Role Models
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/27/2008 - 10:17Today, as I was surfing EntreCard, I came across Regina’s blog post about Michelle Obama’s speech the other night. She was effusive about the wonderful speech and others were adding their comments.
Here is what I wrote:
Yesterday, as I drove to the train station to pick up my daughters, I saw young black women on their way to work or school. My thoughts went back to Michelle Obama's speech, and I wondered, how many of these young women could be the next Michelle Obama? How can we work together to help some of these young women attain such a lofty goal?
I hope that Michelle Obama's speech will help her become our next First Lady. Yet I have higher hopes. I hope that her speech will cause more people to stop and think about how they can help all of the youth of our nation, black or white, male of female, to become closer to the sort of person that Michelle Obama is.
I went on to think about Michelle Obama as a role model for my daughters. Yet in the media cycle, Michelle Obama’s speech is already old news. The talk of the day is Hillary Clinton’s excellent speech. She, too, provides an excellent role model for young people today.
So, I hope we look beyond the immediate political aspects of the convention and beyond November. My mind goes back to when Gov. Dean was running for President. He often said, “The biggest lie people like me tell people like you, is that if you vote for me, I will solve all your problems. The truth is, you have the power.”
The problem is that we don’t know what to do with our power. How do we use that power to help make a better world? Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton help us understand that power and provide role models in how to use it.
We need Barack Obama as our next President, as a leader that can help us return to the values that have made our country strong. We also need great people around him, like his wife, and like Hillary Clinton to be role models for us as each one of us owns our own power and takes a more active role in living out our great values.
The Kitchen Table
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/26/2008 - 18:59Finally, I get a chance to sit quietly in front of my computer. Television convention coverage is streaming into my PC. I haven’t read a lot of the blogs, twitters, friend feed or other sites. I was close to catching up on my email, and now I’ve fallen further behind. I was up late last night and early this morning.
I spent time today speaking with various clients about their computer needs. I spent a lot of time dealing with some of the financial difficulties we are facing, and talking with Kim about how we address them, those difficult kitchen table discussions.
All of this frames the way I’m watching the convention. I was at the 2004 convention. Many of my friends are in Denver. To a certain extent I wish I was there. It is great to be immersed in a convention. On the other hand, I’m tired and broke, and glad that I’m sitting quietly in front of my computer.
When you’re struggling to get by, a lot of the convention just doesn’t seem to resonate. Who are these delegates in Denver? How does all of the political infighting related to me in a small rented house just outside of New Haven, CT.
Michelle Obama’s speech touched on this sense of the struggle for a better world. It may be that there were other things worth noting. I’ll have to see if I can find them, when I get a chance to catch my breath.
Assorted Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/25/2008 - 20:38I’m spending time catching up on emails, following the Democratic National Convention coverage on sites like the Friend Feed DemConvention room, and generally tweaking and mucking with computers, websites, and so on.
PVR
Yesterday, I wrote a little bit about the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) that I purchased yesterday for a project that involves recording parts of the Democratic National Convention coverage. Today, I tried moving the connection back into the office. In the process, I was asked if I wanted to update the software on the video stick.
The software uploaded relatively smoothly, but it took a few tries to finally get the new version loaded and configured. However, when I did, it managed to find lots of digital stations. So, I believe I can now get the HD broadcasts I couldn’t get before. In addition, I managed to reconfigure the wiring and I can load watch and record the television from my office.
I’m sharing some of the videos I’m recording and I spent a bit of time nailing down the best format to use. The Pinnacle PCTV stick supports ten different formats:
DVD 640x480 It takes 47M per minute. Great quality, but too big. DVD LP 640x480 28M per minute. Again, very good quality, but too big. SVCD 640x480 19M per minute. Okay quality, also too big. VCD 321x240 10M per minute. Okay quality. This is my second choice for formats DivX Home 720x480 31M per minute. Very good quality, but too big. DivX Portable 352x240 7M per minute. Okay quality. This is the format I like best. DivX Handheld 144x176 1.5M per minute. Okay quality. Small screen. Not bad for the space. Mpeg4 PSP 320x240 6M per minute. Poor quality. Mpeg4 Ipod low 480x352 12M per minute. Poor quality. Mpeg4 Ipod High 320x240 12M per minute. Poor quality.
Comments about this site
Recently, one person noted that my welcome message said that previous blog entries were listed on the left. Well, they were, until I upgraded to Drupal 6. Then, I moved things around a little, so the list of articles are now on the right.
Another person commented asking if I knew that I had two different comment systems running. Yes, I know that. I actually wrote a bit about it in this blog entry. I may end up pulling SezWho soon. It slows down the site and doesn’t seem to work very well. I’ve contacted SezWho Tech Support and they were going to look at the issues, but that was a while ago, and I haven’t heard anything since.
I should also note that I dropped a lot of underperforming widgets. My site has always been a bit slow because I like to test out any widget that comes along and I’m always slow to remove them. These widgets slow down the site. Now that I’ve removed them, the site may be a little faster.
The Tiara
I was asked if people who pledged to give me EntreCard credits had followed through and some have, some haven’t. Yes, the tiara was small, but it was all that I had. Yes, the girl standing next to me is my daughter Fiona.
Using Social Media
Also, today, I received my first real Shelfari spam. A lot of people feel that Shelfari is spam in and of itself. Miss Anita Weluha wanted to know if I liked the same books as she does. She also wanted to know if I could help her transfer $5 million.
I also received an email from Twitter, letting me know that Sen. Barbara Boxer was now following me. I wondered if this was really part of her organization, or if it was some random spammer. Later, I received an email from “Friends of Barbara Boxer” highlighting her new Twitter account.
Now, its time to get back to paying closer attention to the convention and all the coverage.
The Faith of Barack Obama
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/25/2008 - 12:16A few weeks ago, I received a review copy of The Faith of Barack Obama. It is a short book, around 150 pages, and written in a light breezy style, so I figured I would get through it very quickly and get my post up reviewing the book done well before Saddleback or Denver.
However, while it is a quick read, it is also an enjoyable read, so I’ve stretched it out, savoring the experience. Today, the convention begins, so I figured I’d better get this finished.
First, I should give a little back background. The author, Stephen Mansfield lived in Texas before moving to Tennessee and wrote a book, The Faith of George W. Bush. With that, I feared that his religious and political viewpoints might be a bit more conservative than my own. If they are, it is not obvious, and certainly isn’t an impediment to enjoying the book.
Instead, Mansfield starts off by observing Sen. Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he stated, “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States”. He talks about the changes going on in religion and politics, liberals reclaiming their religious beliefs and chaos amongst various conservative leaning ministers.
With this as a background, Mr. Mansfield traces Sen. Obama’s religious journey, exploring what it was like to be brought up by an atheist, married to a Muslim and attending a Catholic school in Indonesia. He talks about Sen. Obama’s organizing in Chicago and the interactions with the black churches there. He explores black liberation theology. All of this providing grist for Sen. Obama as he works out his salvation with fear and trembling.
Even if you aren’t interested in what has helped form the faith of Barack Obama, the book is worth reading, simply as a well-written biography.
How will this fit with the stories that we will hear about Sen. Obama during the convention? It is hard to say. My sense is that it will supplement it nicely. I enjoyed reading the book. I think people who read this site are likely to as well. If you’ve read it, or have some other good books you would like to recommend, please let me know.
PVRs and the Democratic National Convention
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/24/2008 - 22:50During the Democratic National Convention, I’m working on a project that requires me to record the five hours of convention coverage each night in a format that can easily be read by computers and transmitted across the Internet. In order to do this, today, I went out and obtained a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate stick.
This is a cool device. It is like an oversized USB Memory stick, with a mini USB port on the side and a coax connection on the end. The software is stored on the stick, and there is about 2 gigabytes of memory on the stick that can be used for recording onto.
There are a few different options for setting this up. The first option was to use an antenna that comes with the device, or connecting up to a rooftop antenna. My first pass was to connect the supplied antenna, but that did not give me any usable signals.
The second option was to use my cable connection. Since I was planning on doing this in my office, I installed a cable splitter just before my cable modem and tried connecting that way. It claimed to have found something like 69 different channels, but I couldn’t get any of them to play. It may be that this is because I was in a rush and didn’t spend enough time trying to figure out how to get it to work.
The third option was to capture from a Cable or Satellite Set-top box using either composite video or S-video. I got the S-video to work, which was a relief. However, I hadn’t figured out the software well enough to figure out how to record off of the S-Video channel. I suppose I could get the Remote to do that for me, but I hadn’t set up the remote.
Hopping back to the first option, I tried taking the channel 3 output from the cable set-top box and feeding it into the PCTV stick. This worked well. However it meant that I needed to watch the same channel on the TV as I was recording on the PC. That is a viable option, but not as good as I was hoping for. I tried shifting around the connection in different places, between the set-top box and the DVD/VHS player, between the DVD/VHS player and the TV. Finally, I found that I could successfully split the cable signal coming into the set-top box and get the analog channels on the PCTV stick. This is the best since it allows me to record on one channel on the PC while watching a different channel on the TV. I also found that I could take the S-Video output from my DVD/VHS player into my memory stick. This will make it easier for me to take some old VHS tapes and digitize them and store them on YouTube, Blip.TV or other sites.
With the wiring working a bit better, I went back to see if I could get any of the digital signals to work. This would be nice, since the PCTV stick supports digital HDTV, but our regular television is an old analog SD TV, so we can’t watch digital HDTV channels.
Unfortunately, I still couldn’t find and HDTV stations. I’ll try that again a little later. I’ve been told that Cablevision does weird stuff with their HDTV signals which makes it harder for people to pull them in without a set-top box.
Now that the basic functionality was working, my next test was to record shows using the stick. There are about ten different formats that can be saved, using various resolutions of DivX, MPEG 1/2 or 4. I’ve set up a bunch of recording sessions to see what the resolution looks like for each of these as how much space they take up. Once this is done, I’ll start testing various things that can be done with the files in these different formats.
I did end up installing DivX and Quicktime on my laptop so I can view the files in different format. This is also supposed to work with the Windows Media Center, so I may try working with as a future test.
So, initial impressions are that you can turn a PC with Windows XP or Vista into a Personal Video Record fairly easily for around $100.
