Introducing Honey Bear, starring Oki the Okapi and, of course, a guest appearance by Sharkie the Shark.

Calling Garp - are you ready for your closeup??


:: Schmap Anchorage Fourth Edition: Photo Inclusion

Emma Williams,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides

If you click on the link, and hover your mouse over the entry for the Clarion Suites, you’ll see Schlepp and Bea in all their glory.

Except it’s Thursday and I’m too sick to make my own puppet theater this week. Yesterday was the Brit Awards, the UK’s premier pop music award show (and since UK pop is the world’s best, make that the world’s premier pop music award show) and I’ve spent some time digging out clips from YouTube. I am sure these will all soon be deleted due to their undeniable copyright infringement so get them while you can.

I love this one: The Klaxxons and Rhinna do “Umbrella”, cool lasers too.

Mark Ronson won Best Male award or something, despite the fact that he doesn’t do his own stuff:

And in case you didn’t get enough Amy, here she is solo. I love her to death but when she sings live it’s like she sings her own random timing and the band has to be adept at changing tempo to match her. And in both this performance, and the one above, she seems obsessed with the length of her skirt.

Finally, you might be saying “what about Kylie?”. Yeah, she won International artist and performed but frankly she looked horrid and it’s a terrible song (if you can call it that) so I’d rather we just moved along….

I swear, it was just an ordinary evening; no one saw this coming.

Thanks to db, or maybe josh, yesterday I bought a Flip Ultra camcorder so I can join the video blogging craze, or something. Yes, I know I have three perfectly good camcorders at home but none of them are the sweet, easy to carry and use size of the Flip. I figure I will keep it in my bag, whip it out (so to speak) when the mood strikes. Hell, maybe I’ll record some video for the Wailing Cat sometime.

My first impression was a little underwhelming, actually. But the joy is in it’s simplicity. There’s no complicated buttons, just turn it on, point it at something, hit record, hit stop. Then it plugs right into your computer and you can use the supplied software to save/upload or any of your own tools. The video quality ain’t bad for $150. The trick is finding a hosting site that does a decent job of encoding the file but doesn’t take forever to do it.

First, I used good old YouTube which is the de facto standard, I guess. It processes pretty fast but the quality sure ain’t great:

DB tried Vimeo which did a much better job in terms of quality but took a long time to upload and encode. Rather than rehash the same experiment, I tried Viddler which was pretty quick, at least as fast as YouTube, I think, but I’m not sure the quality is improved any.

I’ll probably sit back and let josh and db figure out the best solution, they’re good at that kind of thing. In the meantime, I am pondering registering guapacha.tv for my video blogs, but at $25 a year it makes one think twice.