Birthday, Cryptography
February 23rd 2006 -
It’s been a busy and stressful week. Happily, Monday was neither busy nor stressful: I turned 36 (1^2 * 2^2 * 3^2, and one of my favorite numbers) and wandered around town looking at things I could buy for my birthday. I ended up choosing a cheap mobile phone (which has already broken – the screen doesn’t display properly) to replace my lost mobile, and a fedora. Anna got me a t-shirt that said “Blah blah blah blah blah” on the front and “Blah blah” on the back. I’m not sure what message she’s sending me, but I like the t-shirt and will wear it a lot.
I bought the fedora mainly because I wanted to do some filming for my cryptography talk and needed a secret-spy kinda look, but I like the look of it anyway (I’m ignoring my usual instinctive wince at anything involving fashion.) When winter comes, I may wear it a bit more regularly, though it probably requires a waistcoat.
Actually, I did quite a lot of work on the cryptography talk on Monday, but it didn’t get really stressful until Tuesday when it was all looking a bit dodgy and far-from-ready. In grade 9, I gave a talk on binary numbers that was memorably bad – I didn’t prepare enough, I tried writing things on the blackboard, I stuttered and mumbled and was instantly branded a total geek for the rest of high-school. “Binary numbers” became an instant giggling point for the girls in my class. I’m not saying the total-geek branding wouldn’t have happened anyway – I am – but for a long time I rather overzealously prepared talks, and tried not to be too ambitious.
This talk, I was very ambitious. I have my theories about the learning process, and I wanted the talk to be something of a demonstration of these theories. I wanted to try out doing the entire talk using iMovie instead of powerpoint. I wanted to have some dialogue and interaction between the characters in the movie and me as presenter, because I’ve never seen that kind of thing done effectively, and I figured I could do it. Also, I wanted to give the kind of presentation on cryptography that I’d have benefited from, when I first joined Security Domain.
When it came to Tuesday, I had to cull a couple of these things, ’cause I wasn’t nearly well-prepared enough. The dialogue/interaction thing will have to wait for another day, though I still think I can do it well. Still, I figured I could do the rest of it if I did without some sleep. So at lunchtime on Tuesday I rounded up some of my workmates and filmed the story of Alice the baker, and Bob the director of the orphanarium. Alice wants to give her recipes for delicious fruit-flavoured lamingtons to Bob, so that he can feed his discerning orphans, but she doesn’t want Eve, the evil lamington factory owner (wearing a trenchcoat and fedora and poised with a notebook), to get her grubby hands on the recipes. We filmed for about an hour, and I got the shots I wanted.
That evening, I realised I had made a big mistake. My video camera (a sony trv900) is developing problems with its sound – it records sound perfectly well when you use an external microphone (which I do most of the time) but when you use the internal mike, the levels are too low to be useful. I had taken my video camera to work, but I forgot the mike. No matter: we have many canon video cameras at work, so we just used one of the really cool xl1s. However, I used a tape that I had “formatted” with the sony – I had prerecorded over the entire tape, so that it had a timestamp all the way through. I’m not sure whether that was *the* problem, but there certainly was *a* problem when it came time to capture the footage onto the computer: both the sound and video were glitchy and stuttery and full of weird artifacts. Unusable, in fact.
I retreated to the bedroom and did some kukoru for a while. It was now 8:00pm and although I had a bunch of notes, I had, essentially, no presentation yet.
The footage wasn’t too bad when I played it back on the video camera itself, if you ignored the bad sound. But it wouldn’t capture properly. So, I played the footage on the TV using the mini DV deck, pointed the video camera at the TV with a fresh tape, and recorded the footage straight from the TV.
It worked. In fact, it wasn’t even all that bad – if you squinted closely you could see the reflection of the video camera from the TV screen, and the resolution and colour were a bit rougher, but there wasn’t any flickering.
As it happened, I was also trying to capture footage from a couple of DVDs, and was having a hard time with that, too. The process of coverting the DVD to a movie file was proving extremely tedious, and then importing the movie file into iMovie was just as tedious again. Since I already had the camera pointing at the TV, and I had already logged all the footage I wanted to capture for “Enigma” and “Mercury Rising”, I went the low-tech option again, and recorded all the footage off the TV again. It took mere minutes, and there it was, all the footage imported into iMovie at the cost of a bit of resolution and colour. Bloody hell.
So, the remainder of the night was putting footage together to tell the story of Alice and Bob, and writing up extensive notes, because there was no way in hell I was going to improvise this talk. I got up early on Wednesday morning and kept going until I had to get to work, and I even did the rendering of the movie in the background while I was at work. It hit about 11:00am, and suddenly all the stress evaporated. Why was I caring? I was surrounded by friendly geeks, and I knew the subject well. There was no way it was going to be a disaster. Sure, the second half of the talk would be a bit more talky and less showy – I couldn’t work out what footage to shoot for the explanation of public-key cryptography in time – but it would be fairly reasonable.
And so, when it came time to give the talk I was perfectly calm and happy and not at all stressed, and it went down very well, I thought. There were a lot of interesting questions, which I knew the answers to (or at least had opinions on.) A couple of people came up afterwards and said they had learned a bunch from the talk.
Yesterday afternoon was a good afternoon.
Lessons learned:
1. I really should prepare more, but only the stress of imminant failure propels me to do the necessary work. I therefore need a new brain.
2. Low-tech hacks feel ugly and stupid, but work better and faster.
3. Cheap mobile phones can be kinda dodgy.
jen Says:
February 25th, 2006 at 5:41 am
well hey dude, happy 36th- glad it all went smashingly- I hope to call you tomorrow to say it- i’m afraid i have been characteristically slack… a new brain for your b’day sounds good but maybe expensive.. i can afford some very lovely (and yes slightly less cool) low tech things as i also having a few ‘issues’ with IT. sometimes one really wants to throw things…
admin Says:
February 25th, 2006 at 10:22 am
Thanks, Jen! Yep, it sure was a pleasant day even though I had the talk hanging over my head. What kind of things are causing you to throw stuff?
jen Says:
February 26th, 2006 at 5:45 am
well, heh, my lovely non-digital manual/automatic camera is on the blink and will cost nearly half of it’s own price to fix, am having trouble with our digital camcorder-(but, maybe i should read the sodding manual about that one!)- also video recorder is annoyingly deciding not to record one channel (the good channel) so general not-very-exciting minimal-but-annoying low tech problems i’m afraid!! talk to you tomorrow dude… jen