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* Bad, really bad cold. Fever, tendency to throw up, unable to stay awake but also unable to sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time, couldn’t breath when lying down, and heart arrhythmia (I was feeling that my heart was stop beating when falling asleep). I caught the bug from JBQ, but I really think I had a worst time than he had… He was driving to work and all, I was unable to even walk as far as the toilet.

* I am thinking of buying the DELL Mini 9 for $480 (fully spec’ed) when my 12″ Powerbook dies. I prefer it over the Acer Aspire One as it also has Bluetooth and a 3G card onboard. I guess the next big thing in these nettops are the 1280×768 resolution at 10″. The res is the main reason I prefer XP over Ubuntu. A large number of GTK+ utils just don’t fit on 600px vertically. And this is something I was shouting at the Gnome devs for years now, and they were coming back to me to say “nobody uses 800×600 anymore”. Well, too bad for you, but the latest trend is 800×480 and 1024×600 res nettops, and some of your badly designed utils don’t fit. So I am going with XP.

* [Spoiler] Ancient Egyptians will be seen on the new season of “Lost”. Man, can’t wait for February.

The most dumb question that someone could ask me, and usually I am asked, is this:
“How to export my video to get the best possible quality“.

If I was to take that question literally, the right answer would be “use a lossless codec, like Huffyuv, or uncompressed”. This would create a file that’s several GBs per minute.

But that’s not what these people want as an answer. They usually ask this question meaning how to export in a codec that it’s viewable at a reasonable bitrate, and it’s web (youtube/Vimeo), DVD, PS3/XBoX360, and PC friendly — and by retaining a good visual quality.

Problem is, there is not a single format or way that covers well all these viewing platforms. Depending what the user wants to do, different options or codecs must be used. In general though, h.264/AAC in the MP4 container, progressive, is the best way to export. In detail (assuming HD camera):

DVDs: just use the way your video editor usually exports for DVDs. On Sony Vegas for example, you export separately audio (AC3) and video (mpeg2 template), and the Sony DVD Architect app puts them back together.
Vimeo: 1280×720 at 4-5 mbps MP4. Example.
iPod/iPhone/YouTube: 640×360 at 2mbps MP4 is more than enough. Adapt tutorial above.
PS3/XBoX360: Same as Vimeo above if you own a 1080i TV, or 1920×1080 at 12 mbps if you own a 1080p TV. These devices don’t support h.264/AAC in MOV btw, but only in MP4.
PC/Mac: Like Vimeo if your computer is not very fast, or in 1080p if it is.

Of course, then there’s the problem of your video editor not supporting h.264/AAC in MP4, in which case you might want to investigate XViD AVI or WMV. No matter the codec used, just use the same bitrate/settings as discussed above.

If you don’t use an HD camera, then it gets more complicated as PAL/NTSC use different resolutions and there’s the point of 4:3 vs widescreen. Some ideas here.

So next time you want to ask me this question, always tell me four things:
1. Format that video was shot (e.g. miniDV PAL 50i, HDV NTSC PF24).
2. Aspect ratio of the said video (e.g. 4:3, widescreen).
3. Video editor or video tools owned.
4. Target viewing platform.

I am not religious at the slightest, but my brother’s family is. They were fasting during the first 15 days of August (Orthodox Christians usually fast before Christmas, Easter and leading to Mother Mary’s day). Greek Orthodox fasting disallows all blood animal products, meaning that eggs, dairy and meat from fish/birds/mammals are disallowed, but shellfish are allowed (because they have nothing that resembles red blood — obviously a convenient technicality even if the Bible mentions pork and shellfish as unclean in general). On Good Friday, olive oil is disallowed too.

As a kid I was forced to fast for Easter (usually just the week before), and I hated every minute of it (even if I loved the Easter time in general). Truth is, while my mother is an excellent cook, she has a limited repertoire when it comes to recipes and ingredients. She only wants to eat and cook the recipes passed to her by her mother. She is extremely closed-minded regarding new ingredients and tastes (I can easily picture her face of disgust when I mention mushrooms or shellfish, for example). This severely limited our tastes during the Holy Week, making it almost as unbearable (on purpose, I suppose) as the tortures Christ had to undergo for the week.

So here are some very nice recipes I have gathered that could really make the fasting time pleasant. They are all Mediterranean-inspired, and delicious, all carefully cooked by Kalofagas — a Canadian Greek cooking blogger. Some of the recipes might include some dairy elements, but these can easily be omitted without diminishing the taste of the dish.

- Mussels Saganaki With Mustard. Omit the feta cheese. Great with mushroom wild rice.
- Vegetarian pizza, with non-dairy (fasting) cheese (sold in some places in Greece). I did this twice for my brother and his wife in August. I used non-dairy hard cheese, ball peppers, chili peppers, tomatoes, olives, onions. Mushrooms are equally nice but unfortunately in my home area, Epirus, very few people trust mushrooms so I didn’t use them.
- Prawns saganaki. I cooked this last night! It was delicious. Omit cream cheese.
- Prawns Tourkolimano. Again, omit feta cheese.
- Grilled Sesame Scallops. Great when served with some pasta or fries.
- Tomato Fritters (omit the egg) and Kolokithokeftedes (again, use fasting cheese). Serve with a fasting dip, like the Macedonian Makalo (which is the Greek version of ketchup), or Hummus.
- Tagliatelle With Zucchini, Tomato and Fresh Herbs. Add some stir-fried shellfish or mushrooms to make this recipe even better.
- Potato Salad for Good Friday (no olive oil). And another potato salad too.
- Vegetable soup.
- Briam Florinis.
- Thai Green Curry With Scallops & Shrimp. Might be a bit difficult to get all the ingredients in Greece.
- Soup With Mussels and Ginger. Omit the heavy cream.
- Greek Chickpea Soup. Substitute chicken stock with vegetable stock (note: not all vegetable stocks in the market are vegetarian).
- Scallops Provencal.
- Mercimek Kofte. I had this appetizer in a Turkish restaurant this week, it was delicious (note: “bulgur” is “pligouri” — do you remember this, now forgotten in Greece, food?).

And of course, there are all the “normal” Greek fasting foods, ranging from bean soups to lentils, and from yemista to green beans.

Today I tried Google’s new web browser, Chrome. I liked what I saw. It is fast to load, fast to render, and it’s streamlined. They pretty much pulled a new Firefox (comparing what Firefox did to Mozilla with its speed and streamlined interface). Even the Flash plugin seems to run a bit faster, as full screen 480p at Hulu.com has fewer frame drop outs than on Firefox/IE on my dated 3Ghz P4.

However, unless Google creates the equivalent of NoScript, I am not going to move away from Firefox — at least in regards to my Windows machine. Malware is so common these days, and spyware so disturbing, that I simply do not browse anymore without NoScript on Windows. This little Firefox extension disables any Javascript code from web sites that you don’t have manually authorized. While it is time consuming in the first week you use NoScript to instruct it to allow/disallow all these hundreds of web sites you usually visit, eventually it pays back with its added security.

Chrome uses Google’s anti-phishing/malware information regarding “bad” sites” in order to protect the user, but who’s going to protect you from the sites that are not marked as dangerous yet, or from sites that use spyware via third party ads and their code changes all too often for Google to track properly?

However, I must say that I don’t expect Google to create something like NoScript because the whole noise around Chrome is about their javascript engine. Adding the option that actually disables scripts by default until a user authorizes it goes against that model — in expense of my security.

After a hacking of gnomefiles yesterday, I think that was the final blow to the site — which was in decline anyway. It’s now offline (redirects to osnews), and it will probably stay that way — unless someone wants to spend days of reading logs in order to find and patch the hole. I hope the Gnome community find a way to replace it eventually. It was a good run.

My late grand mother told me ~15 years ago that during the World War II she had to eat quite some “stinging nettle soup” (σούπα τσουκνίδας) to survive. Since then I’ve been meaning to learn how to cook this food, but it wasn’t up until 10 days ago when I asked a great aunt of mine (now in her mid-70s), that I learned how to cook it. Since then, I also learned that Scandinavians, Turks, some villages in France, and native American Indians also eat nettles. I haven’t tried the recipe as it’s not the right season to harvest them, but I am transferring the recipe as told by my aunt.

So, first, you need to wait for the time that nettles grow, around February-March. You have to use some thick gloves in order to not get irritated by the nettle stinging. Harvest the nettles while young, before they have bloomed. Wash well.

On a big pan put lots of water, bring it to boil, and cook the nettles until tender. Drain the water away, and bring the nettles into a blender to make them a puree (traditionally, Greeks would use a wooden tool to “beat” the nettles until they become mashed instead of puree). Add some water on a pan, bring to a boil, and add the nettle puree.

While stirring, add some salt, tender onion greens (chopped), one garlic clove crushed, olive oil, a bit of lemon juice, and just enough of white flour to get the soup thickened. Eat warm.

As a variation, for these modern days we live in, I guess you can also use some vegetable stock instead of salt, to give it a more distinct flavor.

My mother, Barbara, is showing us how to cook macaronopita, a pasta-based Greek pie recipe. One of the best foods to take with you on picnics or trips.

Shot with a cheap Kodak V1233 digicam. The video has no editing niceties or direction, it’s just a point-and-shoot handheld video at my mother’s kitchen. HD version here.

Sony Vegas Platinum 9, released a few days ago, is the most flexible consumer video editor out there. To me, it’s the best bang for the buck editor for the $85 it costs. Sony added full customization support on its h.264 encoder now, it has full 1920×1080 read/write AVCHD support, better HDV support and more. If you are looking for a cheap editor that’s full featured and not “dumb and drop” like iMovie or Ulead, then this is the one for you.

I have two problems with Platinum 9 though:

1. The newly added “new project” wizard. I think the wizard was a good idea, but the screen where it asks you what kind of project you want (e.g. DVD, Blu-Ray etc), is the worst thing ever. I really don’t understand how Sony could make such a tragic usability and technical error. You see, it’s very easy for someone to pick the DVD option while his/her source video is HD. Problem is, when this person comes back to that project weeks or months later and wants an HD export, several elements in the timeline will not automatically adjust to the new resolution (e.g. the text frame sizes must be changed manually throughout the video if the project properties change). Let alone that most people don’t know in the first place that they must adjust the project properties before export in HD (and that can lead to massive quality loss). To add to that, editing in a non-native resolution/frame rate, has up to 50% speed decrease in overall performance. So what the hell was Sony thinking when introduced this wizard that asks what your target export is? Don’t they know that people export in more than one formats/targets? Don’t they know that most people don’t even use the project properties? Don’t they know that performance goes down? Thankfully, for those few of us who know, there is still the “match media” icon in the project properties dialog. Moral of the story: always edit in the native properties of your video. Decide how to export at the very end. All Sony needed to do in the wizard was to launch the “match media” procedure instead of the “how do you want to export” dialog.

2. After enough bickering, Sony added 1920×1080 AVCHD export in the free update v9.0a (the original v9.0 didn’t support this). Unfortunately, the AVCHD “custom” export screen still doesn’t let you specify 24p even if it easily could let you do that (23.976 frame rate and progressive field order, that is). Consumer camcorders like the Panasonic SD9 support such formats. While this omission doesn’t affect everybody, there is no workaround.

If Sony fixes these two issues, I think we are looking at a near-perfect consumer editor.

A few new TV shows start this season, some of them might turn to be interesting as it seems to be a trend to have a sci-fi/fantasy elements in them, although they certainly are rehashes of older ideas we’ve seen before:

* Crusoe. A guy shipwrecked on a tropical island tries to make it back home.
* Eleventh Hour. A tech/science-type detective. Obviously a crime drama geared towards geeks.
* Fringe. An X-Files/Alias type of paranormal drama. Might make it big, might not.
* Kings. The biblical story about David, but set in our time and world.
* Knight Rider. This one is going to suck, just like its preview movie did.
* Life on Mars. Yet another detective drama, but this one has some time travel elements. Remake of a BBC drama.
* The Mentalist. Another detective story. Between “Psyche” and “Life” last year, we’ve seen it all before.
* My Own Worst Enemy. Multiple-personalities spy thriller.
* Dollhouse. Multiple-personalities spy thriller. You read that right.

* Back from Greece. Too long of an overall flight time for my taste (15 hours, 3 flights one of which had a stop).

* To everyone who is looking for a business idea: bubble-bursting touchscreen device for babies. My 8-month niece would usually throw away her normal-looking toys after 15 seconds — she quickly grew bored with them. But when I gave her the iPhone… with the iPhone she was totally surprised. She wouldn’t stop bursting bubbles with the two such iPhone bubble games I had installed in it. Especially with the one of them, where she could use more than one finger on the screen at the time, she wouldn’t stop playing! Now, that’s a toy for smart babies!

* I am thinking of growing some tomatoes on our balcony. I got jealous of the nice tomatoes I had in Greece during my stay from our vegetable garden.

* My mom prepared and cooked some kokoretsi for us. That’s most of the animal internals, well-cleaned, and tangled together. Then, roasted.

* This was the first time that I felt that I didn’t want to leave Greece after being vacating there for a few days. I was happy there.

Geeks.com sent over this nice mp3 player, an iPod Nano look alike. It costs just $35, which is a very fair price for 4 GB storage.

The device has a 1.7″ passive matrix color LCD, an FM radio with station bookmarking option, a speaker on the back side, a normal headphone jack, a microphone, a mini-USB interface for both data and recharging, and 5 buttons on the front. There is no “hold” button on the player, but instead the buttons are rigid enough to prevent accidental clicking in most cases.

The player supports mp3 and WMA audio files, and it also has support for JPEG picture viewing, an e-book, tel-book, and video player. Unfortunately, there is no documentation to tell us how to create and use the right formats the e-book, tel-book and video player. I tried both as WMV v8 and XViD at small resolutions/frame rate/bitrates, but nothing worked. The manual says nothing about what kind of videos exactly it supports which makes it impossible to guess it right.

The audio screens are pretty good, but dated in terms of design. Nevertheless, it supports an equalizer, replay, shuffle etc. Unfortunately, there is a buzzing noise when the audio interface is up or you listen to low-volume music. This usually happens when cheap electronics are used.

The overall speed of the device is good, although the flash storage is very slow. It took minutes to copy a few songs over, much slower even than USB 1.1. Battery life is pretty low too, just 4.5 hours compared to iPod Nano’s 24 hours (plus, the Nano is even thinner than this player).

Now, all things fair, the player does the job. It doesn’t have the good interface and usability design or better hardware of an Apple product, but then again it’s much, much cheaper and if you are not a person who wants perfection out of such a gadget, this player will suffice. I gave this player to my brother and he liked it anyway. He said he prefered it over his cellphone-based music entertainment while at work.

Rating: 6/10

A recipe directly from my mother, which is different than the main courgette pie recipe found in Northern Greece. This is one of my favorite pies and very few people know this particular recipe.

Ingredients (for 10)
* 1 kg mexican courgette/zucchini (it must be this kind, rather the more common kind)
* 1 cup of olive oil
* 1 big onion, chopped
* 2 cups flour
* 1 egg
* a bit of mint
* some water

Execution
1. Peel off the courgettes and cut them in very thin slices inside a big bowl. We add some salt on the slices and we use our fists to dry out their juices completely. This is the most difficult part of the recipe, as you need to put out quite some physical strength to dry out the courgettes from their juice.
2. Later, we add and mix in 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of olive oil, the chopped mint, and the onions, and we stir well, for all ingredients to become one. We oil a big baking pan, and we put the mass everywhere in the pan using our fingers to even everything out in the dish.
3. In another bowl we add salt, the second cup of flour, 3 tbspoons of olive oil, 1 egg, and a bit of water, and we beat them all in order to make a non-stiff batter. We add that mix on top of the courgette mass on the baking dish and we use our fingers to evenly distribute the batter too.
4. Add the rest of the olive oil on top and distribute it too, and we then bake it at 250 Celsius (over 400F) in an already warmed-up oven, for over an hour, until well golden brown.

Here in Greece I am using the IBM T23, with the latest Ubuntu Linux in it. It generally works ok, but wifi and dialup is a pain in the ass. While I never had a problem with my netgear pcmcia wifi card in the USA, we had to set the channel number to 6 from 12 in order to get the laptop to connect. It would just refuse to connect otherwise, and we even tried with another usb wifi stick, that was bought in Greece. It seems that somehow Linux keeps as default internally the channel number of the country you first use wifi with, and if you travel, well, bad luck for you.

As for dialup, it connects once every 5-6 retries, it somehow misses the mark to get an IP and DNS from the server. And don’t let me start about the troubles we had with Linux trying to copy from an SD card 4 GBs of data to a usb fat32 external drive. Apparently it never “sync” after the copy, and so files were never really copied. Or something.

Every few months I am getting this “chill” to leave OSX and XP behind and go with Linux. But every time, Linux will somehow let me down with a very specific kind of bugs. It’s the kind of bugs that are only getting fixed when the developers have project managers and closed down teams, rather than random developers at random countries working on their own.

There is a good chance we will be having a flashback of the story of the “Black Rock” on “Lost” this coming season. The producers are currently trying to find two old ships for shooting. Personally, I can’t wait for the new season!

[I am reposting this as it somehow has disappeared form the DB]

My internet connection is very flaky here in Greece. I used to have access to a shared wifi hotspot a few days ago that suddenly stopped working, so I am now with a prepaid 5 Euro internet connection called “net” (20 hours of connectivity per month). Apparently, to make that working with our Ubuntu Linux laptop (IBM T23) and the “martian” winmodem driver, I needed to install GnomePPP (gnome-networking doesn’t stay connected), enable its “stupid mode” option (whatever the hell that is), and add the forthnet gateway and two DNS IP addresses. Only then it connects correctly and stays connected. Hopefully this will help some users.

We can buy organic, free range chickens everywhere in the world. But even these organic free range chickens look just like any other industrialized chicken. Here’s the real organic, free range, corn-fed chicken. From my grand-mother’s hens. Meat that resembles duck, not chicken. More real than the real thing.

Uncooked:

Cooked:

My internet connection is very flaky here in Greece. I used to have access to a shared wifi hotspot a few days ago that suddenly stopped working, so I am now with a prepaid 5 Euro internet connection called “net” (20 hours of connectivity per month). Apparently, to make that working with our Ubuntu Linux laptop (IBM T23) and the “martian” winmodem driver, I needed to install GnomePPP (gnome-networking doesn’t stay connected), enable its “stupid mode” option (whatever the hell that is), and remove all default init strings. Only then it connects correctly and stays connected. Hopefully this will help some users.

Apparently, some employees want to sue Apple for not offering pays for overtime. I think that this lawsuit was long overdue. Living in the Silicon Valley, we have a number of friends who work at Apple (mostly in the iPod, iPhone and OSX kernel divisions), and who were worked to death. I know people who would work every weekend and who would check out their cellphone every 10 minutes when they are out just in case there’s a work emergency. Sure, in the Valley, every company requires its engineers to work extra, and to over-care about the product, and to work even more extra around release dates, but the Apple situation was worse than in most Valley companies. I heard someone even saying once about Apple “burning out its engineers by working them to death for 2 years and then hiring new blood immediately after, doing the same thing to them too”.

Sorry, but Apple deserves the heat in this situation. That’s my personal opinion.

A lot of heat here in Greece. I never liked humidity and heat, it just doesn’t let me sleep much. Other than that, everything is good. So far. See you later.

Hello everyone from France! We have a great time here. Just so you know, my internet access is limited while on vacations.

“Human Cannonball” by Evan Spade, shot by Dane Sigua. A 35mm adapter was used, on location. HD version here.

By the time you are reading this I will probably be in Europe. So Geeks.com sent in some really cool PC parts, gadgets that I tested this past week and I will be taking with me in the trip.

* Transcend TS4GSDHC6 4GB Class 6 SDHC Memory Card
A 4 GB, class 6 SDHC card. This card with its ECC and write protection support will serve my Kodak digicam. I plan to mostly grab HD video with it rather than plain pictures, and this is a card that can deliver the speed that HD video requires.

* Coolmax HD-250B-U2 2.5″ USB 2.0 Aluminum SATA HDD Enclosure
This SATA 2.5″ enclosure now hosts our 60GB drive that we removed from our Sony PS3 when we upgraded it. It supports USB 2.0 and it comes with a double USB extension cable that uses two USB ports from your computer in order to operate (this way you don’t need to use power adapters). The device also comes with a travel case and a screwdriver that let’s you secure the drive in the enclosure. Installation was a piece of cake, compatibility was great too (XP, Ubuntu and OSX all worked with it).

* 53″ Aluminum Camera Tripod w/Bubble Level (Silver)
This is a pretty nice and extremely cheap tripod. It’s has an aluminum frame, a quick-release platform, 3-way, 360-degree swivel pan-head, adjustable tilt controls & pan controls, 90-degree vertical platform, gear operated center column, a 3-section aluminum legs with brace, quick-release leg locks, a bubble level indicator and a 3 mm standard tripod mount. It’s a good, compact tripod that fits easily in a suitcase. Only thing missing is a fluid tripod head to help with video pans. Great for photography though.

* Overland 70910 Executive Portfolio Bag - Fits to 14″ 3-Pack
Whoah! 22 bucks for three laptops bags! That’s quite a deal. There are two black and one brown bag. I will be using one of them as my main carry-on bag with an IBM T23 laptop in it (the bag fits up to 14.1″ laptops), and all my phones, gadgets, papers. It’s got two big compartments on the back and four smaller ones on the front. It’s got a strong handle and an expandable section. Only thing I didn’t like is the big compartment behind the 4 small ones, which doesn’t close (some Velcro would have suffice).

A handful of people wrote lately online saying that they “expected more of me” in terms of video. They marked my latest video as “half-assed”, despite my explanation of the tiny timeframe we had to shoot it and the lack of locations.

Well, see, here’s the real problem. When you are a very public person, like I am, people expect from you more than they would expect from others. Even if I have never excelled, studied, or even offer suggestions in art. I offer suggestions regarding software problems and software tricks, which is where I excel. But I never wrote an article or forum thread to say “if you use this angle you will be able to achieve this”, or “if you use that shutter speed you can then get this look and then couple it with that scene” etc etc. My filmmaking advices are all software-related, and how to best use software to get an acceptable result, not how to put together an Oscar-worthy movie. Even my recent article on how I do travel videos, was just a description of how I do things, not necessarily how travel videos should be done.

But from the moment you get “known” in that small community and gaining some authority because of that side of knowledge, then the expectations go through the roof. They want to see you excel in places that you don’t really have much to do with (I am just an amateur filmmaker like most in that community, started shooting just a year ago), and they will crucify you if you release something imperfect. It comes with the territory I guess.

Make no mistake, I don’t mind critique of my work. But when they say that they “expected more of me”, me in particular, I find this to be unfair. It’s like telling me that “Joe Videographer can release an imperfect video, but you Eugenia, are not. We only expect the best from you”.

* I received an mp3 player for review last week. It came loaded with a… chinese song and with the Downloader.Banload.GZH trojan. Apparently, the device had an autorun.inf file in there, and a usb2.0.exe file. The autorun.inf file was calling the execution of usb2.0.exe during the mounting of the player. So you end up getting the trojan without even having to execute the file yourself. The interesting thing is that the usb2.0.exe file was NOT visible by Windows Explorer, but it was visible under Mac OS X and Linux. Thankfully, my anti-virus seems to have caught the file and removed it, although this happened only the second time I mounted the device, so I wasn’t sure if I caught any spyware or not. I later ran the latest AVG anti-virus, Windows Defender and Ad-Aware, but none of the apps found anything suspicious on my system. I have emailed the sellers of the device and I expect them to remove the whole range of these devices from their shelves. If you have any of these devices (1, 2, 3, 4) you might be in danger (it doesn’t mean that all the batches have the trojan attached, but many might).

* Today we went for the second round of shopping for my brother in law’s wedding. JBQ got two beautiful suits, I got a nice business suit too among others. Oh, and two new bras…

* After shopping we went to eat out. We decided to go to Menlo Park’s “Chillies”. I started crying when we arrived, I couldn’t stop. Reason? The restaurant is just across where the Be, Inc. offices used to be (20 meters away, across the street). I only visited the Be offices 3 times I think in my life, but remembering the whole “hope” around BeOS at the time and the effort the community and engineers put back then, reduced me to tears. JBQ became annoyed which I interpreted it as “don’t remind me please, I am trying not to care, and I do a good job so far”.

In many ways, “Twin Peaks” is the daddy of “X-Files” and grand-daddy of “Lost”. I have almost finished watching the series, and I can write a bit about it.

“Twin Peaks”, is a surreal thriller, serialized for the TV, by acclaimed writer and director David Lynch. The show is seemingly about the murder of teenager Laura Palmer, but eventually it becomes apparent that it’s about good and evil and the duality of everyone, wrapped in a paranormal way. In many ways, “Twin Peaks” is a lot like “Lost”: people who are not what they seem but are interconnected, deep mysteries, and paranormal elements that drive their fans into theory frenzy! “Twin Peaks” did it first: it put people into theory mode, it’s just that unfortunately for it, the Internet was not widespread at the time, and so much of the glory was lost in localized conversations (aka the “watercooler show“) rather than becoming an international phenomenon.

The first season was almost perfect. It was up to the point, interesting, haunting. I regard the second season being split into two phases: the Laura Palmer investigation, which is a continuation of the first season, and the aftermath after the killer is found. The first phase of the second season is not too bad, but it’s apparent that things started to get a bit haywire with the writers, David Lynch having very little involvement with the show, and ABC trying to drive the project. For example, the Harold Smith outdoors-phobic and Japanese investor subplots where downright useless and silly. But you haven’t seen silly yet. In the second phase, 90% of the plot is downright silly. From the pregnant Lucy and her two silly men, to James and widow subplot which had nothing to do with anything else, to Josie becoming a maid (what the hell?), to Ben Horne becoming crazy and then sane again, to Leo getting controlled by a dog collar (!), to David Duchovny guest-starring and appearing in woman’s dresses. I mean, the consensus is that “Twin Peaks” lost its audience because the killer was revealed, but the truth is, it’s lost its audience because the show lost the plot entirely, all by itself. I could barely sit through and watch the second season’s second phase. I would pause it every 10 minutes and go eat something, or check out my email, or go pee. I just couldn’t sit through an entire episode anymore.

The truth is this: “Twin Peaks” should not have had more than 16 episodes. It should have ended when the murderer is revealed, and should have replaced some unneeded subplots with some of the (rare) points found in the second phase, like the Lodges, Cooper getting possessed by BOB after Laura’s murderer dies, the army’s involvement & Major Biggs etc. And after the series’ run, the three movies should have been created, just like Lynch wanted it. Only one movie was shot at the end, because by that time, the peaksmania has died down, exactly because of that disastrous second phase, and so the movie didn’t do well in the box office.

In conclusion, “Twin Peaks” failed because no one could take the step “Lost” writers took with ABC in February 2007: to give an end to the series and not let it go on and on forever like that. If Lynch was to strike such a deal with ABC before he started shooting, then “Twin Peaks” could have become the ultimate series today (both TV and cinema). It’s a shame really.

As I have said many times in the past, the HV20/30 are the best consumer cameras in terms of picture quality. Various high-end AVCHD models (HF100, SR11/SR12, SD9) tried to compete this year with the HV series, but they were still lacking that bit of extra quality that you can squeeze out of the HV20/30.

Well, that’s all the past now.

Canon has just announced in Japan two new models, the HF11 and the HG11, which can record in 24mbps AVC, which is the highest bitrate that the AVCHD standard is asking for (higher bitrate is used by some prosumer camcorders, but that’s not part of the official standard).

With the HF11 and HG11 recording at full 1920×1080@24mbps MPEG4-AVC, the HV20/30 with its 1440×1080@25mbps MPEG-2 has no chance in hell to keep the reigns any longer.

Today the tape died, as far as I am concerned, with this fall of the HV20/30.

The HF11 is largely the same camera model as the HF10, but the HG11 was completely reworked compared to the HG10. It has a brand new body, better lens, better usability, 120 GB drive with ability to also record in SD card, 12x zoom instead of 10x. I would have considered the HG11 if it wasn’t for the stupidity of Canon of going down to 37mm filter thread, and not staying with HG10’s 43mm. I have a gazillion accessories for the HV20 that would have work with any 43mm camera. Step-down rings are not good in my case as large and heavy lenses and adapters would break the step-down ring and the camera’s filter thread if I was to mount them in the HG11. It sucks to be stuck in something as trivial as a filter thread.

“When the four letters [of God’s Hebrew unpronounceable name] are flipped, he says, the new name makes the sounds of the Hebrew words for “he” and “she.” God thus becomes a dual-gendered deity, bringing together all the male and female energy in the universe, the yin and the yang that have divided the sexes from Adam and Eve to Homer and Marge.”

All I have to say is this: Good politics mate! You should run for office.

I am trying to clean up the office so I have 4 machines to give away (I won’t bother trying to sell them): an AthlonXP 1.6 ghz, a Duron 1.3ghz, a dual Celeron 533 mhz, and a Pegasos 1. From all these machines, only the Duron works properly and the Pegasos only when used with Morphos 1.4 and not with 2.0. I installed Ubuntu on the Duron and it’s ready to go, while the Pegasos could actually land me at least $100 if I could install morphos 2.0 (the CRT monitor goes out of sync when loading the installer CD). The AthlonXP and the dual Celeron are completely dead, they don’t start at all. It still is weird to see a machine go completely dead while it was working the last time I used it (granted, about 2 years ago).

Just a clarification for those who don’t recognize the drummer of my latest music video, Dolorata’s “You’ve Gotta Want It“. Dawn Richardson used to be the drummer of “4 Non Blondes”, a band that had a big hit back in early ’90s with the song “What’s up“.

* I watched the indie film “First Snow” tonight (trailer) and it is one of the best movies I have seen lately. It has a rather low rating on IMDb, in my opinion it’s vastly underrated. The movie is the epitome of “character development”. First time director Mark Fergus does an excellent job, and cinematography is great too. No wonder it’s a good movie, as Fergus also co-wrote “Children of Men” and “Iron Man”. Great talent and one writer/director to watch for.

* I managed to upgrade my iPhone to 2.0 firmware and unlock it last night. This wasn’t easy. I had to try 2-3 times to get it in to the right “restore” mode.

* This article says that Indie music is dead. It reminded me what the older people tell to younger ones: “in our generation, we did things better”. The article is just wrong in so many ways that is not even funny.

* Google’s Jeremy Allison blogged about LinuxHater (thanks for the link Dimitar). He gives a lot of good points, but he ends up saying that the problem with FOSS is “just a few bugs”, while the problem really is leadership, culture, and project management.

* This is why I am an atheist. Because cults, mysticism, dogmas and all that shit, don’t make any sense whatsoever.

* Larry King has hosted UFO-related shows many times, and the most recent one was a few days ago. I feel that he is a believer even if he will never admit it publicly.

My second music video. HD version, info, and feedback here.

For the last two months I’ve been in correspondence with Chandra from Nepal. Chandra has a band, and he had just bought the HV30, so we exchanged a few emails about how to shoot a slowed-down music video etc. His very first video, is now ready to be seen. For a first video, it’s a really good effort and the song is nice too! HD version here.

A new series on my blog, an extreme color grading example each week.

Original picture by M_Eriksson, licensed under the CC-BY.


After extreme color grading

I wrote in a hurry two months ago about how I shot my first music video, but having already shot my second one, I have done some adjustments into my workflow, which I will share with you below. As I have explained in the past, nearly all the professional music videos are slowed-down, even when they don’t look like they are. And of course you don’t need lots of money to shoot a music video, you can do it on a budget.

1. Acquire the audio CD of the song you want to shoot a video for. Compressed audio formats like MP3, OGG, and AAC won’t work correctly, you will end up with an A/V sync issue eventually, so get the original audio CD. Load the CD into iTunes. Go to “preferences”, “advanced”, and “importing” and change the importing format to WAVE like this:

Then, rip the CD with these settings via iTunes. The ripping will create a .wav file on your iTunes library folder, usually somewhere around here: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\ for Windows, or somewhere on your ~/Music/ folder if you are on a Mac.

2. Install Audacity 1.3x from here. Load Audacity, and then open into that audio editor the .wav file that was ripped earlier via iTunes. Click “Effects” and select “Change speed”. Make the audio’s speed 25% faster like this:

Then, save the audio back as wave (.wav) with a different file name via Audacity.

3. Go back to iTunes. Load the sped up version of the song created by Audacity above to iTunes by adding it to the iTunes music library. Place an empty writable CD-R on your optical drive. Place the sped up song on the “Burn” playlist of iTunes. Burn the song as an audio CD twice. Keep one copy, and give one copy to the band to rehearse the speed up version a few days before the actual shooting.

4. When the shooting day arrives, use a portable audio CD player to get the singer to lipsync, or if you are shooting in the band’s rehearsal space, use their audio CD player which is possibly hooked into big speakers. Shoot your video with that sped up audio. Shoot in 1080/50i if you got a PAL camera, or in 1080/60i or PF30 if you have an NTSC camera. I suggest that don’t shoot in 24p, because by the moment you slow-down the video on step #6, you will need all the frames you can get to make it look smooth. Don’t worry, it won’t look like home video because of the slow-down involved. 1080/60i or PF30 are the best ways to shoot (compared to PAL modes or 24p) because the kind of slow down we do here is perfect mathematically: 60i/2=30/25%=24p. What this formula means is this: “After you de-interlace a 60i stream, you get 30p. Because we make that 30p stream 25% slower on step #6, we get a true 24p frame rate across time”. And that’s the frame rate we export at the end of step #8. If you are concerned about 60i having too high of a shutter speed, consider using PF30 (found on all new Canon HD cameras), which is as good as 60i in terms of the “mathematics” involved, but it uses lower shutter speeds. I would be using PF30 for my music video projects if my HV20 supported that. In fact, I hereby declare the Canon HV30 the best consumer HD camera right now to shoot music videos, because of its PF30 feature.

5. When the shooting is all done and you are ready to start editing, load the footage on your video editor. I will use Sony Vegas for my tutorial here. Copy away to the video’s project folder, and place in the audio track, the originally ripped .wav file (not the sped up one, but the normal one you ripped on step #1). On Vegas, it’s very important to have the right project settings before you start editing. Click “File”, then “Project Properties”, and a new dialog will pop up. In there, click the right outmost icon called “Match Media”, the one that looks like a yellow folder. From there, select one of the files you will be editing with, and click “open”. Make sure “none/progressive” is always selected in the “field order” option, and for quality select “Best”. If you shot interlaced (e.g. in 50i or 60i), make sure that for the “de-interlacing method” you select “interpolate”. For NTSC 60i HDV for example, it would look like this (you can safely ignore additional settings not shown in my screenshot but found on Vegas Pro instead of Platinum).

6. Then, place a take of your footage (hint: dragging a clip from the project media tab to the timeline with the right mouse click rather than the left, allows you to place in the track the video across the timeline without its accompanied audio). Right click on the clip event in the timeline, click “properties”, check “disable resample”, and change the “playback rate” to 0.800. This change has effectively made the video slower now, which will sync perfectly to the non-sped up song. Now, left-click on the right outmost side of the video take and drag it to the right to make the video longer. Stop when a little arrow appears. We need to do that extra step because when we changed the playback speed to the slower 0.800x, Vegas doesn’t automatically resize the video in the timeline to fit the whole take.

7. Add more of your takes on different video tracks. Then, try to sync up the audio and video on each of these takes. It will take some practice, but it’s possible. On Vegas, if you select a clip in the timeline and then you keep the ALT key pressed while also pressing the numbers 1 or 3 in the enabled numerical keypad, it will move that clip frame by frame left or right in the timeline, so that can help you be more accurate with the audio syncing. You can even “lock” a clip in the timeline so you don’t move it accidentally. Then, edit away. Be aggressive with cutting scenes, as rock videos require quick change of shots. Slow-down more shots that don’t require syncing. Color grade aggressively too.

8. Export in 24p (that is, 23.976 frame rate), progressive field order. I suggest h.264 at 4 mbps for video codec, and AAC 128kbps for audio, with the MP4 container at 1280×720 resolution for HD, or at 874×480 if you shot in widescreen miniDV SD. This exporting also makes the video compatible with AppleTV, Vimeo, XBoX360 and PS3, so it would be easier to enjoy it in on an HDTV.

Now, go help your favorite local rock band!

A very nice, relaxing video by Wayne Avanson. HD version here.

We were watching some Audioslave, The White Stripes, and Oasis videos on Youtube tonight and I thought I check out iTunes to see if there’s a best-of album for Oasis. There is one such album, but it is not DRM-free, and it does not include the “Whatever” song which I like a lot. I ended up buying another album instead: Slade’s best-of, 21 songs for $9.99, DRM-free. A much better deal. Oasis have more songs that I like, but I am not willing to purchase under those terms.

C****m on Feel the Noizzzzze…

After buying me a beautiful necklace tonight, my JBQ took me out for an [expensive] dinner at a French restaurant. I told him that we should be careful how we spend money but he replied that he just doesn’t want to think about it because he is very stressed and calculating about work, and he just wants to relax and have some fun when he’s not working.

Eugenia: Maybe we should just move to Greece then. Nobody is stressed there, most people go to work whenever they feel like to, they have night life, live the good life — even with less money. We Greeks do nothing that we shouldn’t have to. We don’t invent anything either, we leave the cancer cure for the Americans to find. Then we import it.

JBQ: So you are telling me that you are retired as a nation. Hmmm…. it almost makes sense. You did what you had to do 2500 years ago and you lay back since then.

Eugenia: …

EA said that the iPhone is more powerful than the DS, and now Sega is saying that it’s just as powerful as the Dreamcast. It makes perfect business sense to me for Apple to create an addon controller that attaches to the port and adds buttons on both sides of the device, and what not. Then release an API for it too, and let people design or port games to it. Honestly, why not?

The NTSC HV20 cameras can record in 60i and PF24 modes, the PAL ones can do 50i and 25p, while the NTSC version of HV30 also adds PF30 support to the mix. The common question that Vegas users have is “which project properties should I use for each mode before I start editing?”. So, load the “project properties” dialog and follow the info below:

1. 60i or 50i
If you shot using the default mode of your camera, simply use the supplied HDV 1080i template for either 60i (NTSC) or 50i (PAL).

2. PF30
If you shot in PF30 mode with your NTSC HV30 camera, select the HDV 1080/60i template, but change the “field order” to “progressive” and the de-interlacing method to “none”.

3. 25p
Select the HDV 1080/50i template, but change the “field order” to “progressive” and the de-interlacing method to “none”.

4. PF24
By default, PF24 is just 60i, not true 24p. But if you do the extra work to remove pulldown, you get a true progressive 24p stream which is and should be handled differently.
Case A: If you have not removed pulldown before you entered Vegas to start editing, then you should just use the supplied HDV 1080/60i template unmodified.
Case B: If you have removed pulldown, then you use the HDV 1080/60i template, but change the “field order” to “progressive”, the de-interlacing method to “none”, and the frame rate to “23.976″ (type it exactly like this if it’s not available in the list).

And of course, if you are using these non-standard recording modes a lot, you can “save” a new template under a new name in the project properties dialog, so you won’t have to change these options again in the future manually, but you just pick them up from the template listing.

Some shit is flowing around about breaking compatibility for GTK+ 3.0. Imendio should stay clear of library code if that’s what they want to do. Thankfully, there are people who do get it, like Miguel de Icaza and Morten Welinder.

The hard part is keeping compatibility (something that even Apple doesn’t do right in between major OSX versions), and it seems that especially in the FOSS world, no one wants to do the hard things. In the world of Linux, coders should realize that it all comes down to “compatibility, compatibility, compatibility…” and not “developers, developers, developers…”.

My friend Dominique arrived with a present (thanks!) for me tonight: the Sony DVP-FX820 portable DVD player. Which of course I will be using as an external video monitor for my HV20 camcorder through its video-in port, rather than as a DVD player.

The screen is vibrant and high-res enough that even through the lowly RCA cable it delivers a very good image quality. This device is a must have for amateur but serious filmmakers, especially if there is a 35mm adapter in the mix, because not only the large 8″ screen helps with focusing, but also because you can rotate it effortlessly (don’t forget that most 35mm adapters record with the image upside down).

However, the most interesting point for me was something else. It was the fact that the Sony monitor has a wider display zone than the HV20’s LCD screen. Many times I fell into the trap: I would frame a shot that looks great on screen, but when I see it on my PC’s LCD, there are crap objects outside the safe zone that were not visible in the camera’s LCD, and that ruin my framing! Having a safe zone on the LCD of the camera might have been a useful thing back in the day, but today’s videos that end up only online, or on TVs that have a “dot by dot” mode (like mine), doesn’t make sense to design camera LCDs with these limitations anymore. So I was happy to see that this Sony player can see “more” of the actual shot and helps you frame more accurately (especially horizontally).

You will need a “Triple Phono Plug Coupler” (aka a female-to-female 3-way RCA adapter) to connect your camera to this device. The only other problem this setup has is that it’s bulky, as you will have to dangle along a full DVD drive all the time, so you might need something like this. Battery life is pretty good for what it is (reportedly over 5 hours), and the device comes with a car charger.

More discussion and info about it over at HV20.com.

I received from Computer Geeks the other day some interesting gadgets and tools that I would like to share with you. (more…)

For those who also read my husband’s blog, will already know that yesterday we had a great time shooting a music video clip for the all-female rock band Dolorata. We shot the song “You’ve Gotta Want It”. When we arrived at the band’s rehearsal space I was delighted to see that its exterior was all green! And so I used that fact to color grade it to the extreme and possibly add some chroma key elements too. Here are some ideas I got so far for post-processing:

For those who read my blogs for years, they know that I don’t give much credit to Greeks. But every few years they surprise me. They appear more organized than the usual disorganization you get in Greece, and more capable of pulling a clever trick to get the job done.

It is my personal opinion, that the doping Greek problem was and STILL is government-sponsored. In fact, Greeks come close to the inhumane doping policy that East Germany had. GDR was putting athlete’s health in danger to prove to the West that communism works. It was a political game. With Greece was also a political game, again to prove something: that Greeks are as good as the ancient Greeks and that the Olympics “belong” to them.

The story starts at the end of the 1980s. Before that, the Greek track and field was in the middle ages. The Greek records were not better than the youth world records, meaning that a good 16 year old American or Russian athlete could run rounds around a mature Greek track and field athlete of the time. But around 1988, the city for the 1996 Olympics was about to be decided. The Greeks wanted these “Golden” Olympics like crazy (100 years of Olympics). While Greece eventually was given the 2004 Olympics, the sour taste of Coca-Cola winning the bidding for Atlanta was never cleared off their mouths. One of the (good) points Atlanta made against the Athens bidding was pretty much this: “your sport performance sucks, Olympics in Athens would be a disaster if you don’t have good Greek athletes to get more spectators and interest”.

And so the Greek machine started working on it. Suddenly, Patoulidou won the 100m hurdles in Barcelona’s Olympics in 1992 –the first track and field gold after almost a century for Greece — an athlete who’s never ran nearly that fast before, not even after that win. Think of the not-so-good 12.96 and 12.88 performances set in the qualifying rounds that week were much better than her previous record in that sport. In essence, Patoulidou ran 1 whole second faster in the final than she ever ran before (that’s equivalent of her running about 7 meters ahead of her pre-Barcelona self). This is just hard to swallow. No one can get that much better in a month’s time. After Patoulidou, a whole new crop of athletes started appearing with world-winning performances. And not only on track and field, but also in weightlifting. Suddenly Greece was one of the big powers in weightlifting — out of nowhere. They all said that “Patoulidou was the example set and inspiration to get good performances”, but inspiration alone doesn’t make you faster.

The programme seemed to continue after Atlanta, and until Athens 2004. Fani Halkia wins the 400m hurdles, a hurdler who again, never ran nearly that fast, and neither did after that win. When the Thanou and Kenteris case pretty much blew up the whole doping thing in Greece, the Greek sports took a back stage again. Except Deventzi in triple jump, there are no major Greek athletes today that can compete successfully in the international scene. There are a few who do some good times sometimes, good enough for world recognition, but who weirdly, perform very badly in international meetings. It almost doesn’t make sense. And I hate it when the Greek sportscasters talk about “lack of international experience” to cover the lack of pills and injections on these games — because of fear of getting caught.

And of course, in the beginning of this year, pretty much the whole weightlifting team was caught using a banned substance, and just yesterday, another athlete was caught too, using the exact same substance (this article was the reason I decided to write this blog post today). It is my opinion, that ALL the athletes who are part of the “pro” Greek team, are all doped. Consider this:

* GDR had something to prove, and so had Greece. Politics.
* Some athletes who won medals seemingly disappear afterward for one reason or another. This is not consistent with “big athlete” careers. It can happen once, or twice, but when it happens for 10-15 athletes something is smelly.
* Greece, like GDR did, trains their pro track & field athletes, together, in the same place, usually with government-sponsored coaches and programmes. Same goes for the Greek weightlifting. This is unheard of in other countries where an athlete has his/her own independent coach and usually trains in their hometown.

Is any of this proof? No, it’s not. But it is my personal opinion and analysis, and I am entitled to one: The government itself, or a branch of the government, sponsored doping so they can prove that Greeks still “got it”, and to prepare for the Athens’ Olympics. While some athletes still use banned substances, the programme is not as rigid and fool-proof as it had to be in the past. I believe that 1992-2004 was the “golden age” of track & field and weightlifting for Greece.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all these other athletes out there, from US or China, are clean. I don’t believe that any pro sports are clean. Heck, possibly not even chess is. Wherever money is involved, there’s one more reason to beat your opponent by any means necessary.

I also would like to say that I am not against doping per se. I am just against drugs that actually do harm. If someone was to create a drug that makes you “better in any way” without any side-effects whatsoever, I would get some myself.

A few days ago Gizmodo was making fun of Android’s calendar application, which indeed, from what I see in the emulator, is nothing to cheer about. However, Apple’s Calendar 2.0 is not perfect either: there is no “week view”, the repeat function does not have enough options, and when you press the “previous/next” horizontal-looking arrows to go to the previews/next month view, the calendar scrolls vertically rather than horizontally.

I guess we might get the perfect calendar app around the same time we will get Artificial Intelligence.

I always liked the way 100m sprinter Zhanna Pintusevich (Tarnopolskaya) looked like. I love this kind (NSFW) of athletic body and I wish I looked like this too (that is, if I wasn’t a couch potato). Instead, I have to literally search hard to find and buy a 38D bra each time. I hate boobs. They get in my way. Thankfully there’s a reason to keep them: my JBQ loves them.

We must be one of the most unlucky people when it comes to immigration, visas and green cards (we already have 5-6 failed ones because of plain unluckiness). Our lawyers made a mistake in the filing of some papers and now we might have to leave US for 2 months — unpaid. Which means that we will lose double-digit thousands of dollars. Although 2 months sounds better than a year, which is another recent bureaucratic fuck-up that we might have to endure (we won’t know for sure until the last moment).

And then you are telling me why I support globalization and open borders? Well, that’s why. JBQ is one of the brightest engineers in the valley, and he fully deserves to work with best of the best — which right now this means Google, here, in the US.

I am in distress right now. This shit never ends. We are in this mess since the first day we got here.

And this is the first property video I shot. I hope you like it. I had a blast.

Over a year ago I wrote a review at OSNews for the IBM T23 Thinkpad. Back then, Ubuntu had severe bugs with this (ultra popular in its time) laptop model. But as I have promised that laptop to my little brother, I cleanly upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 last night. The default Ubuntu installation is now better than ever, as I had to change very few things to make it more usable (e.g. font sizes always irked me as to how big they are by default).

Anyways, all the severe bugs I had found with 7.04 are now fixed: including two suspend bugs, ethernet and USB bugs, and four S3 Savage ones. The laptop works perfectly by default (except the Lucent Winmodem). Overall speed is good too. Within an hour I had setup and configured 5 user accounts for myself, JBQ, my brother, his wife and a guest one.

The trouble started when I needed to make my old Prism54 WG511 PCMCIA card to work with the laptop. Apparently Ubuntu has both the drivers and firmware for this old ISL3890 chipset, but it didn’t work. Following advice from UbuntuForums, I had to blacklist the default 4 related drivers, download the Windows firmware and use Ndiswrapper instead. It then worked, but it was a pain.

The Lucent winmodem worked for the first time on this laptop too (my bro uses mostly dial-up). It works after you download the “-full” version of the “martian” driver: compile and install as per instructions the driver and then do a “modprobe martian_dev” and then a “martian_modem /dev/modem --daemon --mode 0666“. I then put these two commands on the /etc/rc.local file to force the modem to get started on each reboot. If someone upgrades the kernel the driver will have to get recompiled, which is why I made my brother a normal user and not an admin. Unless Ubuntu adds the martian driver to their -restricted kernel modules package, no one should touch the Ubuntu update manager…

“Meet Dale Decker, 31. He lives in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, about an hour north of Milwaukee. On June 25, he decided to fly the American flag upside down on the patio of his apartment. Decker is upset about the Iraq War, he’s upset about the loss of civil liberties in the United States, he’s upset about the plans he says are under way for a North American Union with Canada and Mexico, and he’s upset about our economy,” writes Progressive.

It’s funny, I had a discussion about flags with JBQ last week. JBQ says that flags are symbols and need to be respected. I find flags (any flag, including my own) to be pieces of cloth. I don’t know, I don’t really believe in “symbols”, especially ethnicitistic symbols. But then again, I am for complete globalization, so flags and countries get in my way.