Have you got a nickel
This is an old clip of two girls demonstrating their talents on the the Gong Show. That third judge is great "Do you know that thats the way i started." She even comes up with a Popsicle herself. A nickel...talk about inflation!
Soprano's finale
11.9 million viewers tuned in to see the final episode of Soprans. Here are some interesting observations by louie A. on courant.com.
The two men who previously tried but failed to kill tony are in the diner.Phil Leotardo's nephew Nikki is in the diner.- The scene switches back and forth from Tony's perspective.
- We hear the bell ring for nearly everyone as they enter the diner.
- In one episode, Booby and Tony discuss what its like to die and Booby says "in the end, you probably don't hear anything, everything just goes black".
- There was a flashback to Bobby discussing what its like to die in the second to last episode.
When meadow enters the bar, we don't hear the bell, the scene just goes black.
UPDATE: Bob Harris has a lengthy writeup on the finale.
Podcast primer
In previous articles I've talked about converting QuickTime movies (mov files) so that they can be used in Windows Movie Maker (WMM). WMM creates ouputs Windows Media Video (WMV) files. You can upload the wmv to YouTube or blip.tv to share your video with other people. If you have a blog, you can then add the code to a post. Otherwise you can copy the URL and send it to friends in an email.
If you've subscribed to podcasts, you know that the video or audio files are delivered to your machine (and possibly your mp3 player) automatically whenever the author publishes a new episode. You can do the same things with your videos.
An easy way to manage your podcast is by creating a blip.tv account. YouTube wants you to watch movies using their player so you'll have a hard time trying to manage a podcast there. When you create an account at blip.tv you'll be given a "Show" page. This page contains a "Subscribe" section which publishes your videos as a podcast. Visitors will have 3 ways to subscribe, with iTunes, Windows Media Center and Democracy Player.
If you're uploading your videos as wmv files and you're concerned about making the video available to all 3 audiences (including iTunes) you need to convert your video to a format that iTunes understands.
To convert the wmv file, you're going to need third party software. I use MPlayer because its free, fast, powerful and it doesn't need to install itself on your system. Download MPlayer and extract the files onto your machine. I've written some scripts to make converting the files easier so you'll need to download those into the MPlayer folder as well. Take the files you want to convert and drag them one at a time onto wmv2mp4.bat. This will create a file with an mp4 extension. Upload that file to blip.tv. Blip.tv allows you to store the same file in more than one format. If you've already uploaded the file to blip.tv in another format, "Add additional format" from the edit page and upload the files from there. I usually use "Portable (iPod)" as the format.
- Download MPlayer and extract the files.
- Download mov2avi.bat and wmv2mp4.bat into the MPlayer directory.
- Drop the wmv files (it can be located anywhere) one at a time onto wmv2mp4.bat
- Upload the file to blip.tv.
Now that your podcast is ready, you can add it to your blog. You can let everyone know about your iTunes podcast by copying and pasting the following code. You'll need to change qicboy.blip.tv to the name of your show. You can find this by going to your show page and copying the URL from the address bar.
<a href="pcast://qicboy.blip.tv/?file_type=mov,mpeg4,mp4,m4v,mp3&skin=rss"> <img width="186px" height="47px" src="http://qicboy.blip.tv/skin/blipnew/icons/sub_itunes.gif"/> </a>
See also: Movie watermark, Editing mov files with Windows Movie Maker, Podcasting 101, MPlayer invocations