Big surprise: I’m not teaching English.  Hordes of screaming children would have overrun me and my feeble attempts to order them around or herd them with my crutches.  So I had to find a new job that didn’t involve jeopardizing my knee.

A couple weeks ago, a strange opportunity popped up in the classifieds section: an editing job helping rewrite translated text for an MMORPG (like World of Warcraft) being imported to the US from Korea.  Flexing my nerd muscles, I threw together a creative cover letter that landed me an interview.  I got the job on Monday and started Monday evening. 

One of my first tasks was learning the game, so I spent some time playing the Korean version alongside my new boss.  Much less exciting than it sounds – it really just amounted to a lot, “oh what’s this say?” “where should we go now?” “what is that we’re buying?”  But it’s definitely a gaming environment.  On my first day, my officemates challenged me to a Starcraft match over lunch to see who would go buy ice-cream (unfortunately, we had a deadline, so I had to postpone the inevitable ass-kicking that would ensue).  Also, when I left the office on Friday at 7pm, 2 guys were questing together on another MMORPG.  It felt like a caricature of a Korea, in office format.  It should make for an interesting 7 weeks…

Let’s not confuse ourselves.  I would change the soiled underwear of every kindergartner at Brian’s and Rob’s school if it would give me my knee back.  If anything would undo the financial damage, physical pain, and the instability my knee will have for the rest of my life, I would do it.  This job is a small luxury amidst disaster, maybe like winning a poker game during a shipwreck.

And actually, one unacknowledged tragedy of my knee dislocation is that I don’t get to teach alongside Brian and Rob.  I mean, I’m not shedding tears here, given Brian’s horror stories, BUT if there was anyone among us who had a prayer of enjoying that job, it was me.  I LOVE kids, and anyone who has seen me around them would quickly conclude I simply never grew up.  I love to play with them, I love making them laugh, and when they don’t listen, I can just pick 2 or 3 of them up and relocate them, which usually gets all the children’s attention.  Unfortunately, I never even got to try.  So instead of playing roller coaster with kindergarteners, I’m leveling my Korean character…

Note: If you’re in Seoul and have a free bed or couch, let me know.  One of these days, the wrath of Rob or Brian might just spill over…

Poverty seems antithetical to Japanese culture, but after more than two months in country the crew is beginning to find their niche just in time to leave it…

Making this episode sucked.  As you’ll notice, Episode 205 is airing almost a week late.  I think there are 4 separate and almost complete versions of this episode featuring radically different content sitting on my storage array.  The draft I had planned out with the crew a month ago disappeared somewhere around the second revision never to be seen again.  Almost none of the original footage made the episode.

(more…)

In an effort to give you a better idea of how I spend my time working for JS0 I think I’ll start passing on various little nuggets about our editing workflow.  In this edition I’ll cover some of the joys of Apple software design.

We (I) at the JS0 Production Office use Final Cut Pro to edit our show, and to help me (the sole editor) get some sleep during the week we have Bryan and Kevin diligently log all the footage they record in the field and then email me the log files.  When a batch of tapes arrives I just import those log files to Final Cut Pro, toss a tape into our capture deck and hit “Go!”  FCP reads all the times/lengths of shots from the plain .txt log file and attaches those attributes to clips coming in off the camera for a nice, tidy package that I can work with.  It’s a pretty slick-and-smooth workflow.

Usually.

Fuck you, Steve Jobs.

Windows plain .txt files use a kind of line ending character called a CRLF, or “Carriage Return Line Feed,” which includes more data than the simple LF or “Line Feed” character that Macs use by default when encoding plain text.  The two are incompatible for a number of reasons, and if you’ve ever tried to open a .txt file created in TextEdit on a Mac in NotePad on Windows, you’ll probably have noticed that all the lines are mashed together into one big jumble.

Usually Bryan & Kevin are doing their footage logging on a Windows machine, scribbling down frame numbers and typing them into a pre-formatted text file for me, which saves all the line endings as CRLFs.  But once in a while they happen to do the note taking on a Mac, which saves the batch files with my new enemy in this world, the LF character.

In Apple’s infinite wisdom they have decided that Final Cut Pro (which is available exclusively on the Macintosh) should only recognize CRLFs, and will completely ignore LFs, thus rendering an otherwise identical batch file unreadable.  Naturally this is completely undocumented and cannot even be found in a Google search or forum troll.  I should know: I just spent the last two hours screaming at my laptop and staring at tab characters and word spellings looking for a difference between two text files that, as far as TextEdit is concerned, simply doesn’t exist.

So, in conclusion, to get my Mac only editing software to recognize a .txt file created on a Mac I must convert it to a Windows only text format.

Thanks, Steve Jobs.  Now make me a cheaper iPhone.  And a sandwich.  Dick.