Thursday, July 14, 2005

African jailed for running as woman

My friend John sent me this:

HARARE, Zimbabwe (Reuters)—A Zimbabwean court has jailed a man masquerading as a female athlete, court officials said on Thursday.

Samukeliso Sithole—a triple jumper and runner who competed as a woman at several international sports events—was convicted on charges of impersonation and offending the dignity of a woman athlete who undressed in his presence, unaware he was a man.

I can only wonder what the real story is here:

Sithole told the court at his first appearance that he had both female and male organs and that he lived as a woman after consulting a traditional healer. A medical examination showed that he was a man.

Guilty

Rove’s behavior put an end to any doubts I had.

TPM suggests we “set aside a few minutes to read this new piece by Sid Blumenthal, which sets out the broad horizon of where the Rove/Plame story is at press, while knocking down much of the standing disinformation.”

I did. You should too.

Grrr

My video‘s been rejected!

The cryptic message refers me to the policy guidelines that by now I know by heart:

6. What are the technical requirements for my video to be included in Google Video?

• The video must be in a format we accept; see question 5 above

• The video must contain recognizable video content (video container files that do not contain video will not be accepted)

• The frame rate should be above 12 frames per second

• The video metadata must be accurate and relevant to the content you upload (no spam)

Ok. It has to be 5. Even though I’ve uploaded this stuff a dozen times in varying formats and settings trying to meet their file format spec:

5. What file formats do you accept?

Google accepts video in a wide range of popular formats. The fastest way to get your videos into Google Video is to submit each file in MPEG4 format with MP3 audio or MPEG2 with MP3.

While we also support other digital formats such as QuickTime, Windows Media, and RealVideo, it’s important to note that submitting your files in these formats may significantly delay us from using them on Google Video. In some cases, we may not be able to add your video at all.

Here are our preferred video specs:

• NTSC (4:3) size and framerate, deinterlaced

• Video Codec: MPEG2 or MPEG4 (MPEG4 preferred)

• Video Bitrate: at least 260Kbps (750kbps preferred)

• Audio Codec: MP3 vbr

• Audio Bitrate: at least 70Kbps (128 Kbps preferred)

I know they’re in beta but a little more spcificity would be helpful. The video they rejected met that “preferred” spec and there’s no way for me to find out more on why it was rejected.

Is it too much to ask for a “How to” that suggests settings for the major popular video editing packages, say iMovie, FinalCut, Avid and Adobe Premier? Or even an advanced settings screen?

I’ve resaved with new output settings and uploaded again. And I’m open to advice if you have some to offer.

Damned if you do…

James Joyner notes that PBS will have six Monty Python specials next spring. Then observes:

...one can not help but wonder why we need taxpayer subsidies for this sort of thing. Python (admittedly shown originally on the British Government-owned BBC) has been a great commercial success for thirty years now. People are paying $600 apiece for tickets to see “Spamalot” on Broadway. Why could a commercial or cable network not produce this show?

Get with the program James. I expect broad Republican support for PBS now that they’ve tackled the nasty liberal bias.

And my position will be that I don’t like the way the game is played, public braodcasting has never been efffectively public anyway, so it’s time to let go and change the media structure.

Goodbye network TV; hello we TV!