Jun. 22nd, 2008

joreth: (Purple Mobius)
I've been tossing around the idea of a poly advice column for a while now, but there seem to be several of those popping up. Plus, my "no-nonsense" approach (as one of the nicer things I've been called) can be a turn off to many people. I've been going back through back-episodes of Poly Weekly and I came across the episode where Minx discusses the poly question someone asked Miss Manners. It was a surprisingly poly-friendly response, but, as Minx pointed out, if you write in to one of the nation's most conservative advice columnists, what kind of advice to you expect to get but a conservative response?

So, while that stewed in the back of my brain, it also occurred to me that much of the "advice" floating around with how to be polyamorous is not a very practical, day-to-day kind of advice. Not that it isn't valuable, but working on self-esteem and insecurity and jealousy is sort of an ongoing process and only so much help from websites can be expected, even from the fabulous [livejournal.com profile] tacit's website.

So I decided that I would try my hand at a poly etiquette advice column. I'll leave the complex issues to people like [livejournal.com profile] tacit, who always says what I want to say but much better anyway. Instead, I'll address simple polite social behaviour. There seems to be a lack of this kind of discussion. I mentioned my potential column to Minx who immediately jumped on it as a regular segment for Poly Weekly. So, after much research for appropriate theme music and how to make myself accessible to the public for their questions, and many, many failed attempts to figure out my crappy free audio-recording software, I finally recorded my first Miss Poly Manners segment!

You can hear it on this week's Poly Weekly episode #160, just after the interview with Tristan Taormino and you can read my "column" at the Miss Poly Manners MySpace page. If it works out, I might eventually buy a domain name and build a better engine for submitting questions and answering them on the page, but for now, MySpace's comments feature allows people to submit questions to me publicly without having a specific journal entry that people will have to find or remember the long url string. Of course, I also have misspolymanners@gmail.com for private email.

But go and listen to the podcast and tell me what you think! I'm nervous and awaiting the flames in the PolyWeekly forums!
joreth: (Silent Bob Headbang)
So I wandered over to YouTube, as I am wont to do sometimes, and I stumbled across an amazing guitarist.  And I followed the links to find more of his stuff.  And I skimmed the comments on the first page of each since the description told me nothing except the URL to his record label's website.

And I found a comment that said if you add &fmt=18 or &fmt=6 to the end of any youtube URL, it'll sound better.  

So I tried it.  

http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2008/03/view_youtube_in_highres.html
YouTube has been testing higher bitrate encodings of it videos, which you can see if you add a &fmt=8 or &fmt=18 to the video url. Historically, all videos have been delivered to the lowest common denominator: sorenson encoded 320x240. By adding &fmt=6 to the URL, the video is served up in 448x336 resolution and I'm guessing it's using the VP6 codec (can anyone confirm?). &fmt=18 gives you the iPhone-style MP4 stream.

If you have a YouTube account, you can change your settings in your account to always play the high-res when available.

So I'm posting about this so I will have a convenient place to find the tag later.

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