Calgary mayoral candidate Naheed Nenshi
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Calgary, Politics on 2010-07-08
Having seen Naheed Nenshi speak at TEDxCalgary on the subject of “Calgary 3.0”, I wanted to hear his mayoral pitch.
His July 7th reception at Art Central was my first opportunity to do so. I was too busy taping to get an answer to the questions: “Are you concerned about splitting the (social) progressive vote? Can you pursue Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) as mayor for civic elections?” Maybe next time I see him we’ll get to discuss it.
For more information on the Nenshi mayoral campaign, visit the official website.
This footage of Naheed Nenshi is released under a Creative Commons share-alike license, and is available for download and recycling from Internet Archive.
TEDx Talks pertaining to Calgary’s 2010 Election
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Calgary, Politics on 2010-06-06
TEDx, is the license used for independently organized TED Talks. Already in 2010, Calgary has experienced TEDxYYC followed by TEDxCalgary. I shot & edited the videos found on their respected YouTube playlists, so when I recently saw footage of Naheed Nenshi being interviewed by CBC, I kept wondering to myself… where have I seen that guy?
I’d edited his TEDxCalgary talk of course.
This got me thinking about the range of TEDx Talks given in Calgary. Some were extremely pertinent to civic issues, so here’s a brief summary for Calgarians.
Naheed Nenshi – Calgary 3.0
Journalist & mayoral candidate Naheed Nenshi (with the help of dataminer Natalie O’Toole) reviews Calgary’s growth patterns, and proposes that we are approaching decision time: What kind of City does Calgary want to become? Los Angeles and Curitiba (Brazil) are offered as potential futures, depending on choices Calgarians make today.
Grant Neufeld – Communicating for Change
Community activist & computer programmer Grant Neufeld shares his learning experiences on how to effect change. Since this blog entry is specifically for matters pertaining to Calgary’s 2010 election I’m skipping ahead in his video (you can of course rewind) to his discussion of http://CalgaryDemocracy.ca, his tool to assist Calgarians with Calgary’s 2010 municipal election by consolidating candidate information.
“Isn’t that something local papers like Calgary Herald and Calgary Sun do?” you may ask. All I know is that during the last civic election, I waited until election day to do research before voting. It was hard to find detailed consolidated information online (to the point I was not satisfied with my own knowledge about the candidates as I voted). Maybe bigger news organizations will provide easier to find, more detailed information for 2010… But I would suggest bookmarking http://CalgaryDemocracy.ca just in case. It is exactly what I was looking for in 2007, and never found.
Jennifer Martin – Innovative Spaces
Fostering innovation in youth isn’t normally thought of as a civic issue (with education being managed provincially). But Jennifer Martin argues that innovation can be encouraged by providing civic spaces for experimentation (her example being Telus Word of Science).
What Telus World of Science does for kids and teenagers, Calgary Protospace provides for young & young-at-heart-but-in-reality-old adults: A space for experimentation and shared learning. These spaces aren’t something I’d specifically expect a mayoral candidate to support in their campaign, but I would expect candidates to share ideas on how they would “foster innovation” in Calgary.
Chris Turner – Great Leap Sideways
Climate change is not an issue I normally associate with municipal elections… carbon taxes, cap-&-trade and fuel economy standards for automobiles are legislated federally & provincially, not municipally. And while a typical Calgarian’s carbon footprint exceeds the Canadian average by 30%, our municipal government is actively pursuing energy efficiency in its operations.
“They’re on it.” In fact (around the world) municipalities are taking action on climate change more aggressively than any other level of government.
However the significant per-captia carbon footprint of Calgary citizens is something which can be addressed by properly managing urban development. Here, author and journalist Chris Turner shares efficiency success stories which Calgary is free to emulate. “It can’t be done” is trumped by “it’s been done”. Calgary’s next mayor won’t be taxing carbon, but he/she still has many opportunities to help Calgarians lower their CO2 footprint.
Again, I’m skipping ahead in Chris’s video (past the argument that climate change is a problem) to his examples of success in improving energy efficiency.
That’s all the TEDx wisdom I can impart regarding Calgary’s 2010 municipal election. Beyond that?
#yycvote is the hash tag for Calgary elections, and it can be easily applied as a twitter search filter.
COSSFest 2010 – Calgary’s Open Source Software Festival
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Alberta, Calgary, Canada, open source software on 2010-05-31
On April 9th & 10th, Calgary Open Source Software advocates held a 2 day festival to discuss the challenges facing open source software, and promote its adoption.
Interested in OSS, I volunteered to create video archives of the event. Downloadable and Creative Commons licensed recyclable copies of the video coverage can be found on Internet Archive. (Anyone without full Flash support in their browser might need to access the lectures that way.)
But for YouTube hosted copies, I decided to experiment with YouTube Annotation Hyperlinks. They allow you to link from within one YouTube video to another. This allows me to show a brief summary of every event, and let the viewer click through if they would like to learn more.
For anyone denied YouTube Annotation Hyperlinks (currently not supported by iPhone or iPad), here’s an index of lectures. Clicking will open the appropriate YouTube video’s landing page, where you can either watch it, or find embed HTML if you’re looking to propagate your own lecture.
DemoCampCalgary17 Coverage
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Calgary, iPhone, startups on 2010-05-11
Here’s coverage of the Calgary DemoCamp held on 2010-04-27. Of all the demonstrations, the one I found most interesting was Big Nerds In Disguise‘s presentation of the iPhone game “Own This World“.
This is mostly because of my fascination with GPS enabled games, which raise the chance of physically bumping in to some stranger who you’ve just been battling with. That, and a resource system reminiscent of M.U.L.E. (yes, I’m old), must make for an interesting social laboratory on the programmer’s end.
For a more detailed summary of the demos, and future DemoCamp scheduling information, head to BarCampCalgary.com.
Trilogy of Failure: CUFF 2008 to 2010
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Calgary on 2010-04-20
When you bring up the subject of failed movie trilogies, most people immediately think of Star Wars prequels. But I’m here to tell you of an even bigger failure. A trilogy so bad, it even failed to rake in 2.4 billion dollars in box office revenue. A trilogy that saw no toys, no slurpee cups, and no fan edits.
Who is responsible for these disasters? Who can be held accountable?!? I say, blame the Calgary Underground Film Festival! They made us make these movies!
CUFF runs the 48 hour movie making challenge every year. CUFF promises participants fame. CUFF promises fortune. CUFF promises cold beer. But in the end, it wasn’t fame or fortune I spilled down my shirt.
Countdown to Destruction
| Year: | 2008 | Prop: | Hat | Genera: | Sci-Fi |
| Dialog: | “I bet she gives great helmet.” | ||||
| Prize: | We took home several CUFF program guides. | ||||
Our first CUFF 48-hour challenge saw us finalizing our script after a mere 18 hours of debate. But we had our largest team ever, allowing us to build “sets” and send people out for “food”.
You could say we stalled that first evening, trying to agree on an idea. We all headed for home, agreeing to each return the next morning finished scripts in hand. The next morning, Blaise showed up with a mostly completed script. The rest of us had only brought coffee. So we went with Blaise’s script.
To speed up editing, we tried hooking up a laptop to our primary machine’s firewire port as a means of sharing video data (this was back in the day when Windows still supported 1394 networking). Blaise was able to perform some editing on the laptop, but ultimately the connection was too slow to facilitate true parallel editing with my desktop.
Lesson?
Screenplay by committee does not work. Once an outline is agreed on, then it is possible to write scenes in parallel, but brainstorming should alternate with working-in-silence or else too much time is wasted debating.
| CUFF 2008 | Who beat us? | What did they beat us with? |
| 1st Place | Mos Eisley Cantina Band | Catalyst |
| 2nd Place | Short Sword Films | Chrono Shift |
| Audience | Stuff Productions | Selenium Chip |
Fantasy is Hard
| Year: | 2009 | Prop: | Ball | Genera: | Fantasy |
| Dialog: | “You’re so sure that your crew’s comin’ to get you?” | ||||
| Prize: | Smuggled out pizza, washed down with a nice warm cup of fail. | ||||
Curtis (“Crom“) Larson was easily fooled into joining our team by lies about our 2008 performance. “No really, we were this close to winning in 2008, Crom!” <snicker/>
Crom said he’d show up to help out Sunday, if we still needed any help by then. It was with this small and cautious first offer of help that Crom would be sucked into the vortex.
At 7pm, as soon as we received our short story parameters (prop, genera, dialog) we raced to the office and began writing scripts in parallel. By 2 am, we reviewed what we had created, and the panic set in.
Little did we know Crom was also writing a script in parallel. He emailed us a copy (a PDF, because that’s how Final Draft users make fun of everyone else), and we knew that despite his inability to be videotaped until Sunday, he would play the lead role.
Saturday we shot every non-Crom scene we could, while Crom laid down guitar tracks (and Cameron Falkenhagen supplied synth). I took some naps over night while others took a whack at editing. On Sunday, we picked up the missing Crom footage on Flamingo Block rooftop.
Then, realizing we were almost out of time, I took the music tracks which had been so lovingly constructed, and jammed them onto the editing timeline like a drunken chef constructing a turducken by force.
The rest, as they say, is movie making history!
(We lost again.)
Lesson?
Background render your current, crappy edit to an uncompressed video file early on, while CPU cycles are plentiful. Come deadline, when SONY VEGAS decides it doesn’t want to export some specific piece of your video project you can focus on exporting that one troublesome section. Then all uncompressed parts can be quickly transcoded together if a deadline panic hits.
| CUFF 2009 | Who beat us? | What did they beat us with? |
| 1st Place | Unknown Team Name | Hard Done By |
| 2nd Place | Unknown Team Name | Stranger |
| 3rd Place | Unknown Team Name | Grande Gringo: Man of Action |
| Honorable Mention | Science Bear | Juantourage |
Fun House
| Year: | 2010 | Prop: | Ball | Genera: | Revenge |
| Dialog: | “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.” | ||||
| Prize: | Free roll of toilet paper from men’s room. | ||||
After 2 consecutive years of failure, and the discovery of Cameron Falkenhagen and Crom’s bodies with “You have failed me for the last time” carved into their foreheads, it was getting hard to find new team mates.
Fortunately, Sarah “@ispeakcanadian” McKenzie hadn’t heard about the bodies! And Blaise Kolodychuk, Elaine Boyling & Colin Kershaw volunteered to create music at home and email tracks to us as MP3s.
Unfortunately, as the team worked in parallel on different scripts, we didn’t quite have an ending we were 100% satisfied with. We figured we’d jump off that bridge when we came to it, and the best thing to do was start shooting what we had.
Tubby Dog was gracious to let us shoot before (and after) opening on Saturday morning. Jeff at The Mustard Seed not only let us use their Coke vending machine, but glamorized cola theft. (Soda pop theft is a gateway crime, so I’m guessing this was a long-term strategy for job security.)
Things were racing along, until Sunday at noon when we agreed the current ending needed improvement. We shot 2 alternate endings simultaneously, and I quickly tacked one onto the end of Fun House. Then I spent 3 minutes stuffing in music that had taken Blaise, Elaine and Colin hours to create. (See a pattern here?)
And for the 3rd time, we made movie making history!
Lesson?
If sleeping on a problem doesn’t present a solution, then running around shooting video probably won’t be conducive to finding an answer either. We knew we had script issues, it was a perfectly parallelizable problem which we could have bounced off multiple writers simultaneously, but we waited until the last day to try address it. We should have taken the time up front to get someone else to solve our script problem, while we shot and edited the solid portion.
| CUFF 2010 | Who beat us? | What did they beat us with? |
| 1st Place | Pauls Simmons and the Prequels | Robinson Family Vacation |
| 2nd Place | 2 Days Moonshine | SIN |
| 3rd Place | Dr. Robotnik | You Fucked My Mother |
| Audience | John Wayne and the Ladies | Gumshoe: A Victor Flint Detective Flick |
2011 CUFF 48-Hour Challenge
A word of warning to anyone thinking of competing in 2011.
There will be no awards left for you after we win them all.
There will be only cold beer and pizza. And even then, we will try acquire all the meat-lover slices for ourselves.
Why not spend the weekend at home with your family? Perhaps you own a dog. They need lots of attention, don’t they?
Hey is that your car over there getting towed?
TEDxYYC – Calgary’s TEDx Videos
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Alberta, Calgary, Canada on 2010-03-10
I’ve finished editing all the TEDxYYC videos, but they’re not yet indexed on the official TEDxYYC website. Until they do, the 2010 TEDxYYC videos can either be found at YouTube’s TEDxYYC Playlist, or right here (in chronological order)…
Rick Castiglione – Storytelling
John Manzo – Third Wave Coffeehouses
Chris Turner – Great Leap Sideways
Decidedly Jazz Danceworks – Wise Apple
Jennifer Martin – Innovative Spaces
Garnette Sutherland – Imaging, Robotics and Surgery
Eden Full – Changemaking & Solar Panels
Lorrie Matheson – Creative Process
Ben Cameron – Live Performing Arts in the 21st Century
Ruben Nelson – What Calgary Must Become
Dan Lui of BNetTV.com provided me access to additional coverage (footage swap!), and access to BNetTV’s mixing board audio. And thanks to Sarah Blue for letting me capture the event.
Sony Vegas 9.0c Bug vs Hottie Hookups
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Calgary, iPhone, SONY VEGAS on 2010-03-08
Hottie Hookups is a new iPhone game by Calgary’s own Big Stack Studios. It features some pretty innovative gameplay mechanics: Swiping, shaking and tilting are all used to keep swarms of nerds from disturbing the mating rituals of Jocks and Models on a dancefloor…
…as you can see, the promotional video introduces the Hottie Hookups team using “Guy Ritchie on a budget” style title cards. In theory, a Sony Vegas workflow for such dynamic titles isn’t terribly difficult… grab a frame from video, manually trace around the Hottie Hookup developer’s image so they’re masked out. GIMP or Paint.NET can both mask and stylize, so Photoshop is not required.
A single masked out image can then have multiple effects applied, each slightly different looking effect saved as a separate file. Rapidly alternating between different versions of these masked images, at slightly different positions (be sure to use “hold” keyframes, or the images will slide instead of jump), an editor can use Sony Vegas to manually create extremely dynamic title cards.
Unfortunately, the story does not end there… at least while VEGAS PRO 9.0c 64-bit is SONY’s latest release. Because Sony Vegas 9.0c does not like my masked images.
This is an inconsistent issue, and I’m finding it does not matter what format the image is in. What does matter, is the complexity of the timeline at that instant (how many layers, how many masked images), and the pan & scan movement being applied to the video element.
While Hottie Hookups title cards features jerky motion, such an error is best illuistrated by a slow pan and zoom. When previewing the video in Vegas, I see the image flicker and disappear, instead of expanding and filling the screen. This may be some sort of caching error, since I found I needed at least 5 images in any single project before one image would flicker and disappear. Occasionally, I could return to a “trouble” spot on the timeline, only to see the video suddenly preview correctly.
This inconsistency also applies to rendering the final video. Not being able to edit the video in a WYSIWYG manner is bad, but lucking out when editing (so that the image remains visible) does not guarantee your final render will contain the image.
Fortunately, there is a work-around. Unfortunately, it is extremely tedious and makes Sony Vegas a giant time-suck for complex title sequences.
- Create a new (temporary) Sony Vegas project. Set project resolution either as big as your masked image, or as big as possible.
- Import your masked image into Sony Vegas.
- Export your image as a short uncompressed video clip (AVI version 2 with alpha channel enabled).
- Instead of using images in your “real” Sony Vegas project, use your exported short video clips.
No, seriously. It does not matter if my images are JPG, or PNG. They don’t even have to be high resolution (I see this problem with images only 1280×720). And it doesn’t take much complexity for images to start disappearing.
Those dynamic title cards you see consist of layers of static video, and not images. Because Sony Vegas could correctly render a complex timeline filled with many alpha channeled video clips, but not alpha channeled images.
I realize not everyone uses Sony Vegas for animation, but to quote Gob, “Come on!”
Sony Vegas 9.0c came out in 2009-10 (October 2009). Since then, VideoLAN Media Creator has been announced.
Sony Vegas currently maintains the lead in supporting a wide variety of file formats (AVCHD is why I’m using Vegas today, and not Final Cut), but the only other significant advances I’ve seen Sony make since 6.0 are multicam editing and 64-bit support. How about basic UI issues, like freeing aspect ratio for more than one clip at a time? Or directly exporting old-school FLV?
In fact, I had a complex project on hold for 6 months until I happened to upgrade my Windows box to 64-bit, finally allowing the project to render successfully. In 32-bit land, no memory warning was given. Sony Vegas simply crashed while rendering.
So Sony Vegas 9.0c 64-bit solves one problem, while introducing another. Given VLC Media Player’s fantastic support for playback of various file formats, one has to wonder if Sony Vegas’s strongest feature, broad file format support, won’t be soon surpassed by a free and open source application.
VideoLAN Media Creator will support all 3 OSes (Linux, Mac, PC) just as VLC Media Player does. Give me stability and consistency, I’ll take that over multicam any day.
Oil Sands Extraction – LFTR in Alberta?
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Alberta, Calgary, Canada, Environment, thorium on 2009-11-23
THORIUM REMIX 2009 has been well received, so I’ve cut it down further to 10 minutes and put the subject in a Canadian context: How about using a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor to power oil sands crude extraction?
Bill Dickie (Alberta Minister of Mines and Minerals 1971-1975) pointed out the Stelmach government just polled 1024 Albertans and found only 25% object to new nuclear projects…
Calgary Herald: Alberta would welcome private nuclear power, Stelmach gov’t says (excerpt follows)
The Stelmach government opened the door Monday to nuclear power in Alberta — rejecting a moratorium and saying it will consider the controversial energy option on a case-by-case basis — but vowed no public dollars will be invested in any project.
The province announced its nuclear power policy the same day Energy Minister Mel Knight rolled out the results of the province’s public consultation on the issue. A telephone survey of 1,024 Albertans, which incorporated input from stakeholder groups, found about one-quarter of people want the government to refuse projects. Two in 10 said the province should encourage proposals and 45 per cent of people polled want nuclear power plants considered on a case-by-case basis.
With those numbers in hand, Knight said Monday that Alberta is open for business on nuclear power. But he stressed the province won’t cough up a penny and hinted the lack of subsidies might dissuade companies from proceeding in Alberta. “We’re not putting a moratorium on nuclear,” Knight told reporters. “We are not proponents of nuclear energy,” he added. “We need power and proponents that want to build (nuclear) in the system in Alberta are welcome to do so.”
Premier Ed Stelmach, however, said Monday in his “Ask Premier Ed” online video that nuclear energy is a “viable option” in Alberta.
“This is one way of keeping down the carbon footprint,” Stelmach said, noting the United States is “very high” on nuclear energy.
The premier acknowledged nuclear waste is a worry for many, but said new technology is key to addressing concerns.
I’m got some useful feedback on REDDIT, and forum pertaining to LFTR’s potential in Alberta…
Depleted uranium can be used as fuel in fast reactors. However, it is not usable in CANDU. CANDU is a thermal reactor, not a fast reactor: it does not breed fuel. It runs on fissile U-235. It can run on (0.7% U-235) natural uranium because it is very efficient at using U-235, not because it burns U-238 (not self-sufficiently, anyway). Conventional reactors are extremely wasteful, as they throw away over 99% of the starting material (because they can not feasibly burn U-238). A closed fuel cycle, with reprocessing and fast reactors, increases fuel efficiency by 100x – hence decreases fuel demands by 100x, and waste production by 100x. The transuranic elements, the most important of nuclear waste, are not left over but are consumed as fuel. Fast reactors can import these waste components from other reactors and burn them. They are waste incinerators. Thorium fuel cycles are basically the same – substituting U-238 with Th-232, and Pu-239 with U-233. They have the same basic advantages as plutonium-cycle fast reactors – fuel efficiency, waste burning. - deleted
Somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 of a barrel of oil is needed to extract 1 barrel of oil. This is a very significant amount. I can not speak for other people. My primary concern with nuclear reactors are the usual concerns about cost, fuel production, safety, disposal, and cost. If the benefits of nuclear can be had without the drawbacks, then I will dance a little jig. It’s the promise of fusion, after all. - MechaBlue
Canadians are slightly anti-nuke, but the primary problem is that the oil companies already own the natural gas. They just drill a hole and it comes out of the ground to be burned for free, so from their point of view why would they use nuclear? They used to burn natural gas off as waste. You would have an easier time selling the idea of a Thorium reactor in terms of providing people with cheap power. Even then, in Alberta, the “lines provider” will be taking most of the profit from delivering that power. The reason why consumers are stuck with heavily polluting mines and power generation is primarily political. The current generators have used regulatory means to exclude newcomers because it isn’t in their best interest to lower their profits. - raghead
Use of nuclear energy for in situ gasification of coal (via high temperature steam) could reduce mining deaths. High ash coal deposits could also be exploited. Non-volatile poisons could be left in situ and the gas could be cleaned of volatile poisons and suspended matter before use. The process may also be feasible as an alternate for bitumen deposits like Alberta sands. - jagdish
Indian thorium solid fuel fast breeder will be up in 2011 at Kalpakkam This is unrelated to LFTR, which is a thermal spectrum reactor working with liquid fuels. - tt23
2011-10-21 Update:
THORIUM REMIX 2011 is now complete. This is my recommended video resource for learning about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (a type of Thorium Molten Salt Reactor). It begins with a brief summary comparing LFTR to Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR).
Oil Sands Debate with Elizabeth May
Posted by gordonmcdowell in Alberta, Calgary, Canada, Environment, Politics on 2009-11-20
“Is Oil Sands Development Ultimately Irreconcilable with the Environmental Agenda?” was the question posed by Calgary Enterprise Forum. The discussion was held at Calgary Petroleum Club featuring Elizabeth May, Deborah Yedlin (Calgary Herald columnist) and Murray Smith (Energy Minister 2001-2005).
Despite the plethora of oil patch executives, Calgary Greens and red wine, no fisticuffs took place.