William Matheson's Journal

01:32 am - shuttle, Artifact, optical media, CPA night, don't make your papers too perfect

Okay, Christmas is over. Time to sit back with a glass of Rickard’s and take stock of things.

I wrote those two sentences in a coil-back notebook. Also, one of the Christmas gifts I received was a hardbound paper journal with a magnetic cover. But I just can’t bring myself to use either most of the time. When faced with the choice between chicken-scratching on the couch in the sunroom or typing in Word on Uncle Shane’s desktop computer, the computer usually wins. In Ukraine I wrote by hand a lot, but that was only because I didn’t have access to a computer very often; in most cases, I really only had time to type posts as opposed to composing them.

So here I am on the computer again.

I’m in Souris now, and staying with my aunt and uncle for two nights. Getting here on the shuttle was the usual torture – we had the crazy driver (but I’m used to him now, and he’s a friendly fellow), I kept nodding off and bumping into my seatmates every time we rounded a corner (he wasn’t particularly smooth going into and definitely not smooth coming out of turns), and the guy on my right had the zarking SMUflu and was sniffling the whole godda -shdarned trip. I don’t feel myself getting sick though, so maybe no harm was done. But the sound of his breathing through his nose drove me up the wall.

And to top it all off, we rush and tear and beat the band only to be dropped off earlier than our ongoing rides expect us to be, and so we wait in the cold in front of the Burger King for an extra twenty minutes or more.

The shuttle is also crowded, there’s little legroom, and forget about congenial space to work on anything, or even to take off your coat (I had mine on until Oxford!) And then there’s the whole dichotomy of public and private space; you’re riding in a van (a private sort of space) with total strangers (so it’s a public space). You’re sitting so close to people that it’s impossible not to acknowledge their presence (unlike the usual situation in a full-size transit or coachline bus), and yet you have to remain strangers – you can’t make small-talk (trust me, I’ve tried), and you have to ride out the hours in stony silence. God, it’s awkward.

So at least one thing is settled: when I make my fortune and come back here for the holidays in the future, I’m darn well renting a car for the month. But the shuttle isn’t all bad. The owners gave us a “Happy Holidays” note, chocolate, and a discount coupon. Well, it’s only valid for January, so I won’t be able to use it, but it’s the thought that counts. =)

* * *

I’m happy to tell you that Artifact has now been completed and is currently being distributed on DVD to cast members (the ones I could find at the CPA reunion – more on that in a moment), fans, and a few others who are connected with it. I made less than thirty copies, but I have the ISO, so I can always make more. Further to this, it’s easy to duplicate the discs already in circulation – I included no copy protection, and anyone with a DVD writer and a few gigs of hard disk space should be able to copy the movie bit for bit. I unofficially encourage this, since it’s a heck of a lot less work and trouble on my end. I only have a notebook DVD burner, and getting jewelcases for the discs is a pain in the butt.

Let’s take a moment to talk about DVD. DVD sucks. In this day and age when we can carry 2-4GB on a $25 wafer in our pockets, DVD isn't quite so magical anymore. Remember when CDs seemed limitlessly HUGE? Whatever happened to those days, and will something like that ever happen again?

That being said, Artifact on DVD is quite okay. Or at least the main feature is. I had to compress the crap out of the featurettes to get everything to fit. And don’t ask about how I discovered that you pretty much have to route the paths between your menu buttons manually, lest the user’s cursor wander into a no-man’s land (not an issue when you’re watching DVDs on your computer and have the mouse cursor, but a serious issue when you’re using a standalone player – you can quite literally get stuck and have to restart the player!).

Still, that can easily be fixed, and in my case, it was. But the larger issue remains: 4.7 gigs just ain't enough. (Dual-layer is prohibitively expensive and not really an option (and then there's the bloody layer pause); it would have been better to just publish on two discs, but I couldn't bring myself to the extra work that would have been.) Or, more accurately, it’s not enough for consumers such as myself. We don’t have access to the fancy high-end media encoders that the Hollywood studios use, nor the time to painstakingly manage the whole encoding process on even a scene-by-scene basis.

HD-DVD (17GB) and Blu-ray’s (25GB) extra capacity will be nice, but even they will still require the use of compression, although Artifact could fit onto a single-layer BD-ROM with only intraframe compression, so it would still be pretty darned pristine. But that’s just standard def! What we really need is a cheap format capable of carrying at least two hours of uncompressed 1080p video. It’s time to be talking in fractions of terabytes. Wake me when we get there.

(And, yes, HD-DVD and Blu-ray are also dual-layer capable, but as with DVD you are dramatically increasing the cost of the media, significantly decreasing your recording speed, and you’re subject to the whims of how DVD/BD player manufacturers engineer their players to handle layer pause. No thanks.)

Artifact has also been converted to both high-bitrate / quality (for Google Video) and 100MB (for YouTube) WMV versions, and will be available on those services and willmatheson.com sometime in January. I’ve still got some web space issues to work out before it happens; I don’t want to upload to Google or YouTube before I have the new webpages and media (such as photographs) to support the release. A lot may also depend on when I get internet access in my Japanese apartment.

(Hey, wait a second. Why should YouTube be dictating how I chose to encode my movies? Who do they think they are, when other services like Google Video operate without any time or filesize limits? They’re just making me go through a whole heckuva lot of extra work because as anyone knows, 100MB is enough for an hour of watchable video (thanks to the magic of QuickTime for Macs and the suprising utility of WMV in Windows Movie Maker), but not an hour of clear, fullscreen video. I’ve spent hours and hours encoding and reencoding my videos, and those are hours I would have gladly spent doing other things. Man.)

Oh, and last night while I was clearing up my render files and other junk from Artifact (but I’ll keep the raw footage and edit decision files; I’m not crazy!), I started playing around with something, and let’s just say that there will be a little low-fi bonus surprise that I’ll release to YouTube, Facebook, and willmatheson.com the day before Artifact.

Anyway, if you’d like a copy of Artifact, call me sometime on the 28th – 31st, and you can come by and pick one up or (preferably for me) get one burned onto your blank disc. You can also come to my going away party, since I'll have a few copies there.

* * *

Here's food for thought: It turns out that DVD-R and DVD+R aren't equal. I had known that there were drives out there (like on older Macs) that could only write DVD-R, and as recently as a few days ago I encountered a DVD-ROM that could read -R discs but not +R discs. But I didn't know why.

DVD+R is technically superior to DVD-R, with superior error correction, speed compatibility, and read/write efficiency. But I burned Artifact on -R, and now I'm glad that I have, for the simple reason that -R has (wow) a five-year head start on +R, and is therefore playable on a wider range of devices.

So use -R for wide distribution, and +R for your personal archiving, such as your photos.

* * *

Oh, yeah, the CPA (high school mini-reunion / Christmas) party. It stunk. There were a few people I knew there, but none I could call more than the casualest of friends. (Don’t get me wrong; I was happy to see them. But it’s hard to spend a whole night drifting among casual acquaintances.) The crowd was also young. It would seem that our time has passed, and while I won’t say that I’ll never go again, I can safely say that I’ll never go out of my way to go again.

The part that I hated the most was waiting for the 6am bus to go back to Bedford. I went down to Saint Mary’s (it being Christmas Eve morning, I was the only one in the McNally East computer labs – I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before) with the intention of blogging about the night in order to kill time, but I wasn’t able to get my password correct on the first few tries, and so I got locked out of my network account. I could do nothing but lean over the table and doze, and hope that the security people wouldn’t throw me out. That wasn’t much fun.

But it wasn’t over yet. Once I made it to Bedford, I had to wait at the Tim Hortons for almost two hours for a ride (I would have walked, but it was pouring rain) because Mom felt that our street was too slick to drive on. And then she wanted to wait for the Sun to rise fully so that she could see better.

Ah, crap. That wasn’t much fun, either.

Why can’t we just have 24-hour bus service? I mean, really. While still at the Palace, I came very close to giving in and dumping the $40+ on a cab ride home. But it offends me that I have to pay so much for the “privilege” of sleeping in my own bed. Crap crap crap.

Man, I’m going to be so happy to be living within a real city, within walking distance of everything, OMG like REALLY.

And I have my passport and visa now, so everything will be above board. Then again, so were Heinrich Himmler’s papers – true, a person the world doesn’t miss, but mentioned here because it’s the most famous case I can recall of someone arousing suspicion because their papers were too perfect. There are no guarantees in life, not for students, nor for officers who had been in charge of concentration camps and death squads who are attempting to escape prosecution, and thank goodness for that.

Current Mood: tired

02:03 am - twelfth night reunion + RIM's coming to town!

There’s a moment in Jude the Obscure where Jude Fawley walks for miles from his aunt’s house in hope of sighting “Christminster” (Oxford). He walks, waits, waits, and waits, and finally the mist clears and he sees it.

I feel like I’m having one of those moments tonight. I had an unusually pleasant bus ride and walk home, thanks to the pleasant memories from our little reunion gathering. I’m so glad we had it; and I’m glad our last memories of each other aren’t going to be from the cast & crew party! =) Yeah, anyway we had a lot of fun tonight; Emily spurred the creation of a drink named “Viola,” after her character; and much pool was played. We were also shamelessly evangelizing for Facebook, and Alli and Shawn (pretty much the only cast members who didn't have it) may have it shortly. =)

I discovered tonight that as much as I hue and cry about freedom (mostly transportation-related), I am totally free in a much more important sense. I don't owe anyone anything, my driver's license doesn't have an "N" that stops me from driving after midnight (eww!), my parents don't impose a curfew on me or get mad if I come home late, and I'm living basically for free. Even though it took me an hour and fifteen minutes to get home from the party, even as I was shutting off the alarm at 1:15am, I was thinking, "Gee, I'm a lucky b****..." (Not to mention I felt great from the exercise; it was a great night for walking!)

Now what in all this specifically relates to Jude’s sighting of Christminster? Well, Canadian tech darling Research In Motion (makers of the BlackBerry) is building a wee lil’ facility on Symonds Road, up where the Canadian Blood Services facility was going to go way back yonder (and there’s a ghost boulevard going up there – but it won’t be ghostly for much longer). In fact, you can actually see the construction crane for this new facility from the end of my street. Do you know how fundamentally odd and awesome that is?

This RIM facility could be the best thing that ever happened to our neighbourhood. First the obvious: I might be able to get a job there. To that end, I spent the time between meeting with my seminar professor and the Locas gathering working on my résumé, and I applied for several jobs online. (I don’t necessarily think that in itself will get anywhere, though, there’s probably 500-1000 more hopefuls everywhere I tread. Good jobs are not exactly plentiful in Halifax, as you might have guessed.) I need to take my résumé back to the Employment Centre for a second critique, but already I’m astounded at how much better it looks now that I’ve formatted it myself (roughly according to a guideline) instead of using a template.

Anyway, even if I don’t get a job the conventional way, I can do it unconventionally. It shouldn’t be hard to make the acquaintance of some key people, especially when I live so close by. (Actually, now that I think of it, our next door neighbour (my stepfather’s cousin) owns a trucking company – why have I not thought of becoming a trucker? I guess I’d like the driving, but I’d probably start gaining weight and the job doesn’t have a genteel reputation. Well, it’s something to keep in mind. I’m sure truck driving school is cheaper than a Master’s Degree in Library Science.)

But even if I don’t ever work there, it’s still good news. This facility will not only bring 600-1500 jobs to my backyard, it will also draw much-needed attention to the plight of West Bedford. This facility will spur the creation of sidewalks, bus routes, and OH! Hello Fast Ferry! You can bet RIM had that in mind when they decided to locate here. It looks a little bit silly at first, because you wonder, “Who the heck lives here?” But they’ll be located a two-minute drive from the freeway (NS-102), and it’s positioned roughly along a potential bus route that would link to the fast ferry at Mill Cove.

Now here’s a guy who knows what’s coming: Sandy Hines, a local real estate agent, set up this special informational webpage for RIM employees from other parts of Canada interested in relocating to Halifax. I really like the “Commute Ratings” on the page for the different urban areas of Halifax. Instead of “Fair to Poor,” for Dartmouth, though, I’d pick “Poor to Abysmal.” To get from Dartmouth to (West) Bedford, you have to drive through Burnside (traffic lights) and reach the Magazine Hill (a short freeway), and then get off that, then drive into the very heart of Bedford (traffic lights galore, 2-lane traffic the norm), then drive past a bunch of shopping malls, then get on the freeway (NS-102) again, drive south 1 exit, get off, and drive up to RIM. When the Magazine Hill and Bedford By-Pass freeway was built, the businesses in Bedford all but stopped a direct link between that road and the 102, making it really only useful for people whose 1) final destination is Bedford or 2) final destination is Sackville, or off in the direction of the Annapolis Valley. It totally screws anyone who wants to travel to 1) the Airport, Truro, or anywhere north along the 102 or 2) West Bedford, Hammonds Plains, or Halifax (people who are too cheap to take the Harbour Bridges).

Anyway, enough about that. My commute would be A++, “Super-Duper Excellent,” or whatever. And tonight I looked at that construction crane and the frame of the unfinished facility and I said, “Yep, I’m going there.” One way or another.

Current Mood: excited

06:57 pm - CPA Christmas Reunion Party

CPA CHRISTMAS REUNION PARTY

Wednesday, December 20th 9:30pm*

The Palace, 1721 Brunswick Steet, Halifax NS
(click here for map)

Check out the Official Party Website, with more details.

I've been to the reunions in '02, '03, and '04 (click either for photos!). (In '05 I was in Ostroh, Ukraine and couldn't attend.) These reunions ROCK! You run into people almost every few minutes. It's like a continuous "heyyy! great to see you!" buzz that lasts for hours. I definitely encourage everyone to go, you'll be so glad you did!

* - Often there are pre-party warmups and other such things, which we'll variously stumble unto on our own. =)
The icon you see is from the '03 party, if you're curious.

Current Mood: excited

08:47 pm - 2006 Matheson Family Picnic (photos)

2006 Matheson Family Picnic

Current Mood: tired

01:13 am - burnout and recovery

You know, when you see the same relatives every six waking hours on the hour and have an average of three servings of ice cream a day with said relatives and spend two weeks sleeping on an air mattress (with a later upgrade to a sofa-bed) - it gets tiring. Now just about everyone’s gone, and I have my own room, which I celebrated by taking a three-hour nap. This is pretty much the first day since I’ve been here that I’ve had mostly to myself, to do as I please. Vacation is hard work!

Ah, so where were we? The reunion went quite well. Highlights included showing off my volleyball skills learned in Poland (where they wiped the gym floor with me but upgraded me to a fourth-rate player in the process) and being present when a certain cousin (for once, not me) decided to break into song:

MC Heber: “And first we’ll have a song from-”
Ross (standing abruptly): “Ross Farley! ... Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light...”

You had to be there. More recently, we all went up to Basin Head for an afternoon. The boys and I spent a good 30 minutes letting ourselves get beat around by the pounding surf (those white water waves can really push you around), and we left as soon as we got tired, taking 7 away in Grandma’s 5-passenger car and sticking to the back roads. That was at around 4pm. We left some of the girls there, confident that their mothers would be down at 5:30 as promised. Naturally Muriel’s husband Gerard caught a tuna and everyone was tied up at Naufrage Harbour all evening. Heather did get out to pick up her daughters and Muriel’s, who by then were hitchhiking.

Between the beach and the tuna and other things, it was busy - Aunt Shirley estimated that around 40 people passed through the house that day, and at one point there were eight cars in the driveway simultaneously. Poor Ruth-Ann got separated from her car keys and didn’t get back here and able to take her car (and her charge) back to her cottage until 3am. Her story is the most amusing in and of itself, but it’s so complicated that I can’t even understand it, much less tell it to others. I’ll have to ask her about it the next time I’m staying at her place in Toronto.

* * *

two nights ago:

My cousin Elizabeth from New York hosted a huge party at her rented cottage - she was a brilliant hostess, in a picturesque, charming, yet well-equipped lodge. Jim, Art (Jr.) and I had a ton of fun playing games with the kids. There were only two complicating factors: 1) I got the silly idea of calling up a girl I knew (we get on famously, although she isn’t single) and 2) Jim and Art wanted to head into Charlottetown to see the 9:30pm showing of The Descent (and were actively planning this, knowing I’d be able to drive them).

So then I was faced with two pressing concerns: 1) how to get out of a party that I kind of wanted to stay at, 2) how to keep my commitment to call this girl again with something to offer. I got the idea that maybe she could come along for the ride into Charlottetown, since she was complaining so much about being bored, but when I called her there was a boy’s voice in the background, and the reality that she had to work early in the a.m. came suddenly to the fore. I got the hint, and that problem solved itself.

Number One was harder, and it was almost 8:30 before we left, and it takes more than an hour to get into town from where we were. ,could safely I as fast as drove I but when I drove into Heber and Jennifer’s to pick up Trevor and Lindsay, I suddenly had no brakes. (It later turned out that the brake fluid line had rusted out - it’s likely that a stray pebble on their driveway struck what was left of it.)

Thinking only of making the show, we (perhaps foolishly) decided to make the trip in anyway, which I accomplished by staying a few hundred yards behind the cars ahead. I could still slow down with great effort, but sudden stops would have been out of the question. It was one of the more stressful drives I’ve ever had (I pictured all manner of expensive accidents), and in Nova Scotia I probably wouldn’t have even attempted it. Anyway, we did pretty well and were quite safe the entire trip.

I dropped everyone off at the theatre entrance at around 9:40 while I went to park the car. I came back to find them in the line, just after I too discovered that our show wasn’t in the options on the self-serve kiosks. When we came to the end of the line, we discovered the reason: the show actually started at 9! (Where the others got the idea it was a 9:30 show, we have no idea.) And between the rest of them, they’d seen every other movie available.

So we rented Hostel at Blockbuster and got ourselves snacks at Shoppers. We had a quiet, hilarious drive back to Dundas - we ran a couple of lights on the Bypass and then Art and I entertained everyone without really even trying (he’d ask me questions like, “Who would you rather share a room with, cousin x or y?” - you had to be there, although Lindsay and Trevor remarked that their sides were hurting as we got out of the car and into their house to watch the hard-earned DVD).

Thoughts on Hostel:
- Are travelling Americans really that superficial?
- I knew that hostel was too good to be true. Not just the girls, it was too clean.

Some parts of it were difficult to watch, and fortunately the featurettes on the DVD were so inane that I was able to terminate my suspension of disbelief more quickly than usual. I did have a nightmare that night that was set in Eastern Europe, but it wasn’t too scary, and it didn’t have anything to do with the movie.

* * *

yesterday:

Just as I was getting home that night around 2am, I realized that I’d agreed to help my dad unload straw at 8:30am that morning. I hustled to get to sleep on the sofa bed, got up way too early, and drove into Albion Cross with the compromised brakes.

That morning we unloaded 5 wagonloads of straw into a dusty loft in Red House. The dust and the heat made it rough going, and my hands are still tender as I write this, but it’s still better than working in a call centre. I had the opportunity to get reacquainted with Mitchell, and got to know David H., who knew Uncle Shane very well.

During the day, I drove the 41-year-old International tractor, with a hay wagon, back to Albion Cross (“I’m in 5th high?!” I exclaim as I trundle along at jogging speed), and said goodbye to Rachel, Craig, Beatrix and Cole, after we all enjoyed the official Springwater Farm hayride (the wood paths and the stop at the spring really make the ride) followed by lunch.

After we finished putting away the straw, Jim and Mary (on their way to Halifax to their flights home) dropped me off at the Campbell's garage to pick up Grandma’s car, now blessed with the ability to stop. Art then called to let me know I was invited to go to Elizabeth’s barbeque again (it had been split up over two nights so as to accommodate everyone), which was welcome news to me as I could give it my full attention. I was instructed to bring along Pictionary, a bat, and a tennis ball.

A complicating factor arose when I found my eyelids getting droopy as I crawled up Souris’ Main Street. I pulled into Aunt Shirley’s driveway, turned off the engine, let the seat back, and dozed for more than half-an-hour. And then I needed to check my e-mail, shower, etc.. so by the time I got to Elizabeth’s, it was just after 7pm, which was pushing fashionably late for a 6pm gathering.

As I was getting my things out of the car, Elizabeth’s 6-year-old son Skye (who is one of the most eloquent and literate 6-year-olds I’ve ever met) shouted at me, “Hey! Get a move on! You’re over an hour late! Where’s the bat?!” It was actually quite cute, because I was ridiculously late.

We ate. Dad and Melaney and my sisters Ila (7) and Rae (4) were with us that night, and Ila has these two exasperating habits: 1) running to greet me at high-speed, which is fine except that her impact occurs at the level of my belt if you gather me, and I need to turn myself around or otherwise slow her down to avoid painful mid-level compression; and 2) reaching at said belt to grab my “celly phone, celly phone,” which she likes to grab and then run off with. Last night I was busy eating and for various reasons I didn’t want to part with my phone just then, so I physically fended her off. Later Rae came up to me during a quiet moment and said, “William, may I please borrow your cell phone?” So I gave it to her, and then Rae went up to Ila and said, “Ila, I have William’s cell phone! Guess how I got it? I asked him for it.” Ila pouted and probably deliberately resisted the point.

Later that night us kids avoided playing General Fruitbasket and instead got a good game of Pictionary going, since there were too many mosquitoes to comfortably play outside. We boys were having a good go at it until Jennifer came and joined the girls’ side, at which point the girls got halfway around the board and caught up to us.

Digression: I don’t like this Canadian-edition Pictionary as much as the older editions. There are way too many “All Plays” and I don’t like drawing for an All Play because it rushes me (but I love guessing for them, as you can sneak a glance or two at the other teams’ drawing), plus the new board and cards are kind of ugly compared to the classic style. Nevertheless, the fun remained.

* * *

today:

In Souris the next morning I purchased a phone card for BJ and picked up my cell phone charger from the post office (and returned BJ’s - just in time, for she leaves tomorrow). I drove out to Albion Cross in the early afternoon to help bale some straw, but it turned out I wasn’t needed. It was an innocent miscommunication, but I still had the opportunity to return Rae’s soccer gear and fix Melaney’s printer.

Ross and Laurie left this morning, so I now have a room, and as I indicated, I was ripe for a nap when I got back from the country. We went down to Sheila’s for a bit for a combined birthday party for some of Uncle Shane’s nieces and nephews, and now for the first time in what seems like forever, I’ve had the time and energy to blog. I hope it wasn’t too tiresome for you.

Tomorrow: Unloading the straw that was baled today. Sunday: A Matheson gathering down at the farm. Sometime: Write a Farm Mutual scholarship application and somehow get something done with those Ukraine pictures...

Current Mood: tired

12:05 pm - directions for the NS-PEI 500

Things are humming along nicely here. I’m going into Charlottetown by myself tomorrow to pick up Arthur and Jim at the airport, which should be fun. My first cousin once removed Marion will be coming up with her two grown children (she’s already made it as far as Stratford, where they’re staying with my Aunt and Uncle there - you remember them Catherine, with the really tall house?), and she hasn’t been to P.E.I. in more than thirty years. (I first met her in Toronto in 2002.) Also, my cousin Mary is coming up with the entourage of well-to-do relatives from New York, and they’re landing in Halifax and going to rent a car to come up here, which necessitated some hastily-written directions from yours truly:

( See my madd direction-writing skillz... )

... anyway, I hope we’ve passed the punchline of this story and that they don’t have any problems getting here. There’s a lot that could go wrong, and it’s a good thing I proofread my directions because at one point I originally wrote “right, then left” when it needed to be “left, then right.” I know from experience that when one is following directions, you tend to treat them as gospel and turn your brain off, so they can be as much of a hazard as a help.

The Hellers and Collishaws went down to my Grand Aunt Elsie’s yesterday for tea, which I wouldn’t necessarily blog about except that they raved about her biscuits, which she was making specifically for her son Earl, and we were also (later on) talking about many hours it takes to get from Halifax International Airport to the Inn at Bay Fortune by car, and we’re thinking “five, four if you take the ferry and time it right” but some of the New York relatives heard “three,” which was a big contributor to last night’s confusion. Upon hearing “three,” Uncle Shane remarked, “Well, Earl could do it.”

Further updates as events warrant. Oh, here's one: my car is now fixed! Only $325 to procure and install (and pinstripe) a door from a donor junkyard Chevrolet. The colour was a perfect match. What luck to be out of it so cheaply (and not suffering the ignominy of driving a two-tone car).

Current Mood: chipper