"In a world..."

Don LaFontaine has died.

He was the voice of about 5000 movie trailers, countless commercials, nearly all the big awards shows and was a hero of mine.

R. I. P. Don.

Here's his website. And here are a couple of videos you'll enjoy.

Video killed the radio star...

Today I conducted my first video shoot. I am producing a commercial that I will play no part in - no voice, no on-screen appearance, no apparent presence at all.

Let me tell you something... anyone who works in broadcasting of any kind does so (at least partially) for the ego stroke. This video project is quite a departure for me. Em's Dad is an attorney and we're putting together a series of three television commercials for his practice.

I'm doing it in high definition. I rented lights, bought a microphone and software for the project and am feeling pretty good about it. I'll let you know how it came out. It's strange - at this point in my life, ego is no longer a thing. I like that.

It IS the size of the pipe

If you don't give a crap about high speed internet, what I'm about to say will bore you to tears.

High speed internet is of great importance to my business. When I lay down a voice over session in the recording studio, the audio gets delivered via the internet to a waiting client. Because I upload hundreds of megabytes of audio every day, connection speed is big.

I paid $250 a month for years for faster business-level access. Now, because of the competitive nature of the market, I have five times faster service for less than 1/3 that amount. Here's the screen shot of a speed test of my Charter service taken moments ago:


If you don't know much about the internet, that's 96th percentile in the US. Wanna test your own internet speed? Try Speakeasy's speed test.

The future of high speed internet is fiber optic, with Verizon's FIOS offering up to 50 mbps... but fiber optic isn't available on a wide scale, and build-out is expensive and slow.

WiMax and LTE are duking it out for mobile carriers. Theoretically, you soon may need little more than your mobile phone to handle all of your internet needs, with speeds of LTE looking to reach around 320+ mbps. (20x my current speed)

For now I'll take the 16 mbps I have. Oh, and the iPhone gets about 1.2 mbps via AT&T's 3G. Soon those numbers will sound very slow... and we'll all be computing on a cloud with no need for a PC.

Violet loves when I talk tech.

Bottle Tree

I've been busier than a one-armed paper hanger this week. Or a cat covering up crap. Whore in church? Neh, that's being sweaty. You get my drift.

Here's a Christmas tree I'm working on:

This has my name written all over it. Is that a cup of coffee on top of the red gift? Yeah, I'd say you'd need it after setting up THAT tree.

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I changed servers for my business website again this week, which is what kept me extra busy. If you ever get the chance, avoid ixwebhosting.com. Their service is spotty, their upload and download speeds are inconsistent and they don't answer trouble tickets in a timely manner. In short, they suck. I moved to Sectorlink.com. MUCH better already.

Side note: you can now reach this blog via two addresses. My new addy is www.davemorrisblog.com. Or you can continue to access it via the usual Blogspot address. Two, two... TWO ways to view! And yet the crap I write doesn't warrant one address...

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We're narrowing down our list of names for Sparky. We are down to three or four, but we're not telling anyone until he's born. That's right, even you Ma. Sorry.

Meanwhile, Em has been busy on ebay, she bought about six thousand onesie's the other day. Note to friends - we won't be needing any newborn clothing. Start with about three-months and up. Oh, and we don't need diapers, either. Every time we go to Sam's we pick up a jumbo box, along with baby wipes. I think we might have enough for two babies.

Which is great, because our friends Dr. Mike and Paula have announced they are having another baby. We're taking all the credit, because we made a pact that if we had a baby, they would have another one. (Although Ella is cute enough for two)

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A partner and I are getting into the video production field. It's not a big stretch for me, since I have most of the equipment sitting in my audio studio now. The software is installed and I'm preparing to build out a new green-screen room and office soon. We're going HD right off the bat.

So now I, who have never done video production, now must learn the new software, reorganize my office and schedule, and launch another branch of Morris Creative Services, Inc.