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.

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.

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.