Emptyeye

I’m having to stretch more and more to come up with stuff that counts as “working on the presentation”, but at least I’m doing something every day.

Today’s non-productive productive thing was creating and ordering business cards to hand out or leave for people to take after the presentation. The basic idea is that it’s nice promotion for emptyeye.com (No link, you’re here already, goofball), but more importantly, I want a way for people who have questions that I won’t be able to answer during the planned Q&A section (Either because I won’t know the answer, the question is a bit outside the scope of questions I want to answer at the time–E.G. “How was trick X in the video for Game Y you showed actually done?”–or I just run out of time.) to be able to reach me after the convention and ask the question. To that end, the cards have my full name, the site, my e-mail address, and my AIM name on them.

I really do want to engage people as much as possible and try to answer their questions if I can. To that end, I do plan on being available more informally after the panel as I’m taking stuff down/hanging out around the area afterwards to try and answer questions that I didn’t get asked during it. But I figure, essentially, I’ll be amongst a bunch of geeks, some of them (Like me) too shy to actually walk up to me and ask the question even informally. I know I do my best communication via writing (Despite the obligatory bizarre typos I make every now and then) , and so people like me should be able to have their questions answered too, even if it takes a bit longer.

-EE

Literally the only thing I did to make progress on this today was inserting the Final Fantasy VI excerpt into the slide show. And I’m going to be busy enough over this weekend that that level of work is likely to be in the next couple updates as well. But it’s something–as long as it’s moving forward, however slowly, it’s moving forward. if I stop for a day, though…well, I know how I am. One day becomes two, becomes three, becomes a week, becomes “Oh hey it’s convention time and I’m not even close to having anything presentable.”

Speaking of projects, I plan to resume work on Hysterium once either this or my Dragon Warrior Liveblog are finished. the liveblog is likewise being worked on slowly.

I did a bit more of substance today regarding the presentation. The main thing was cutting down the slides even more, and aligning any bullet points I have to the left (Open Office Impress defaults its text to center-alignment). The other thing I did was take the excerpt from my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles run that I’ll be using to demonstrate “Play your game to the point of memorizing just about everything”.

I’m going to have to do some more editing to a couple of the slides, and then integrate the videos I’ve made into the presentation itself so I can just click to the next slide and have the video in question start playing. Then, I think it’ll be time to begin roughly timing out how much time I think I need, and let Don (Who runs Gobble-Con) know what that estimate is so either he can get me the time I think I’ll need, or I’ll have plenty of time to cut out certain parts of the presentation if it turns out I need to.

I did very, very little today. Literally, the only thing I have to note is that I picked out what section of my own glitchy TMNT run. If you’re curious, it’s the walk to the second cave in Area 5, plus the cave and Technodrome fight itself.

The main reason for my laziness is that one of my friends came to visit, and we went out to eat and then watched Ghost Hunters International. Not exactly the best way to make progress, but I’ll resume working on it some more tomorrow, including actually editing the TMNT video.

About the entirety of my “new progress” today consisted of getting the snippet of Essentia’s Final Fantasy VI run that I needed. This was still a major victory though, since I actually had to cut the video down beforehand to make it fit into the program I was using to edit the final product (I got a “took too long to import” error otherwise). This was still progress, though. You see, thanks to a bit of actually paying attention to the settings of the source video, I managed to get rid of the static that had plagued the first two run snippets I had planned to use. it turns out that taking audio originally encoded at a rate of 48000Hz and re-encoding it at 44100Hz is a terrible idea. Who knew? So I re-encoded the videos I had done before, and now they sound much better.

At some point, I should look through my game collection and try to find another game I actually want to run. one of the things I read today said, more or less, “Beware of gurus who don’t follow their own advice.” In other words, public speaker types, motivational speakers, “gurus”, etc. tend to eventually reach a point where they spend more time talking about how they were once X and it’s so easy to do X than they do actually doing X (Which, it turns out, is not as easy as they claim). Taking a quick look at SDA, my last actual SDA-quality run was done in late 2008, which is an eternity ago in Internet time. While I do keep fit (To borrow a Shizz meme) for the SDA Marathons and such, I have enough games that I should be able to continue doing what I’ve kind of become known for post-Battletoads obsoletion: Filling in the “What the heck game is THAT?!” gap on the site.

Today was another day spent chipping away at stuff. I did some more editing of the slideshow portion, although I’m not sure how much more I can cut it down word-wise without hacking slides off completely (Various presenting blogs would argue that hacking the slides off completely is actually the correct move, lest the audience fall into “Death by Powerpoint” syndrome [Again, even though I technically don't use Powerpoint at all.]. I’m not sure that I’m totally ready to do that though.). My plan to go version-by-version was scuttled today, when either I accidentally saved over the 8/14 version with today’s changes, or Open Office did it for me. Oh well.

I did manage to edit down the Double Dragon II run to the relevant part (Levels 2 and 3). I also managed to integrate the Super Mario Bros. run into the presentation itself. That’s a nice feature, as it means that when I’m ready, I can just click my cool little presentation remote and the video will play right in Open Office, without having to walk over to the computer and hit various keys.

Also, I’m looking at my own site in Firefox for Ubuntu for the first time, and…wow. Okay. Yeah. Once I can actually remember what my PHP looks like and how it works–I haven’t had much occasion to mess with it–I’ll have to see what I can do about fixing that.

-EE

Today saw some actual tangible progress on the panel preparations. IE, I don’t have to stretch the definition of “working on the panel” to come up with something here, I could actually show it to you if I wanted!

The big news is that I actually got some editing software in Ubuntu that gracefully let me edit a video correctly, finally. That’s a huge relief, as it means I no longer to scramble around to try to find something, anything, that works. Interestingly, Ubuntu itself has what seems to be an annoying habit of occasionally “losing” my wireless mouse’s buttons (Although not the mouse itself), but I’m willing to deal with it for now, and honestly, I haven’t done enough testing to know that that’s really what’s going on anyway.

So what did I actually do on the presentation today? Well, I edited down the Super Mario Bros. run into the parts I needed, also adding a title card to make sure proper credit was given and to direct people to the full run (I also plan to have a post-presentation handout with the run information, plus have it go into detail on some of the stuff I’ll likely have to gloss over due to time limitations.). After that, it was time to create some title cards, which I did for two more of the runs–Essentia’s Final Fantasy VI, and sinister1′s Double Dragon II. Amusingly, I had to do this in Windows Vista, and specifically Paint.NET, because in my brief search, I couldn’t find a program in Ubuntu that would do what I needed (Yes, I’m aware of GIMP. My impression of it in my messing around with it hasn’t changed since I first tried it 8 years ago–by Linux geeks [Which I guess I am one now], for Linux geeks [This includes the Windows build], normal people [And usability] be damned. Yes, it likely could have done what I needed, but i honestly didn’t want to go through the learning curve.).

Luckily, whether it’s because I installed Ubuntu via Wubi (Essentially, it acts like the installer of any other Windows program), or because my USB drive isn’t tied to any specific type of file system, I have no problem migrating files (Or at least images) between my two OSes. So in other words, I can take the title cards, move them on to my USB drive, and from there put them on the Ubuntu portion of my drive where I can use them when I go to edit the videos down to what I need.

Tomorrow is going to be a very difficult day indeed–it’ll involve watching individual F-Zero X and F-Zero GX runs to try and find one that I really like. I also have to go through my own glitchy TMNT run to try and find some choice bits from there as well.

What I’ve also decided to do is save each day’s edit of the actual slideshow portion individually. What I’d like to ultimately do with that is show people what I had at one point, and how I edited it down to the final version of the presentation, with the help of all those public speaking/presenting blogs I keep talking about. Not that I’m an expert slideshow maker or anything, but hopefully it’ll give people an idea of just how much actually went into the final slides that will end up at the final panel.

-EE

Despite not being home all day, I was actually more productive regarding the panel today than I was yesterday. How so, you ask? On my way to Newington today, I essentially recited most of the presentation to myself, out loud, in the car. After the first sentence or two, where I think my mind had to convince myself that the good of actually practicing verbally would outweigh the “God this is silly” feeling of literally talking to myself, it was surprisingly easy to get maybe 4/5 of the way through the presentation while on the highway. I’m not exactly sure what that means time-wise, and I don’t have the videos done yet anyway (That’s an ongoing quest), but it did feel good to begin practicing, in a sense. I’ve decided that, while the panel may well end badly, it will not do so because of a lack of preparation on my part.

What did I do well from what I could tell? There was a minimum of “audible hesitations”–in other words, I did very little, if any, “um”ing or “ah”ing. My main area for improvement is almost certainly flow. While occasionally pausing, especially at the end of making a major point, is actually a positive thing (It gives the audience time to digest what they’ve heard, as well as giving you time to collect your thoughts, glance down at your notes, etc), my subjective opinion was that I was pausing for what seemed like forever after just about every sentence. While I don’t want one long run-on sentence, right now I think I’m going too far in the other direction. We’ll see once I actually solidify things a bit more, though. There were also one or two times when I started speaking, realized “Crap, I forgot something major”, and had to basically start over again, but I’m, for the moment, not super concerned about that–familiarity with my major points will come with actually doing this more in an environment a bit more conducive to practice than my car.

-EE

I actually have nothing to report today, because I spent all night stuffing envelopes after working all day (Long story). I don’t know that I’ll necessarily have much to report tomorrow or Sunday either. I’ll do what I can to get a post up both days though.

-EE

It’s amazing that I’ve managed to keep this up for a week straight. Especially since I have just about nothing to report today. Thus far, Linux is not proving to be the magic cure-all I had hoped it would be. While there seem to be various programs out there on the Internet, interestingly, most of them aren’t in the central repository I talked about earlier, which is kind of odd. AVIDemux at least doesn’t randomly crash like the Windows build does, but I have a separate problem of it not playing the audio when I put an image before the actual movie as a title card (Presumably, it thinks the entire file is a still image based on that first frame). Oh well.

I have to say, I don’t mind the Linux experience itself–Ubuntu really is Linux for people who don’t want to mess around with a terminal. I’ll keep plugging away and trying to find something that works here.