theMediaman.com

No more than hours after posting my intentions,
I received encouragement naught.
Simply, “so where’s the Dec 1 Blog entry? Hmm?”
…said the kettle to the pot.

The first topic to cover isn’t my new job. I’m a couple days away from being “full time”, so I’ll cover that later this week. I won’t yet cover marital bliss. I’ve been out tonight and am not entirely sober and that’s a topic that deserves my attention.

For the moment I’ll cover something as superficial as my entertainment system. Consider this a warm-up. I’m a bit out of practise.

The new television is a 46″ Panasonic plasma screen. I was leaning towards an LCD as long as I have been looking at large screens. The biggest issue against an LCD screen was the low contrast ratio. However, the brightness (helpful in rooms that get a lot of daylight) and the quick response time were strong arguments for an LCD. The weak support on plasmas was the history of burn-in problems. However, just as LCDs have increased contrast ratios, Panasonic has gone a long way towards preventing burn-in.

The one hold-off on the choice of brand and model was that I wanted something I can hook up our laptops to. The model of Panasonic screen I was looking at had no VGA input, but as it turns out there’s a Future Shop exclusive model that includes exactly that.

With the help of Michelle’s Mazda 3, we managed to get the oversized box home. Later in the day, we picked up a new Yamaha surround sound system that we got a fantastic deal on at the same time, and I used my bachelor party gift card for Best Buy to pick up a Playstation 3.

It took me over a week to get it all fully set up, including more than one trip to Active Surplus to get cables. However, I have replaced nearly all my analog cabling with digital. Video is now carried over HDMI, and audio is transferred at the speed of light thanks to digital optical cabling. The only holdout is the Wii, but that hardware doesn’t support any digital outputs.

My biggest concern was that the new, $1800 television was sitting on a stand that has held the Clark family television since before we had a VCR. I wasn’t overly worried, since the old 27″, lead-loaded CRT weighed 75 lbs, and the new 46″ plasma only weighed five pounds more. However, the shaky feeling wouldn’t leave me and I realized that, in addition to the shaky legs on the stand, my worries about having the stand collapse and destroy a five-year-old, three hundred dollar television wasn’t as big a deal as if it collapsed with over $2000 of components on the stand.

So Simone and I headed off to the Etobicoke IKEA early on a Saturday morning and hit the as-is section. We found exactly what I was hoping for, in a brown-black shelf that was severely scuffed up. A Sharpie pen was able to hide the most obvious problems, and now we have a table capable of handling the television, the receiver, the PS3 and the Wii.

Ever since my Murdoch project, where I built a computer dedicated to playing back video files downloaded from the internet on my television instead of my 14″ computer monitor, this is exactly what I have been working towards. My desktop downloads television shows I can’t get without expensive cable, I copy them to the Windows Home Server and they are streamed in real time and played back by the Playstation 3 on my 46″ television.

Right now we’re watching the X-files season 6 cliffhanger where Scully finds the UFO buried on a beach in Africa. Since season 5, they’ve been shot in 16:9. Right now I’m seeing episodes of X-Files as even many of the most X-Philes of us have never seen before.

It’s very sweet!

Well, in spite of my ranting time and again about Blu-ray, it did win the format war against HD-DVD. And in spite of my misgivings about the format I am overwhelmed that my very first mass-produced DVD was a next-generation video format.

Tonight I picked up a copy of Young People Fucking on Blu-ray. This was the first project I had a hand in authoring after starting at Juice. I didn’t do it alone. Saying I did would be slightly more egocentric than I commonly resort to. However, much of the troubleshooting and debugging (and repetitive coding) was performed on my part.

$29.95 and I have my very first Blu-ray disc on my shelf. I don’t even have a Blu-ray player yet.

It’s a strange feeling to see something I worked on out in the open. Eight years at Livewire and the most exposure my work would get was being projected on a wall behind Frank Stronach’s front page photo in The Globe And Mail. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m unhappy with the extensive work I’ve done over the years, but I find myself standing in awe as my very first month at Juice produced more exposure than any single project (or even the accumulation of all projects) that I have worked on over the last eight years of my professional life.

It’s a very strange feeling indeed.

I think it’s…

…pride?

Wow. My brain hurts.

But all that spare time spent learning about DVD capabilites, learning MPEG-2 compression technology, reading Blu-ray engineering whitepapers, and researching specs has paid off.  The crash-course I had today in preparing a DVD would NOT have been productive had I only ever experienced DVD authoring through Encore.

Tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Still, around 3 o’clock I was getting pretty sleepy. It might have been the load of information, or the lunch I had from Burrito Boys…

Oh yeah, and every Wednesday, Juice Productions buys everyone lunch and we just sit around and shoot the shit for half an hour.  Sweet.  It’s a very large group of people who like movies, but I had to hold back on displaying my full wealth of nerdy trivia knowledge in order to keep from sounding like, well, a movie trivia nerd.

Still, I was able to identify Seth Rogen as the actor they were describing, and I also gave a brief outline of a Canadian film based off the same story as “21“… I might have gone overboard with that particular innane piece of trivia.

Tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Dressed in khakis and one of my short-sleeve button-up shirts, I was woefully overdressed.  The only person as dressed up (and only just as “dressed up”) was one of the two partners. The other one - yep, shorts and a t-shirt. Tomorrow I think I’ll wear jeans.  However, I still haven’t gotten my gut down to a point where I feel comfortable in a t-shirt.

All the way to work I was feeling like it was the first day of school.  Simone had to reassure me that the other kids weren’t going to make fun of me.

I’m not kidding. Ask her.

The view is stunning, as it faces the downtown core from Adelaide and Peter with an unobstructed view.  I have to take a photo and post it.  This is definitely my new “favourite view” of Toronto following the obfuscation of my former favourite by all the new condos.

The trip home took 40 minutes. A far cry from the old time of 75-90 minutes. In fact, it takes an hour and a half just to walk the distance from work to my apartment.

Now I need sleep. My brain started slowing down today, and I need to keep my speed up. I have a little over a week before I leave for my honeymoon so I need to soak up as much valuable info as I can.

And tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Wow. Busy week.

Monday after work I met with some fellows at Juice Productions downtown. By Wednesday afternoon I had resigned from Livewire.

My last day will be the day after Labour Day. I will be leaving on my eighth anniversary of starting at Livewire. To put that in perspective, I spent nine years going from Kindergarten to grade 8 in public school.  I’ve almost spent as much time with Livewire as I have at Steele St. Public School.

It’s a real shift for me.  For the last four or five years I’ve been trying to push my way into more video and DVD work. For the last nine I’ve been trying to find  a job in the downtown core. Years of job searching managed to culminate in a single, whirlwind week.

I’ll probably go into more detail in a later post (and better composed), but for now I’ll say that I’m going to help the office move towards more Blu-ray production. I’ll be able to utilize my animation/programming background, and extensive experience with DVD production (al beit for corporate video productions…  zzz…)

It looks like a young and growing company, but they already have an extraordinary number of titles under their belt. It’ll feel good to be doing work that’s seen by thousands instead of hundreds or dozens.

I wonder what it will feel like the first time I see my work on the shelf at Blockbuster or Future Shop.

The location is supurb. Adelaide and Peter, between Spadina and John St.  A block east is the Fox and Fiddle, my favourite pub - best price/quality combination of any pub downtown. Just north of that is the Paramount Scotiabank Theatre, and just south is a Tim Hortons… a REAL Tim Hortons. No more four-timbit-selections for me anymore.

A five minute walk takes me all the way up Spadina’s rich Chinese district, or to the SkyDome Rogers Centre for a Jays game.  Three blocks will put me in front of Simone’s workplace.

I’m seriously waiting for the other shoe to drop. This job is exactly what I’ve been wanting and training myself for, it’s a perfect location and it is timed perfectly as I start my new life with Simone.

Even the cat’s feeling better.  Life is good.