Gift Cards Are Evil

February 13, 2010 – 10:25 PM

Since my wedding in 2007, I’ve decided that gift cash cards are evil.

I’m not talking about product-specific gift certificates like iTunes cards, Home Depot, Amazon Gift Cards, etc. I’m talking about generic Visa/MasterCard cash cards like the Vanilla Visa or others.

Why the hate? These cards have limited use and are frustrating to spend. Often the cards can only be used for a limited time before fees are charged and God help you if you have to deal with customer service for anything.

Also, the giver and recipient of these cards lose some of principal when the card is used for stuff like online shopping (bet you’ve never done that). So that $100 (or whatever) you gave someone is probably going to be less and you paid a fee to buy the card in some cases.

You’d be better off writing a check or maybe even using PayPal to shoot money to someone. And cash is sometimes just more personal though I know you did the gift card because it was convenient. Convenient for you, not your recipient.

Gift cards are highly profitable to credit card companies, etc. because most people leave small or even large balances on them because it’s such a hassle to keep track of them. I’ve been there and learned this the hard way and have more or less become a master of squeezing out every last penny I can – and you can’t get it all.

Guess what? It’s a real hassle and not worth it for the few dollars that end up left on the card after trying to spend it. And remember you can’t use these things when a PIN is needed, so for example gas has to be paid for inside, not at the pump. Basically any transaction you do without a savvy real living breathing cashier is going to bring the pain.

The best solution if you get a gift card is to blow it all in one purchase. Do it as soon as you can and get the card out of your life. The instructions on many of the cards I get actually say this. This might be best done anywhere that deals with paying with two cards (not so much online). Often that means dealing with a person and explaining that you need two charges for X amounts.

My recent solution to this has simply been to convert whatever card I get to an Amazon Gift Card. That means I can buy whatever online and Amazon tends to sell rather a lot.

If you want to do this read the following carefully, because it’s trickier than you think.

  1. First, register your gift card at the bank so you can have your name attached to it (required). Info about this should be on the card somewhere.
  2. Then head over to Amazon.com and click their gift card tab. Go for the instant emailed option because you’re a savvy wired dude on the Internets who knows where your towel is at all times.
  3. Plug in your card info. No PIN is needed but get the name.
  4. Most important: subtract $1 from the total amount of your card and put that in the gift amount. If you fail to do this the transaction will fail and you’ll lose a dollar from the principal (perhaps recoverable via customer service, but probably not worth it).
  5. Submit the gift card purchase and wait about five minutes for Amazon to email you a handy-dandy code that can be applied to any purchase you make at their site (though some restrictions may apply for third-party sellers).

Congratulations! You’ve lost a dollar, but you’re done and free of the cursed gift card and can buy that new BBQ, PS3 or whatever using a credit card mixed with your gift card number!

By Eric | Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

The iPad Versus Flash

February 4, 2010 – 1:54 PM

The iPad is revealed. And there is a wave of whining, excitement, confusion and PR spin like you’ve never seen.

Like it’s older and smaller brothers, the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad doesn’t allow the Flash plug-in to run within the included Mobile Safari browser. This was a hot topic with the iPhone, but it’s even hotter with the iPad largely because Steve Jobs hailed the device as the “best browsing experience” and also because more folks seem to understand that the Flash overhead wouldn’t make sense on the iPhone; the iPad is a faster beast thanks to Apple’s new A4 chip after all.

The amount of arguing and discussion on this is still snowballing as I write this, but in summary here are the better posts that have come up so far:

The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience? – a visual point well-made from Adobe Flash Evangelist Lee Brimelow.

Sympathy For The Devil – Adobe Photoshop PM John Nack’s excellent post on the subject

Adobe, Apple, Flash and Flash on iPhone Political Calculus by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber

Flash Headed The Way of Director – by Michael Pinto

What If Flash Were An Open Standard – John Gruber again

Adobe isn’t in the Flash business, again by John Nack (as a rebuttal)

The Withering Away of Flash – by Nathan Peretic

Flash, iPad, and Standards – by Jeffrey Zeldman

And finally, but not least check out these bonus post from Steven Frank, who needs to talk to you about computers and also The Failure of Empathy by Mike Monteiro.

I personally believe that no matter what happens to Flash, we are seeing the turbulence that comes with the next evolution of personal computing (hence my link to Steven Frank’s article).

Flash may become a casualty. It may not. Folks will have to move on and learn new skills. As Michael Pinto points out, it could fizzle the way Director/Shockwave did. Boy, do I remember the loads of Shockwave developers in college, many of whom did indeed go on to working with the stuff professionally, for a little while. It went downhill fast once Flash really took hold. Director (and therefore Shockwave) was really huge. I don’t think anyone expected it to fizzle.

What could replace Flash? Web standards (specifically CSS3 and Javascript served with HTML5). Probably not Silverlight, Microsoft’s “Flash Killer” that nobody really asked for. Although Silverlight has DRM support that Flash couldn’t handle, so Netflix streams their videos through it.

Probably not another plug-in either. I really do think we’re moving past that.

My point is that this huge explosion of naysayers and pundits is proof that something big is going to happen. We’ll look back on this years from now and hopefully laugh.

Update: see also this more technical but interesting post over at Diary of an X264 Developer.

The always excellent A List Apart published what has so far been an excellent summary of the debate so far: Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web.

By Eric | Posted in Commentary, Technology, Web Design/Development | Tagged | Comments (0)

The State of Video Playback for Mac OSX Users

December 17, 2009 – 2:15 PM

This is a quick little post inspired mostly by the comments to this news item regarding the open source VLC project.

I’m sure I’ll want to refine and update it later, but right now I felt the need to jot this down. I won’t get into ripping, transcoding or conversion, this is all about playback.

Based on the news that the VLC team has had roadblocks from Apple I have only one thing to say: Apple is a corporation that has to abide by contracts and that means DRM (Digital Rights Management). VLC can ignore or remove some DRM restrictions, especially with DVDs, hence it’s usefulness. To expect Apple to openly support a product that might violate any of the undisclosed contractual obligations they must have with big media corporations is silly. Love it or hate it, that is our system. Plus, the market is still reeling from the boom in digital content delivery and it’s a mess.

Next, Apple’s long-in-the-tooth Quicktime API is finally getting a rebuild starting with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you asked me I would tell you that it’s going to be transitional for a while, but this is probably a good thing given the long life that Quicktime has had with an older “Classic” Mac OS code base. That means Quicktime APIs are a moving target. That is possibly one reason Apple hasn’t published a lot of info or willingly assisted an open source project like VLC. There has to be a lot more work to do before that can happen.

I like and use VLC from time-to-time. If anything I’d congratulate the team for getting this far while dealing with so many confusing formats and APIs. It’s a little engine that could, GUI for Mac OS X aside. I hope the news of their current predicament helps rustle up more support.

In the meantime what can an OS X user who aquires a MKV (Matroska Multimedia Container), M2TS or any other video container do? As of this writing it comes down to these tools:

VLC – Well duh. Been a standby for a long time. Worth having around for more than one reason. Much buggier than the other players I’m about to mention, but still a worthy app.

Perian – the only one of it’s kind, a Quicktime Plug-in that adds support for MKV, DivX and a slew of other confusing and convoluted formats. Load it and Quicktime Player 7.x is your bitch for the most part. Note: I don’t have an Intel Mac, so I can’t comment on the Snow Leopard compatibility with Quicktime X and Perian, if any. This is the easiest way to start playing a whole boatload of non-Apple native codecs. Includes 5.1 surround sound or DTS passthrough if you have the hardware for that.

Movist – nice slick player that is in a league of it’s own. Runs great and plays everything I’ve thrown at it.

MPlayer OSX Extended – a cleaned up MPlayer derivative that works better than VLC (for me). Some 1080p clips might need some tweaking of the “frameskip” pref, but otherwise this is a easy to use way to play most everything. Also includes 5.1 surround sound or DTS passthrough.

Plex – A media center/player that is Intel and OS X 10.5 Leopard only. It’s designed for keyboard or Apple Remote control and is essentially Front Row on steroids. Slick.

Miro – A media center/player for PPC and Intel Macs that ties into torrent networks. More features and complexity than some might want. Offers lots of subscriptions that foreshadow what TV is going to look like in a few more years.

If you’re struggling with playback on OS X these are the better tools to try.

By Eric | Posted in Commentary, Technology, Video | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

SEO, the new messy misconception

October 13, 2009 – 12:44 PM

Derek Powazek has crafted the perfect post about SEO or Search Engine Optimization and the whole huge trend that surrounds it.

Seriously, this is important. If you are a client with a web site or just someone who is interested in to being a good web citizen read this.

By Eric | Posted in Business, Link, Web Design/Development | Comments (0)

Thank You Ken Wilhelm

July 26, 2009 – 12:44 AM

During the last half of 1994 into the first half of 1995 I was enrolled in a night class called Audio In Media at my alma mater, The Evergreen State College.

Our instructor was a unique and somewhat legendary fellow named Ken Wilhelm. The class was for audio engineers and A/V geeks and Ken was all of those things. He was sort of a mystery as we never were completely sure when he was making a sarcastic joke laced with some truth (for the sake of learning) or what he really thought. Reading his evaluations of my work always surprised me – Ken knew more about what was going on then he showed.

One of Ken’s assignments split the class into groups of three or four people. Each group was given a edited part of a classic Benny Hill movie – with the audio stripped out. Each group was to re-dub all the dialogue and foley and do so without knowing what the other groups were doing. As an assignment for teaching foley and sound for picture using SMTPE sync this was genius. Why, because even though it was work it was fun.

So off we went. I hauled my eighties Yamaha DX-11 into the Audio Lab for several sessions and we used that for music cues, and some basic sound effects. Other sounds came from props and our voices. We actually brought in glass and broke it to match a broken window in the footage. We had eight tracks to work with and as I recall we filled them all easily.

At the end of the assignment all the newly dubbed segments were handed in and Ken edited them back together and showed them during our final class. He made popcorn for everybody. I missed this class due to a conflict with a performance I had to play with the Batucada band I was a key member of. I still wish I could have seen the final piece.

Ken seemed to have a love of kitschy things though he never referred to anything using that description. He had boxes of a vinyl 45 record made by JBL recordings in the seventies during the hifi boom as a promotional or educational vehicle. The record featured the band Malibu performing a track called “Enjoy Yourself”. An accompanying film showed the band in the studio. We watched this as a class and Ken apparently offered copies of the 45 to anyone that wanted one. Turntables weren’t super common unless you were a DJ in 1995, so I don’t recall anyone taking any. I should have but didn’t as I have a solid old Techniques belt-drive that still spins to this day. Little did I know that years later I’d end up working with another Greener who took Audio In Media with Ken Wilhelm who did take a copy of Enjoy Yourself home. So I borrowed it and recorded it with my dusty turntable a few years back. And now that it’s been sitting around for a while I’m going to share it here, for anyone that might ever find the need to search for it on the Internet.

Enjoy Enjoy Yourself, by Malibu, brought to you by Ken Wilhelm.

Thanks Ken.

By Eric | Posted in Commentary, The Good Stuff | Comments (0)

Upgrade Season 2009

July 23, 2009 – 11:07 PM

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While I was at work today I noticed a tweet that ever so casually mentioned that Apple announced, nay, was shipping both Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio upgrades. So I’m like “woot” and spent part of my lunch scanning what’s new.

There are a lot of joyous tweets and surprised blog posts, all fo which amounts to very little information that isn’t readily available on Apple’s product page. As is often the case some reading between the lines is needed and then there is the fine print:

Required: Mac computer with an Intel processor

The big one. The last nail in the PPC coffin.

Logic Studio is no different. It’s all Intel from now on.

Final Cut Studio also is $299 for the upgrade. A nice price. I bet that’s partially because it has omitted the twenty or so pounds of printed manuals – check out the smaller box in the photo above. Yup, time to save some trees.

This will probably not surprise anyone too much – I personally was shocked that my Final Cut Studio 2 box was the same behemoth that previous versions were (albeit no extensive Color manual). No doubt UPS and Fed Ex drivers everywhere burned some extra calories after Apple shipped new Pro Apps.

The biggest new awesome improvement for me is the beefed up ProRes codec, now supporting the ubiquitous alpha channel, a staple in my workflow.

Curse you Animation codec! You were grand back in the day, but now I want my lossless compression and my full frame playback too!

And as I tweeted, it’s the little things that are the core of this upgrade, some of which are long-standing Avid features that Final Cut Pro hasn’t had all these years.

It should be fun to take for a spin – after we’re done with my current project which is tied up in ProRes and Red Raw workflows that would have loved the new features had they come before post production.

The other problem for me is that times are tough and I still can’t afford a suitable Intel replacement for my PPC G5 Quad core Mac. The writing is now on the wall and it started with After Effects CS4 so hopefully that day will come.

It’s important to note that not having the latest and greatest right when it comes out is also a great thing – the bugs won’t be a problem and in the end I can still make great things. These days the tools aren’t as much of an obstacle as the creative process anyway.

Cheers to Apple for what looks like a fantastic upgrade (Logic too!).

By Eric | Posted in Commentary, Technology, Video | Tagged | Comments (0)

Giggles

July 23, 2009 – 10:13 PM

Fatherhood at seven and a half months, taken by my wife Kathy.

By Eric | Posted in Commentary | Comments (1)

Another Twit on Twitter

June 30, 2009 – 1:42 PM

I figured I should mention that I’ve been using the now trendy-as-heck social service known as Twitter. You may have heard of it.

It’s not bad if you like to spurt little things that have less value on a blog such as this. In the marketing world everyone is ga-ga about the service’s potential. For the past two years Twitter has shown us that it’s healthiest users are the bloggers who essentially offload their comments or discussions to the service.

I sat on it for a long time but have been enjoying it a bit of late. So here I am on Twitter.

By Eric | Posted in Link | Comments (0)