Feel free to vote for it, because the top submissions get an iPhone. 

Tools used:

• Second Life
• Sony Vegas

I must have spent 15-20 hours on that video, primarily on sound effects. While working on this, I discovered that sound effects are very essential, but if they're good no one will really notice them. I.e., making something look and feel natural is a lot harder than it looks and isn't appreciated unless there are no sound effects.

If you notice, Helen's voice is distorted in a way as to make it sound as if she's coming through a digital line. My voice is distorted to reflect the environment I'm in, there are environment sounds like splashes and vehicles, etc. This all required a lot of work, but you can barely 'notice' it while watching the video. You just expect these things to be present.

Second Life is a great tool for creating the stage and environment. Inside its interface, I used existing Second Life places (e.g. the Midgar Final Fantasy Island) and dynamically created iPhone look-alikes (see if you can spot it). I also adapted an in-game laptop to display a fake webpage, and created a weird/fake server rack on the fly. I only scratched the surface, but you really can create just about any environment you imagine. This can be very helpful for fun videos.

I can't harp on Sony Vegas enough-- that tool is wonderful. I happen to have the $50 home version of the tool, but it's possible to get effect and codec plugins from the professional version and they work there, too. (The primary limitation being 3-4 video tracks, and 3-4 audio tracks, which I've always worked around. Professional versions allow unlimited tracks, I believe.) With Vegas, I was able to create overlays, manage sound effects, apply video rendering effects, pan/zoom, etc. If you enjoy video editing, I highly recommend it. I studied video editing in school for a few years (winning best editor awards, even), and I'm in awe of how far digital editing has come. I'm ten times more productive with this software than with a top-of-the-line editing deck from 8-10 years ago.

Here's what I was able to accomplish with Paint.NET:

There are a few features different from Photoshop, so it wasn't 100% trivial to do, but I did manage to emulate it pretty well. I may write a similar tutorial for Paint.NET users to follow. Take a look:

This happened to me while listening to Soul Coughing one day. (Stop reading if you don't want to potentially affect your enjoyment of their music.) I discovered that nearly every single time Mike Doughty (lead singer) sings a sentence that ends in a consonant, he ends it with a very audible "uhhh" suffix. For example, this turns "Unmarked Helicopters" into "Unmarked HelicoptersUHHH".

This realization has quite tainted my enjoyment. Now it's very difficult for me not to notice it, making me unable to casually listen to their music.

Perhaps no one else runs into quirks like this and I'm just losing my mind; either way I thought I'd share.

(Thanks to digg for the link.)

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY.  The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.

Basically, this describes what I do about 5-30 times a day. I grab something formatted and want to paste it into another document or email, but I rarely want to keep the formatting. Before this tool, I copied the text to the clipboard, then I hit this arcane sequence of keys: WindowsKey-N (my Notepad hotkey), Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Alt-F, x. Now that I've bound this tool to WindowsKey-Q, I've shortened 6 keystrokes (with slight delays) to 1 immediate keystroke.

It may seem silly, but it's worth it for me.

In addition, you can share the directory with invited friends if you want.

It doesn't have the deadbolt-security feeling of GoToMyPC. As such, it's even easier to use, though it might make people hesitate when they see how easy and fast it is for them to access their remote files.

No, Vegas has nothing to do with gambling. Vegas has everything to do with digital video editing. I had heard great things about Adobe Premiere and the state of digital video editing, but the mid-range software is far better than I expected. This weekend I tried out Sony Vegas (formerly Vegas Video by Sonic Foundry) and have fallen in love.

It shouldn't be surprising, but it still feels weird: if you spent ~$1,500 on video equipment today, you can do ten times more than you could with $25,000 ten years ago. I run into this sort of 'leap' a lot in software development, but it's rare that it hits home just how far we've come in other technology areas.

In high school, I was the lead video editor for our school's television studio. In order to create professional-looking video, it required all sorts of clever tricks and hours upon hours of your life. Now there are no such requirements. So much work is now done in software that near-professional-quality is just a few minutes away.

I can't wait to get home and play with it some more. 

I'm not sure if it will do so, but it looks pretty snazzy so far.

Even if AJAX turns out not to work wonderfully for online Office tools, this shows that Flash has a lot of promise.

Even cooler, though, is that some creative folks began camping the overflow rooms. The idea being that the most interesting sessions (with some 'sleepers') will overflow and with only a few footsteps you can view the best sessions.

Personally, I love it because I actually stand outside the overflow rooms and peer/listen through the doors-- bouncing from session to session. I'm much more interested in getting breadth over the cool tidbits than getting a deep pull into any one thing (probably the story of my life). When you sit in a session, you're a captive audience and you watch every second of people navigating their IDEs/demos/technical probs/etc.

Just a moment ago I watched a session on Microsoft Research's thoughts for future synchronization/concurrent (e.g. RaceTrack, Cω, etc) while I also watched an interesting panel on the future of RSS (with Microsoft, Newsgator, etc).

Now I'm waiting for overflow sessions to start for the next block. There's always the possibility that no sessions will overflow this late in the conference, but that simply means I can go and get a seat in any of the other rooms of my choice.

I spent a long night talking to the Windows Installer and WiX development teams. More on all of this later.

I'm taking some detailed notes with the free copy of OneNote they gave us. Kinda handy, but I'm not totally sold yet.

Highlights from the first half of Day 1 in no particular order:

• Sidebar and Auxiliary displays
  • Sidebar is back in Vista (probably beta 2)
  • They're hyping the auxiliary displays for laptops/PCs. These are little color LCD and buttons on the outside of your laptop that lets you quickly check appointment data, email, etc, while the machine is off.
  • People can write things for sidebar/aux by visiting microsoftgadgets.com
• They offered ~2000 very cool PDA phones which I was too late to buy. (cry)
• I really want to try Office 12 which they showed-off for the first time today.
  • Really like the new menuing plans, though screen real estate is eaten.
  • They're redoing UI because 9/10 of features requested for Microsoft Office already exist, but users can't find them.
  • Outlook emails now have a very easy way to mark them as things to handle later. I like how it works/looks, though it's a small gain. Still, I want it now.
  • Outlook can replace FeedDemon/NewsGator as it has a lot of new RSS support.
• From the what-in-the-world department, they showed-off somehow using USB Memory sticks as virtual memory expansion in Vista. Very very cool especially combined with their virtual memory optimization additions ("superfetch"), but I have so many questions about this. It doesn't make sense and seems like an easy feature to cut from release.
• I love LINQ/DLINQ/XLINQ/etc. Basically, they showed-off very cool .NET language constructs for doing queries in the language itself, without a need for SQL, etc. These can be off of a database or you can actually query any collection of objects. I can't wait to play with it. At the moment, I rate this as the most interesting announcement.
• We saw some really cool Avalon apps demo'd. One you can try yourself is Max, a photo sharing application. It was designed and managed by one of their Usability leads as a test of Avalon and XAML. I must say the application looks nice, but I can't try it because my laptop runs on Vista and it won't install. (They demo'd it on Vista, though.)

That covers most of the things I've seen thus far. I've been to a couple of sessions, but neither of them seem very impressive compared to the keynotes and the overall cool atmosphere.

More soon!

The game definitely helps put certain things in perspective, but makes some of the investment options too easy. It's not difficult to get the 'gist' of the game, yet I can see how some people might try to take some of the game interactions as literal ways to behave in the real financial world. That seems a little dangerous to me.

At any rate, I began as the janitor last night. This profession has an incredible lack of expenses and it made winning fairly easy. The biggest trouble I had was landing on investment opportunities once I was out of the Rat Race. Indeed, it feels like the game is really 'won' by getting out of the Rat Race-- the ease of life afterwards is almost laughable. I'm sure this isn't accidental, since they want to convey that as the most important step.

For today's game, we decided to put our personal financial information onto the sheets to see how well things worked. My friend Scott won quickly, mostly because he has very low living expenses and it only took a handful of wise investments to get him to financial freedom. I was able to get out of the Rat Race soon after because my income was so much higher than my expenses and debt. As such, I was able to invest in large deals from the get-go and leapt into the Fast Track with far more money than we had seen previously (nearly half a million).

All in all, it's a neat game. It definitely has me thinking very much about my own finances and how I can make the most of my investable income. We'll see if I can carry that momentum forward.

I just ran across the WMI Code Creator tool from Microsoft. This fellow will generate example code in C#/VB.NET/VBScript for all sorts of WMI tasks. It really demonstrates how easy it is to do powerful things with WMI. For instance, it takes only a click or two to create a VBScript that gets notified whenever a process is invoked. Here's code of a VBScript it generated for me:

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\CIMV2")
Set objEvents = objWMIService.ExecNotificationQuery _
("SELECT * FROM Win32_ProcessStartTrace WHERE ProcessName = 'notepad.exe'")
 
Wscript.Echo "Waiting for events ..."
Do While(True)
   Set objReceivedEvent = objEvents.NextEvent
 
   'report an event
   Wscript.Echo "Win32_ProcessStartTrace event has occurred."
 
Loop


This snippet will display "Win32_ProcessStartTrace event has occurred." whenever notepad.exe is invoked. This is only a small example of the easy demos you can put together with their code creator tool.

Well, part of that is already here. Take a look at MyProgs.Net. It acts as a del.icio.us for cool and clever software utilities.

... To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperence. Apart from which this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need. The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand works: I should feel sorry for him if he had merely read so many useless works. In these works he discusses such questions as Homer's origin, who was Aeneas' real mother, whether Anacreon's manner of life was that of a lecher or that of a drunkard, whether Sappho slept with anyone who asked her, and other things that would be better unlearned if one actually knew them! Don't you go and tell me now that life is long enough for this sort of thing! When you come to writers in our own school, for that matter, I'll show you plenty of works which could do with some ruthless pruning. It costs a person an enormous amount of time (and other people's ears an enormous amount of boredom) before he earns such compliments as 'What a learned person!' Let's be content with the much less fashionable label, 'What a good man!' ... *
    What about thinking how much time you lose through constantly being taken up with official matters, private matters or ordinary everyday matters, through sleep, through ill health? [...]

---

* 15 lines (§§39 to 40, on further examples of worthless learning) are omitted.

I don't imagine the irony was lost on the translator.

Running Windows with No Services

(This will not be useful for anyone who wants their machine to be usable.)