DREWspective

It finally went out on the 14th March (13th March in the USA - not the release date I was hoping for), but I have to share with you guys what Danielle Kennedy referred to as "the agony and the ecstacy" of my latest YouTube video: Best Chadwarden Parody Moments REMIX.

It took roughly three weeks to produce, which included:

• watching and downloading as many Chadwarden videos as I could;
• grabbing all the funny [enough] parts in Premiere;
• deciding on the order;
• making all the titles in Flash, complete with sounds;
• customising and rendering the model of the "PS Triple", from six different angles;
• so and and so forth.

Everything was ready to go on the 11th, which admittedly left me with an empty feeling inside.  I really felt that the already 25-minute long masterpiece was missing something, maybe a more personal touch.

But at the beginning of the final render, little brother cracked a line from another YouTube video that we’d recently seen:

"There’s more!"

and the saga continued, as I struggled to put together some extra footage. I spent the entire day on the 12th trying to think of some funny clips I could make. Because of sudden commitments, I was unable to make a start that same night; it would have to wait right up until release night.

Have you ever desperately wanted to get something done, but there’s a billion things literally standing in your way? Things like spending/wasting nine hours of your day at work, with two hours of travelling in one direction?

Well, of all days, that’s exactly what happened.

First thing was, I was late to work. (I think it was an hour late.) This place where I work at the moment, they’re very anal about spending nine hours locked up in an office, regardless of whether you actually have anything to do.

Leaving work at around 1830, it was time for the journey home. Funnily enough, the second train I’d intended to catch had been cancelled. That’s never happened before.

After catching the next train, it was reliance on an unreliable bus service to get home. I sure hope the [dumbass] people of London have the sense to vote Red Ken out this May.

So I got home, but little did I know the fun had just started.

I’d spent around two hours solid putting together the clips, disappointed that YouTube was being anal and not allowing access to a video I’d really wanted to use. That was the relatively easy part.

I began the final render, which for some unexplained reason stopped at around 80%. I soon realised that the partition was low on space, so I rendered again to another. After about 30 minutes, the video was rendered. It stood at a massive 5.44 GB.

Obviously I couldn’t upload something that big in a million years, so the next step was to shrink it. I used MediaCoder for the job, which did a faithful conversion in around 20 minutes, but again not without some hiccups.

The time was just before midnight, and I thought I’d made it.

But no! On the uploading page for YouTube, I discovered that my videos were restricted to 10 minutes only. On further discovery, I found out that they’d disabled the privilege for newer YouTube members, regardless of their account type.

How fucking anal; though they claim it’s to deter copyright infringers, for bona fide directors and filmmakers it’s nothing more than an inconvenience. James Rolfe (aka The Angry Video Game Nerd) was able to upload a 20-minute video not so long ago, so at the time I put it down to sheer favouritism.

But it doesn’t stop there!

Frantically searching around for a program that split movie files, the computer caught a very annoying worm. Some of you might have experienced the same one: on execution it immediately disables your firewall and any antivirus programs you may have, as well as Spybot S&D. It also prevents you from installing such programs to get rid of it, though an online scanner would probably work.

I eventually found a working program, which split the video successfully into three parts. It was around 1am, and I was pissed off at YouTube for inadvertently destroying my Windows installation.

The rest of the night was spent uploading two of the parts to YouTube; the third was uploaded later on in the morning.

So far I’ve had nothing but rave reviews on the video, and I am extremely proud of it. It was meant to be my last Chadwarden video - having made a total of nine altogether - but I am extremely tempted to come out of retirement.

My final Chadwarden YouTube video.

I’m sat here at work, doing my thing of producing CSS very quickly. It suddenly dawned on me, having looked through a 1300+ line CSS file that I previously created, that even I get confused by the style names I use. In different situations I tend to mix camelcase and lowercase, and the result is usually confusion (and at some point, guilt).

Wanting to be consistent and code in a specific way, I did a quick search on the Internet for established CSS naming conventions. There are none.

I did, however, find an interesting weblog post by Andy Clarke that offered suggestions for common situations. Theoretically it’s very similar to how I name elements on the pages I build, though I use different names:

#wrapper

#header

#logo

#search

#middle

#sidebar

#content

#footer

Basically I usually reserve IDs for layout elements, like the header and footer; everything else is unstyled as much as possible, and uses classes when it’s not.

For consistency, I’ve decided to follow ‘the norm’ (you’ll never hear me say that again!) by using lowercase names with hyphens for spacing. I’ve started to do it now with this CSS, and it already looks a lot more legible.

This has been a post in the making.

Having been speed dating a total of eight times, I’ve noticed some commonly occuring themes during the events. Here are a few of my observations: feel free to disagree or agree with them as you will.

Please note that I am specifially referring to speed dating in the 20s age group in London; these may be less relevant for older people, or those in other places.

Observation #1

Men want female friends as sexual partners.
Women want male sexual partners as friends.

A lot of these so-called dating gurus say that men focus on looks, while women focus on looks and personality.

Bullshit. If anything, in today’s society it’s usually the other way around.  As a guy or girl, how many times do you get blocked and deleted as soon as you reveal your photo? How many times do you do the blocking and deleting?

Either way, we can all agree that looks are important to both sexes. But there’s a huge difference between how important looks are to each genders.

I am speaking as a disgruntled, generally luckless speed dater, but with most women (at any kind of speed dating event) it really does all boil down to looks. Show me someone who disagrees; I’ll show you a liar.

From my experience in the dating and even friendship world (and it may be that I’m in London, which is generally a shallow city), girls get so many offers from men, so they are looking for people they find attractive physically and sexually to be their friends.

On the other hand, guys have enough problems with just talking to a girl, and would be just as happy making friends with those they didn’t find attractive. Of course, there are guys who are just after one thing (and they usually get it), but even they have female friends.

I famously carried out an experiment on the London branch of Gumtree some time ago: I posted an ad looking for friendship (and only friendship) with females.
Of the nine responses I’d received, seven of the girls demanded to see a photo, and cut off all communication once they found out what I looked like. The other two had just stopped responding after a while.

Observation #2

Men are more serious than women.

There have been maybe one or two girls at an event that I would have liked to have been involved with, but at the end of the day I have always been primarily looking for stable female friends. The guys I’ve spoken to at events, though they don’t say it explicity, are in the same boat.

In most cases, the emphasis in "speed dating" for guys is dating.

Ask any girl why she chose to go speed dating, and you’re guaranteed to get an answer similar to:

• "just for a laugh"
• "something to do"
• "for fun, innit"

As with the dating game in general, the onus is on the guy to do all of the work, while the girls just sit pretty (Rapunzel syndrome); this is merely an opportunity for them to evaluate the guys on offer.
With many companies offering a free event if nobody is ticked, they’re prepared to go away empty handed (probably to abuse the system). Either way they’ll decide whom they’re attracted to, and completely discard the rest.

In most cases, the emphasis in "speed dating" for girls is speed.

Observation #3

Men make up their own minds.
Women have their minds made up for them.

Before you queue up to disagree, I have a couple of questions for you:

How many times have you seen or heard of a guy pursuing a girl, or taking some course of action, though it’s against popular culture?

How many times have you seen or heard of a girl pursuing a guy, or taking some course of action, because of popular culture?

Whether your opinion is influenced by real life or the media, depending on your perspective, the answers will probably be the same. There are of course exceptions but, far as I’m concerned, too few.

In speed dating, both guys and girls compare notes during and after a speed dating event.

It has also been known for girls to change their minds based on what other girls think of potential suitors. Girls are far more concerned about having approval from other people than guys.  While deep down a guy wants a girl who will compliment and "complete" them, in their 20s and even 30s a girl is more concerned with finding a good "trophy", to improve their image and make other people jealous.

You won’t get a confession any time soon, but people changing their ticks has happened in at least one event I’ve been to. This is probably another reason why girls statistically tick less than guys.

In her mini book on speed dating, Clare McCann tells about a strange phenomenon: guys who tick more than one girl in a group of friends are often less likely to be a long-term match after the event. When the girls find out, they’ll wonder: "does he like me or her?" The result is that nobody wins, because there’s perceived competition and each girl thinks they’re going to lose.

Whether it was this phenomenon or something that I did wrong, I had experienced this after one event: one girl didn’t even respond to an e-mail, while the other, after a short phonecall and text messages, decided to break communication.

On the flip side, I have never known a guy to have based his ticking decisions on what other guys have ticked. Time after time, it’s been demonstrated that, if a guy really wants to see a particular girl again, he will register ticks for every girl that he liked.

From what I’ve seen, most guys keep details of their ticks a secret, but openly talk about the women they like (and dislike).  They also see other guys being a threat, even if subconsciously, but they all think they’re in with a chance… if only they get ticked back.

Observation #4

Men generally want what’s different.
Women generally want what’s popular.

I can’t sum this point up any better than Chris Rock’s famous line in one of his shows:

• guys look at someone else’s girl, and say they have to get a girl just like her;
• girls look at someone else’s guy, and say they have to get him.

There’s a hidden rule in the dating game, that says a girl will reject someone if they have never met their friends’ approval. Guys, on the other hand, have been known to risk friendships and even social status to date a particular girl.

In the film John Tucker Must Die, many of the girls in the high school had been out with the titular character, and complain about his ethics. But as another male character says later in the film, they all queue up to go out with him.

Guys, on the other hand, seem to be after someone who may be like someone they’ve found attractive, but is "just for them". Girls seem to know this, as shown by their efforts to emulate actresses and singers and the like in physical form.

There are noticable examples of guys initially rejecting, or turning a blind eye, to girls who aren’t very popular (Napoleon Dynamite, American Pie, any "teen" movie you can think of). But whether it’s a girl or a guy that does it, if they’re chasing someone on the basis of perceived popularity, I see it as a sign of not knowing what they really want.

In terms of speed dating:

Both girls and guys will go for the people who have the highest perceived value. But for the girls, it’s usually restricted to the one or two most popular people (in accordance with Observation #3). Guys will probably tick everybody they’re drawn to, whether as a friend or otherwise.

That’s enough bullshit from me.  Thanks for reading; just remember that these are my observations, and that I don’t expect anyone to take them as gospel. Actually, you shouldn’t; go out and see for yourself.

While moving my new three foot fish tank upstairs into my room, I accidentally knocked my pimp cup over. It was barely a two-foot drop, but it smashed into pieces.

Was I mad? Yes I was. If there hadn’t been so much stuff in the room, it might still be here.

Am I moping about it? No.

I might have lost the original: a bargain brandy glass, a good fortune in cheap rhinestones, and hours of baking time an labour. I haven’t lost the blueprints, however, and I can always make a new one.

Time to raid eBay!