Jason Poole

Ok, I know…  it has been over a month since I last posted to my blog, but I promise more is coming.

I should have had plenty of time to write here since I was pretty much snowed in for over a week. I live in the Washington DC area (actually, I am 40 miles NW of DC) and we got hit with one of the biggest storms recorded in the area. So far this season, we got around 72-74 inches of snow this season. Our typical snowfall for the season is around 22 inches, so needless to say, we aren’t prepared for it.

So what’s coming up? I am glad you asked.  I am going to start recording my video netcast called Public Poole(see link in the menu bar). I am going to try to get on a regular schedule of recording the show at 11:00pm EST on Sundays. You can watch live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/quanack and join the live chat at irc.jasonpoole.com. Hopefully I can keep the schedule and I can get some people to watch and contribute. Should be fun.

I have a couple other shows that I would like to do, one on PC and console gaming, and one on ice hockey. I should get one show on schedule before I commit to more, but I am a planner.

That is it for now. Hopefully I will see you online.

I guess it has been almost a year ago that Mac Heist 3 took place (I think it started in January and ended in March) and it is a great bundle of apps for a very low price. If you have a Mac, make sure to visit the Mac Heist site and sign up for the newsletter…  you don’t want to to miss out on the great deal.

Anyway, this is really not about Mac Heist…   it kind of is in a round about way. In the bundle of great applications that was in Mac Heist 3, there was a great tool called BoinxTV. With this application, you can make broadcast quality video transitions and effects that will rival multi-million dollar studios. This software is somewhat expensive with a sponsor edition costing $199 and a full version costing $499. Back to Mac Heist for a moment to let you know what a deal I got, I paid $37 for 13 applications, with one of them being BoinxTV.

I don’t know about your financial situation, but $499 is not in the budget for a hobby item, let alone $199. So where does the common hobbyist go to find an affordable solution to video production? Well, while looking through the documentation on the Boinx site about streaming to the internet (link), I found a pretty good solution with CamTwist.

This is a very cool application with a very cool price point…  free. You can do just about anything that a big production studio can do right on you Mac.  I am using is with a 3 year old MacBook Pro and it works very well. In the above picture, you can see a guy named Benjamin Higginbotha who does an excellent podcast call Space Vidcast, and he does some great screencasts of how to use CamTwist Studio.

I played around with the application for a few hours last night and I was totally blown away. I kept asking myself, how could you give this away for free. I will be producing a show over the next couple of days and I will use CamTwist for video switching and effects. It can make an amateur look like a pro.

John Carlson, Washington Capitals property, scores his second goal of the game with a OT game winner to beat Canada. It is so great that they won it up in Canada.

Check out the IIHF site for more details.

It has been almost 2 weeks since my last post and I though I should post a Happy New Year post before February comes.

Here are the top 5 games and movies, according to me, for 2009.

• Top 5 Games:
  1. Borderlands
  2. Dragon Age Origins
  3. Forza Motorsports 3
  4. Assasin’s Creed 2
  5. Scribblenauts

• Top 5 Movies (disclaimer: I have kids and don’t get out much):
  1. The Hangover
  2. Inglourious Bastards
  3. Up
  4. Night at the Museum 2 (this may have been a 2008 film)
  5. Planet 51

Hope 2010 is a good year for all. And remember, we only have 2 more years left according to the Mayans.

Welcome to the new Jason Poole site.

It has been some time since I had updated my site from the old static look (I think I originally made the site back in May 2002). I felt like I would try to accomplish something in 2009, so I decided to set up my site as a WordPress site.

So, what can you expect from this site?  To tell you the truth, I don’t really know. I am planning on doing a few podcasts, which I will post to this site. I also plan on posting photos I take and just generally writing posts about what goes on in my life.  I hope to get some interaction from people following my site, but I guess I will have to post something worth reading first.

You can follow me on Twitter (quanack) and also on Facebook (quanack). I will post when I am doing a live podcast and also how to interact with me. I am planning on video streaming using Ustream.

OK, now I am going to get back to the “redesign” and I hope you like the new site.