Carl and Pattie Unboxing the Canon HF M40

At last, Pattie and I step into the world of AVCHD! This video, shot with our in-house standard definition camcorder (and rest assured this very topic will come up at length), shows us unpacking the parcel as shipped, including stuff that the retailer (who will remain anonymous) threw in after packing the camcorder. Prepare yourself for the longest, most epic, least efficient, most obviously extemporaneous (planning? rehearsal? lighting?) unboxing in the history of digital videography.

East Las Vegas Business Report 21 OCT 2011

The federal Commerce Department has released its GDP growth figures for 2010. As usual, there is fodder for the razor-sharp yet subtle satire our staff favors.

Qaddafi Is Dead.

Works for us.

We have a new joint blog on Psychology Today, examining coupling issues in the context of chronic illness. Today is our first entry. It is also our 19th wedding anniversary

Who Gets to Be Sick Today?

New Blog by Pattie and Carl

Pattie and I will begin a new blog on the Psychology Today website on October 10! The title will be "CWD." The acronym officially stands for "Couple With Disabilites," but we have a few more ideas about what it should stand for, and as the blog progresses, you can be sure we'll throw them in. :)

Carl has had a blog for several months now called, "The FoxyMBA's Guide to Everything Important." It is mostly about sex and intimacy, of course. Click on the link to have a closer look: The FoxyMBA's Guide to Everything Important

Talk Like A Pirate Day 2011

Being able to talk like a pirate is a gift, but let's not forget what REALLY matters.

Introducing a New SINdustry City Project: PDA Nation Call for Stories

We will be launching a project on August 7th, Be Body Positive Day in response to ABC's "The ReVolution" which will be coming out in January 2012 and which we believe co-opted last January's "ReVolutions not Resolutions" campaign.

We will be making the campaign until January, but we are hoping to have so good initial response to help get the project noticed. Please share with others.



There will be several ways to participate:

1. Create your own video and post it as a "response video" to the August 7 video on the PDA Nation channel on youtube.

2. Write your story in the comments under the post on August 7th video.

3. Send a video to us at drpattie@scmslv.com and we will post it for you.

4. Place links to your blog in the comments section or send links to us where you have told your story.

5. Hit "like" or "favorite" on the August 7 video and any stories you like in the response videos or comments.

We welcome any other way to get the word out. We're tired of television reality shows and talk shows sending the message that we are not okay. It's time to send a different message. We are people and we are okay RIGHT NOW. No make-over necessary!

Boredom Fuels Creativity In Medical Sociology

I don't bore that easily . . . Yes, I do. A quick case study in the American medical system.

Van More O' Sun!

Our van is repaired after x months of dry dock and is off on its way to pass smog and become street legal again. It lives to bask in the Las Vegas desert summer again!

Beaten Paths

One happy little June morning (01 JUN 2011, to be specific), Carl asked Pattie if she wanted to do a "12-hour film challenge" with him. The idea was similar to the "48-hour" challenges faced by larger film crews in a number of cities. Pattie said Yes!!! By the time they started rendering the finished product (with eight minutes to spare before the 12-hour mark), they had shot and edited this video. In the spirit of Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder from "The Dharma Bums," Carl and Pattie talked about the philosophy of the path while they were on the road.

Old News: Cloud Computing Model Just Another Attack on Content Producers

Imagine the next step in technological progress: a new world in which content providers not only don't get paid for producing, they don't own their content, and not only don't they own their content, they don't own the computers they use to assemble it for the Net. Well, it's not that far off, but in truth, it isn't that different from the way content has been dissed over the last ten years of "Internet innovation." Carl Wilkerson explains how so.

The Golden Hours

Or, "The Nature of Naturalism."

Chop Up Video: 06 APR 2011

In this video, I perform a composition of mine in which I took a perfectly lovely American folk song and substituted lyrics to it that were critical of the President. Better still, I was only about 12 years old at the time I wrote it, and the president in question was Jimmy Carter. Listen and gain insight into the adolescent mind of Carl Wilkerson as I expose the underside of the Carter administration over thirty years too late. (BTW, Carter was a nominal prof at Emory when I was taking classes there for my MBA, which I did receive, thank you. He did speak to my International Perspectives class one day at the request of the instructor, Dr. Jeffrey Rosensweig. This knowledge should help you to assess the full seriousness of my posting a composition featuring such pithy and subtle lyrics.)

Beat Warming

Pattie and I attended a housewarming earlier this year. Some friends of ours were moving into a new apartment, and to celebrate, guests were invited to bring some sort of music performance or poetry to share with the group. I found the whole thing to be very Beat, and I called my edited video of the event "Beat Warming."

Nevada Business Report 18 MAR 2011

I've come to believe that Nevadans don't really understand commerce.

Carl reads "Whales Weep Not" by D.H. Lawrence

I looked over Lawrence's poem yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised at how the themes of public love, or at least overt love, and big love were handled so masterfully. It's almost like he wrote it just for the PDAnation YouTube channel. :)

Double Day

When two holidays collide, we are there to provide the mashup!

Reflections on Libya

I have been watching the massacres in Libya with a heavy heart. I think many people wonder why this sort of thing happens. This is the best short answer I can give.

Laughlin After Dark: Testing the Low-Light Capabilities of the JVC GZ-MG330

The JVC Everio GZ-MG330 is a well-regarded standard definition consumer camcorder. (Camcorderinfo.com gave it their award for the best SD camcorder of 2008.) I do a lot of low-light shooting, and I felt I might get just enough marginal improvement versus fully automatic mode if I despaired of extensive manual operation (which JVC enables in a way that makes me think they didn't want to do so) in favor of concentrating on one or two options, leaving the rest to the wisdom of the automatic settings. I made a lot more progress than I anticipated, especially in getting the shutter speed to play nice without sacrificing the motion quality. Note how the casino signs at night, which show up as nightmarish blurry backlight in automatic mode, can be tamed by this model. Note that I pulled off a couple other noteworthy "low-light" shots in other settings. The subject of my little test session is Laughlin, a Nevada resort destination ninety minutes south-southeast of Las Vegas and just acros the Colorado River from Arizona. It really does look this good after dark, and I'm glad that the GZ-MG330 allowed me to reveal its special qualities to the viewer.

Note to Libya: Good luck, and kick Qadaffi's ass. I'm not normally a fan of railing on easy targets, but I'll make an exception for him.

SINdustry CITY on Curvaceous Bounty of Sin City

Tune in at 8p on Sunday, Feb 13 to the "Curvacious Bounty of Sin City" net radio show and hear Pattie and Carl talk about sex and our book!

Fellow Pearlsong Author, Pat Ballard will be joining us as well!

MST3K Tribute to the new Super Bowl Champions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iqLhdInGrk

Happy MLK Jr. Day: Carl Sings "Old Man River"

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, I do what Frank Sinatra once did for him.

Pattie has a new blog, this one on the Psychology Today website. She is now the sociological voice among the commentators on/for the site. Her first post is already up.

It's Still Multimedia To Me

A lot of "filmmakers" are starting to close the gap between the pretty pictures provided by still cameras and the utility provided by dedicated camcorders by using DSLR's. Personally, my inner cost-effectiveness predilection is impelling me to head in the direction of buying a dedicated high-definition camcorder and to supplement the footage with still camera shots when I want segments of the final product to look especially good.

Latest trend in our never-ending search for the Next Camcorder is that we aren't comfortable with the thought of "going AVCHD." It's a resource hog. If it produced strikingly better video than anything else, we'd bite the bullet, but Samsung's lower-midrange units (H200/H204) produce awfully impressive video (well into the "film look" range) without using the AVCHD compression process. The Samsung units would be overdoing it in a way: we're videomakers who want our video to look better, not filmmakers who want our video to look like film. If the Samsung units in question are already more than good enough, the issue becomes a no-brainer.