It has been 3 months since my last post

Hi. My name is Mike. It has been 3 months since my last blog post.

Hi Mike.

I have missed all aspects of the COW. I receive my Business and Marketing forum e-mails, but frankly have had little time to read these, or browse the forums or the blogs.

Well, dammit, I pledge to find the time. Here is a little review of what has happened these past 3 months, and why I have strayed from the COW's fertile pastures.

Ooh, that last sentence may have come from a Mike Huckabee speech!

LOL

Early October 2007

With the looming medical convention in New Orleans I have these key projects to finish:

1. Planning for live surgery event Oct 25. Drive to NY to check out the Florence Henderson Theater. Actually it is the Florence Gould Hall, although sometimes it is referred to as the Elliot Gould Theater. Contract with a prominent video conferencing service for lots of clams as Fred Flintstone would say.

2. Wrap up DVD on colon surgery. From main menu you select either the surgeons or the steps. If you select the steps, you get a menu showing 7 steps of the operation. You click the step name and you get a list of the 5 surgeons's videos for that step. If you go to the surgeons' menu, you can click on a surgeon, and then get a list of the 7 steps of the operation the way the surgeon does them, and in that surgeon's order. This is where it gets confusing. Let's say Dr Smith (not his real name) does his surgery step 1-7 consecutively, according to the master list of steps, but Dr Spock (not his real name) does his surgery, following the master steps list, Step 1,2,3,5,6,4,7. The reason this is confusing, is because the file names and hence timeline names in Adobe Encore are named according to the surgeon's own order of steps, that is step1,2,3,4,5,6,7, not step1,2,3,5,6,4,7. However on one menu listing the steps, we need to link to the surgeon's step 4 from step 6 on teh master list of steps, but from step 4 on the surgeon's list of steps. And to make matters worse, the surgeon's menu also includes a Play All button, so we need to make sure the end actions play the steps in the surgeon's particular order. You with me so far?

Next comes the self-playing DVD demo of this project. We want to see the menu for step 1, then the video for surgeon 1's example of step 1, then the end action takes us to the menu for step 2, to surgeon 2's video and so forth.

For both of these projects, things can get very confusing. A hand drawn flowchart saves the day. Encore 2.0 lets you view the project like a flowchart, however I have never gotten Encore 2.0 to successfully build a project without an error, and in some cases the project file becomes corrupt altogether. So using Encore 1.5, a roadmap is the key to avoiding confusion.

It is at this point that I start wearing a hat to work every day, due to the incongrous patches of baldness thanks to the above project.

Oh well, it was a learning experience.

2. Next project is, get this, a DVD on colon surgery. This one is a bit more complicated, as each of 25 surgeons has his or her own chapter, including a Flash interface, video, narration, illustrations and a companion printed book. We demonstrated and took orders at the aforementioned convention, but still have months to go before a final product is ready for shipping.

This project is a great example of how to develop a workflow while a project takes shape. Lessons learned include:

- capture all content as soon as you get it

- do not let anything gather dust, take the hour or day to work on something sooner rather than later

- find a review process which works and is simple, especially if multiple reviewers are involved

Mid-October - Medical Convention, New Orleans

I had not been to NOLA since 2004. The convention center and tourist district are largely unchanged. During the taxi ride form the airport we see a lot of homes with tarps on the roof, and the French Quarter has many many abandoned homes and businesses.

The Loew's hotel however is quite nice, with one of the nicest indoor pools I have seen in a hotel.

A Few Representative Pics from this trip:

My last day there while walking around the French quarter, I called to check on my grandma Hilda. News is, she isn't going to make it. Her first words upon learning this, "Mike is going to miss talking to me." 36 hours later she was gone.

Over the New Year's holiday I started going through my home video collection, cataloguing all my videos of my Grandma Hilda. I feel so lucky that she permitted me to interview her on camera several times over the past 10 years. I recommend doing this with anyone you care about and will miss when they are gone.

Late October, 2007

Time for our big live surgery event. Four hospitals in NY transmitting live cases to the Florence Griffiths Joyner-Kersee Gould Henderson Hall. I find this funny. Two hospitals had full iSDN connections, two had only marginal IP bandwidth available. The ISDN feeds looked good, the IP not so good. We filled the time with some pre-recorded HD surgery. We rented a Panasonic PT-DW10000U HD projector and some XDCAM decks. Of course playing HD surgery after IP surgery is like viewing the Mona Lisa in person compared to using a ViewMaster. Actually, ViewMasters usually look pretty good, so make up your own metaphor.

The next day we rented out the historic Hudson Theater adjacent to the Millenium Broadway hotel. This day consisted of about 40 PowerPoint lectures, panel discussion and a presentation over ISDN from London (cha-ching$).

I couldn't resist taking this shot:

With this big event over with one could focus on the coming tasks for the rest of the year.

Early December, 2007

Fly to Tampa, FL. I have not been here since 2000. Little has changed, although I never actually visited downtown. While the Courtyard is a nice hotel, it is centrally located in a ghost town. Walking at night just a few blocks to a great cafe was like a Twilight Zone episode. You know, the one where a salesman finds himself alone in a strange town...like every episode! Next day I was to shoot 3 gastric bypass cases, however the patients were put to sleep before consenting, so I was stuck with the 3rd case of the day, which turned out to be a bad case to videotape.

Next day fly to Phoenix to shoot 4 new nursing videos. This shoot went great. Word of caution, if someone recommends going to a little town with lots of cute antique shops, run the other way and don't look back. Aside from the dozens of what I would call junk shops, Glendale, AZ actually has a great German beergarden and restaurant called Haus Murphy's which made the trip worthwhile. It was also the winter festival, which was a lot like a New England winter festival without the snow.

Well, here we are in 2008 and looking forward to wrapping up some lingering projects and starting some new ones. Now if I could just shake this cold...ACHOO!