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The Mozilla Summit was amazing and this video doesn’t do it justice. There were so many cool things – science fair, world expo, dozens of breakout sessions, lightning talks and demos – that I didn’t even attempt to capture because I wanted to experience them. Instead, what I’ve got here is a few moments from the beginning and the end. It doesn’t sum up the full experience but I think it does represent the spirit of sharing and celebration.

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I don’t know why it’s taken me more than a month to make this post. I guess I figured I’d have learned some big lesson or something. I don’t know. Certainly I wish I’d been able to finish. But really, I did something worthwhile, I raised $3000 to fight blood cancer and spent 4 months training with some really amazing people.

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I’ve got less than 2 days before the big event. I need your support. Please donate now to help me reach my fundraising goal and save lives. As a thank you, I’m making some cool artwork for everyone who donates.

For some reason Dylan needed a one page commentary written about her by a parent for an English assignment. Of course she doesn’t say anything about this until the night before it’s due. So it’s not only a homework assignment, it’s a last minute homework assignment (nice flashback to high school). It feels like it fits in on this blog so I thought I’d post it.

Dylan and writing. I’m not really sure what I can say about Dylan and writing. My sense is that she’s a good writer. She’s always loved to read and talk about art and ideas. She’s articulate and thoughtful. When it matters to her, she’s a perfectionist. And when she cares, she can be very serious.

When she was four she was very serious about staging her own version of the Wizard of Oz. She was going to put it on at the Jump-Start theater where I’m a member of the company. She rehearsed along with the movie almost every day for a while. She even tried to organize rehearsals with the other kids at Montessori school but they wouldn’t cooperate. She complained that they, “weren’t serious enough.”

When she was 10, I helped her set up a blog. She posted things regularly for the better part of a year. I loved reading it – the stories about school and her obsession with J-Rock. Later, when I took up videoblogging so did Dylan. She was great at it. In fact, for a short time in the pre-YouTube world, she was Internet famous.

I’ve always loved that we’ve been able to share these little things. Last week for my birthday my family gave me 2 tickets to see the Flaming Lips in concert. Of course Dylan will go with me. We’ve always listened to many of the same bands (except for the time she was really into the Backstreet Boys). But something changed towards the end of middle school.

About the time she gave up videoblogging, Dylan also stopped sharing things she created with me. We still enjoy things like watching films together and talking about them but I never get to see the things she makes anymore. Photos, drawings and things that she writes – even simple essays for school – I get only brief glimpses if I’m lucky. The one exception was about a year ago when she forgot to erase some writing assignment from the flash drive she borrowed from me. A week or two later when I put it my computer I found a few precious documents. Here’s a bit from one that made me laugh out loud.

“I am not white!
Babe. You’re white.
But, but, I’m Italian! And I have some Mexican-
You’re white. Come on, you listen to The Shins, you have laptops upstairs and downstairs.
I do live on the Northeast side of town…
Yeah, and in a gated community. And you’re a vegetarian!
Well shit.”

It’s funny, it’s real, it’s self-aware and it makes an insightful observation about the interrelation between race and culture. So my sense is that Dylan is a great writer. I just wish we could share this like we used to.

I had such a great time today with the team. I don’t understand how/why people do these things without Team In Training.

The race was fun although the swim was kind of weird. It was really short swim to begin with (400m) and because of the fast current they shorted it to something like 300m. So as we rounded the buoy and headed upstream it was just really crowded. There was hardly any room to swim. But once I was out of the water I think I did about as good as I’m capable of right now. That was pretty nice. All in all it was good practice for the CapTexTri next week.

This was Sprint Triathlon – 400m swim, 12mile ride, 3.3mile run. I think it ended up more like a 300m swim, 13mile ride and 3.3mile run. Next week the CapTexTri is an Olympic Triathlon – 1.5k swim, 40k bike, 10k run.

Click the image to see full size.

Lots and lots going on with web video these last few days. I’m not going to speculate about stuff or talk about the politics of it right now. I just wanted to play with it here. There aren’t many tools out there to create WebM videos. I tried something by Sorenson but the video it created just crashed Firefox. So I tried some other Windows only tool and it worked but it took an hour to compress a 1 min video and made it 175MB. Of course I tried ffmpeg and I think I have it patched for the VP8 codec and everything but I have no idea what parameters to give it to compress the video. Just as I was about to give up, Miro released their Miro Video Converter 2.0. It’s a super simple drag and drop thing. You can’t customize anything but it does work. The video here is compressed with it. It’s compressed at about 540kbps total (both video and audio) so it’s about half the size of what I’d use with H.264. It looks pretty good but the audio is way too compressed, though I’m sure they’ll fix that. Anyway, even at 540kbps the quality is good. I’m sure when we have some decent tools to encode WebM we’ll be able to make stuff that looks great.

In order to view this video you need something like the latest build of Firefox (that’s what I’m using). And just for rough comparison here are the direct links to the WebM file and an H.264 version. They’re both 640×480 but the H.264 version is about two and half times the bit-rate.

Here’s some more info on WebM including the announcement at Google I/O:

Open Web, Open Video and WebM
The WebM Project

I got my first real road bike the other day. It’s beautiful and fast! I rode it last night at practice. I can’t tell you how much better this is than the 40lb. mountain bike I was riding.

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A bunch of people from our team did the Windcrest Freshman Triathlon as a warmup for our big event at the end if the month.

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We got our wetsuits last night and did some swimming at Landa Park in New Braunfels. It was WAY different than swimming in a pool. I’m going to need lots of practice.

So here’s the deal. I’m doing a triathlon in May with Team In Training and I’m raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. As a thank you to everyone who donates, I’m making this heart milagro print. All of the money you donate is tax deductible and goes directly to help save people’s lives.

Please donate now.