Bloody Microsoft !!

We take so much technology for granted and a large part of it is affordable thanks to Bill Gates et al. I'll accept that MessySoft has never been great at innovation but they are good at driving the price down at the consumer level. They're greedy bastards but they have a habit of putting competitors out of business by giving away features that most of us never figure out how to use. And the reason we often don't figure out how to use those features is that they are really bloody difficult to learn because Microsoft does such a great job of making the interface un-intuitive. Take movies for instance.

My new camera can make movies. I don't use that feature very often but it does a remarkably good job and we have used it in the past to capture waterski and wakeboard video. It is really helpful to look at yourself skiing. Whenever I see myself ski I realize that the perfect form that I imagine when I am crossing the wake is just that - an imaginary form.

So the other night when we were in Regina at Dove House I took a movie of father with his grandcat and then subsequently attempted to upload it. After three tries on the flaky park wifi I gave up and used our Hughes connection but it just barely fit. On the Hughes connection we are subject to a Fair Access Policy or FAP and the limit is 250 megs in 24 hours. The video was 194 meg and there must have been quite a bit of overhead in the transmission because when it was all done we needed over 22 hours to get our FAP allocation refilled completely. No big deal except that when it was all done the miserable video was lying on its side. I had taken it in portrait format and it displayed that way on my computer but on YouTube it displayed with father lying sideways across the screen.

I considered just propogating the link and telling everyone to turn their monitor on its side while viewing the video but decided I could do better than that. Google is your friend and eventually I came up with an add-on for Windows Moviemaker which lets you rotate a video while retaining the format of the original video. That was the first Microsoft gotcha - Moviemaker let me rotate the video but it left father looking about 200 pounds overweight and that wasn't a glitch. Apparently that is a feature of Moviemaker and I am supposed to just learn to live with it although one forum suggested that there is some way to correct that in Media Player but then if I wanted to go that way I could just have told everyone to tip their monitors and saved myself a lot of bother.

So it turns out that you have to import the video file into Moviemaker and mess around with it a lot and then effectively export it to a new video file but the upshot of all that buggering around is that the file ends up being MUCH smaller. From 192 meg large to 10 meg small which made it much easier to upload.

Other than taking pictures of father and the cat we haven't accomplished much this weekend. My Prevost parts still haven't arrived so I can't do anything on that front but more importantly we can't leave here until they do arrive. I suppose I'll have to phone Quebec and yell at the parlez-vous on Monday. They screwed up big time on the last shipment so this will make two in a row if they have managed to screw it up as well. Merde!