Saturday, October 27, 2007

Selling cat food

Wow, I cannot believe it has been over 3 months since I posted. That is almost a tenth of a year! I've got a few random bits I wanted to share.

First, I have been getting small bags of sample cat food in the large bags of cat food I buy. Obviously it's from the same company, but it seems like a strange way to promote this product. I have not even checked to see if the sample is a more expensive variety. How is this supposed to work as a marketing technique? Do people try it and say, "Oh, I really like the color of that cat food!" Or maybe, "Wow, the cats really ate that food also!" ???

Next, I just have to vent about what a piece of crap Windows is for doing video work! I really need to get a Mac for that someday. I can record shows and make DVDs, which is a good thing, but a lot of stuff is a pain. (I'm going to count programs here) Like I was wanting to put the video below online from the TV, so first I recorded the clip in Windows DVR format (1), which Windows movie maker can not read!?! So I converted it to an MPEG (2), so I could add it to movie maker and save it as a smaller .wmv file. The first MPEG file kept crashing movie maker (3). Then I used a different program to make an MPEG (4), but it was crashing movie maker also. So I ended up using yet another program to convert the MPEG to .wmv file (5), but it was larger than I wanted. So I used Windows movie maker to open the .wmv and save it as a new .wmv with different quality settings. So to get the file ready for the internet I ended up using 5 different programs. Luckily, I already had the programs because I had done this before, but I had to re-figure out how to do it all. When I get a Mac I may be posting all the time :)

Finally, here's the video. I was watching TV one afternoon and this was on, and I almost did not even notice. When I did notice I decided to record it, since you can record from TIVO's buffer after the fact. All this needs is a live audience and you've got a funny SNL skit :)