The teachers at my school seem to think that the purpose of Arts & Crafts class is to make kids mass produce enough decorations to cover the walls of our classrooms thrice over. They pass out two or sometimes three copies of the same coloring page to each student and prod them along until each one is fully decorated. I’ve never heard kids put up such a fuss about coloring; they’d rather continue doing math work than be sent off to Arts & Crafts.

The other day, one of the teachers came into my classroom and handed me a stack of papers, each bearing the outlines of four flowers. She explained that we needed more decorations for the third floor, and even though the kids had colored at least 8 of these flowers each already, we needed another 8 from each of them. I gave her a funny look and told her that I’d do my best but I couldn’t promise I’d get a page from each kid, much less two.

Our school suffers from a serious flower deficiency

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Last Wednesday, we were invited to Seoul’s only English radio station, TBS eFM. Here we are with Drive Time hosts, Sam and Annabelle. This photo was taken during the first of three radio appearances we made, the latter two of which will be available via the TBS Podcast. I’ll throw them up when we get ‘em.

Behold! True Believers actually do have a website:

http://www.myspace.com/beholdtruebelievers

So that shows what I know. Go check it out, and guess which of the songs on their page I’m thinking of using next!

At the risk of coming off like an Apple fanboy, I just have to post this image of a Windows 7 ad I snapped today on one of the tech blogs I read:

F.P.O. is a graphic design term which stands for “For Placement Only.” So who’s building with Windows 7? Apparently no one, yet.

So I’ve been playing around with compression schemes this week after noticing how washed out the color was in 301 — in the original footage it’s vibrant and on Vimeo it’s almost monochrome in some sections.  After reading up a bit on how H264 handles color I ran some tests with our trailer:


Check that out. The bottom right is the original, the bottom left is the copy which is on Vimeo right now, the top right is a version of it compressed to 720p (instead of 1080p) and the top left is 720p at a higher bitrate. Going from 1080p to 720p at the same settings produced a video which a.) looks identical (and crappy) and b.) is actually a larger file size. That makes no sense.

Doesn’t matter though, as clearly the 720p at a higher bitrate (top left) is our winner for today. The files will be a bit bigger but they should stream exactly the same way on Vimeo. Now to try replacing 301 with that!

Having escaped near disaster in Tokyo the team begins to recover in Seoul.  Is traveling while working possible?  Yes.  Is it easy?  No.

This is it, let’s crack the seal on Season 3: Seoul.  About freakin’ time, if you ask me.  It’s going to take me a while to catch up with the crew’s adventures, but hopefully you won’t find them any less entertaining now than they were two months ago when they actually happened. (more…)

You run a nice video hosting service.  My favorite, by far.  I have but one, teensy tiny complaint:

FIX YOUR GOD DAMMED VIDEO UPLOAD SYSTEM.

I have stared at this progress bar 3 times already today.  Considering that it takes me a half hour to render an 11 minute episode, roughly 6 hours to convert it to H264, 45 minutes to upload it and another 45 minutes to convert before it’s ready to play, I spend a minimum of 8 hours just watching progress bars before every episode is live on the site.  IT WOULD BE NICE IF YOUR UPLOADER DIDN’T FAIL AT 100% COMPLETE EVERY TIME.

Also, it would be nice if you could prevent this from happening EVERY TIME I STAY UP ALL NIGHT TO GET AN EPISODE LIVE AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE.

Thanks,

Jed

P.S: 301 is on the way.

Professional Starcraft is awesome, hilarious, and way more entertaining than I imagined.

Steve Aoki put on an awesome show at the walker hill Sheraton Friday.  We headed out with our usual crew plus some Korean friends Yuyu, Haji, and Yuni.  Hit the local hof for some prep and a few rounds of soju, then it was off to the venue.  Aoki was long in coming to the stage, but damn, what a mad man he has when he got there.  The show was an endless series of shirtless screaming fist-pumping stage dives by Aoki captured by a flashing horde of photographers lead by Cobra Snake. And our own brief appearances onstage were brief, and they were ended time and time again by a pack of Korean security.  Good times and some fun pictures.  I wish we could do this every weekend.

As a bonus we made it onto Cobra Snake.

Tons more photos after the jump.

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