'Place to Be' by Hiromi Uehara

Music · Jazz · Video · 2011/01/28 · Comment · Link

Buying Our First iMac for Video Editing

My son Max has volunteered to help athletes at his high school edit video of their game highlights to send to colleges. The athletic department devotes an Apple iMac to this purpose and also has some Windows 7 laptops.

Since my sons all have an interest in filmmaking, thanks to YouTube, we're going to buy an iMac that will be devoted to editing video and find classes to help them nurture their inner Akira Kurosawa. As a Windows and Linux guy, I'm not sure what we need to purchase. I have a few questions for Mac gurus reading this post:

• How much iMac do we need to edit video, in terms of hardware, memory and disk space?
• Is Apple iMovie sufficient, or should be we looking at Final Cut Pro?
• What other software should we get?
• How upgradeable are iMacs?

We'd be buying the Mac from an Apple Store, so if there are service or training plans to get (or avoid), that advice would be helpful too.

The high school produces video in several formats. Some are VOB, BUP and IFO files, which I think are the standard DVD format. The others are in either Quicktime or AVI.

I don't think the school has Final Cut Pro, so my son will be using iMovie on the Mac and Windows Movie Maker on the PCs at school.

I tried unsuccessfully to pull VOB files into iMovie. A Google search led me to advice that Toast Titanium can convert that format to one iMovie likes, but when I tried to do that with Titanium 6, a dialog informed me that I needed "Toast with Jam."

Please help me become an Apple snob. I don't want to have to ask a Genius.

Apple · Movies · Editing · 2011/01/21 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

Direct Quote

"Thought experiment for conservatives: You have a terrorist, really bad guy, plenty of blood on his hands. He's in your basement. There's a bomb set to go off in 24 hrs that will wipe out an American city, killing millions. Only he knows where the bomb is, and how to defuse it. The only way to get the information out of him is to get his wife heart surgery, his mom into a good retirement home, set up a college trust fund for his son and bake him delicious homemade sugar cookies. Do you do it?" -- Quinn Norton

Quotable · 2011/01/15 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Direct Quote

"As female journalists working in this region we constantly find ourselves putting clothes on to please Hamas and taking them off to please the Israelis." -- Sherine Tadros

Quotable · 2011/01/13 · 1 COMMENT · Link

The Best Way to Deal with Rev. Fred Phelps

The drama of a field crasher would make excellent television. Most of the time, it's just a drunk, an attention-seeker or a drunken attention seeker, but sometimes things take a more newsworthy turn. A teen was tasered by cops at a Philadelphia Phillies game last year and a father and son assaulted an umpire in 2003 at a Chicago White Sox game.

Live broadcasters don't show these crashers because they know that the TV time would encourage more people to do it. The industry-wide self-censorship helps discourage idiocy.

It's time the media took the same approach with Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.

Phelps is getting widespread media coverage by threatening to picket the funerals of the Tucson shooting victims. It's the same game he's been playing since 1991. Find a funeral of a soldier, public figure or someone else whose death is getting major media coverage. Fax blast a press release celebrating their demise, grab the "God Hates" signs, gather up the kids and grandkids and hop in the Ford Econoline.

Because of the enormous amount of attention his deeply offensive protests receive, you might get the impression that Phelps is a significant religious leader in this country.

He's not. Westboro Baptist Church had only 71 members as of 2007, according to a BBC report, and they're members of his extended family. He has 13 children, many of whom have stuck around and brought their own kids into the loathsome family business.

Nate Phelps, an estranged son of Rev. Phelps, says the only point of the protests is to get attention. Phelps doesn't care if he attracts a single follower to his religious views:

My father equipped his church with a bank of fax machines, and daily sent faxes to hundreds of machines across the city and state, filled with invective and diatribes against anyone who had offended him. To demonstrate the effectiveness of his methods, this tiny church of 60 people, led by my father, is today known not just throughout the United States, but across the world. ...

My father has simply refined Calvin's doctrine to the point where the vast majority of us are going to hell. And he and his followers are among the privileged few chosen by God.

This doctrine is very important to understanding the Westboro Baptist Church. My father, and those who follow him, are not preaching to try to convince people of their truth. Unlike street evangelists, who are trying to convert people, my father has no intention of converting anyone, since conversion is impossible. You're either chosen, or you're not.

The best way to deal with Phelps isn't to organize counter-protests or to form a human wall of "angels" to block people from seeing the Phelps family picketing a funeral.

Instead, it's to convince the national media to stop covering the publicity stunts of a no-name preacher with no following and no influence.

Update: "Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church won't picket the funeral of a 9-year-old girl killed in Saturday's shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz., in exchange for getting airtime on two radio stations, a church spokesman said." -- Topeka Capital-Journal

Journalism · Religion · Politics · 2011/01/11 · 19 COMMENTS · Link

Dear Abby: My Man Has 6 Kids by 6 Women

The advice columnist Gay Best Friend received this amazing letter recently:

I have been seeing a man from Nigeria off and on for about 15 months. I am seven months pregnant by him. I have been pregnant once before by him, but I had a miscarriage early on. He was mad the first time I had gotten pregnant and told me all kinds of horrible things on the phone. Then when I miscarried he was back up in it two weeks later, raw. He told me that he had a vasectomy after the first time I got pregnant and I believed him because he has six kids from six different women and always talks about how he's always broke because of them.

When I got pregnant again four months later he said, "I don't want you to mother my child because you don't have a driver's license, high school diploma, or any of your other kids, what's going to happen to mines?" Then why would he get me pregnant or not use protection? I always have condoms. He never wants to use them and even takes them off when we're having sex.

I think he got me pregnant on purpose. ...

I am a very pretty woman and I get a lot of attention. I feel like he tried to trap me so I would be pressed to be with him forever. Can a man love you that told you this big of lie about having a vasectomy?

If these two can't make love work, what hope is there for anyone else?

Relationships · Advice · Parenting · 2011/01/07 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Consultants Sue Huffington Post for Stealing Idea

Democratic political consultants Peter Daou and James Boyce have sued the Huffington Post, claiming that Arianna Huffington and other founders took their idea for the site and never compensated or credited them.

Daou and Boyce had a lot of planning meetings with Huffington before the 2005 launch of the site, which was originally intended to be a liberal counterpoint to the Drudge Report. They sent Huffington a proposal for a site called fourteensixty.com that pitched features that were later implemented on Huffington Post, such as the inclusion of celebrity liberals as bloggers.

I haven't read the suit, but the story makes me question whether Daou and Boyce should prevail. The biggest weakness I see in their suit is that they waited six years to raise the issue and continued to actively blog for Huffington after they were allegedly ripped off. Peter Daou wrote numerous blog entries for the site from December 2005 to July 2010. Boyce contributed from May 2005 to Oct. 7, 2010, just five weeks before they filed suit.

Although they claim they could not speak out until now because of professional entanglements, I don't see why they would contribute unpaid work for years to a site that had stolen their ideas. I've had experience beginning a business partnership that was such a colossal error in judgment we ended up communicating only through lawyers. I reached a settlement, took my lumps and moved on. I didn't keep working on the project (for free no less).

I corresponded with Daou a few times back when he ran the Daou Report, a terrific political news site. His presence in the early stages of Huffington's existence could explain something I've wondered about -- how my blog ended up on the Huffington Post's original blogroll the day it launched.

The Vanity Fair piece and other media outlets covering this story keep saying that Boyce and Daou's site name was chosen because 1,460 is the number of days between presidential elections. So far, I haven't read any journalist who checked the math.

There are never 1,460 days between elections. There are either 1,456 or 1,463 days, depending on how Election Day -- the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November -- falls on the calendar. Daou and Boyce wrongly assumed that four 365-day years separate the votes.

Politics · Publishing · Law · 2011/01/06 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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