Pug’s Place

It seems that my latest short film, What is Free Culture?, is now listed as a Staff Pick on the right-hand column of the Open Source Movies collection. A minor thing, really, but it means someone at Archive.org appreciates it
The response Thursday night to the film was pretty positive at the first Florida Free Culture meeting. At least one other chapter is already going to play it for their next meeting, so that hath much nift as well!

I’m going to fiddle with SpamKarma a bit. If you try posting a comment and it gets eaten, drop me a note please.

Friday night, waiting at TGI Friday’s with “my harem” after seeing Constantine (Very short review: I think they edited to include special effects rather than clarify the plot):

I’ve written a cute little perl script which finds the lowest gas prices for any city in Florida. It uses the database at floridastategasprices.com for the prices, but returns the info in a nice little table without the hassle of advertisements, etc. You could use this in a cron job and have it email your phone every day or something, who knows?
Interestingly (for me), I’ve made it work with pretty much all of the command-line HTTP access programs, curl, wget, links, elinks and lynx. As long as you have one of those (and perl) you’ll be safe! This is also my first serious perl program, so that’s cool… I’ve never had much use for perl in the past, but it sure makes things fast!

Anyway, it’s at the normal place. Let me know what you think of it. Sean, maybe FWBLUG would be interested in it?

A random “I don’t want to do homework” search caused me to shout in delight. Look at the third line of pictures on this Google Images Search for Young Yoda!!!

In the words of Odette, “ROCK ON!!!!!”

Also on Google (with the help of Odette):

• Vengef
• Pug-jo

Sadly, I don’t see any other terms that work well.

VERY random image — I just thought of doing this 5 minutes ago, and with the help of the GIMP and what was currently on my screen, well, here it is:
star_wars/PizzaJedi_MC_Escher_ForeverScreen
You want to click the thumbnail and enlarge it. And then zoom forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever….

Chris pointed out Spoofstick this afternoon on his blog (an anti-spoofing extension), so I installed it for Firefox, but it was too big for my tastes (font wise), didn’t fit my theme and such. So I’ve put a modified version online at my usual place which drastically cuts the font size for the text and halves the size of the “button” so that now it fits nicely in my theme. I have its text in light grey in the Toolbar now, just left of the upgrade button and spinning progress meter.

Enjoy.

The changed copies of Pizza Delivery Jedi and the copies of What is Free Culture are both approved and available at Archive.org now:

• Pizza Delivery Jedi
• What is Free Culture

I spent ~8.5 hours yesterday in Norman Hall’s computer lab on a G5 with Final Cut Pro editing, silently cursing, wiring, converting, and finally burning two films: a little ditty titled “What is Free Culture” and another change of “Pizza Delivery Jedi.”

Pizza Delivery Jedi
This was one set of changes, exactly as I described yesterday morning: the removal of all but two of the lightsabre clashes. Now there’s one clash effect in the fight between Crumu and Vengef (where the sound effect indicates there should be one, and it looks *much better* than the old ones did) and one in the last melee where Crumu strikes the ground (since he should be fusing that sand into glass).
I’ve already re-encoded the whole movie into its various formats and have uploaded the changed copies to Archive.org. I’ll post when they’re on-line so you can all go and download it yet again.
What is Free Culture
Gavin Baker, the president of Florida Free Culture asked me to put together a short video to the tune of Electric Frankenstein’s “New Rage” to serve as some eye-candy and show a taste of what the Free Culture movement means by ‘having a participatory culture.’ This is intended to be shown at the first meeting of the Florida chapter of the group. I did not, however, get much direction on what to put into this video, so I just found some creative commons/public domain licensed video on Archive.org that I liked, took it in yesterday morning and started mashing stuff together.
Like most video projects I’ve done in the past 5 years, I’m not particularly proud of it, but I ran out of editing time (bastards at Norman close at 5 pm on Fridays…) and definitely will not have time to re-edit the film before the meeting on Thursday. I made up all the text on the fly, which is why it seems so disjointed. Hell, I’m lucky that there aren’t any mispellings… But it’s made, it’ll show on Thursday, and it should serve its purpose well so long as it is adequately introduced anywhere it is played.
I’ve already encoded it in various formats (told Ressy to take care of that while I slept, she said she would and told me to get to bed, and lo - all encoded and named properly upon my waking up), and I’ve submitted it to Archive.org as well. It should go on-line soonish, but the placeholder page with all of the information is already on-line.

I’ll post again when both videos get approved and you can see what I was up to all day yesterday
As to what I was up to last night… well, James and I met E. and April at her place, watched some Futurama and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade whilst eating Pizza and quaffing Mountain Dew. Huzzah!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have two more days of class left before Spring Break: Next Tuesday and Thursday. After class on Thursday I’m attending the first meeting of Florida Free Culture, the new local chapter of FreeCulture.org, the student movement embracing, among other things, the idea that deriving creativity from older works is a good idea, not something that should always be illegal. Then I’m going to bed, waking up early and driving to Fort Walton Beach! The plan for spring break involves seeing Mrs. Smith and perhaps attending the Gulf Coast Renaissance Faire in Pensacola on the 5th of March. Definitely going to celebrate Elf’s birthday on the 3rd of March, too.
The EFF is going to write text for my Orphan Works Copyright Office Comment application, and it will be linked very soon. I’m bubbling a bit. The EFF. Is writing stuff. For my application. I feel like a teenager who, presently crushing on a movie star, just finds out that movie star is going to fly over his pathetic little town and organizes a host of equally moronic friends to write something stupid like “I LOVE YOU KATE MULGREW” on the football field with 10 molar potassium hydroxide. Anyway, I’ll let you know when the EFF does all the hardest work for me and takes most of the credit.
I’m going to put together a 3-minute (or so) video tomorrow morning of Creative-Commons and public-domain licensed stuff to show at that first Florida Free Culture meeting. It might end up being a good piece of work and thus end up on-line. I’ll let you know. I’m also planning to digitize a number of things I made during high school (like that awesome County Honors Night video intro, the senior video opening that apparently has been used every year since, etc). Maybe some of that will appear on-line, who knows?

Another thing on my to-do list is to redo (read: remove) all of the lightsabre clashes in Pizza Delivery Jedi. After watching the Star Wars Trilogy again, I’ve realized that I completely forgot what the lightsabre fights looked like. They’ve all got to go, but luckily that won’t be hard to do. The hard part will be re-encoding the movie into those six different formats once I do it… eh heh, eh heh. I wish I could go and replace all the music in the film, but it would be way too much hassle at this point, since I don’t have a multi-track audio file of the film (note to self, do that for later productions). I doubt I’ll get to this stuff tomorrow though.

And for the more mundane stuff, I have another Analysis of Algorithms homework assignment due Tuesday, and the requisite weekly Numerical Analysis assignment also due Tuesday. Those combined with April and E. and James plotting to do stuff (with me, too) tomorrow night, well, I might be busy this weekend.
Oh, and I’m living off campus next year.

I have a couple peices of choice randomness for you this afternoon. First, Odette’s roommate is presently ill (sad!):

(16:39:22) Pug: There, I have made Jen a card and taped it to this email.
(16:39:30) Pug: I do hope when I hit send that it’ll take the card with it.
(16:39:38) Odette: *laughs!*
(16:39:46) Pug: …shoot.

Second, well, I did some work with Blender today on a whim…

(16:20:25) Pug: I turned a naked female body into a monster just a little bit ago.
(16:20:45) E: yay!
(16:21:02) Pug: It was sort of on accident. I was trying to simplify it into a more comic-looking body, but the meshsmooth operation smoothed a bit too much in some places and far too little in others.
(16:21:11) Pug: The result was scary.
(16:21:15) Pug: I abandoned the project.
(16:21:33) E: oh
(16:21:40) Pug: I thought you’d be amused though
(16:21:41) E: what were you doing with naked pics anyway!!
(16:21:49) Pug: Wasn’t a picture. It was a model.
(16:22:17) Pug: And it was female only because MakeHuman 2.0 Pre-Alpha’s male generation engine is broken at present.
(16:22:34) E: oohhh ok
(16:23:01) E: what are you doing with naked people software and not real naked pics!!!
(16:23:15) Pug: I’m just weird like that.