Month: November 2007

Besides the bigger redesign of my ‘80s site I mention below, I’ve also made some minor changes to my DrikoLand Gallery pages, most notable adding a Personal Favorites section to highlight some of my favorite photos.

I’ve also considered adding PayPal links to the photos on the gallery to make them available for sale. I’ve never had anyone actually offer to buy a print, but I suppose if the option is there, there might be some incentive for people to do so.

Suggestions or comments on the new section and/or the e-commerce possibilities are most welcome!

It’s probably obvious to my few regular readers that I haven’t posted in some time. It’s not for lack of things to post, as I continuously save items of interest for future posting. It’s mostly lack of time to sit down and properly make the posts themselves, which sometimes require some more thought, research, and/or formatting. In any case, I haven’t been making enough time for that, although I have been working on some behind-the-scenes things here at DrikoLand.

First of all, I finally migrated all of my ‘80s pages to a subdomain, 80s.driko.org. Along with that migration I’ve redesigned most of the main pages to conform with the design of the blog. I think it’s a much cleaner look, but I still have to apply it to many of the subpages, which will of course take some time. Please take a look and tell me what you think!

Secondly, I’ve also made some tweaks to the DrikoLand Gallery, which I mention in the next post above.

I’ll try to be better about posting more regularly, but we’ll have to see if I can stick to it or not… 😉

Update 2: Stage6 closed up shop at the end of February. It was one of the only decent places to find high-quality music videos that I’ve come across, so I’m quite sad to see it go. As I mention below, pretty much no one matches YouTube in its selection of all kinds of videos, but until it ups its video quality (something in the works, apparently) it’s still hard to watch some of those videos. In the meantime, if anyone has come across a decent Stage6 replacement for music videos, please let me know!

Update: I removed the embedded video, as I didn’t realize that it prompts people to download a divx plugin. Sorry about that…

My latest obsession (like I need another one) is amassing a collection of ‘80s (and beyond) music videos. For some time now, I’ve been TiVoing VH1 Classic’s We Are The ’80s and creating pretty decent-quality MPG files (~640×480) once I transfer the shows to the computer. USENET newsgroups (alt.binaries.mpeg.videos in particular) have also been a gold mine for high-quality videos. YouTube is an amazing source for all sorts of obscure videos, but the resolution is not that great (~320×240). Still, I think that a lower-resolution obscure video is still worth a download in most cases, if only to remind myself to keep looking. 😉 Finally, I found a couple of boxes of VHS cassettes in my basement and realized that I can connect my VCR to my computer’s TV decoder card in order to capture video from VHS. Of course, it has to be in real time, but I’ve found some great stuff there. The quality usually leaves something to be desired (although the resolution is good, ~640×480), as almost all of the tapes were recorded in six-hour SLP mode, but again, some of this stuff I haven’t come across anywhere else…

Most recently, I’ve come across another great source for music (and other) videos, sometimes even available in HD (~720×480 and up) resolution: Stage6, sponsored by divx, a popular video codec for AVI files. I’ve been uploading some of the stuff I’ve recorded off VHS there, starting with Sun City, seen below:.

As I get to them, I’ll post some more videos to Stage6; keep an eye on my profile page here. Let me know what you think! Of course, any suggestions for good sources of music videos are welcome… 🙂

Mmmm… Tornado Potato.

Check out this awesome Homer Simpson cake…

A teacher of English in Taiwan took a somewhat unusual route to help the children learn: use MC Hammer songs! The YouTube video is priceless. 🙂