I have spent the past couple of months putting together my first YouTube video. It is not nearly as easy as throwing together a blog post and so I don't plan on doing very many of them. I did learn a lot about the process though and that is why I put together this one.
While I enjoy spending time in front of my computer, I much prefer spending time outside. I wanted to start putting together some videos about our National Parks. Then I discovered that you need to have an expensive permit if you plan to record video for anything other than your personal use. So instead of starting with a National Park, I decided to start with Goblin Valley State Park. Note that there is no such restriction for photographs.
There are a lot of poor quality YouTube videos and I didn't want my video to fall into that same category so I tried to do it right the first time. I created my own script before heading down to the park. That gave me an idea of what video I needed. Then in March I drove to Goblin Valley State Park where I met my son with his wife and puppy. We spent the next day wandering around the park taking pictures and gathering video. I had 3 other people helping me take pictures along with 2 separate video cameras. One is an old camcorder unit while the other is an older action camera. We used the action camera for all of the rappelling shots. I plan to update both video cameras in the future but wanted to use what I had for this experiment.
As I compiled the video and showed early versions to family, I got some very important feedback. While I had a lot of video of the park, most people liked the still camera shots except for the rappelling scene. Video made that part more dramatic.
No video is complete without a soundtrack. I had all of my video edited together and then found a piece of music that I can use for free with attribution to the artist. It is no coincidence that my video is around 7 minutes long and exactly the same length as the music.
The last thing to do was to record the narration soundtrack. Recently I purchased a high-end condenser microphone complete with shock mount and pop guard. Then I locked myself in my bedroom which had the best acoustics in the house for recording my voice. Combining the narration with the music and my edited video didn't take long at all.
As I mentioned, I created the video as a learning experience. I am very interested in feedback. Is the video boring or does it hold your interest? Do you want to visit Goblin Valley State Park now? Please feel free to send me comment as I am looking to improve for my next video.
Saturday, May 26, 2018
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Video Game Review: Horizon Zero Dawn
In January I started playing Horizon Zero Dawn while spending evenings on my sailboat in the Bay Area. That means I only got to play for an hour or two on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings. Last week I finally finished the game. I have about 100 hours into the game and completed all of the side missions except tutorials. I also only have a few other tasks until I complete all of the trophies.
A lot of my coworkers and friends have played Horizon Zero Dawn and encouraged me to do so. I hesitated playing it because I knew it would take a long time to complete. I am glad I did though as I thoroughly enjoyed the game. My youngest son also loves the game and I can see why. The story is very compelling and while I thought some of the tasks would get old, it turns out I needed that much time learning how to take down all the different machines available in the game. I also discovered that having the shield-weave armor really helps when trying to take down some very difficult enemies. If you decide to play the game, I highly recommend doing a bit of research and making sure you acquire it as early as possible.
Horizon Zero Dawn is an open-world game that allows you to go anywhere and do missions in almost any order. Towards the end of my game, I discovered there were plenty of earlier quests I hadn't done and so I went back and completed them before the final battle. Completing everything helps ease the difficulty towards the end.
Horizon Zero Dawn is rated T for Teen because of blood and violence. I enjoyed the game and highly recommend it for anyone over the age of 12. You can find a used copy of the game for around $25 and new for $30. It is well worth that price. I would also spend the extra money and get "The Frozen Wilds" DLC as I want to continue playing the game. I am a big fan of the PlayStation 4 console and this is a console exclusive so it is not available for the PC nor the Xbox platforms. That may be a deal breaker for some.
A lot of my coworkers and friends have played Horizon Zero Dawn and encouraged me to do so. I hesitated playing it because I knew it would take a long time to complete. I am glad I did though as I thoroughly enjoyed the game. My youngest son also loves the game and I can see why. The story is very compelling and while I thought some of the tasks would get old, it turns out I needed that much time learning how to take down all the different machines available in the game. I also discovered that having the shield-weave armor really helps when trying to take down some very difficult enemies. If you decide to play the game, I highly recommend doing a bit of research and making sure you acquire it as early as possible.
Horizon Zero Dawn is an open-world game that allows you to go anywhere and do missions in almost any order. Towards the end of my game, I discovered there were plenty of earlier quests I hadn't done and so I went back and completed them before the final battle. Completing everything helps ease the difficulty towards the end.
Horizon Zero Dawn is rated T for Teen because of blood and violence. I enjoyed the game and highly recommend it for anyone over the age of 12. You can find a used copy of the game for around $25 and new for $30. It is well worth that price. I would also spend the extra money and get "The Frozen Wilds" DLC as I want to continue playing the game. I am a big fan of the PlayStation 4 console and this is a console exclusive so it is not available for the PC nor the Xbox platforms. That may be a deal breaker for some.
Friday, May 11, 2018
Narrating Text Messages
I had to visit the post office this afternoon and had a guy behind me narrating his text messages. That means he used his phone's speech-to-text capability to send a regular text message. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a text message? Why not just call the guy on the phone. Then you don't annoy the rest of us in line while you have your conversation.
The guy in the post office really annoyed me today. Yes, it is much faster to speak into your phone and have it convert your message to text than it is to type it in yourself. Perhaps I am strange and only use text messaging when I know that someone is busy and can't talk on the phone or I can't talk on the phone. This guy held a conversation like he was talking on the phone, yet he kept having to correct the text message because speech to text isn't perfect. If you insist on texting instead of using the phone, make sure that is the most efficient use of communication. Otherwise you are just annoying those around you.
The guy in the post office really annoyed me today. Yes, it is much faster to speak into your phone and have it convert your message to text than it is to type it in yourself. Perhaps I am strange and only use text messaging when I know that someone is busy and can't talk on the phone or I can't talk on the phone. This guy held a conversation like he was talking on the phone, yet he kept having to correct the text message because speech to text isn't perfect. If you insist on texting instead of using the phone, make sure that is the most efficient use of communication. Otherwise you are just annoying those around you.
Thursday, May 3, 2018
Video Game Widows
Today is one of my department admin's birthday and I asked here if she had any special plans this evening. She said that she didn't and so I told her to tell her boyfriend to take her out somewhere nice. She responded that he is dating one of the recent video game releases and doesn't have much time for her. It made me think of my own video game playing and if I neglect my wife.
That is sort of a loaded question because I leave my wife every Monday morning, catch a flight to the Bay Area, work at a video game company until Thursday evening, and then catch a flight back home. While I may not play any video games when I am home, other than for guitar practice, I do leave for 4 days each week to work in the video game industry. I guess you could say that my wife is a video game widow along with the admin mentioned previously.
So are there any video game widowers whose wife's neglect him to play games? Unfortunately I don't have any statistics I can cite, just anecdotal evidence. Most of the women I know that play games, do so with their husbands or boyfriends. One of the project managers I work with loves the puzzle solving part of video games while her husband likes the shooting part. When they play, they play together and this is common among most of the video-game couples I know.
Fortunately I get all the video game time I need at work or during the evenings when I am away from home. Unfortunately that doesn't help my department admin who won't do anything special on her birthday because her boyfriend is too involved in a video game. In his defense, it is a pretty good video game with a lot of positive reviews.
That is sort of a loaded question because I leave my wife every Monday morning, catch a flight to the Bay Area, work at a video game company until Thursday evening, and then catch a flight back home. While I may not play any video games when I am home, other than for guitar practice, I do leave for 4 days each week to work in the video game industry. I guess you could say that my wife is a video game widow along with the admin mentioned previously.
So are there any video game widowers whose wife's neglect him to play games? Unfortunately I don't have any statistics I can cite, just anecdotal evidence. Most of the women I know that play games, do so with their husbands or boyfriends. One of the project managers I work with loves the puzzle solving part of video games while her husband likes the shooting part. When they play, they play together and this is common among most of the video-game couples I know.
Fortunately I get all the video game time I need at work or during the evenings when I am away from home. Unfortunately that doesn't help my department admin who won't do anything special on her birthday because her boyfriend is too involved in a video game. In his defense, it is a pretty good video game with a lot of positive reviews.
Thursday, April 19, 2018
Machine Learning for Predictions
This past week I have been working on trying to predict the future based on historical data with the help of machine learning. This is one of those areas where you have to be careful because if it was easy then everyone would be doing it to cash in on the stock market or for bets on who will win the next sporting event. However there are certain variables that can be used to increase the probability of an event happening. For instance, if you have clouds in the sky, there is more likely a chance of rain than on a sunny day. The trick is figuring out what those variables are and this is what is know as feature selection.
If you think about your favorite sporting event, think about all of the variables that go into a game. Who are the players and what are their various statistics? Does the weather impact those statistics or are the games played indoors? You can eventually see that complexity spirals out of control if you are trying to predict the winner of a game.
The problem I have been trying to solve is something akin to when someone will go out to dinner next based on historical information. An overly simplistic algorithm might look at the average time between restaurant visits. For someone that dines out on a regular basis, this will work. Someone else might only go out on special occasions and that won't work unless those special occasions are evenly distributed on the calendar. Think about variables that contribute to when you eat out. Some might include:
When I look at my own restaurant habits, I know that I generally eat at the airport on Thursday evenings as I catch a flight from San Francisco to Salt Lake. Unfortunately that won't be the case this evening as I decided to buy a big lunch and only eat half of it, saving the other half for this evening. Therefore it is important to remember that predictions are no guarantee that an event will happen.
If you think about your favorite sporting event, think about all of the variables that go into a game. Who are the players and what are their various statistics? Does the weather impact those statistics or are the games played indoors? You can eventually see that complexity spirals out of control if you are trying to predict the winner of a game.
The problem I have been trying to solve is something akin to when someone will go out to dinner next based on historical information. An overly simplistic algorithm might look at the average time between restaurant visits. For someone that dines out on a regular basis, this will work. Someone else might only go out on special occasions and that won't work unless those special occasions are evenly distributed on the calendar. Think about variables that contribute to when you eat out. Some might include:
- Day of the week - Perhaps you eat out only on Friday or Saturday evenings and never on Sunday.
- Holidays - It is always more difficult to get a restaurant reservation on a holiday.
- Proximity to Payday - While it is tough to generalize when everyone's payday is, if you have that information, it might be a factor in some people's choice to go out.
- Weather - A snowstorm has the potential to greatly reduce people's desire to go out.
When I look at my own restaurant habits, I know that I generally eat at the airport on Thursday evenings as I catch a flight from San Francisco to Salt Lake. Unfortunately that won't be the case this evening as I decided to buy a big lunch and only eat half of it, saving the other half for this evening. Therefore it is important to remember that predictions are no guarantee that an event will happen.
Friday, April 13, 2018
Video Game Review: XBLAZE Lost : Memories
After a month or so of playing XBLAZE Lost: Memories, I finished the game on my PlayStation Vita this morning while waiting for service to be completed on my car. I mostly finished the game last night on the flight from San Francisco to Salt Lake City but had to watch the credits and final scene after the credits.
This is really the first time I have ever played a Japanese visual novel and I have to say it was kind of strange. It felt like I played 3 different games all nested within each other. The first game consisted of a well-drawn story where you mostly just watched events unfold between a group of teenagers that also fought magical bad guys. Then you had another story of two sisters in a completely different universe trying to unlock the secrets of their mother's death and father's experiments. Once again, you mostly just watch the events unfold similarly to a movie. Then the third game is a clunky 8-bit graphics treasure hunt with quizzes that sort of ties everything together.
While the game kept me entertained over the past month or so of flights, I can't say that I really enjoyed it. At least not to the extent that I have enjoyed some of the Telltale games where it feels like you have more control over the choices you can make. Towards the finale of XBLAZE, you do have to make a number of choices, some of which take you down a dead-end and you have to go back and redo them in order to finish. The fact that it came at the conclusion of the game confused me and I almost stopped playing the game prematurely. The thing that kept me going was knowing I only had two more trophies in order to Platinum the game and it would be a shame to get that close and not complete it.
In addition to the trophies, I continued playing the game because the dialog is entirely in Japanese with English subtitles. I spend a lot of time in Japan and am always trying to improve my language skills. By the end of the game I had a better comprehension of a handful of more Japanese phrases. I wouldn't recommend this as the only tool for learning the language as you won't pick up much unless you have a foundation to build upon.
XBLAZE Lost: Memories has an ESRB rating of M for Maturity because of Violence, Language, and Brief Nudity. The brief nudity isn't anything beyond well-drawn cartoon characters in skimpy swimsuits but I wouldn't recommend this game for anyone under the age of 18. It is available for the PS Vita, PS3, and Windows PC platform. I got the game in a bundle of PS Vita games I purchased for $5 and so I didn't pay much for it.
Unless you love Japanese visual novels or are looking to brush up on your Japanese language skills, I would not buy the game. If someone gives you a copy of the game and you are interested in a cultural lesson then go ahead and play it. Hopefully this has been helpful.
This is really the first time I have ever played a Japanese visual novel and I have to say it was kind of strange. It felt like I played 3 different games all nested within each other. The first game consisted of a well-drawn story where you mostly just watched events unfold between a group of teenagers that also fought magical bad guys. Then you had another story of two sisters in a completely different universe trying to unlock the secrets of their mother's death and father's experiments. Once again, you mostly just watch the events unfold similarly to a movie. Then the third game is a clunky 8-bit graphics treasure hunt with quizzes that sort of ties everything together.
While the game kept me entertained over the past month or so of flights, I can't say that I really enjoyed it. At least not to the extent that I have enjoyed some of the Telltale games where it feels like you have more control over the choices you can make. Towards the finale of XBLAZE, you do have to make a number of choices, some of which take you down a dead-end and you have to go back and redo them in order to finish. The fact that it came at the conclusion of the game confused me and I almost stopped playing the game prematurely. The thing that kept me going was knowing I only had two more trophies in order to Platinum the game and it would be a shame to get that close and not complete it.
In addition to the trophies, I continued playing the game because the dialog is entirely in Japanese with English subtitles. I spend a lot of time in Japan and am always trying to improve my language skills. By the end of the game I had a better comprehension of a handful of more Japanese phrases. I wouldn't recommend this as the only tool for learning the language as you won't pick up much unless you have a foundation to build upon.
XBLAZE Lost: Memories has an ESRB rating of M for Maturity because of Violence, Language, and Brief Nudity. The brief nudity isn't anything beyond well-drawn cartoon characters in skimpy swimsuits but I wouldn't recommend this game for anyone under the age of 18. It is available for the PS Vita, PS3, and Windows PC platform. I got the game in a bundle of PS Vita games I purchased for $5 and so I didn't pay much for it.
Unless you love Japanese visual novels or are looking to brush up on your Japanese language skills, I would not buy the game. If someone gives you a copy of the game and you are interested in a cultural lesson then go ahead and play it. Hopefully this has been helpful.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Research on a New Computer
A friend has asked me to work with him on a new project. This will be outside my normal work and is something completely different from what I do at my regular job. Therefore I don't want to use my work computer for the project as that is not fair to my current employer. This new project needs to run on an iPhone and so I need to invest in a Mac as that is the best place to develop iOS applications. Yes, I know you can develop on Windows, but I have another personal project where I would like to use a Mac and so buying one solves two problems for me.
My natural tendency is to go out and get the best computer on the market. Fortunately I realize that I really don't need that much processing power. Remember that this is a side project and isn't my full-time job. If it was, then I would have no problem spending the extra money.
Today I went through Apple's website and compared the iMac and Mac mini. My second project requires a 4K monitor and so I don't want a laptop. While I could add a 2nd monitor, that just adds to the cost of the machine and I am trying to spend as little money as possible. So I ran through the website and configured 2 comparable machines in each style of computer. I erroneously assumed that the Mac mini would come in at a less expensive price. That is true, but once I add a 4K monitor, even with a highly discounted one, it is about $200 than the iMac. Furthermore, the iMac has a slightly faster processor and I can get it with twice as much memory than the max configuration for Mac mini. For the record, both computers come in at under $2,000 with 16MB of memory, 1TB disk drives, and Intel i7 processors running at or above 3GHz.
I have to say that I am surprised as I expected the Mac mini to be the less expensive choice. There are a number of other things on the project to research before I purchase the computer and so pricing may change in the near future. Apple has a tendency to announce more hardware choices towards the summer and that may influence prices a bit. If that happens, then I will adjust accordingly.
My natural tendency is to go out and get the best computer on the market. Fortunately I realize that I really don't need that much processing power. Remember that this is a side project and isn't my full-time job. If it was, then I would have no problem spending the extra money.
Today I went through Apple's website and compared the iMac and Mac mini. My second project requires a 4K monitor and so I don't want a laptop. While I could add a 2nd monitor, that just adds to the cost of the machine and I am trying to spend as little money as possible. So I ran through the website and configured 2 comparable machines in each style of computer. I erroneously assumed that the Mac mini would come in at a less expensive price. That is true, but once I add a 4K monitor, even with a highly discounted one, it is about $200 than the iMac. Furthermore, the iMac has a slightly faster processor and I can get it with twice as much memory than the max configuration for Mac mini. For the record, both computers come in at under $2,000 with 16MB of memory, 1TB disk drives, and Intel i7 processors running at or above 3GHz.
I have to say that I am surprised as I expected the Mac mini to be the less expensive choice. There are a number of other things on the project to research before I purchase the computer and so pricing may change in the near future. Apple has a tendency to announce more hardware choices towards the summer and that may influence prices a bit. If that happens, then I will adjust accordingly.
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