The new camera is a Canon PowerShot S100, in case you’re wondering. Most of setup at the beginning was shot with my Canon PowerShot G9 in time-lapse mode, and the rest is shot with the S100 at 240 frames per second, 320×240 pixels. The domino shot looks a bit dim because I tried to do it in natural light, since the flickering of fluorescent light is too noticeable at high speed. The rest was lit with a halogen lamp.

Practically everything went wrong during the making of this video. I learnt:

• Either my dominoes are bad quality (they were from the $2 shop), I’m terrible at setting them up, or dominoes in general are more difficult to set up in a line than one would think. I ended up putting them on their sides.
• Natural light after spending far too long setting up dominoes on a winter afternoon is not bright enough for high-speed video.
• I’m not as good at building houses of cards as I used to be. Or they don’t make playing cards like they used to.
• Natural light after spending far too long setting up dominoes and then spending far too long setting up playing cards on a winter afternoon is not bright enough for high-speed video.
• Halogen lamps don’t flicker at 50Hz.
• A container of glitter hit by a toy car goes a long way.
• When dealing with piles of shaving cream, always know where your towel is.

Maybe I should make a blooper video.

Edit: Oh, alright. I made a blooper video. It uses ‘Incompetent’s Lament‘ by Paul and Storm as the soundtrack, which contains the F word, so if you don’t want to hear it, just turn the sound off.

Most of this music is explicitly released under a Creative Commons license, and most can be downloaded for free (there are links below), and most comes from artists who generally don’t mind people using their music and don’t have labels that are likely to sue me, but there are a few tracks I didn’t make 100% sure I was allowed to use, so I hope those artists don’t mind being included.

I tried to include as many different artists as possible so that people will discover someone new. The only ones I used twice are Jonathan Coulton (well, he only got a short bit at the beginning) Jonathan Mann (I planned from the beginning to use Penguins Having a Party, not suspecting that he’d written a song in which he said ‘building’ over and over, which is the perfect space-filler in a video of a building) and The Cow Exchange (I had many possibilities for the last song, but this one followed better musically from the one before it.)

I did this fairly quickly, to get it ready by Christmas, so most of the time I just searched my music library for keywords relating to a scene and picked the first song I found that seemed to fit. There may be better matches in songs which don’t happen to have the right keywords in the title, or which I don’t have yet, or which I ignored because I didn’t know what the artist’s or their label’s policy on reuse was.

You can get most of the songs for free, but I encourage you to support the artists if you can, and if you like what they do, of course. The songs are:

1. Chiron Beta Prime, by Jonathan Coulton
2. Christmas Time in Paris France, by ShiSho
3. Elephant, by Alan Cohen Experience
4. Reindeer Direction, by The Camryn Manheim Steamroller (I actually know six songs about reindeer, but this one fit the image best.)
5. Penguins Having a Party, by Jonathan Mann
6. Here is the Outline, by Science Groove
7. Machine, by Crabbydad (Andy Poland)
8. Requiem for a Snowflake, by Jutze
9. The Star, by Edric Haleen
10. Eating, Building, Sleeping, Party, by Jonathan Mann again
11. It All Makes Sense At The End, by Mike Lombardo
12. I Don’t Get It, by Carrie Dahlby
13. Silly Reflection, by Lunch Money
14. Yellow Snow, by Insane Ian
15. Shadows in the Moonlight, by Josh Woodward
16. Above the Sky, by CraftLass
17. Randall the Shiznit Rapper, by The Cow Exchange (mutilated by me in an attempt to make it say ‘now you can wrap our home’)
18. Hanukkah on the Moon, by Paul and Storm
19. Good Morning Moon, by Marian Call
20. Creepy Doll, by Jonathan Coulton again
21. Twangles, the Christmas Squid by Jason Morris
22. The Pixels of the Universe, by Request-A-Song.com
23. Trees are Green, by The Cow Exchange again.

I almost forgot; I also filmed that concert I went to, which was by Spring Breakup and Susie Asado. I’m not sure I’ll put up the videos of that, because the lighting wasn’t great, but I am uploading videos of their show in Trogen the night before. Here’s a playlist of what I’ve uploaded so far, and here’s a Christmas song they sang:

Also, here’s a playlist of all Christmas-related videos I’ve made, including some from Epcot.

That was not specifically made for his birthday, but this other video I was involved with (mostly on ridiculous percussion that didn’t make the cut, and robot choir in the final few verses) was:

It’s based on A Talk With George, which Jonathan has said was his favourite Thing a Week, and rewritten, sung, strummed, mixed, filmed and cut by the great people on Jonathan Coulton’s forums, most of which I have met or will meet in real life at concerts in the UK or on JoCo Cruise Crazy.

And now back to overexplaining the first video.

At first I thought I’d show video of myself reading each poem, with an appropriate backdrop or costume for each song, but then I realised that would take far too long, and would mean a lower-resolution and generally much worse-looking video than if I used the Visual Thing a Weeks that Len Peralta drew during Thing a Week. Len is also an internet superstar now, with more cool projects than I can name without this sentence totally losing its flow, and it seems correct to honour both of their work in one video. I commissioned him to draw a new picture of Jonathan changing into a superstar, to show at the beginning of the video, and a flipface of me for the end credits. If you think I have an obsession with superheroes now, just wait for the next few posts.

So, I took the rhymes I’d already written, Jonathan Coulton’s music, Len’s art, and some clips of George W. Bush, a recording of a rock and roll girl volunteer, and some screenshots, placed them carefully into the pre-made Comic Book theme in iMovie, and still managed to overrun my self-imposed deadline.

The music at the beginning opens with Opening Band, the traditional opening song of Jonathan Coulton’s opening band Paul and Storm, and ends with The Captain’s Wife’s Lament, their traditional closing song. It’s really just like a live Paul and Storm set, complete with being far too short. Well, except for The Captain’s Wife’s Lament, which goes on forever. The video ends with a comic Len drew to illustrate a blog post by Jonathan Coulton.

If you don’t quite understand the Mr. Fancy Pants part, you might want to watch how he does it live. For the rest, there are explanations on the Anniversary Cards post, and further explanations on the Thing a Week blog posts (and songs) linked from there or in JoCopedia.

Danger

Particle Physics Test Facility

Keep Out

And ends up getting caught in a some kind of beam and becoming the Sandman, a being made out of sand who can change his shape at will. I watched it in the theatre with about a dozen people from CERN (all of them named Maikel), and one of them exclaimed, ‘Run to building 40, get a coffee!’

Unfortunately, you won’t turn into the Sandman by sneaking into CERN. But you might just turn into something like the Silver Surfer. Well, okay, maybe you wouldn’t travel faster than light, but you could levitate.  I finally got to do so on their superconducting scooter at the Supra Show to celebrate 100 years of superconductivity a couple of weeks ago:

And you don’t even need to jump a fence! Just keep an eye on CERN’s homepage and MaNEP’s homepage, and sign up to the Globe’s mailing list to find out when there will be interesting talks and demonstrations for the general public. There are also a few other events coming up where it might make an appearance. I’ve seen the scooter at a couple of different events, and I don’t know how often they bring it out, but there are many other interesting talks and demonstrations.

There’s more information on how the superconducting scooter works in the video description. It’s essentially superdiamagnetism, as far as I know. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Superman, but hey, it’s real! Welcome to the future. Here’s a nice explanation which begins with a Superman reference. Incidentally, you don’t have to be a superconductor to levitate due to diamagnetism. Even frogs can levitate, but it’s not easy.

Of course, the other way you could become a superhero is by using Generic™ brand hair gel.

By the way, the song in that video is Liquid Nitrogen, by CERN’s other LHC, Les Horribles Cernettes. My other superpower is knowing a song about almost every topic. Today, somebody brought up Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that becoming an expert at something takes 10 000 hours of practice, so I decided to find out how much time I’ve spent listening to funny music. I wrote an AppleScript to sum up the time spent listening to the selected songs in iTunes, and selected all the songs in my Silly Songs playlist. Alas, I have only listened to it for 3026 hours, at least since April 2005 when I dropped my iPod and lost all that information. So if it turns out there’s something I don’t have a song about, it’s because I’m not an expert. I am an expert on all of my music, including the ‘normal’ stuff, though, with 11 242 hours.

Back to superheroes: Could somebody who understands more about the relationship of electric power to superconductivity please make a joke involving Spider-Man’s ‘with great power comes great responsibility’? As far as I can tell, with great power comes the same great power, circulating forever, but that’s not very funny. Just like immortality without immunity to pain isn’t very funny after the Sun burns out, when you’re just floating through space for eons on end, occasionally getting stuck inside a star or black hole until it goes supernova or evaporates.

I can’t be bothered fixing all of the tracks manually, so a few years ago I wrote a few AppleScripts to fix up the metadata of the music podcasts I was subscribed to, and also add the tracks to my Songs playlist (which I use as the basis of most of my smart playlists) and turn off the ‘Remember position’ and ‘Skip while shuffling’ options that are turned on by default for podcast tracks. I’ve since subscribed to and made scripts to fix a few more music podcasts, and it occurred to me that other people might find the scripts useful, so I’ve just tidied up the code and added a way to choose which playlist to add the tracks to. There are links to the scripts and related podcasts below.

All of these scripts do the following things:

• Ask which playlist(s) you want to add the tracks to. If you have a playlist called Songs, it will be selected by default. You can select nothing if you don’t want to add the tracks to a playlist, or press Cancel if you decided not to do anything after all.
• Go through all the selected tracks you have selected in the frontmost iTunes window. I have smart playlists containing the tracks from certain podcasts which aren’t already in my Songs playlist, so it’s easy to select the tracks that need the script run on them.
• Fix the track names and artists. This differs according to the script. Eventually I’ll make one big script that goes through all your podcasts and fixes each one appropriately, so you don’t even have to select anything, but for now each podcast has a separate script.
• Add the tracks to the selected playlist(s).
• Turn off ‘Remember position’ for these tracks.
• Turn off ‘Skip While Shuffling’ for these tracks.

Here are the scripts. Please let me know if there’s another music podcast you’d like a script for, or one you’ve written a script for, or one which one of these scripts already works for. I’ll add them all here and then more people can enjoy more music.

• Basic script which does nothing to the track and artist names but makes all the other changes. This could be used as a base for writing a script for another podcast, and can also be used on podcasts which already have the correct title and artist filled out, such as Song Fight.
• Fix FuMP script, which fixes the track and artist names of The FuMP and The FuMP sideshow podcasts from The Funny Music Project.
• Fix KEXP script, which fixes the track and artist names of the KEXP Song of the Day podcast.
• Fix FM102x and MPR Song of the Day script, which fixes any podcast which has the track names in the form ‘Artist Name – Track Name’ such as FM102x Song of the Day and Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current Song of the Day. This would probably work for most KEXP songs as well, but I haven’t tried it on all of them.
• Fix Beatles Complete on Ukulele script, which fixes track and artist names from the Beatles Complete on Ukulele podcast.
• Fix Radio K script, which fixes track and artist names from Radio K’s Track of the Day podcast

In reality, I spend most of my time writing code to do things to databases or writing generic add-ons for the software used for the control systems, but this sounds much cooler.

Continuing with that idea, here is a very rough (both in artwork and factual accuracy) illustration of how control systems interact with a few other things:

In reality, of course, it’s a little more complicated, the safety systems work, and I haven’t seen graph paper for far too long. This was just for fun. The big red button picture is a public domain image from wikipedia and the graph paper was from SciRep. All other art is by me, which is why it’s so terrible.

I would have used the song ‘Carambar’ by Jérémie Kisling for the end credit music, simply because it’s the rhyme scheme of that song which inspired the poem, and it’s in French, but he didn’t reply when I asked for permission. So instead, I’m using the much more thematically-appropriate song ‘Whistle While You Wait‘ by Marian Call. It’s one of my favourite songs of hers, even though it’s not as geeky as some of the others.

I’m trying to get Marian Call to give a house concert in Geneva when she’s in Europe in September, but she needs more people to show interest before she can come. If you liked that music, and you are near enough to Geneva that you’d go there for a concert, please either contact Marian directly or join and publicise the facebook event I created to gauge interest in a concert. If enough people say they’d attend my event, I’ll tell Marian, she’ll figure out when she can to come to Geneva, and I’ll send a message to everyone attending the event saying when/where it will be. If you’re not near Geneva, how about requesting a concert near where you live? Alternatively, you could book a berth on JoCo Cruise Crazy II to see her and many other great people on a boat.

I also used a one-second clip from Jay Gruska’s main title theme to the TV show ‘Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman’ to introduce my ‘Fortress of Sole-étude‘ (or is that solo-étude?) That soundtrack was the first thing I ever purchased online; a physical CD bought with my mother’s credit card some time last millennium. I hope this short sample counts as fair use.

I’ve put this into the ‘Holiday Highlights’ category, because there were only two things in that category, and I did actually do all the filming during that holiday, I just didn’t finish editing it in time.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if somebody else had already done this. I didn’t search, because I wanted to do it anyway. I had planned to wear a red bra over the top of the Superman T-shirt, but I forgot about it until a few hours after I posted this. Oh well; I remember Supergirl puts a bra on over the top of her clothes at one point in the movie, so it wouldn’t be so original for me to do it. Also, it probably would have looked terrible.

Completely unrelated, but important: don’t forget to watch the last ever space shuttle launch on NASA TV if you aren’t able to hold your breath for 20 minutes and fly alongside it, or can’t get to Florida in time.

I had the idea for this during the tour, as soon as I heard about Chupia Barba, but I only got around to editing together the video today. I’m on holiday from work for the next two weeks, but with no particular travel plans, so I’m hoping to finish many of the creative projects I’ve started, and perhaps even post one every weekday. I’m going to put these posts into a ‘Holiday Highlights’ category, out of nostalgia for primary school when we always had to write a ‘Holiday Highlights’ story at the beginning of a new term. I promise they won’t all be about Jonathan Coulton, or beards.

If you do like Jonathan Coulton, though, you might like the videos I took of the other concerts I went to recently, in Bristol, Manchester and London. Also, booking for JoCo Cruise Crazy II is open, although not all the entertainers have been announced yet. It’s not going to Jamaica, so you really have no reason not to go. Here are some reasons to go from the aforementioned concert recordings.

If you prefer maths, and particularly overhyped constants such as pi, you might like that this video is 3:14:15 long.