Today, many companies are turning to third party solutions to create products for clients. Whether you are a member of a creative agency making an internet TV show or a freelance mobile application provider, you’ve most likely incorporated third party solutions into your products. Incorporating video into the budget for projects is realistic, as online video is more affordable than ever. The good thing about that approach is: you can pass the cost down to your end customer. In either case, low cost solutions are what you are looking for. When you’ve finally finished a project and its a success, you open doors to future opportunities. A successful project can benefit from upgrades and other improvements. And clients are often receptive to ‘up-selling’ proposals if the project is a success. Or you could come at them with a whole new project idea – no need to always wait for them to get back in touch with you. You might have a great idea you want to do for them, and they just might bite.
I work at a company that runs SesameVault - a web video platform. Some of SesameVault’s most creative customers are such people. These customers of ours can continue to innovate the product they’ve sold to their own customer by taking advantage of SesameVault beyond the original scope of their projects.
If you:
• used Flash video on a website, why not upgrade to a higher quality MP4 encoding?
• offer educational content, why not offer the audio-only encoding for playback on iPods or car stereos?
• offering browser based video, why not drop in downloadable mobile & iPod encodings?
• integrated basic media uploading into your CMS, why not add thumbnail picking/uploading ability?
If you’ve had a succesfull project with a client, there is opportunity to improve upon it or to do another one. SesameVault is a great tool in your client services tool box. Have you had success creating solutions from third-party providers? Please share. If you’ve had a succesfull project with a client, there is opportunity to improve upon it or to do another one.
I’ve been listening to A Dark Night of the Soul, the latest Danger Mouse album, for the past week and a half. The ‘danger’ has been heightened with the addition of collaborators: Sparklehorse and many singers. The album has been mired in legal controversy (probably stemming from the appearance of many singers under contractual obligations) and will probably never be officially released. While being inaccessible through commercial channels, it is quite accessible in terms of the music.
For me, Danger Mouse albums are each their own acquired taste. Just like it takes many spins to produce cotton candy, it’s taken me many spins to get an appreciation for the album. The different guest singers on the songs push out across a wide variety of styles. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse bend over backwards to produce sonic structures to support each singer. Unfortunately, the overall cohesion of the album suffers from this. It sounds like an awesome fresh mix tape rather than a traditional album. There are exceptions to this, one of them the surprising title track featuring David Lynch on vocals. Laying a foundation for the monotone, and dreamy lyrics sung by Lynch, the artists seem free to elevate the track to the full potential of such an unlikely and intriguing collaboration.
Even though the album (download it here) will probably never come out in the traditional sense, the accompanying book of photographs by Lynch was indeed released. I just ordered a copy and will comment on it when its received.
I’m excited by the varied output coming from the Lynch camp these days. The release of the Interview Project a few days ago, and this album a few months ago has created a confluence of events that we are very excited to be involved in.
I hate a lot of Microsoft products and policies. I hate IE7 always running with add-ons disabled. The manage add-ons option in Tools graphical button drop down is grayed out.
My colleague Cameron figured out that if you navigate to My Computer/Program Files/Internet Explorer and launch it from there, it works with add-ons!
So make a new shortcut and put it on the desktop and use it. The Start menu shortcut is evil and always launches the browser in that mode (once this happens to you). You could also replace that start menu icon with a new one, but who wants to deal with that in Windows?
I hate windows. I like mac os x and Ubuntu, and also Gentoo some times - but I need my hand held when playing in that sandbox.
I had a hell of a time this year. I once again recycled my silver dress into yet another outfit. I wanted to approach ’space cowboy’ and purchased $10.00 worth of guns from the dollar store. Caitlin hooked a brother up and spray painted them silver. She also did my straw ‘Renegade’ hat and the ensemble looked something like this:
Restys played two shows - one at the Bread and Jam in Cohoes, and the other one at 51 3rd Street. Dirty Jeans Jenkins opened for us at the Bread & Jam, and at 51 3rd we opened for Hatchet for the Holidays. Unfortunately the only recording of our set was done in Cohoes by Caitlin. She recorded a snipped of 16 Tons:
Cameron did a heck of a job as ‘Rich Man’ - the women couldn’t keep their hands off’im:
Even though this guitar was a huge part of my adolescence, I don’t play it anymore. It was a gift from my mom so … is it wrong to sell it? It’s quite cool - and not because of the custom knobs (these are orange, and by default they are smaller and white). The guitar has been augmented with a mini hum-bucking pickup in the bridge position. This is essentially a pickup with two electromagnetic coils that have inverse polarity to each other and thus cancel out interference hum. The sound of hum-buckers is usually thicker, and its a nice boost to the thin sounding bridge position pickup. I would never dream of putting this in the neck position - thats the most ’strat’ sounding position there is. But the bridge pickup is all thin sounding and crappy, so I experimented. If you desperately need that single coil sound in the bridge you can always ‘cut’ the pickup in half but pulling up on the tone knob (also custom) and this will turn off one of the coils in the hum-bucker.
I forgot to blog about this atrocious experience. After hanging out at Fritz and Allison’s house for a few hours, we were leaving the way we came - through the front door. Before walking down the steps though, I spotted a nifty wooden chair to the left of me on the porch that I promptly tried out. When Caitlin came out, I stood up and was ready to walk down the steps when she grabbed me. Right where I was about to put my face was a giant spider web - strung up while we were inside. In the center of it was a gigantic yellow monster. As I realized what I almost did, I exhaled and my breath hit the spider. It clenched its legs - tightening the whole web, and sent a shiver down my spine:
To make it more immediately hot, I replaced some of the rooster sauce with freshly ground black pepper. I added a tiny bit of toasted sesame seed oil to give it a bit of a kick. I was out of worcestershire sauce unfortunately but the results were excellent - this is probably the recipe I’ll stick with.
Ingredients:
2 lb Beef
1.25 Cups of Soy Sauce
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 Table spoons liquid smoke
2 Table spoons sriracha rooster red pepper sauce
2 Table spoons freshly ground black pepper.
2 table spoons of Brown Sugar
It was very fun to eat jerky and watch the election results get tallied, all while practicing Restys tunes.
