Tag: video

WIMP.com – your productivity killer

Normally, I would just bookmark the site with Delicious and wait until it will get into my daily dumps here and be done with it. But not WIMP.com.

This one is special. If you look at it – there is nothing fancy. The design is simple. No features like user registration, banners, or automatically syndicated news from other sources.

All it has are pictures, flash animations and games, and short video clips. And it’s the video clips that did it for me. Short, amateur, often of terrible quality, but interesting and to the point.

Some say that today’s kids have an attention span of 3 seconds. Well, I don’t blame them. With so much stuff out there – do you need any more? Learn to express yourself. If you need more than 3 seconds of attention span, you aren’t targeting today’s kids. Change, if you have to.

Anyway, go and check that site out. I guarantee you that your productivity will drop tremendiously. There is just no way to stop. You can’t have enough. At least I. The only thing that might keep you in reality is your bandwidth monitor. If your traffic is expensive, skip it now.

Let me know what’s your favourite clip, by the way.

More content is coming…

Olga was very good this year and Santa Claus gave her a camcorder for Christmas. That means that even more content will be posted to this website in the coming year. So far you had plenty of texts and loads of images with occasional audio. Video clips were rare. Now they’ll be more often. (Stay tuned for the upcoming New Year Eve filming with me performing as Santa Claus).

We’ll just need some time to study the camera and how the whole process of filming, ripping, and optimizing for web works. Any hints are more than welcome, as usual…

Russian climbing – MUST SEE!

One of the things that I’ve been saying for as long as I can remember is that it is always interesting and exciting to watch a person do something he is good at. And your interest in the subject is irrelevant – it’s all about how that person does it and that only. And ‘it’ can be anything. OK, maybe with few small exceptions, but those don’t count.

Another thought that I support, but always try to avoid is that in order to be good at something, all you need is strong will and a lot of effort. Equipment, financial injections, and stuff like that can only slow you down.

In support of these two ideas, I offer you the link to a video – Russian climbing.

It is a pretty long download and will last for only 8 minutes, but YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO SEE THIS! Actually, you might have seen something similar in Jackie Chan movies, but who believes the cinema these days? Jackie Chan is doing what he is doing for the movies and he uses a lot of trained professionals and equipment to achieve the effect.

In this clip though, you’ll see guys doing some really amazing things without any equipment what-so-ever. Really, really cool stuff!

Video tapes are gone. Long live DVDs.

I have given away our VCR about two years ago. It was malfunctioning and wasn’t fun to watch anymore. But the legacy remained in our house in the form of about twenty video tapes. Those were all excellent movies that either I bought myself or was presented with by my close friends. “Snatch.”, “Pulp Fiction”, “Dogma” – films like these are jewels in anyone’s collection. I had no use for them though as I didn’t have any means of watching them.

Slowly, one by one, I got all these movies on DVDs and my collection was back to useful state. And those tapes were still laying around needless.

Today I gave them all away. I was going to do it sooner or later. I just couldn’t find anyone who I knew would have a VCR and would appreciate the films. Some of my friends have long switched to DVDs and DivX. Others have completely different movie tastes than I do. Yet another others already had their own collection that included either some or all of these films.

Dimitry and Lana passed by our place today after the trip to mountains. They confirmed that they didn’t have these movies, or if they had any they would be dubbed in Russian, which is not a good thing. Especially for the family that speaks English in its entirety. Their movie tastes are very close to mine. And so I was glad to present them with all my tapes.

I’ve emtpied the whole shelf that can now be used for storage of a new movie media – DVD.

Bought few DVDs

Martin has one of his crazy special offers running. I usually try to avoid his shop during such times, but today I had to come in. The result is, as always, I bought a few DVDs for my home collection. His special offer is a very generous one – 7 CYP per DVD or 5 for 30 CYP or 10 for 5o CYP (if I am not mistaken). So I went though the disks that he had for sale and selected 4 DVDs. He pointed out to me that I am buying four for 7 CYP each, while I can find one more DVD that I like and get all of them for 6 CYP a piece. And, of couse, I couldn’t resist.

Here is what I got: