphones that require it. All of these features were new to me as a relatively inexperienced concert recorder, but I quickly learned to use them to my advantage through the explanations offered in the instruction manual and various internet FAQs.

On the whole, I highly recommend the R-09HR to anyone who is in the market for a portable digital recorder. Priced between $300 and $400, depending on the retailer, it’s a bit more expensive than most other recorders, but the quality of the finished product and the ease with which it can be used makes the Edirol R-09HR well worth the cost.

I use the coolest tool for managing projects and generally organizing the stuff that I need to do my work. It’s called Scrivener, and this thing rocks.

A client sends me a project. As my resource material, I have five websites, three PDFs, a slide deck and four Word docs. Normally, I would have to bounce back and forth between my browser, Adobe Reader and the Microsoft applications as I tried to distill the essence of the message. With Scrivener, it’s all in one place. I import all of the links and documents into the project (slides need to be converted to PDF first, a minor nuisance) and they’re conveniently tacked onto my project corkboard so that I can flip back and forth between them with ease. If I want to organize the project into sections or chapters, they get tacked onto a separate corkboard, and I can arrange and rearrange them to my heart’s content. If I need an outline to guide my writing, I simply select it to appear on the right side of the screen, and it helps me to keep track of my progress. All of this for the bargain price of $39.95.

Scrivener isn’t a word processing program, so if you need to format the text (endnotes, etc.), or if you need to send it along to someone else, you need to copy and paste the text into a Word document. But for the actual writing and research phase, Scrivener is an amazing tool. I wish I’d had access to this years ago.

Currently trying to save enough money to color it in.

Ah, the joys of being able to knock out two posts via one DVD release.

Marvel has released a two-fer for fans of the Hulk: Hulk Vs. This time around it is Hulk vs. Wolverine, a throwback to the first appearance of the short berserker mutant. But the conflict between the Hulk and Wolvie is more or less a tease here: this is all about the origin of Wolverine and the Weapon X project.

Like the Thor portion of the DVD, HvW is chock full of cameos: Sabretooth, Omega Red, and Lady Deathstrike, among others. But the best lines are (deservedly) saved for Deadpool:

The Merc with a Mouth

“Hey, good buddy. It’s Deadpool. I shot you!”

“What? Babies creep me out. Rock-a-bye BANG!”

“Omega Red’s a bed-wetter . . . he’s very ashamed.”

Brilliant (and many, many others). Now we just need the full-length Deadpool movie.*

Once again, the animation and vocal talent are top notch. One thing I did not expect was the level of violence. Good for Marvel: if you’re going to put a bunch of ruthless dudes who use blades, claws, and fully automatic weapons in the same room who really don’t like each other, blood is going to be spilled. Props to them for not pulling any punches.

*Stick around past the credits.

“Before there was America, there was the Darby Free Library.”

Less than four miles from my childhood home, you will find the Darby Free Library — until the end of the year, anyway.  The oldest continuously operating library in America is facing its demise without outside donations.  

While I’m sure that they hope that someone will write one giant check to cover their expenses, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a lot of little checks.  So if you would, please, send $5 to the following address:

The Darby Free Library
1001 Main Street
P.O. Box 164
Darby, PA 19023

The Library is a non-profit Pennsylvania Corporation and qualifies as a 501 C-3 Federal tax-deductible organization.  Its story has been profiled in the local media, as well as Boing Boing, The Huffington Post and UPI.

Do it for the history.  Do it for the kids to have a safe place for homework.  Do it so 10,000 local residents will have a place to go for free computer and internet access.  I don’t care what your reason is.  Just do it.

In my head, I’m a rock singer.  No, not just in my head – I’ve been told too many damn times that I have a “good” voice to think that I don’t have talent in the vocals department.  Yeah, after church the compliments come rolling in, and my mom was always busting my chops about joining the choir back in high school.  But I’m a teacher now, and the opportunities to show off the vox just don’t present themselves.  Those talent shows the school puts on?  They’re for the kids, man, not the teachers.

So when Rock Band came out a couple years ago it was a siren call – here was my chance to live out my rock-and-roll dreams by fronting a band made up of guys who like playing with tiny plastic guitars while I show off some REAL musical talent.  I mean, if youtube’s any indication, any six year old can master Guitar Hero on expert if they put enough time into it.  I’m out of college, married with two daughters and a job; I don’t have the requisite time to master those five buttons (and anybody’ll tell you moving from Medium to Hard is a HUGE jump- I think the game needs some re-working). But Rock Band was different. Rock Band didn’t require manual dexterity.  Rock Band offered a mic.  Hell yeah, I was gonna be the Star Dog Champion.

Reality kicked in almost immediately. One, I’m not allowed to play XBox when my wife’s home, so time that I could’ve spent rocking out was instead spent watching the Food Network.  I have a feeling that kind of thing doesn’t happen to Sammy Hagar.  Second, the song lineup did not necessarily cater to my musical stylings.   And by that I mean there were songs I didn’t know on the list.  That makes singing the songs difficult, because singing’s about confidence, not trying to read the lyrics while matching the tone of your voice to a little arrow – and speaking of which are we sure the makers of Rock Band programmed the pitch right on some of these songs in the first place?  Honestly, there’s no way I score a 79% on “Detroit Rock City” – Paul Stanley ain’t that much of a vocalist, and I sound JUST LIKE HIM when I’m jamming to KISS’s greatest hits on the way to work.

Mainly, though, unlike Guitar Hero, this game is meant for more than one player – the game is Rock Band, not Rock Singer.  I’m not quite sure, but I have a nagging feeling there’s something slightly pathetic about standing alone in front of the TV belting out the lyrics to the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (but, dammit, those screams make me feel so alive).  But there I am, knocking out the songs at “Hard” and even turning it up to 11 (“Expert”) when the song’s a real rocker (metal horns flying as “Run to the Hills” blares out of the speakers).

So one weekend I invite some guys over to jam.  We set up the drum kit (whose “Easy” setting is a crock.  Drummers require more coordination than I’ll ever be able to exhibit) and connect the guitars and then they start asking who’s going to sing.  I say I will.  Their response of “You will?” deflates me a bit, but I know I’m getting 94% on most songs so they’re in for a surprise.

We start out with “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and I practically ace it at the “Hard” level, and yet my bandmates don’t remark on my vocal stylings at all.  They’re looking for another song.  So we go on to STP’s “Vasoline”  and still no remarks.  Then one of the guitarists suggests we switch around, so I get a guitar and play bass while he sings Radiohead’s “Creep” and aces it.  Hell, anyone could ace that one, particularly on “Medium” where he was at.  He then goes on to sing “Interstate Love Song”, another STP, and I’m thinking I didn’t buy this game to play guitar.  “Medium” on guitar is friggin” boring, but “Hard” will lead me to fail out at some point before the solo on most songs.  So I’m stuck watching our new singer bound around my stage- er, my living room singing about leaving on a southern train on a Sunday afternoon, and I’m stuck playing a fucking plastic guitar and adding in background vocals while he gets the spotlight, the interviews, the magazine covers and all the women!

Man, the rock star life takes a toll, I’m telling you.  No wonder Dokken broke up.

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Liam Neeson in Taken

Do you remember the old Harrison Ford movie Frantic? The one where his wife gets kidnapped in France and he spends the entire movie trying to find her while whining incessantly about getting her back?

Taken kicks Frantic‘s ass up and down.

Liam Neeson is Bryan Mills, a retired black-ops spy who spends his days hanging around his old crew while picking up the occasional high-profile security job to keep himself occupied. His past has left him seeing the world as a very dangerous place, an attitude that has driven his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) into the arms of another (rich) man, taking with her the daughter (Kim, portrayed by Maggie Grace) he dotes on. But when his daughter begs to be allowed to take a trip to France with a friend, without parental supervision, against his better judgment he relents.

Kim is about to get . . . grabbed.

As you have no doubt seen in the trailer, things take a dark turn for Kim when she is kidnapped from her villa. This leads to Neeson’s over-the-phone plea and threat to her kidnappers: let her go, all is forgiven; refuse, and he’ll kill them all.

Obviously, the captors choose poorly.

What follows is a one-man wrecking machine taking out everyone who had any involvement in his daughter’s abduction, desperately trying to find her before she is lost. As he tears his way through the hierarchy of the underground sex-slave trade, the film plays as an hour-long chase scene. His methods are not for the faint of heart: suffice to say that Mills would disagree with the now-popular belief that torture is not an effective means of interrogation.

This movie makes no pretense of being anything but pure escapism, although the presence of Liam Neeson lends it a significant measure of respectability. But it’s a hell of a fun ride.

American author John Updike died on the morning of January 27. As soon as I read the headlines announcing his death, my mind immediately transported me to moments in my life when I encountered Updike’s work. As a freshman in college, I was assigned his short story A&P for an entry-level literature course. I distinctly recall sitting in a dimly-lit back corner of the university library and being totally absorbed in the world of the story, cheering for Sammy as he took a stand against his overbearing boss, only to grieve at its futility moments later. The honesty of the characters’ emotions and the depth to which Updike understands human nature made such a distinct impression on me that my reading of A&P stands out in my mind as one of the defining moments of literary life.

Three years and two colleges farther down my road, summer hung heavily upon southern California, and we students hadn’t much to do between classes. We sat inside the air-conditioned Student Union building, mostly, and wiled away the hours in idle chat. Among the most popular topics of these chats was baseball. As I encouraged everyone within earshot to read Malamud’s The Natural, a friend sauntered into the room, recently liberated from a class in Spanish or psychology or some other undergraduate drudgery, and butted into my monologue. “If you want to read good baseball writing,” he told me, “go find Updike’s Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” A few days later, once again enshrined in a university library, while reading Updike’s account of Ted Williams’ career and final game with the Red Sox, I was struck with awe at the grandeur of The Splendid Splinter. Although I’d never seen Williams play and didn’t consider myself a fan, the power of Updike’s words transported me to a time and place that enveloped me as truly and completely as my own memories.

After my years in university libraries finally paid dividends, I found myself in the lucky position of choosing pieces of literature to teach in a 10th-grade English classroom. As I considered characterization, metaphor, and themes to which teenagers could truly relate, I settled upon Updike’s poem Ex-Basketball Player for inclusion in my curriculum. Every year, I watch as students slowly nod their heads, beginning to grasp the metaphor of Pearl Avenue as Flick Webb’s life, the contrast between five “idiot pumps” on each side of the gas station and the five graceful athletes Flick once called his teammates, Flick’s disillusionment as he stares into the tiny, silent bleachers filled with dimestore candies. Even to the teenaged mind, Updike is good.

Those who are familiar with Updike’s work have undoubtedly noticed that I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of his accomplishments, and I confess that I have no intentions of doing so. These three pieces are all I have read of Updike’s voluminous contribution to American letters, but they are enough to convince me that we have lost a master today.

An actual scene from the movie.

Thor vs. Hulk is the latest animated offering from Marvel Comics (coupled with the simultaneous release Hulk vs. Wolverine). Unlike the previous “Ultimate Avengers” DVDs, Thor vs. Hulk focuses on the old-school Thor: red cape, winged helmet, and Mjolnir, his mystical uru hammer.

Full disclosure: I’m a Thor fan-boy. I wear a Mjolnir pendant on a necklace and my office is decorated with Marvel Legends Thor action figures. So while I’ve been looking forward to this movie since it was announced in mid-2008, my expectations were tempered by my typical pessimism that it could turn out to be a disappointment.

My pessimism was unfounded. Marvel has really come through in creating an epic Asgardian tale, wearing the influence of Walt Simonson proudly. Simonson is the writer of Thor’s most significant storyline in the 80′s, and many of the characters he defined make welcome cameos: Skurge, Malekith the Accursed, Surtur, and Balder, among others. The story opens in Asgard, in the midst of the Odin-sleep, when Asgard’s enemies launch their attacks while the kingdom is at its most vulnerable. Enter Loki, who is not content to merely repeat the same old cycle of events: he has kidnapped Bruce Banner and with the aid of Amora the Enchantress, plans to usurp the power of the Hulk to finally rule Asgard.

The production of the video is top-notch, from the artwork to the voice talent to the direction of the battles. One would expect the battles between the Hulk and the God of Thunder to be epic, but even I was impressed by the sheer power and brutality of the blows given and received as the two rage through the streets of Asgard. Thor Vs. Hulk is a return to form for Marvel’s animated series, particularly after the disappointment of Next Avengers, and should be an essential addition to any Marvel fan’s collection.