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The side business has all but died these days but recently I had someone ask me to make a ‘backup’ of some 8mm films for them before they lent them to someone. Sure no problem I say. I set everything up and when it comes time to calibrate the digital camera onto the projector lens I see that the picture is totally grey. Doesn’t matter what I do, the camera can’t see anything. A little web research – looks like the CCD chip has died. At one time I had three camcorders:

1. A Sony purchased pre-8mm film business which turned out not to have a good enough optical zoom; I gave it away when I bought:
2. A Canon Optura 20, very nice quality but one day the firewire port gave up and I was no longer able to transfer the image to the computer. Next!
3. A trip to Cost Co for something cheap resulted in a Samsung SCD103, it worked great until this CCD chip business

How hard is it to keep a camcorder running? I’m not doing much film transfer work so I don’t really want to buy yet another camera but I have some potential work that I’d like to do. The alternative is to send one of the cameras for repair at a minimum $157, but a brand new replacement at Cost Co is not that much more. Sometimes the digital world is a PITA.

I just love this song from Kate Nash, called Foundations, and you can get it on the iTunes Music Store for 99c!

This one has it all – cute clay animation bunnies, new york city scenes and it’s all a plug for Sony’s new Bravia TVs so I score some bonus points there.

Two instructional videos for Talk Like a Pirate Day:

Two of my least favourite people on the telly but funny to watch. I’m tempted to say the whole thing was scripted, though.

An absolute classic from the 80s, grab the full 12″ version if you can find it – Venceremos by Working Week. Great latin club beat and a protest song to boot so you can feel double good getting your groove on. The following video is not super quality but any time Tracy Thorn sings live is ok by me.

P.S. Watch out for Tracy’s new album at the end of Feb. Yeah, probably only in the UK but it sounds good from the previews on her myspace page.

Its Friday (here at least) so time for another video of the week. This one is nostalgia time for the Brit readers amongst you…. A little background…. we have a machine that we have to connect to in order to jump to the san diego environment. In Tokyo we have to go via a first machine to get to the jump machine, someone said it like a skip and a jump so I quickly named the machine Skippy. And with that, here is the video.

As an antidote to all the ranting I’ve done this week, here’s something to laugh at/with.