This summer Janes Addiction and NIN are going on the road for what they are calling NIN|JA 2009. Funny thing is, I saw both of them for the first time on the first Lollapoolaza tour, at Irvine Meadows, California back in 1990. Two years later I saw Rage Against the Machine open Lollapoolaza, whose singer is in Street Sweeper which will also be playing with Janes and NIN.

If you want the free music, just head over to ninja2009.com and give them your e-mail. They will send you a link and password that they call a token. After you go to the link and enter your token, you will be given the option to download the music in one of several file formats. Of course you got your mp3s, and m4a (Apple’s lossless format – meh), FLAC (lossless and my choice) and wave, which I almost got but I can convert FLAC to any format I want and it’s half the size of the waves. After you pick which format you will be able to download a torrent.

Trent Reznor has always had a good handle on making good use of techknowledgy. This isn’t the first time he has released music for free. Although the previous times he asked for a donation. This time it’s free and used as a promotional vehical for the tour. While the RIAA is out there fighting a loseing battle against file shareing, Trent, once again, has used it wisely. I also applaud his choice of using bit torrents for the distribution of this Ninja 2009 sampler.

Share/Save

Circoripopolo Goes Artistique

Here is how they re sized windows in the old days…

click here to watch

Share/Save

Try this out and be sure to upload a photon into it for more fun!

Share/Save

The Roxy Chicken Jam is going to be at Mammoth Mountain, March 27 – 29. It’s an all girls snowboard contest with Superpipe and Slope Style competitions. And let me tell you, these girls can throw down! You can follow the event at their blog, which is supposed to have live updates during the comp. You can also check out some of the action from last years slope style comp, by watching the video I made, below…

[flv:http://chris.moesarts.com/wp-content/video/roxy_chicken_slope08.flv 480 368]

I’ve re encoded this with Sorenson and I’ve adjusted the settings a little this time. I think it plays better now and the audio is a bit better.

Share/Save

Since I shared with you a link to 125 free Final Cut Pro tips and tutorials, I decided to find something for Adobe Premiere. And wouldn’y you know it, the folks over at Audio Video Producer have compiled a bunch of their tips on one page. They cover everything from Adobe Premiere 1.5 up to Premiere Pro CS4 and everything in between. Also included are a few for After Effects 7 and Go Live 6. This is a real nice collection and you’re bound to find something useful, if you do video editing with Premiere.

Some of the free video tutorials you will find there are;

Creating a Moving Filmstrip Look “on the Cheap”

Using The Lighting Effects Filter in Premiere Pro 2.0

Premiere Pro Tutorials, Part 6: Using Photoshop CS3

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 Essential Training: Video Capture

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 Essential Training: Importing Layered Images

Adobe Premiere Pro Podcast #25: Creating a Sports Highlight Reel (part 2)

And much, much, many, mucho more! For the complete list head on over to

60+ Free Adobe Premiere Tutorials Free Premiere Training Clips, Premiere Techniques, Premiere Tips & Tricks!

It’s a must have bookmark for all Adobe Premiere users.

Enjoy

Share/Save

Here’s a crazy story. And you read the title correctly. Normally I would reserve this story for my tech blog over at www.pccybertek.com, but I let the domain expire and I’m waiting for it to be reactivated. And this was so crazy, I couldn’t let it pass by.

It turns out that the BBC has a tech show called Click, and they wanted to show how easy it was to create a botnet, so they did. That’s right, the BBC hijacked over 22,000 computers to prove a point. Isn’t that illegal?!?! According to the BBC, what they did wasn’t against the law because they did it on the right side of the law.

“If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law.

But our purpose was to demonstrate botnets’ collective power when in the hands of criminals.”

Huh?!? So if I wanted to show how easy it was to make money selling drugs, to prove my point I could? Or maybe I want to demonstrate how easy it is to kill someone by shooting them in the head, I could blast away and then say “I’m just trying to prove my point. I’m not a criminal or doing it with criminal intent, so it’s ok.  By that logic, there’s a lot of hackers out there that shouldn’t be prosecuted because many of them break into computers, just to see if they can. They aren’t doing it with criminal intent, they just want to prove to themselves that thye have the skills to do it.

After they hijacked the 22,000 computers they used them to spam some e-mail addresses and to do a denial of service attack. Both of which were successful. They did have permission from a security firm to try the denial of service attack, also know as DDOS, on a backup server. And it only took 60 computers to bring down the site.

They say the the botnet has now been shut down, and they have told the victims of the hijack, how to clean the infection and how to patch their computers. One of the things that bothers me about this is they didn’t get permission from any of these people first. Also, being a tech for the last 23 years, I know that installing any program on that many computers is bound to cause a certain percentage of them to crash. I can’t belive they could be that irresponsable and think that they wouldn’t cause anyone any damage or downtime. What about the people that noticed something funny going on with their computer and either spent hours trying to fix it or paid a tech to repair it. What if some of these computers were with an ISP that limits the bandwidth they can use per month, like the cable company does where I live, and then charge you for your overage. Seems like someone didn’t think this through very well. If the BBC doesn’t get charged for breaking laws, I think there’s a good chance of a civil or class action lawsuit. We will see.

If you’d like to see the BBC’s side of the story, check it out here.

I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave me a comment about this story.

Share/Save

Kathy Copeland, Executive Director Disabled Sports Eastern Sierra

Here is a piece I edited recently. Finaly, a recent one. You’ve seen what I did when I was first starting out. Now here is a piece I did a couple weeks ago. I’m pretty happy with the way this one turned out. It’s also about a great organization. Disabled Sports Eastern Sierra headed up by Kathy Copeland works with the Wounded Warrior Project in Mammoth Lakes, California. It’s a great program that works with young men and women who have been injured while in service for our country. They are always looking for volunteers and donations so you can head over to either of the above websites if you would like to help out.

[flv:http://chris.moesarts.com/wp-content/video/dses_feb2009.flv 480 368]

Apparently I have an evaluation version of Sorenson Squeeze floating around still. I’m going to convert the orginal .mov file with adobe flash and upload it here, today. I should have the video that’s here replaced with one without a sorenson watermark in an hour or two.

Share/Save

I thought the old theme was pretty cool, but there were a couple of things I didn’t care for. Don’t be surprised if there are several face lifts around here while I experiment with different themes. It may not look as good right now, but it is more functional. I’ll spice up the look a bit, later.

Share/Save

Tommy The Cat

Funny thing happened on the way into the office this morning. Ok, well not really on the way in. Last night, I was really tired and my cat, Tommy, was laying on the bed and came and curled up with me. He laid with his back against my side and grabed my arm and pulled it against him and went to sleep holding me like that. It was so cute that I forgot to set my alarm clock. Normally, I wake up before my alarm clock even goes off. However, by mid week I’m usually pretty tired in the morning, from staying up too late the previous nights. I guess that’s what happened because I didn’t wake up on time this morning. In fact, if it wasn’t for Tommy, who knows when I would have woke up. That’s right, Tommy made sure I wasn’t too late this morning.

At the time I was supposed to be leaving for work, I was still sound asleep. That is, until Tommy realized it. He jumped on the bed and started walking back and forth across me while yelling at me. I woke up and thought, WTF is he doing??! Then I looked at the clock and saw it was 9:30!  Yikes! I’m already supposed to be at work! SO I hit the floor running and got to work, without being too late. It only takes me 10 mins to get to work, so other than looking like I just rolled out of bed, and being 15 mins late, it wasn’t too bad. Thanks to Tommy that is. Who knows how long I would have slept if it wasn’t for my amazing Tommy The Cat. I knew he knows when I’m supposed to get home because he is waiting for me at the driveway, except the time he was really sick. Apparently he knows when I am supposed to leave for work also. Now if I could just teach him that I don’t have to work on the weekends and that it’s ok for me to sleep in those days.

By the way, stay tuned for Tommy’s blog. I’ll let you know when it’s up and running.

Share/Save

I came across this gem of a site and because I edit in Final Cut Pro, I figured I might was well post it here.

125 Final Cut Pro Professional Training Tutorials Actually it’s 138 – But hey, who’s counting!

Even if just one or two of these tutorials was useful it would be worth it. Many of these are done by none other than Larry Jordan, who is a great FCP certified instructor. You may have seen him on lynda.com

This is one of teh few times I am going to post the same link on both of my blogs. So don’t be suprised if you see a link to the same website on www.pccybertek.com

Share/Save