Palin for President!

John McCain picked the wrong Palin.

Schmuck.

Celebrate!

Happy birthday, Constitution!

Vimeo turns one....million!

Vimeo Directors Promotional from Jeremiah Jacobs on Vimeo.

This is a little promo piece I created to market my music library to the Vimeo filmmaking community.

...which is apparently quite large. I don't know how many members exactly, but they're hosting a million original videos/short films on their site, 100,000+ of which are in HD.

Which begs the question....why, exactly, are you paying your satellite/cable provider a huge premium for content that's often NOT actually native HD?

Anyone with a laptop connected to an HDTV tried watching Vimeo HD via that system?

(later: I read that indeed, these "HD" video sites are not "TRUE" High-Definition, and yes, I believe I've mis-used the term. We really should term these by their encoding codec (in this case, I think it's H.264). In any case, Vimeo's hi-res letterbox is a thousand years better than YouTube...)

Film Out

DO AS I SAY - Official Trailer (1080p) from DO AS I SAY Movie on Vimeo.

A combination of cues from my music library and some written exclusively for the film were used in the trailer for Do As I Say.

Braindump: Fixing Firefox Profiles when they die.

Just a brain dump about managing Firefox profiles when they go bad. This post assumes you've familiarized yourself with backing up & restoring existing profiles, and are comfortable using a text-editor (like Notepad.)

Symptom: When you launch Firefox, it opens with a default, run-for-the-first-time profile OR you receive a message saying "Firefox is already running, but is not responding." Bringing up your process list shows Firefox is indeed not running. This behavior usually follows an "abnormal program termination" (which is a little like referring to a plane crash as a "controlled flight into terrain"), although in my specific case it was related to running Piriform's (excellent!) CCleaner while Firefox was still running in the background.

Solution: search your profile folder for the "parent.lock" file, and delete it (this is for PC's - MacOS has a different solution.) Lastly, locate and open (in notepad) the profiles.ini file.

Firefox creates profiles with names that look like a jumble of letters and numbers, a period, and then a profile name (usually "default.") Select the profile you want to use by clicking ONCE, wait a couple of seconds, then click the file ONCE again (as if you were editing the file's name.) This action will cause the filename to be automatically highlighted. Press CTRL+C to copy the file's name to the clipboard.

In the profiles.ini file, paste the profile name over the existing one. Save and close the .ini file, and make sure all instances of Firefox are closed.

Re-open Firefox, and your profile should be restored.

A word to the wise: BACKUP YOUR DATA NOW YOU STUPID F*CK!!

Where to find Bruce Hornsby lyrics

Just a quick annoyance-dump kind of post. I just needed to get the actual lyrics and tabs for Bruce Hornsby's "Mandolin Rain." Typing the phrase "bruce hornsby lyrics" into Google is a sad mistake, as the first god-unknown number of links are complete spam (and have errors, to boot!). What's odd is that Google does not rank Bruce's official site (warning: audio on opening!) or searchable lyrics. So, I'm linking Bruce Hornbsy's official lyrics from my blog in hopes of giving it a bit more Google-juice.

Creative Commons and Derivitave Works - A Question

Let's say I intend to republish or derive a new work from an existing Creative Commons licensed work. For instance, I could be placing someone's text over someone else's photos....a simple CC-enabled task.

What if, however, in the process, I make changes to the text in the form of spelling, grammar, or punctuation corrections.

Have I created a derivative work? A new work? Have I violated any CC ideals? Do I need to obtain a new license to display the different work? Are such things already provided for in CC language?

If anyone has any insight, by all means, leave a comment.

Ira Glass: On creativity

Creator/Producer of This American Life, Ira Glass gives some level headed insight into professional creativity. This video is actually from the online guerrilla filmaking guide at Current.tv.

Personal anecdote: one of the first forms my own website took included a page called the "Bit Bucket" where I hosted a handful of tracks I felt didn't "measure up." Eight years later, and that bucket's much more full.

Flying Backwards: Kid with drum machine

This really took me back. My first drum machine experience was a Roland drum machine, followed shortly by my own Alesis SR16. What a fun, albeit momentary, diversion.