Videolab is an educational software piece that teaches and lets users experiment with concepts of digital video technology. It can be used standalone by students or as a lecturing tool by instructors.

I developed this Educational Software project as part of the coursework required for my Digital Media PhD, but I hope it’ll come handy in my own teaching. This prototype was made with Processing 2.08b and was thoroughly tested on Windows, but should work on other systems as well.

The last few days have been a bit crazy as I tackled some Murphy Law technical issues in order to have Caos finished today. After a failed first render (my bad actually, in all haste I accidentally unsynced the sound in a couple of scenes), yesterday I had two computers rendering and compressing the film simultaneously. It seems such redundancy kept Murphy at bay, as both finished without any trouble. I just watched a compressed MPEG, and it’s allright. And that is just as well, as the avant-premiere is scheduled for… today.

So if you’re in the Porto or whereabouts, you’re invited to drop by Teatro Nacional S. João at 6.30pm. See you there.

For comparison, here’s a screenshot of my real Geocities-hosted homepage, made in late 1997. The downside to years of data-loss paranoia and redundant backups is that I keep all kinds of embarrassing stuff, readily available for me to share with you readers whenever I find myself on a Cory Archangel-esque, aesthetic-appreciation-of-crap mindset. (Perhaps the Internet equivalent of my not-totally-ironic conversations on the merits and demerits of individual episodes in the Rocky series.)

Anyway, as it has been years since I last looked at this, I have a few questions to my 18-year old self: What the hell is that typeface in the title and background? And how could you even include that handheld-scanned ID photo? And is that darker background color purple or blue? (At 32, I can’t tell them apart.)

For the record I’m pleased no Comic Sans was found anywhere on that page. And surprisingly enough, no hitcounters!

There’s a recurrent theme in my inbox as another semester is near the end. (And yes, I do use that wooden desk Gmail theme. Let a man keep his kitschy customizations.)

Here’s a new sad pasttime of mine, The Gallery of Dead Projects. It will contain posters for all the films I never did, either because I couldn’t find a way to fund and/or shoot them, or because they were only temporary musings and I never even bothered to commit anything to paper. This first one definitely refers to the latter type of project — at some point, I guess I wanted to make a film like Dune, but good and set in this solar system. Don’t we all?

But then again, perhaps this movie does indeed exist, as a blockbuster in the same parallel universe where a James O. Incandenza does his arthouse movies (hence the ‘Interlace’ Infinite Jest reference). I’d like that.

Today, as I got frustrated by my sluggish progress at a motion graphics job in which I was tasked with the most agonizingly long and boring copy, I found myself stacking effects on top of effects, just generating shit at random. Somehow I found this image pleasing, and it reminded me this aimless and purposeless exploration is something I do miss from my earlier years of doing stuff with computers.

So here’s a resolution: to set aside a few minutes every day for random purposeless.

Yours truly just came back from a week with family in Algarve, most precisely from Vilamoura. A place which I found, to be blunt, of pseudo-glamorous landscaped oppression for the nouveaux riche. Most tellingly were the demographics of the place, with a notorious gap from the age of the teenage patrons of expensive clubs to the age of their golf/yachting/casino-going parents. Surely most of the people of my own age/status I met were the attendants in the local commerce. I found myself with not much left to do except for eating icecream while reading newspapers about arson and looting.

My mood improved quite a lot on outings, though. Next to Vilamoura is the ugly and unfashionable Quarteira, but which at least feels like a real place, not like an open air shopping mall. It is a heartwarming and organic relic of 1980s mass tourism — and with an actually nicer beach to boot. I regret not having taken enough photos there. I also recommend a trip to Faro, the region’s capital, which not only is an old place with assorted monuments and whatnot, but also a rather good place to wander around. Photos coming soon.

So here’s my first (symbolic) picture of this year’s summer holiday (because beaches, boats and swimming pools are boring):

My behaviour during holidays is probably the best proof I am and will be Incompatible With Most People, being very much Unable To Identify with the typical southbound holidaymaker. Beach, for me, is a hot dusty and generally unpleasant place, made only bearable by a warm sea that invites swimming (sadly, not the case this year). I can’t stand the quasi-totalitarian ambience of tourist hotspots focused in one or two activities — i.e. sunbathing and riding high-powered leisure boats (which, had I actually access to one, would perhaps render the whole experience somewhat better) — at the expense of every other kind of human expression. Aseptic hells where no good (or any) coffee is to be had in a range that requires petrol consumption, let alone sitting down and spending an afternoon Reading In Peace. Granted, I already procrastinate in both quality and quantity during the remaining 50 or 51 weeks of the year, so I’m unable to abide to Winding Down or understand the appeal of ceasing to work or think hard for a predetermined and rigid amount of time.

I can’t, for instance, understand why I should force my mind into a low gear that handles at most the reading of formulaic prose bought in an airport. Perhaps there were more guys at the beach today not giving a fuck about looking too white and having a bit of fat in their bellies, but I’m willing to bet nobody else would be insane to take Zizek as beach literature (but hey — nobody’s doing my reading for me, right?). Or take tonight’s example: browsing the web casually while having a beer by the condo’s swimming pool, I found this, telnet’d into an emulated PDP-11 (computing wise, a bit like stepping into a time machine) and soon figured out how to get into BASIC. I find myself writing in a language I didn’t use since perhaps I was eleven (and it came back to me, like riding a bike). Is this proper holidaymaker behaviour, drinking beer while writing in the dead tongue of a 30-year old minicomputer? Do I have to be crazy to admit that was the least boring holiday moment so far?

I was born on this very same day in 1979. (photo via Pedro Quintas)

After two years, many bureaucratic hiccups and barely made deadlines, you humble narrator concluded his Multimedia MSc. With a rocking eighteen-out-of-twenty, Which is nice.

Time to celebrate! Reality resumes on Monday. (picture via Actionlog)