NT23: Still to be done...Things 20, 22, and 23.

Still on my agenda to complete in the NT23 are Thing 20 on YouTube, Thing 22 on Developing your own 23 Things for Your Library, and Thing 23, Reflections on NT23.

Thing 20 on YouTube I will probably try to work on this evening, when I'm more at liberty to peruse YouTube on my own free time. I've watched a scant few library-related YouTube videos in the past, but it will be interesting to see how much the YouTube universe has expanded for libraries and librarians over the past several months and years.

For me anymore, I sometimes have more fun spending an evening watching YouTube videos than I do watching Cable TV, especially if there's nothing but re-runs on, and I've run out of rental Anime DVDs for the time being. I'm a subscriber to several prominent "YouTube Atheists" including dprjones, AronRa, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, etc, and watch with interest their trials and tribulations and ongoing culture wars with YouTubers who are hard-core creationist and/or homophobic Christians. It makes for very entertaining theater, I must say. I even take potshots in the culture war by uploading some animations from Xtranormal.com; Take a wild guess which side I'm on. I'm far too camera shy to appear on camera myself using my own face/voice...at least not without heavy special effects to obscure my face; I wish MovieMaker had a way to distort and alter voiceovers beyond simply speeding them up to x2 as fast or slowing them down to x2 as slow. If it can do this, I haven't yet discovered that special effect yet. Maybe it's available as an add on. Or maybe there is OpenSource video editing software out there that I need to check out and use instead of Windows MovieMaker. I don't know.

This isn't related to anything and is completely random, but I'm very annoyed that it's become increasingly complicated to create and play picture DVD slideshows on a standard DVD player. I recall when my girlfriend and I once bought a basic DVD player back in 2002 or 2003, and it was very easy to simply pop in a DVD-R or DVD-RW with only .jpeg files on it, and the DVD player would instantly play them as a slide show on the TV screen. That was the coolest damn thing we'd seen that whole year.

I have subsequently never been able to reproduce that. I even recently burned a picture CD at home using special software; it's supposed to play in DVD players but it doesn't--neither on my new DVD player or in my PS2. It only plays on my computer, which is like, big freakin' whup. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I suspect it's beyond the capability of a PS2 to do that, but I was really hoping my new DVD player (which is built-in to my new small-screen HDTV LCD 19") would be capable of handling it, but nope, no dice. My aunt and uncle have produced workable picture DVDs with edited music and credits that have pretty great production values, nice transitions, etc. If they can do it, so can I...but I just lack the time and motivational drive and funds to do it properly, I guess, plus all I have to work with are my photo album(s) on Flickr. I haven't taken any trips recently I'd like to showcase or anything else notable like that.

Anyway, it's getting about time to clock out for the day. More postings about Thing 20, on YouTube, a bit later on perhaps.