Jason and John over on the Kyte team have been really helpful over e-mail; I’ve figured out how to produce great video on Kyte.

At the moment, they tell me that optimal resolution is 424×318 pixels. Also, a Flash (FLV) video encoded at less than 700kbps will not be re-encoded by Kyte.

Here are two examples of the same video hosted as a show on Kyte (read more »)

I thought I only had two hours in Houston tonight, but it turns out that I have FOUR, which is plenty of time to get off airport grounds for dinner… but all three of my friends in Houston are busy or away.

I like to enter my events in my Google travel calendar by including things like “1400-2000,” which Google is smart enough to interpret as 2pm-8pm (automatically setting start and end time). But I also like to confuse “20″ and “22″ when I’m thinking in 24-hr time, which is why I thought I only had 2 hours instead of four.

Wish I had checked the actual itinerary earlier! Sorry, guys. I’ll be the one sitting at the airport, alone.

Hey guys. Between June 7-14, I’ll be covering the Digital Shootout Bonaire 2008 via video and image streaming from the Divi Flamingo Resort. This year’s staff includes Berkeley White (Backscatter), David Fleetham, Eric Cheng (Wetpixel), Dan Baldocchi (Under Exposures), Daniel Brown, and Mary Lynn Price (DiveFilm), and we’ll have about 60 photographers attending.

See you online!

In preparation for the Bonaire coverage next week, I’ve purchased a Flip Ultra for talking head interviews, and also have come up with a Compressor droplet for easy conversion of 720p video into a format Kyte.tv likes. Uploading 16:9 video results in a squished look as Kyte crams it into a 3:2 aspect ratio. I like using the Sanyo HD700, and will likely bring that as well (although I won’t be using it much because I don’t want to do too much transcoding).

I had a hard time coming up with video settings for upload. For example, exporting in Quicktime using H.264 and selecting the letterbox option worked fine. But exporting Quicktime/H.264 using Compressor resulted in a Kyte movie that was missing the video part. Finally, I settled on MP4 at 640×432 (multiples of 16, as Victor A. advised me) and a padding on the top and bottom to letterbox the output video. This seems to work fine, and the resulting Kyte video looks pretty good.

UPDATE: Jason from Kyte tells me that FLV with bitrate less than 700k means that they will not transcode the video. This is great information! Jason also tells me that the optimal resolution is 424×318.

This photo makes me laugh. Graham Abbott took me around Bali last year on my way back from Komodo, and we had a great time hanging out at this little surfer’s retreat. I’m not sure what was up with the fake gun, but it was fun to pose with. :)

Jaiku is really useful. I’ve added all my public feeds to it, so if you (for some reason) want to keep track of all the crap I spew onto the web, check out my Jaiku page [rss].

It doesn’t seem to be reliably pulling down my Twitter feed, but everything else seems to be working. If Twitter continues to be flakey and continues to not work with Facebook status updates, I may abandon it.

Speakeasy has been the easiest ISP I’ve ever dealt with (aside from working with The Dude at my old residence, who truly was the easiest). Still, I am too cheap to pay for the really fast stuff, so I signed up for what is supposed to be 6Mb / 768Kb. Here’s what I’m getting:

Download Speed: 5142 kbps (642.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 655 kbps (81.9 KB/sec transfer rate)

Meh. Maybe one day I’ll pony up for the 15Mb connection.

elliot, mandy, ilana, dan, victor and me

See all the images at the wedding gallery. Wedding folks: you can buy cheap prints over there, too.

dan and ilana, the happy couple

I’ve been having a wonderful time in Santa Fe at Dan and Ilana’s wedding. It’s great to see them so happy together, and many of us have been waiting for this day for a long time. I took about a billion photos, but I’ll post only three for now because it’s 2:12am and I’ve had quite a bit to drink.

UPDATE: You can see all the photos over at the wedding gallery. (read more »)

me, racquel, julie, jim, kevin, matt, and canon

Julie Anderson came into town in Florida the day we came back from our sharks and dolphins expedition, and planned a dinner with me, Jim Abernethy, and Matt Potenski. I hadn’t seen Matt for years, and it was really great to see him. His research on whale sharks is cool. Ask him about it if you meet him. :)