[Webmaster]

I think leading a charitable life is a very important thing.  One of our primary differentiators between human beings and animals is that we experience empathy and can attempt to understand another's situation.

This empathy needs to go every direction though.  We have to be careful not to demonize people who have the good of others at heart.  Often times we are too quick to judge and base decisions on a single dimension.

For example, BMW donates the dollar for a test drive.  Unless we are arguing that people stop driving cars immediately what harm comes from this, and what good.  The way I see it a single test drive isn't going to give anyone breast cancer and there are millions of dollars given to breast cancer research.  Additionally BMW is the luxury leader in green car implementations with more electric or hybrid vehicles than any other luxury car manufacturer so they are moving the right direction.

Does anyone here give all their income to charity?  We all have to eat.  Additionally the argument that money is the only thing that is important is patently ridiculous, any business person will tell you that marketing is the most important aspect of any industry and in charity we call marketing "Awareness".  Without "Awareness" any cause is lost, it will quickly lose visibility and funding decreases meaning that those living with the condition are quickly sidelined.

Certainly if someone is getting rich "raising awareness" this is a problem but if someone is just squeaking by and has made it their life's mission to raise awareness and encourage giving I don't fault them for not having the means to give most of their profits away in fact I applaud them for making the sacrifice in their life when they could be using their talents doing things that would be more profitable and improve their lifestyle to a much greater degree.

In the end my point is don't buy something because it has a pink ribbon on it, but let that pink ribbon remind you of the suffering and pain that many women and families have gone through.  Let that pink ribbon drive your empathy.  If you see someone doing a good job of raising "Awareness" about a cause consider helping them especially if they do it at great expense to themselves.

[Webmaster]

I just added "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones

[Webmaster]

Love the GNR version of Sympathy For the Devil but the Rolling Stones did it so perfectly the first time around that I can't include the GNR cover.

[Webmaster]

@RoseMay – I use a professional piece of software that comes in the Apple Final Cut Studio suite.  There are other pieces out there however and most editing programs will do it as well.

My guess is there is a setting in the software you found that allows it to remove the audio to save space.

[Webmaster]

Not right off hand sorry

 

[Webmaster]

 

Here you go Chem and anybody else who wants a good halloween playlist.  It's pretty eclectic and all over the place as far as era goes even going so far as to put KC and the Sunshine up against each other on "Your Boogeyman" 😉

 

Ghostbusters – Ray Parker Jr.

Bad Moon Rising – Creedence Clearwater Revival

Dead Man's Party – Oingo Boingo Dead Man's Party

Hell – Squirrel Nut Zippers

Thriller – Michael Jackson

The Time Warp (Remix 1989 Extended Version) – Rocky Horror Show

(Don't Fear) The Reaper – Blue Öyster Cult

Abracadabra – Steve Miller Band

Black Magic Woman – Santana

Boris the Spider – The Who

Devil Inside – INXS

The Devil Went Down To Georgia – The Charlie Daniels Band

Evil Ways – Santana

(Ghost) Riders In The Sky – Johnny Cash

I Put A Spell On You – Creedence Clearwater Revival

I'm Your Boogie Man – K.C. and The Sunshine Band

I'm Your Boogie Man – White Zombie

Love Potion #9 – The Searchers

Men In Black – Will Smith

Monster Mash – Bobby "Boris" Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers

Riders On The Storm – The Doors

People Are Strange – The Doors

Runnin' With The Devil – Van Halen

Purple People Eater – George Thorogood

She Blinded Me With Science – Thomas Dolby

Somebody's Watching Me – Rockwell

Puttin On The Ritz – Taco

Superstition – Stevie Wonder

Twilight Zone – Golden Earring

Werewolves Of London – Warren Zevon

Ramalama (Bang Bang) – Róisín Murphy

You Can Do Magic – America

Frankenstein – The Edgar Winter Group

Hotel California – The Eagles

Sympathy for the Devil – The Rolling Stones

Welcome To The Jungle – Guns N' Roses

Enter Sandman – Metallica

He's a Pirate – Klaus Badelt

This Is Halloween – Marilyn Manson

 

[Webmaster]

Compressing your video will help with both the space it takes up on the hard-drive and how long it takes to upload.

Generally just looking at the output or save settings on your software of choice will give you options such as "compression" or "quality".  Don't be fooled by the quality setting, generally you can cut a video's "quality" but up to 50% with no noticeable degradation.

Just this morning I compressed a nearly 1 gig video down to 14.6 megabytes, almost a hundredth of its original size, with no appreciable loss in video quality.

[Webmaster]

There is nothing wrong with the format. Video files are large and complex which increases the chance that they will randomly contain escape characters that cause the browser to think the file is done uploading. YouTube has thousands of programmers creating proprietary software to circumvent these situations whereas our team is much smaller. Windows movie maker used to let you choose wmv or avi the new version doesn’t have nearly as many features. You may have more success with something like videospin which can be found at http://www.videospin.com

[Webmaster]

@allthatglitters – The file is never properly saving to the server.  I know why its happening and its alot of technicall mumbo jumbo.  While its not because of your file format generally saving to another format will fix the problem.  So if you are saving as WMV try saving to AVI for example.

[Webmaster]

You can post just about anything in the forum including websites.  Thanks for asking 🙂

[Webmaster]

Thanks everyone, I really appreciate the Birthday Wishes 🙂

[Webmaster]

Opera Mini doesn't yet properly register with SV.  You need to use your phone's built in browser in order for the site to deliver the proper experience.  As I said I would probably consider calling your provider for info on why it might not be saving your login.

[Webmaster]

It is most likely a security setting in your phone. I would suggest calling your service provider.

[Webmaster]

Facebook is changing.  They are utilizing their ubiquitous reach to create demand so that they can use the information you give them as a draw for integrated partners like Spotify, Rhapsody, Netflix and Hulu.  The way they deliver your information to developers and integrated partners is through a very concerning technology called open graph which creates a map of your preferences, friends and activities based on everything from your posts to your likes to what you might be listening to on Spotify right now.

In English that equals:

Facebook is giving all your information to any developer who asks for it and we let them because we feel like we can't live without their service.  The depth of information they can access without your awareness is disturbing.  Playing a game such as farmville exposes ALL your personal info to companies like Zynga, which they can then use to model game experiences in a way that will encourage you to spend money (Yes they do this).

Its worse than farmville though.  Spotify, the hot new music service, now requires you to have a facebook account in order to sign up.  When you sign up and use the service they have access to all your social information.  I don't even have to give Radio Shack my phone number any more but this new breed of business wants to know EVERYTHING not just my phone number but who my significant other is, who my best friends are, what books I've read, movies I've seen, etc….

We participate because it makes human relationships easy.  It's easy to contact people, its easy to keep the relatives up to date, it's easy to scream your opinions at the world.  The question I struggle with is whether this ease of communication reduces the value of the communication, especially when it comes at the cost of our privacy.  Privacy is something the modern world has valued for the last two hundred years, the US set the standard and now it's citizens are just giving it away to make their lives easy.

Do we value our privacy and intimacy in the relationships we hold close or is their more value in very one dimensional relationships with a couple hundred people and a complete loss of privacy.  To me it feels as if it is a quality or quantity question.

[Webmaster]

@Squeak – You aren't missing anything.  We don't have an image guide so to speak.  The site resizes any image of any size to appropriate dimensions so size both physically and storage wise are not an issue to users.

As to nudity, we do not allow nudity on public photos.  The age 18 requirement is representative of mixed acceptance of pole in different areas around the world.  This requirement insures we do not run afoul of any laws or parents around the world.

You may post properly censored photos.