Progress of a Snail.

I announced my U.S. Presidential campaign on May 1 to the internet without much fanfare or even notifying the media. It's now been 3 weeks and I still haven't notified the media. To date my youtube video has been viewed 52 times and my website has had 60 unique visitors. My campaign website and video are getting top 10 hits when you google "2008 write-in president."

I thought I might do my press release tonight but I was in a bad mood after today's Land Use, Housing and Transportation Committee (of Richmond City Council) which lasted from 3 - 7 pm. I just wanted to have "fun" and decompress so I called a couple of friends and hung out with them and watched TV. We watched "Outrageous TV Moments" and American Idol with the help of Tivo

Filming the video.

I filmed my youtube announcement video on April 30 and worked all evening and the next day on the video. It was a pretty tedious process-- first I had to convert the video from mpeg to dv (digital video) so I could edit it in iMovie -- that took over an hour. Then I had to sync the audio with the video. I had recorded the audio on a separate device. The audio was recorded mono and I had to convert it to stereo. Then when I saved the file in a 320x240 format -- it took 7 hours to render. The whole unedited video was over 16 minutes and weighed in at a lean 40 MB. However, I soon learned that youtube only has two limitations -- your movie may not be more than 1024 MB or longer than 10 minutes. So I uploaded the original unedited video to video.google.com. Then I edited a less than 10 minute version to upload to youtube. The editing is rough because I used Quicktime Pro to edit it and that is not such a great program to use for video editing. Oh well, it was fast and I hope I selected some good clips. Also there are some funny surprises in the complete unedited version. I'd like to invite citizens to make their own edits of the video and upload them to youtube. I'll post any favorites to my website.

I'm had a long day and I'm tired. So I'm going to call it a night.

Get involved in your government!