Various Things

Oddly enough this update has nothing to do with me being bitter and ranting about some odd industry thing that has found a way to tick me off. I know its odd isn't it? But truth be told I have had a pretty uneventful week (aside from the whole Premier Pro issue), well uneventful enough to account for a blog update on its own, but as a collected whole all these events can make for a half decent update on what's going on with me.

For starters, tonight I get to sign the very last papers that are required for my new house to be built. While this would make most people nevous I have oddly enough I have been anxiously waiting to spend a quarter of a million bucks on a new house for myself and my new bride (we've only been married a few months now). Over the past month and a half we have spent a lot of time talking to the bank, picking out all the little details required for the house such as how much hardwood flooring, light fixtures, cabling required, etc. The only frustrating thing from this experiance was that my mortgage specialists father-in-law died during this time so she was unavailable to finalize everything until about a week ago (which normally wouldnt be an issue if the builders weren't getting panicy about where their money was). After tonight I guess I will soon have a nice little hole in the ground (literally) as they get the caterpillar in to dig out 8 feet (or more) of the ground for the basement and foundation for the new house. Expect a lot of pictures though as the construction happens.

Last night I went out to help celebrate a friends birthday. He had had a bad couple of week lately (such as his new girlfriend who he met at my wedding left him to go back home because she missed her family and friends) so we figured a night of food, beer, and gambling was in order. To facilitate this we went to Klondike Days which is a yearly Edmonton event that celebrates the whole Klondike gold rush that went on a hundred years or so ago (apparently Edmonton was the last major outpost and civilized location as people went and ran into the Yukon and Alaska hoping to strike it rich). The whole event though has turned into this wierd fair/expo where you have your usual assorment of carnival rides, attactions and carnies, and on the other side have a business exposition, a casino, bingo, street performers and so forth. We spent probably a good 6 hours at K-days, ate some decent food, had a lot of good drinks, bought some stuff and of course gambled a lot. Pretty much everyone walked out $100 richer at the end of the night (which isn't bad considering what we had done).


Speaking of K-days, my wife and I had gone there on Monday night and found this cool local Alberta painter who does a Dinotopia style of art that is pretty awesome. You should it out if you are intested. We liked the work so much we ended up buying four prints from the guy for our new house (now to find a frame).

Lastly work on Realm Wars continues in full force. The team is working pretty hard at getting a build ready to show off at LoreCon which takes place August 20th in Philadephia PA. You can read more about these update at my blog on GarageGames.

Premier Pro Should be Recalled & Refunded

Today I had to deal with the "peach" that is Adobe Premier Pro, ah hell let me just call a spade and spade and say "rotten, festering peach", which is probably being too good.

For those of you who have never used the Premier line of products from Adobe, what you are looking at is a pretty generic NLA video editing system that is highly overpriced and sorely lacking on features (especially when you compare it with some of the Open Source or Apple NLA editors out there). With ever new verseion that is released I am shocked by how much this application doesn't change and yet somehow manages to get work and become more and more unusable. Worse yet is that their latest version, Premier Pro, borderlines on what I could call "incompetentcy", its just a horrible application.

Why is it so horrible? Well aside from having an interface that is even worse than the preview versions of Premier, such as their project loader which is like hidding a big brick wall at 80KMPH right when you start the application, and a long standing bug where the program doesn't work with QuickTime or QTPro properly (the short story here is just don't use Premier for any QT work, it fails to properly compress the data anywhere near as good as QTPro can), the latest bit of stupidity is its inability to work with any MPeg4 codec. This doesn't just mean that your staple of DivX or Xvid wont work, but the same goes for your QuickTime MPEG4 codec and Techsmith (Camtasia). To see what I mean, just load in a MPEG4 file into premier, drop it into the timeline and export out to a new file, you will end up with a bloated file because Premier Pro refuses to use or work with the codecs properly. There is something just not right with watching a file that should be 100Mb end up being 16GB (thats right, gigs) because poor retarded "timmy" (aka Premier Pro) is too stupid to work like every other video editing application on the market.

Cudos to you Adobe and to the development team of Premier Pro, you have managed to successfully market and sell a lemon onto the market and didn't have to recall it in embarassment like you did with InDesign 1.0. Although if you ask me, I think you guys should recall this lame duck and either get a real version of the program out on the market or refund everyone who bought this god awful program their money back and adjust your marketing to say "well it sort of works, provided you don't want to do most things that an end user would want and expect from a program like this".