Monday, September 26, 2016

September 22 & 23 Uploads 2016

09.23.16
September 22 & 23 Uploads 2016

The month end is getting close! For this entry I'll be discussing the following videos: What Do You Know About Canada?🍁, Can You Pass the U.S Citizenship Test? 🌐🚕🗽, Infiniti and Beyond!, Flapy Totem: Treat Your Little Red Bird With Respect!, and BMW and Mini.

I've done GM, so now I wanted to go and check out the Bavarian Motor Works and Mini cars. Well, not so much the Minis, but they co-exist with them because they are owned by them, so where you see BMW, you're going to run into Mini. Good? Bad? Depends on how you feel about them. For me, it's neutral, but anyways! It was fortunately yet another bright, warm, sunny September day, so I visited to the Endras location to film these luxury German cars. It seemed to be mostly Minis around the entrance and front, but there were a couple of great looking BMWs as well. There wasn't that much to film near the front, so I went further towards the east in hopes of finding lots of nice shiny BMWs to film, only to find that the gate was locked. Bummer. I was hoping to film at least 10 minutes of BMW and Mini action, but because I couldn't find any other non-invasive way of getting in, this resulted in a shorter than expected video. Nonetheless, I still got to take a good number of pictures before heading over to the neighbouring Infiniti dealership. The BMW X5 is the BMW I would take home if I were in the market for a BMW vehicle right now.

Comedy notice: Even though the Orange BMW was part of the used Infiniti inventory, I felt that it was better for the role it served, though you could argue that the blue mini behind the victim would've made more sense to use.


A bit punny and clickbaity probably, but hey, it really suits it! Infiniti is Nissan's luxurious crown, so it goes beyond being your standard, plain car! Or does it? Who knows. Unlike the tightly guarded BMW dealer, I was able to explore the entire dealership (minus the inside of course) so this allowed me to film and photograph just about everything. In the video, you hear me mentioning a “forbidden” construction area, but after taking a closer look, it turned out that it was not as forbidden as I thought. After I stopped filming and decided to go around taking full resolution pictures, I discovered that it was a Lexus dealership under construction. Nice! So this strip is going to be home to three luxurious entities: BMW, Infiniti and in December, Lexus. Could Porsche be next? Doubt it! There's probably no space, and it would be highly protected. If I had to buy an Infiniti that day, I'd take an Infiniti QX80 in Hermosa blue – Wait! That word: hermosa. It sounds very familiar... Doesn't it mean beautiful in Spanish or something like that? Let's quickly checkYes! It is the feminine form of hermoso, which indeed means beautiful, but I had been under the impression that it might have been slang.


Ok, so the full proper title of the game is actually Flappy Totem Bird FREE, and it was developed by Ajani InfoTech Private Limited. This developer also has a plethora of other wonderful games and applications available for the BlackBerry 10 platform, so you can check them out in the BlackBerry World. I have no idea how good most them are, but they sound good judging them from the names. The app I'll be talking about from them is the one you just read and watched in the video: Flappy totem. Overall, I'd say that it's a good app, but I just wish that free version offered a bird that does not get “injured” and cause you to wait two minutes if you crash too frequently or too soon. Oh well. Can't always have your cake and eat it, and they do work hard, so I guess they deserve some pay for their hard efforts, even if it's a just a flappy spin-off. It's a nice one. The graphics are great, game play was smooth, and because the character is small and light, it makes the game to be one of the easier spin-offs of Flappy bird. Before I resorted to nonsensical, corny narrations, the audio was actually quite decent, but could still be better. Now about the narrations... um... I guess after the bird got injured, I couldn't bother with dealing with a workaround to capture the game's audio, so I lazily just resorted to commenting instead, even though it was horrible! Still, better than a silent game in my opinion, or perhaps silence would have actually been a better option! Maybe. Despite what I say about how the game should be free, you're honestly better off coughing up that 0.99¢ if you want to play this game. Otherwise, don't bother unless you're actually very good at playing flappy bird, or you'll find yourself seriously frustrated every time you have to wait two minutes from crashing too often. Who knows, maybe I'll actually come back to this game with the full version and original audio this time! We'll see...

Ok, I know it's the Canadian Test video that mentions the discussion, but since the USA test video was done first, it means that you'll see the problem that plagued the quizzes I've done two days ago on it first. My first attempt to recorder the video was with the namesake application Screen Recorder, but after I figured out that it only recorded one minute and eighteen seconds out of fifteen minutes, I was crossed! After that, I didn't even bother attempting to use it again, so I just decided to use ScreenCorder instead. Ideally, I wanted to film it in front of my microphone, but because my phone no longer gets wifi in certain areas of my home, I had to resort to recording in another area. “How will I record the sound?” I wondered. I then decided to go with running the Parrot application in the background to see how it would go, and it worked! The sound was recorded and my voice sounded even louder and crisper than what it would in my bedroom! When editing time came, it was a nightmare... the audio was on point for some parts, but became grossly off frame in some parts. Why?! Even when I threw the unedited audio onto the unedited video, it still wouldn't sync! What?! I tried all sorts of methods including sliding, trimming, adjusting etc., but no avail. When I eventually saw that I was going nowhere with this, I had two options: one, abort the video. Two, put up an “excuses” slide. You know what the deal is, because you're reading this and have watched the video, so I went with option #2 to warn people and let others know what was up. Well technically, that was done on the Canadian test video, but the American test video did have an annotation near the end that mentions the off-sync audio issue. So now I'm curious: what happened with Parrot? Did something get borked while it was recording? I know it obviously distorted my voice sometimes, which I filled in with a beep in one of the parts. Speaking of that, as funny or not funny as some of you may have found them, that was the intention: to fill in unbearable goof-ups and occasional distorted words. I originally wanted to leave them out, but I thought that it would've been a better idea to use fillers to make the audio length match the video length, but with or without, original audio and unoriginal audio, it still didn't work... Sigh... Next time, I'll honestly just have to find a way to get my wifi back, but that's the problem: why the hell doesn't my phone have reception in some areas anymore? It is the router to blame? The house? The operating system? Who knows! Probably the operating system, because my computer usually manages to get signals, whether they're good or not, so it might just be that. Speaking of operating system, BlackBerry 10 has really and sadly become such a big joke! It was supposed to see 10.3.3.3 or something like that from when, and hasn't, and probably never will, despite the so called commitment they keep lying about. John Chen, I'd rather you just say, “Sorry, were done with BlackBerry 10 for good now,” than to keep lying and saying that you're committed. Now that I've spent a considerable amount of time explaining, complaining and ranting, it's time to briefly mention the quiz itself. Majority of the answers I had no idea about, but as mentioned above and in the Canadian video itself, that score was originally much lower, but I must have accidentally clicked a link that took me out of the quiz. This caused my results to become skewed by the time I came back to it. The quiz was fun, but editing time was painful thanks to the broken audio that couldn't sync!


Since I already got all my negativity and complaints out with the American entry above, I can focus solely on the Canadian Test itself for this one. This test was even longer than the American version and offered no trivia, so it was quite a serious test! Not my commentaries though. They were quite ridiculous, hilarious, offensive or overkill depending on the way you view it. So, why did I take these tests? Well, I haven't done any quizzes on the channel before and despite how I joke about them not being games, they are indeed a type of game, so why not? If I did America, I felt that it was only natural to go ahead and take the Canadian test. I fared poorly on both tests and proceeded to making cheesy commentaries on how I was not going to be allowed to live in either countries after failing their tests, and that I would be sent through an unsanitary ship or plane back to Jamaica to be slapped, whipped and pick bananas. Again, if haven't said it already, do not take this ridiculous video with it's equally ridiculous commentary seriously, or else you're ridiculous yourself for taking ridiculous commentary seriously! Anyway, after the poor audio results with these videos, I'm determined to do another quiz video in the future with accurately synced audio this time! Don't know how I'll fix the wifi, but as mentioned last time, experimentation and progression is the reasoning behind my lousy videos. Actually, the solution is quite clear: Screen Recorder is the way to go for mobile commentary videos, but I'll just have to shout at the developer to fix his app!!!! Ok, so I won't shout, but you know what I mean. It's an application with great potential, so it's a shame to see it act so painfully unreliable sometimes!

Where is it?! Yikes! Looks like I didn't record a session this time, but hopefully will another time.



Saturday, September 17, 2016

September 16, 2016 Uploads

09.16.16
September 16, 2016 Uploads

Wow, yet another entry discussing half a dozen videos! Night Test After Heavy Rain and Thunder, Asphalt 8: The Great September Max out!, Walking Around Simcoe Street United Church, Asphalt 8: Test Driving The Cars From The Great September Max out!, Pac-Man: Not Gonna Let The Last Cut-off Stop Me!,and Michael Boyer GM Dealership Walk Around. Those are the 6 videos that I'll be talking about, so let's get down into the details right this minute! This is going to be a long hardcore entry!

Alright, so as mentioned in the video and description itself, this video was a 2nd attempt in a different area to shoot better footage in the night. Not exactly the easiest thing to do for a variety of reasons: one, the camera might not simply be “strong” enough, as in not enough pixels, aperture not the ample size, lenses and other technical bits. Two, stabilization is an issue when there's no OIS and then there's the whole trouble of simply walking around in the dark itself, which can bring in a variety of complications. Despite these issues, I just went ahead and determinedly shot another night video anyway. It was originally raining and storming earlier that day, so I was under the impression that I wouldn't be able to shoot a video, but surely, it stopped later. After the rain subsided, I went out, found a suitable area and let the camera roll. Well, it was initially showing blurry footage, but I corrected it by adjusting settings and turning on the appropriate modes. High humidity, hot temperatures, lightning, fog and darkness aren't for the faint-of-heart! So, how well did this video really compare to the other? That depends on your judgement. I do think that this video is certainly better than the other, but I still don't actually think it's good. Stabilization was still an issue, but it was somewhat better than last time, and at least we can actually see more of the surroundings this time. Would've been cool to see some of the lightning that was still present in the sky, but oh well. The camera isn't sharp enough.


All Asphalt 8 players are aware of how hard and ridiculous it is to save millions in this game, so legitimately saving up is lots of hard time consuming work! Wait, is it even possible to hack the BlackBerry version of this game? Who knows. Even if it is, I'm not up for that! After saving up for a few months, I decided to make a video on my upgrades to show what's been done, and what's going to be done next. After rambling and rapidly flipping through my garage, I ended up maxing out the following: Tesla Model S, Chevrolet Camaro GS, Lamborghini Urus, Audi RS 4 Avant, Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione, Ferrari Testarossa, Bentley Continental GT V8, Ford Shelby GT500, Cadillac CTS-V Coupe Race Car, Dodge Viper SRT10 ACR-X, Chevrolet Corvette C7, Lamborghini Veneno, GTA Spano and the ugly Ferrari FXX Evoluzione! Wow! 3,231,396 sure covered a lot! More than I expected actually. Now there was one obvious thing to be done after this: the ultimate test drive! Read below for the full scope!


In this grand episode of Asphalt 8, I race in Iceland with a Tesla Model S, Monaco with the Chevrolet Camaro GS, Barcelona with the – whoa, whoa, WHOA! Whoa. I am not about to seriously list all 14 cars and their tracks like a repetitive, dry robot because it's just overkill, and you already just read the list from above or watched the video (if you were even brave enough!), so there's just no point in going over all the nitty-gritty obvious details. Man! Playing on all these tracks and producing and editing this video was a very big, time consuming challenge, but I did it. I really wanted to take these cars for a spin to test their full unlocked powers, while filming it, so as stressful as I knew it would be, I still went for it. The end results? Unfortunately not good because the earlier parts of the video were very laggy. This was until I figured out that ScreenCorder had been saving the videos to my phone's internal memory, which would cause the videos to lag frequently whenever it came too close to being full. This would happen a lot due to the size of the videos. I switched the save toggle to memory card and it was quite the relief to see an improvement, but it's too bad I didn't notice this earlier. Lagging aside, the next big issue was audio syncing. Syncing audio to 14+ video clips was not an easy task for someone who isn't a professional audio and video engineer, but it was good practice, and it turned out to be quite alright, though some parts of the video are a little worse than others. None were actually horribly off, so that's a good thing. While I'm on the topic of audio, I'd say that the next issue that bugged me the most was the quality of the recorded audio. It's pretty warbly and screechy at most segments, making it very undesirably to listen to. Anyone watching this would likely have to resort to muting it if they wanted to make it through from beginning to end. So you might be wondering, “why would you upload such a long, partly laggy, cruddy video?” Two words: experimentation and progression. That's why. Remember when I thought the processor was the one that was mostly to blame for the lag, when it was the save location that was largely at fault? Had I given up at the point, I would have never made the discovery and allow myself to progress. So as much as I hate the way some of my videos turn out, the only way to get better is to keep going and looking out for improvements along the way. This includes actually playing better too. You've seen that Iceland race with the Tesla and the excessive, hard drifting with the Corvette so you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, so I'm shooting for better audio, less lagging and hopefully professional racing next time.


I visited the Simcoe Street United Church located in Oshawa and filmed it. Old churches have so much charming character with their architecture, that some of the newer churches are sorely lacking. This makes them nice subjects for filming. Mind you, I'm not saying that you should judge a church sorely from outside to determine whether you want to attend it or not, but to judge it from the people within and most importantly the message of the sermon. Are they actually speaking the truth from within the bible, or are they just twisting things, speaking in tongues without a translator, or conducting other activities that God wouldn't approve of? This should be the most important decision in choosing a church, but of course, if a church does look run-down and ghetto, then that would likely send the wrong impression. Thankfully, most places do a good job to make sure the outside looks presentable. So, what did I think of this church overall based on my exploration of the exterior? Great! It was a nice, sunny, warm day, but I did not appreciate the excessive wind that caused my hat to blow off! Being located downtown, it had a lot of other shops and sites within the vicinity of it, but Simcoe United's tall steeple and historical looks makes it easily distinguishable from everything in sight.


For real though, why should I let that cut-off from the last time stop me from enjoying some more retro fun? This time I actually got to play and successfully recorded about 13 minutes of raw gameplay. I believe that I made it to level 5 or 6, before restarting back to level 1. Some will probably laugh, but Pac-Man is honestly not an easy game when it comes onto level progression. Those ghosts speed up significantly which makes me wonder how it's even possible to actually make it to level 256? Seriously, has anyone ever actually done that? No one has ever done that! Anyway, so should I discuss how the recording session went? Might as well. 6.9 out of 10 I'd say. There weren't excessive hiccups present, but the sound could've been a bit better, and my gameplay could've have also been better! Still, I think most would agree that the sound was much better than my Asphalt 8 video. I should probably record another Flappy Bird spin-off soon. You may either rejoice or be sorrowful.



What an interesting dealership to visit! I really like it when GM dealerships actually have all of their brands present, as opposed to the usual GMC & Buick or Chevrolet & Cadillac inventory that most go by. The video turned out to look a little foggy when the time came to edit it, but that did not stop me from enjoying the looks of the cars in person. It's one thing to see cars on the internet, but seeing them in person is just so much better because you get to see all the crisp details to the fullest, and the actual size of the vehicle. I didn't get to see much 2016 or 2017 Corvettes (surprise! They're exotic sports cars after all!), but most of the other General Motors vehicles were there in abundance. Because this is one of the largest dealerships in the area, there was a lot to film which resulted in the raw video being nearly 20 minutes before editing it. One thing I regret is not taking enough pictures... I was very video focused during that trip, but at least it was still a good trip anyway, but would've been a little better if I took more pictures of some of my favourite General Motor cars. Speaking of that, my top three GM favourites are the Cadillac Escalade ESV, GMC Sierra and Cadillac XT5. The Chevrolet Bolt EV is nice too, but I don't know why GM decided to cripple it by not offering an optional All-Whell Drive version. Oh well. Hopefully they'll change their minds very soon. Can you imagine something farfetched like an all-electric Cadillac Escalade ESV? $275,000 CAD is my prediction. GMC Sierra? Let's go with $250,000 CAD if were talking a Denali with a crew cab and 4X4 drivetrain. Hey, if an all-electric Corvette is rumoured, then it can't be too absurd to discuss possibilities of these trucks eventually coming in an all-electric drivetrain. LOL? We'll, see.............. 

Thursday, September 8, 2016

August 27 – September 06, 2016 Uploads

09.06.16
August 27 – September 06, 2016 Uploads

Due to the eleven day upload gap between some of these videos, I've ended up with six videos on my hands: Walking Down Bobmar Road, Walking around a Campus Site of University of Toronto, Gravity: White Stars Taking Over The Galaxy, Asphalt 8: The Test Continues, Crescent Path Night Video Test (Highly cringey!) and #YoutubePartyIsOver Explanation [slides and commentary]. That's a lot to talk about, so let's dive right into this!

I wanted to make a video of me walking down a street, but wasn't quite sure which road to choose. I wanted do an East Torontonian neighbourhood, so when Bobmar Road caught my eye, I decided that I was definitely going to film that area, because of its name. Seriously, it sounds so much like Bob Marley, which had me wondering why they didn't just go with that, rather than some half-baked spin-off of the reggae king's title. This lead to me making some lame commentary about copyright, which obviously wasn't the case because the man is dead, and there are millions of streets that get named after people all the time. Whatever the case may be, it's most likely the surname of one of the pioneers or residents that used to live in that area. So, I was thinking that covering this road would take somewhat long, but when I saw myself approaching Military Trail sooner than expected, I knew that wasn't case, so to make up for the shorter than expected street, I went further up the road to film the next area of interest: a campus site of the University of Toronto.

Even though they are separate videos, they were done on the same day. I was eager to film more areas of interest within proximity, so I went to this area while it was nice and quiet, to take advantage of it. Now, if you haven't read the video description, I absolutely loathed my own heavy breathing to the point that I grudgingly resorted to using some nice viola music that probably many will hate! Ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaa! Well, I don't hate classical music, but most probably do. Oh well. Walking around and filming the premises was a pretty interesting experience for me, as I've never been here before, so I was able to see things from a fresh perspective. The “venting is normal” sign was both interesting and hilarious, which lead me to making the joke in the video after editing the footage. Of course, it's important that you vent in a way that won't cause people to run in serious fear, or else they'll view you as a roaring, unprofessional, crazy wildebeest! Venting and jokes aside, it looks like this happens to be one of the science centres for the University of Toronto, but I'm honestly not 100% sure, because I've never been to any campus of that school. In fact, before reading the signs, I almost thought it was Centennial for some reason... How? Why? What? I don't know, but as Torontonians know, Centennial is located at Ellesmere and Morningside, not Ellesmere and Military Trail. The two are close, but if you read and pay attention, you can't get them mixed up. Funny enough, I believe at one point that I did actually want to go to Centennial College in high school, but decided against it likely due to something along the lines of it not offering something I was interested in at the time, or possibly even the fact that I was under the intention that it was a horrible school. I don't even know! That was years back, so who knows for sure what the reason was.


Why did I play this game? Because it's boring and interesting at the same time; that's why. It's also something a little different, so while I was looking through my gaming applications, I thought hey, why not? The idea of just tapping the screen to mainly create white dots, will probably cause some people to yawn themselves to sleep, but you have to pull the menu down and play around with it a little to discover all the possibilities. I've discovered cool blue lasers, red stars, pausing functions, scrolling, coding, sharing and more. Still, admittedly not terribly exciting, but because I was also narrating the session for a YouTube video, I had more fun that what some might actually experience. So after creating red and white stars, I eventually got around to reading more about the game, and discovering the Sphaghetti Monster, who I proudly dissed, and then went onto “exploring” the planets in our system. Speaking of that, I still find it strange that Pluto has been dethroned of its planet status, just because it's apparently “too small” to be planet. There may be more to it, but I'm no astronomer, so I don't know the full scope of the situation. Nonetheless, I view Mecury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto all as planets.


In the 2nd testing episode of Asphalt 8, I've raced with the Lamborghini Sesto Elemento in French Guiana Reverse, the Middle Eastern Lykan HyperSport in Westminster Bridge, and Tokyo with with the fierce Ferrari LaFerrari. How were the results? Well, it's obvious from watching the video: certainly not good, but at the same time I wouldn't say disastrous either. I mean sure, sometimes heavy hangups can cause your car to end up into a wall or even drift the wrong way, which was exactly the case for Tokyo twice. Now, the season 8 race for the class A cars as we all know is a very fun, but also a challenging, demanding track due to the heavy traffic and sharps turns that have to be made. Despite the hangups, it's honestly the side oncoming traffic that annoys me the most about this track. They're so hard to dodge and they're very annoying! Worse, it's very hard to run into them without wrecking, so you're best bet is to use your vision, judgement and reaction to deal with it. Traffic scenarios aside, Tokyo isn't bad otherwise. Now for my experience with the application in French Guiana: there where some moments of pretty long, frozen frames, but that oddly didn't affect my runs too much. I think that I could've done a better job at tackling the track, especially the part with the highway ramps and bridges. Westminster Bridge had its moments, but overall, it was probably the smoothest of the three to record with ScreenCorder. I don't know if was because the track was short, lack of heavy traffic or whatever the case may be. At the end of the video I contemplated on whether or not I should continue using this application. I stated that I would either do what I feel is best, or possibly leave it up to feedback. I do really appreciate being able to watch my native BlackBerry 10 applications with sounds, so despite the lagging, hanging, and frame freezing (whatever you want to call it!) I may likely continue to use it. Besides, for hangups that are actually long enough, I could always edit them it if I really wanted to. It would also make it more work in audio area, since I'd have to remove the spaces that are occupied as silent lag.


Whoa, why would you put “highly cringey” in the title you may ask? Isn't that going to cause people to steer clear of it? Yes and no. You see, I feel it's just best to tell people exactly what they can expect from the video title, which in this case is an outdoors video of me testing my camera's night settings, which also turned out to be horrible due to the intense shakiness, pitch blackness at some points and – oh, my ever so lame commentary! For real though. I don't know why I kept talking about how I can't see, spooking people, holding my head up, watching the camera and so forth. These topics are far from interesting, funny, educating or engaging. I mean, as cringey as the video is from the lack of stability and complete darkness sometimes, I'm sure if the commentary were better, it'd at least make it not as cringey as it was originally was, or am I being a little over the top here? Whatever. Despite what I say about the commentary, my real focus for the next time will honestly be keeping the camera steady, and holding it at eye level. That way, I'll be able to produce a better night shoot. Of course, there are several other technical things to keep in mind, but it helps to start with basic things first as these things can be easily overlooked. So, which mode turned out to be better? I honestly don't know... Ok, I guess I'll say that night mode (surprise!) looks a little better, but again, it would've helped if I kept the camera steady and at eye level, so that it could actually capture the street lights and the surroundings better. Now that's enough rambling here so it's time to talk about an internet phenomenon below: YouTube's new rules! Oh, goodie!


Well, I already explained everything pretty damn well in the video, so I'll just focus more so on why I made the video. As a Twitter user, you have a section that displays trending tweets and other areas of what you might be interested in. Oftentimes, I don't really dig the trending hashtags, but when I saw a Twitter user posting something about RIP YouTube, it caused me to take a closer look at was going on, leading to the discovery of YouTube's new rules..... Yikes! The hashtag exploded, several headlines occurred, thousands of complaints were issued, so this really triggered me to quickly put a video together while the hashtag was hot. Now, this was originally supposed to be done with me actually browsing the web while commenting and reading, but since Screen Recorder decided to throw a fit that day, I just couldn't be bothered with it. ScreenCorder would've been great if it weren't for the sound issue and the fact that it too, didn't feel like capturing more than a few a minutes that day. *SIGH!* This then resorted to me doing a recording of what I wanted to say, and then hastily drawing slides to match my points. I was worried about audio syncing, but with careful timing, effort and diligence, it came out great. Demonetizing people's videos for the sake of kissing up to advertisers is not cool, so they better change something before the site takes a huge hit, which many are fearing is what's going to happen, but only time will tell.