Keith's Video Blog

More Bert. This is 12:07 long, 313 MB.

When we were up in DC, we also, of course, spent time with Joy's family. I've said that I wanted to do more showing the people in my life, and I decided to start with Joy's step-grandfather, Bert. Bert is in his 90's and still growing strong. But I figured that he'd be a good one to start with both because he won't be with us forever and because he's quite a character. This is the first part of a two part interview. There will be more next week. This is 10:32 long, 269.5 MB.

A couple of weeks ago, we visited the National Zoo. This is what we saw there. I had said in a previous entry that the cats would be up next. Just so as no one is confused, the Cheetah is not one of Joy's cats. I decided to shoot a little more footage for that entry, so that's not ready quite yet. The Zoo entry, however is. So it's up now. Next will be either the cats or Bert. Anyway, this entry is 15:54 long, so a little longer than usual, but it seemed silly to split it in two. And it comes in at a whopping 410MB. Enjoy.

Today we pay tribute to our dearly departed kitty cat, Seamus. This one is 376 MB, 14:35. This may be a tad long, really, but I just couldn't bear to cut anything. It is really cute at least. He was a good kitty.

So, we've moved on to the season of Winter. This one is 268.2 MB, 10:23. It covers all of winter. The bad news is that the white cat you see in the video, Seamus, died this week. It happened suddenly while we were out of town. I had a video all about Joy's four cats ready to go up in a few days, but instead, the next entry is going to be all about Seamus. The rest of the cats will be featured in the entry after that.

Sorry. This has been in the can forever. I actually finished it at the same time as the Engrish one. I just hadn't gotten around to putting it up where everyone could read it. Anyway, here's the one about Autumn. It's on the bigger, longer side, about 185 MB.

Today we have a very short entry. It about the Engrish which I saw while I was in Japan. It's short shots from a variety of signs and items, only 1:20 long and 34.1 MB. If you want to see more Engrish, check out Engrish.com.

This entry is perhaps a little unusual. It's the end of my time in Japan. I took the express train from Izuma (near Taki) to Yokohama, where I picked up the Shinkansen (pronounced Shin-Kan-Sen, not (Shink-an-sen) to Osaka and took the train to the Kansai International airport where I flew to Japan. This entry is footage shot from the train. You can see the flatness of the initial plains leading into the mountains and then back to the plains as we cross to the other coast of Japan. There's also footage of my Shinkansen leaving and the next one arriving. Hopefully, people won't find it too boring. I'm putting it up becuase I like watching it a lot. The soundtrack is a couple of songs from Da Blue Herb, another Japanese rap group who actually tend to be more about production than rapping. I dig them a lot, and hopefully they won't sure me. It's 12:36 long, 326.1 MB.

Today's entry is an interview with my brother Paul and his girlfriend Keiko. It takes place in Paul's living room. It's really short compared to most of the other so far. It's about four to five minutes or so and about 142MB. I forgot to make a note of the length and the file is at home on my external harddrive.

My brother Paul (previously mentioned) has a house. This is a tour of it. It's a very nice house by Japanese standards. It's 7:37 long, 196.9 MB. Next time you'll get to meet Paul. I know I said that last time. I decided to separate the interview with Paul and the tour of the house into two entries. The actual interview with Paul will be next time.

So, my brother Paul lives in a tiny town on the Sea of Japan called Taki, or Taki-cho (cho is the Japanese suffix for village). After being in Hiroshima, I visited him in Taki. This entry is from the area around Taki. It's 11:24 long, 295 MB. Next time you'll get to meet Paul.

Now, back to Hiroshima. Sorry for being slow to put this up. It's actually been done and sitting here for two weeks, I just hadn't gotten around to putting up the entry. Oops. This on is 231MB, 8:57 long. It's about my time in Hiroshima, mostly a walking trip I took around the little island that our hotel was on. Enjoy.

Before I continue with my trip to Hiroshima, I figured that I would do an entry about Japan in general. This one is in full resolution again (640 by 480), as all future ones will be and all past ones are now, not counting the test one. It's 8:47 long. It includes tours of my rooms in both the Japanese business hotel I was staying in (Hiroshima Ekimae Green Hotel) and the big Western-style business hotel (Hiroshima Prince Hotel), just to show people what accomodations in Japan are like.

Now, off to Hiroshima. I've finally figured out that if I avoid using the provided AAC codec, I seem to be able to at least sometimes get a full resolution export, so from here on out, things are gonna be big. The resolution is twice as big in both dimensions, so the file sizes will now be about four times as large. This one is 640 by 480, 346.2 MB, 13 minutes and 23 seconds long. I'm also going to engage in a little historical revisionism when I get the chance and update the old ones to be big too. This is the first entry about Hiroshima. There will be at least one other entry about Hiroshima and maybe two. I'm later getting these up than I had intended, but I wound up not having as much empty time at Paul's as I had expected. The next ones will follow relatively quickly.

This entry is all about my trip to DC. It includes our stop at Richmond on the way up to DC, Natalie running around on the playground in suburban Maryland, and an interview with one of the world's greatest rock-paper-scissors players. In total, it's 15 minutes, 86.3 Meg. It's still only 320x240. I have, thus far, made no headway in fixing this. I may eventually spring for Final Cut Pro and that way when it doesn't export properly I'll have someone who I can call and complain to.

Here is my very first videoblog entry. It's about 15 minutes long, 56 Meg. It's only 320 by 240 because every time I try to get iMovie to export a large file using any codec which will let me set the video size to be larger than that (other than the DV codec, which most of you would not be able to view and would be enormous besides), iMovie has been crapping out and quitting the export process without even being considerate enough to throw an error message my way. I've got a friend who has gotten a new Mac G5 in the office, so I might try taking the external drive in with me and see if things go better there. But not real soon because I'll be in DC for the next while. So for now you'll have to be happy with 320 by 240, but I plan to continue to try to figure out how to actually get better video quality pushed out to you my viewers. But anyway, in this entry I talk about why I've started a video blog and show some of the footage I took back in August before my old camera went kaput. To watch the video you'll need Quicktime. If you don't have a BitTorrent + RSS download client, look at this page which I put together which is, hopefully, an exhaustive list of all clients.