It’s old news to some people, but it’s not to others, which is why I’m writing to share this.
Media.io is an online audio file conversion site that converts your sound files from one format to another. It converts quite a few file formats (see complete list below) into the most popular MP3, WAV, OGG and WMV formats. Why get freeware that does this that might not jive with some of your other software, or operating systems? Why settle for recording software that doesn’t save in some of these formats, or pay for really expensive software that does just for the sake of it? Just upload your file, choose the format you want it output as, and download the new file after the conversion is done!
I love the Chinese video websites Youku.com and Tudou.com because they allow for really long videos, as well as skirt the copyrighting YouTube succumbed to this summer. You can find all sorts of great stuff on Youku and Tudou, like this Neil Young MTV Unplugged concert. This was my favourite MTV Unplugged concert, even though Bob Dylan is at the top of my list for singer/songwriters.
If you haven’t seen this, please do enjoy. If you have, it probably never gets old. It doesn’t for me.
If you eat food and you have never seen this documentary, you should.
Even if you’re vegan, this film is of relevance to you for many reasons, including the Monsanto conspiracy to dominate the world soybean market.
The film may be about America’s food industry, but a lot of it isn’t different around the western world, and a lot of it goes around the entire world because the US food exports pretty substantial amounts of food each year. Besides, those that control America’s food system don’t stop at the borders. Greed and crime have no borders.
If the video is a bit slow to load, please pause for 2-5 minutes while you do something else, then come back and viewing should be fine unless something is wrong with the source site.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.
Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.
Aside from all the insights I’ve gained on the topics of the documentaries I have presented on this site in the past couple of weeks, I have to say I’ve also gained a lot of insight into how people manipulate others in an organizational way. I’ve heard about bribing, having friends in high places, and such, but seeing it in action is something else. The Monsanto manipulation is the perfect example in this film. It’s disgusting enough people do it on their own, but when they find and collaborate, it’s a whole new level of crime as far as I’m concerned, somewhat similar to manslaughter (accidental or in the moment) and murder (premeditated).
It’s really tragic our justice system doesn’t have any punishment that is suitable for the crimes these people are doing.
What do you think of when you think of the shark? A fearsome monster? A man eater from the ocean? Something that should be killed if seen from land?
If you’re like most people of the world, that’s generally what you would think of when you think of a shark. However, sharks are nothing like that. It’s all man-made myth!
Sharks are rather shy, intelligent and have incredible senses. They avoid people if they can, actually being afraid of people, and often know better than to eat people despite how people resemble the seals they actually eat. They eat the only way they know how, and most are not like the way they are portrayed in movies like Jaws. Furthermore, they have a huge environmental impact by being at the top of the food chain, controlling populations of other species below them so all the phytoplankton in the oceans which generate oxygen for us to breathe are allowed to do just that. We are destroying our future just by letting a bunch of fishermen slaughter all these sharks because some people in China believes eating their fins bestow good health and miracle cures, and are willing to pay a ton of money for them.
Sharks are absolutely remarkable creatures which have survived hundreds of millions of years, virtually unchanged, while the world around it has or has become extinct. They were here 150 million years before the dinosaurs! Come see how amazing they truly are, and how they are being hunted to extinction by greedy people who only take their fins and throw the rest of the animal away. Sharkwater will show you all of this, with remarkable cinematography in a captivating adventure that has won 31 major international film awards.
More of the world needs to see this film. I hope you will watch it if you have not, and/or tell other people about it!
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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Vodpod videos no longer available.
This full-length online version is of good quality, though not the same as a DVD version, obviously. But if you can’t get access to the DVD, this will do. This also has English and Chinese (not sure which form) subtitles. If it gets stuck loading when you play it, please pause it for a few minutes while it loads and come back. You should be fine, then.
Synopsis
For filmmaker Rob Stewart, exploring sharks began as an underwater adventure. What it turned into was a beautiful and dangerous life journey into the balance of life on earth. Driven by passion fed from a lifelong fascination with sharks, Stewart debunks historical stereotypes and media depictions of sharks as bloodthirsty, man-eating monsters and reveals the reality of sharks as pillars in the evolution of the seas. Filmed in visually stunning, high definition video, Sharkwater takes you into the most shark rich waters of the world, exposing the exploitation and corruption surrounding the world’s shark populations in the marine reserves of Cocos Island, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador.
In an effort to protect sharks, Stewart teams up with renegade conservationist Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Their unbelievable adventure together starts with a battle between the Sea Shepherd and shark poachers in Guatemala, resulting in pirate boat rammings, gunboat chases, mafia espionage, corrupt court systems and attempted murder charges, forcing them to flee for their lives. Through it all, Stewart discovers these magnificent creatures have gone from predator to prey, and how despite surviving the earth’s history of mass extinctions, they could easily be wiped out within a few years due to human greed. Stewart’s remarkable journey of courage and determination changes from a mission to save the world’s sharks, into a fight for his life, and that of humankind.
Noteflight.com is a music composition webware. It allows you to compose sheet music online in their website, play it and share it as a follow the music style video. Copying and pasting code is about as complicated as it gets for social bookmark style sharing, but the entire package is brilliant. This despite a few shortcomings still present in Beta 3 version.
Isn’t the free world wide web great these days? Everything is going on-line via webware, and “software is so passé” according to CNET and I can’t say I disagree. Their blog has like 10 entries a day on webware for crying out loud! Soon, we’ll only need to get the same scripts on our electronic devices (far more than just computers) and the browser will serve as the means for everything. We will only need the scripts on our electronic devices for when we don’t have a reliable connection and might lose data.
The latest webware I happened upon is sheet music composition software at Noteflight.com. I learned about it from Wesley Fok in his awesome weekly columns called Apps We Love in the Globe & Mail (Canadian paper). Being a bit of an amateur musician, who happened to have composed something like 15 years ago, I not only got to try the site, but I had personal vested interest.
I found the site to be fairly good, though not yet at the quality of expensive software like Finale. You can still do quite a lot with this software. I’m sure there are many things people wish it had, and it will with progressive versions, but this is great for now. The only thing I found on this first go that was disappointing was I could not change tempo in the middle of a piece. They’ll get that sorted out soon enough as it’s just timing and is a digital fix.
But more than just music composition, you can share the file and have multiple people work on it. Then you can share it on blogs and such. They give you some codes and you just throw it in somewhere. It doesn’t quite work for every platform yet. I can’t embed it in my WordPress.com post, for example. However, I can collect it with my VodPod account and widget to the right. I just put those codes from Noteflight.com into the collector, it gives me a page to view it, and I can link the URL to the text like here.
The computer “performance” is less than stellar without the ability for me to indicate tempo changes that were all over this piece. It loses a lot of its life without the appropriate tempo changes. However, I’ll take it just to be able to share it. When the better beta versions come out, I will update it.
As for my étude, it was something I composed to get around stupid and horrible sounding exercises. I was teaching myself piano, cowboy style, you see. Jump in and shoot. Ask questions later. I had no piano training, but I was teaching myself to play the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (video below) because there were many nights I needed to play it for therapy in the moonlight coming through my bedroom window.
Wow! That video link has over 6.5 million views!!! Talk about timeless! Beethoven gone majorly viral!
Etude in C, Op. 1 No. 1, by Minh Tan (original manuscript)
Anyway, there were some things about piano playing in that Sonata I was really being challenged by so to get around it, I composed aptly named étude style pieces. I only ever got around to completing one, but I have held on to it like a Beethoven original manuscript. Lo and behold, 15 years later, serendipity, synchronicity and karma had given it a better purpose and meaning in my life. I had it to try and share with the world. It did get a public viewing I never allowed it after all! Life really kicks you know what when you can have skeletons of this sort in your closet!
It’s instances like this, actually, which have happened frequently in my short life thus far that led me to write my six-word memoir as being
It’s old news to some people, but it’s not to others, which is why I’m writing to share this.
Digital Citizen 