papabean’s blog

Well Christmas is over and we have final confirmation that we have a very unusual daughter.  While every 5 year old in the Universe is waking parents up at 5am to see what Santa has brought, we had to wake ours up at 745.  Her initial response was to pull the covers over her head and want to sleep longer....  Nevertheless, she eventually awoke and had a really exciting and memorable Christmas morning.

 

I have been asked to post some recent family photos up here for quite some time.  I dont have a whole lot, and they are all of Celia, but isn't that what people are really asking for anyway?

 

 

This pictures was taken in La Jolla when some frends came to stay with us for another friend's wedding.  It may not be obvious, but you can see "Sealia"  in the background behind "Celia"

 

 

This may be my favorite Celia picture of the year, taken during the fall up in the mountains near Green Valley Lake.

 

 

While not an amazing picture, it was an amazing moment in parenting to watch Celia get up and perform in front of a crowd for the first time.  She inhereited the gene from her parents that makes you shy away from being the center of attention, but once she got going was quite a dancer at the holiday festival.

 

This is from just 2 weeks ago, where we were up in the mountains for about a foot of snowfall and got to go sledding in our backyard and make a snowman.  The mountain house has been such a refuge for us, and a great part of Celia's childhood experience.

testing vmix

So, in honor of 9/11 all the video on the vmIx home page are remembering the tragic events of 9/11.  I watched the one below, and holy crap is it powerful.  Maybe it is because I just dropped my daughter off at kindergarten, maybe it is because she is weeks from her own 5th birthday, but this one really moved me. 

 

I encourage you to watch it and the others because, regardless of how you feel about our actions in the 5 years since 9/11 this is a real tragedy that has affected everyone of us.

Click here to watch: 

http://www.vmix.com/viewVideo.php?ID=1335574

OK, now I can talk about the cool reporting options that we added to vmix this week.  For any video that you upload, you get really cool charts on who is watching it.  Here is a picture of one of my reports.  I can filter for today, last week, last month or all time and see the trends over time, whether it was men or women watching my video, and the age of the people watching my video.  It reports on this whether the video is played on vmix.com or embedded offsite like on myspace.  I love this!  Am I a geek or is this cool, or both :)

Anyway, it is there, but right now you can only see it for your own videos, so become a member and upload videos there instead of craptube.  We are planning to open it up so you can see other people's videos too - what do you think?

I want to report on what I think are 2 killer advancements in the evolution of online video.  Both were done at vMix (full disclosure: I work for vmix, but I think that these features really are cool and would say so even if craptube released them first). 

The first is vMix Capture (http://www.vmix.com/capturelanding.php), which integrates your webcam directly to your vMix account.  So, you login, click record, and BAM! your video is online.  No more trying to get them off your video camera, editing, uploading, encoding, blah blah blah...just record.  Check it out.

 

The second thing is super cool reporting on your videos or slideshows.  I have to roll now, so I will report on that manana.

If you feel like buying me a book, this one would be great.  I am not very flexible, and am worried about causing an injury, most likely to my knees.  (I know that I am just advertising my age with this, but I am still trying to figure it all out)

 

 

 

 

 

On a different note, I love this video.  Very funny, while also making me embarassed to be an American.