Here’s the video I shot of the launch:

Launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor from def on Vimeo.

Here’s the Best Names list:

Blake Ashby
Claire Cruise
David Masters
Charles T. Maxham
Kat Swift

Here are some candidates that have NO chance:

Quay Fortuna
Michael “Jingo” Jingozian
Steve Kissing
David Koch

(Those last two should run together “Kissing/Koch 2008″)

Jeff “Petro” Petkevicius

(He apparently isn’t cool enough to have seen “Napoleon Dynamite” - no obvious “Vote for Petro” t-shirts on his site yet.)

“Average Joe” Schriner

(”Joe” also plays ball with urban youth, so he’s got that going for him.)

Da Vid

I painted the banners this afternoon, just for fun. They say “Peace in all seasons” and “Peace in all places.” The character on the door is an upside-down luck. Painted with tempera paints on red wrapping paper. Very authentic! Happy New Year!

Of course, I really don’t know how this “Format War” will turn out anymore than anyone else does, but it sure seems like both of these clearly superior format will fail just as spectacularly as Beta or Laser Discs did. One or both of these formats may be the next-gen in optical data storage, but that’s a whole other question.

DVD-Video
DVD-Video disc technology remains the fastest technology ever to be adopted in the United States. It took about five years for half of US households to get a DVD player and, today, market penetration is essentially saturated. I believe DVD-Video will be the last physical format we ever see for distribution of movies, however.

HDTV penetration, by contrast, is still below 36% according to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA - an industry trade group). Nielsen estimates that the number of people actually watching HD content on their HDTVs is only 14%, meaning that roughly 50% of those that own HD-capable sets are still watching plain old SD cable and DVD-Video discs. So the question is: What fraction of 14% of US households watching HD content are using the winning “format of choice” Blu-ray players? It’s hard to say, but HD - Blu-ray and HD-DVD combined - accounted for 1% of all home market movie sales in 2007.

Broadband HD
Most homes already have HD displays in the form of a computer monitor. And, when combined with the one of the fastest consumer technology ever to penetrate 50% of US homes - namely, Broadband Internet - we have the answer to our initial question: “If not Blu-ray or HD-DVD, then what?”

The popularity of YouTube and other video services teaches us something else: people really don’t care about HD. Grainy, postage-stamp sized video of cats doing, well, crazy cat things seem to be endlessly entertaining to the unwashed masses, to the chagrin of high-priced ad agencies everywhere. And higher quality - but still SD-resolution - television and movies are also going mainstream, as sites like Hulu.com, Netflix.com Watch Instantly and networks like NBC and CBS come online in a big way, either for free or for a fee. Broadband HD can’t be far behind. It might be tempting to predict that 2008 will be the Year Broadband HD makes its debut - but anyone who’d make such a bold prediction would be a fool.

Vimeo, et al
Because it’s already here: Check out vimeo.com. If it makes you sick to watch your gorgeous HD video ruined by YouTube’s 320×240 blocky compression and monophonic audio, then this is where you should be uploading your video. Vimeo let’s you upload stereo HD video at 1280×720, of any duration, with the only limit being that you can only upload 500MB a week. At a reasonable data rate of 4,000Kbps using a high-quality H.264 codec for HD, that’s about 15 minutes or so.

Of course, YouTube HD and other HD Internet distribution services can’t be far behind. It’s almost impossible to imagine what we’ll be talking about in the realm of Broadband HD a year from now.

Damn! 30-seconds is not a lot of time! Especially when you MUST include your name, hometown and some context. I really wanted to rant about deregulation, the banking industry, the fiasco caused by deregulation of the energy industry in California some years back (when I lived there), the forced deregulation of Iraq, the deregulation of our government ever since the Republicans got hold of all three branches, the rape of the environment, the abuses of Big Pharma, etc. etc. etc. But 30-seconds is all you get, so I ended up with what is a fairly legitimate question.

Which, if my question gets picked, will be dodged by the bastards claiming that the sub-prime mess was NOT a result of deregulation. Which won’t answer my question: Do we need more or less regulation?

That’s all over now: some busybody on the Internet whined to the FBI, prompting the Office of the General Council to send me a Cease & Desist letter, which I am, of course, complying with 100%. Although this FBI Webpage states that “…it is perfectly fine for anyone, without FBI approval, to use…” the FBI warnings for legitimate purposes and I understand that the FBI would like to “…[permit] the broadest possible public use of the seal by all individuals and businesses with a copyright interest.” the FBI Seal has been removed from all documents on this site.

I would also like to state that I completely agree with the OGC’s reasons for restricting the use of the Seal, as their letter to me states: “…the primary purpose of this legal restriction is to protect the dignity of the FBI’s insignia and ensure that they are not used for improper purpose[s] or in a manner that would confuse the public.”

If you, however, would like to buy my warning screens and add the FBI Seal back into the images yourself - for legitimate purposes - you can do an image search on google for “FBI Seal” and find at least a hundred other non-FBI pages with the seal on it, used on everything from golf balls to coffee mugs, which, of course, are not using the Seal for anything other than completely trivial decorative purposes that do not in any way “protect the dignity of the FBI’s insignia.”

Be careful: Even though YOUR use of the Seal is probably more legitimate than decorating sports gear, you might be violating Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 17, but as long as someone doesn’t report you to the overworked FBI and the OGC, you should be OK.

All of these uses of the Seal must certainly have OGC approval and the sanction of the FBI, because I’m sure Mr. Dehler reported them to the FBI too:

Last night, I saw one, then the other glide into the tree in the back right as it was getting dark (30-minutes after sunset). So I got up before dawn this AM and went out there and, sure enough, there they were, squeaking away. Ya, the Noble Eagle’s call is kind of a squeaky, undignified thing. What you hear in the movies is, well, just in the movies:

* Listen to a Bald Eagle
* And here’s a Red-Tailed Hawk
* Film Sound Cliches