December 26, 2003
With some reluctance, I am releasing a draft version of The Many Faces of Dot Matrix so it can be eligible for the 2004 Unofficial ReBoot Awards. We recently landed a new project at work (I'm a contract LabVIEW programmer) which, along with personal commitments, will leave me no time for video authoring until March. The video still needs another 50+ hours to finish it, but the current version is IMHO still better than my first two videos. I'll release the final version whenever I can find the time to finish it.
^ TOPNovember 30, 2003
I announced somewhere (apparently not on this site since I can't find it) that the Dot video would be done by the end of November. Well, I was wrong. Real life has intruded and I have had virtually no time to work on it. I still hope to have it done by the end of December so it will be eligible for the 2004 Unofficial ReBoot Awards. Although I'm proud of how my first two videos turned out, the Dot video is much, much better and I think it has a chance to take the Best Music Video award. Of course, I haven't looked at my competition, so I might just be kidding myself ;) I've also taken this opportunity to update the FAQ about my next few projects and timelines.
^ TOPOctober 11, 2003
Well, I finally got myself to finish up Viruses Are Beautiful, my celebration of the ReBoot villains. I've uploaded the MPEG version for the fast internet people, and the RealVideo version for the poor, underprivileged dial-up people.
^ TOPOctober 10, 2003
Just making a few changes to the site. I've added a "contact me" link to the menu, since someone pointed out that it is awfully hard to find my email address. That wasn't deliberate, just reflective of my basic lurker personality. I added a completion date entry to the Ave Daemon page, and will have that on all future video pages. I'm a big fan of putting dates on web pages, because nothing's more frustrating that coming across a site that you think is interesting, but having no way of knowing if the site is alive or hasn't been updated in three years. Even better are the sites with messages that say "the site's down for a couple of days" that stay down permanently. I debated about moving this page to a news page and making the index page a crawler-friendly title page, but didn't. I just hate title pages, and ultimately I don't care that much about search engine placement other than the typical "mine's longer, er, I mean higher on the list than yours" guy stuff.
On a related note, since I'm now showing up on search engines, I've been doing a few searches just to see where I show up. For example, as of today, if I do a google search for reboot music videos I show up in position #122, and if I search for reboot "music videos" I'm in position #69. Interestingly, yesterday these same searches put me around #200 and #100. Anyhow, just for laughs, I did a search for cyjon video. The good news is that I'm #1 on that search. The bad news is that all of the other links lead to another Cyjon who also makes videos. He doesn't produce them; he's, um, well I guess you'd call him an "actor". Let's just say that his ReBoot videos wouldn't feature Dot and Daemon. They'd be more likely to feature Matrix. In leather. With lots of close-ups of Little Matrix -- and I don't mean Little Enzo.
Beautiful continues to sit there patiently waiting for me to finish it. It's a pretty common theme with me: get a project almost done, then get bored and move on to something else. Just call me Professor Calamitous (yes, that's a Jimmy Neutron reference). I've done some more work on Dot and started piddling around with my next two videos - Mouse: Simply Irresistible (not surprisingly, a video about Mouse using the song Simply Irresistible) and Dance of the Henchmen (a comic video about Hack and Slash using the final section of Dance of the Hours from Fantasia -- you know, the crocodiles and hippos bit).
^ TOPOctober 1, 2003
Pinnacle Studio is a bubbling pool of Satan's vomit. It is tangible proof of the presence of true Evil in the universe. It is a punishment from God. And I just hate it. I actually completely gave up on the video thing for a while, having reached the limit of my patience with this craptastic software. You see, when I installed it on the new computer, it wouldn't load ANY of my projects. Beautiful crashed right to desktop, and Dot just maxed out the CPU for eight hours before finally giving an "out of memory" error. I finally moved the MPEG source files and didn't tell Studio where they were, forcing it to load just the DV AVIs, and I was able to load the projects. I have converted all the ReBoot episodes over to DV AVI, and converted all my projects to use them, so I'm back to actual editing.
Beautiful is 99.9% finished I suppose. I'm still a little unhappy with parts of it, primarily the Megabyte section, but I'm just darn sick of looking at it. It still needs a final polish as some of the clip timing is off. I need to find a couple of hours to do it, but it's one of the more tedious parts of the project so I keep blowing it off. I've gotten a solid first draft of the Dot video done and I'm really happy with how it turned out; it's already by far the best of the three I've produced so far. I'm hoping to have it done by the end of October, but I'm thinking November is probably more likely.
Other than that, I've added a couple links to the Links Page. I'm also showing up on some of the search engines, so I guess I'm a real person now (dissolve to Steve Martin shouting, "The new phonebook's here! The new phonebook's here!").
^ TOPSeptember 9, 2003
"Beautiful" is about 95% done from a content point of view. I still need to swap out a couple of clips and tighten up the timing. However, it's still using my MPEG sources so I need to convert the needed episodes to DV AVI and substitute them into the project (there is a noticeable difference in quality, especially the season 3 clips). My new computer arrived yesterday, so I'll start the conversion process probably tomorrow. I'm still on schedule to post it by the end of the month.
I used to do SETI@home, but my old AMD-based computer was just running too hot (Long story, but short version is I messed up the thermal paste) so I quit. Besides, I couldn't find any groups that lasted very long. I'm pleased to see there is a ReBoot group that has substantial recent activity. Since I've now got a hyperthreaded 2.8 GHz chip to show off, I joined the group. I also added some SETI@home links to the links page
^ TOPAugust 25, 2003
...and in a dream, the great Web God came to me and spake thusly, "Foolish mortal, who are thee that hath a web page that lacketh a counter? The Thirty-Seventh Commandment sayeth 'Let ye have no web page without a pointless tally of the number of visitors.' Mend thy sinful ways or thee will be cast into a purgatory of pop-up ads, virus-infested warez, and porn spam."
Hey, who am I to argue with a deity? So I added a counter.
^ TOPAugust 22, 2003
Uploaded the sneak previews of Viruses Are Beautiful and The Many Faces of Dot Matrix
^ TOPAugust 21, 2003
I managed to recover all of my data off my failed hard drives (yay!) after 4 hours trying to install an external hard drive (boo!). Apparently Windows 2000 has issues with USB 2.0 storage devices. Luckily the drive had a Firewire connection, and that works flawlessly (though slightly slower than the USB). I took this opportunity to re-render the Daemon video, which was already finished but I had to change the title card from "www.cyjon.com" to "www.cyjon.net". I'm uploading that video as well as parts of the rest of the site, tonight just for the heck of it. The site's still not really open -- I'm really just testing my uploading, the site structure, and so on.
^ TOPAugust 17, 2003
The unofficial opening of Cyjon's. Since my preferred domain (cyjon.com) was registered just three weeks ago I figured I'd better snag this domain name before it was gone.
This is going to be a repository for some music videos I've made using clips from the television show ReBoot. At the moment I am recovering from the failure of two hard drives which contained all my existing video projects and my ReBoot source files. Pending recovery of the data and the arrival of my new computer system, I hope to have my first two videos posted by the end of September. They will be "Ave Daemon" (a pro-Daemon propaganda video set to "Ave Maria" from "Fantasia") and "Viruses Are Beautiful" (an homage to Megabyte, Hexadecimal, and Gigabyte using Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful"). I also plan to include a sneak preview of my third video, "The Many Faces of Dot Matrix", which uses the song "Bitch" by Meredith Brooks.
^ TOP