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.



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