I think my video review of the new JVC camcorder will be available soon on the Internet Archive here.

I shot this last night in the bathroom in building 18. Hey, it has a mirror so you can see the camcorder in the video.

I'm still returning this camcorder and getting a less-expensive Panasonic model.

I really like the idea of OurMedia.org. After all, I want to have a service that makes it easy for me to share my entire life with you. Text. Photos. Video. Audio.

But my experience in the past 24 hours tells me we are a LONG way from a service that anyone can use. Particularly when it comes to video.

First of all, the uploading experience, in particular, sucked. I tried more than half a dozen times to upload a video. In both IE and Firefox. It barfed everytime and gave very vague error messages.

This is one place where AJAX just isn't the right methodology. The browser wasn't designed to upload things. I switched over to http://www.archive.org and there they force you to use an FTP client or an app that you download. This was a far superior experience, albeit I had to be a geek because using FTP isn't something that most people are familiar with.

With my FTP app I could see how progress was going. With the browser I saw no progress. It either works or it fails.

And that's on top of being forced to be a media file expert to begin with. My new hard-drive based camcorder makes MPG2 format videos. But they can't be uploaded cause they take 4GB per hour. Whew.

So, you need to pick between Microsoft's format, Apple's format, Macromedia's format, Real's format, or the more generic MPG4 format. Problem is there's no ubiquity in playback (except for maybe Macromedia's format which I don't like as much as the others). I can just imagine a normal person giving up.

Don't think Microsoft is blameless here. Our encoding tools are WAY too complex. Windows Media Encoder is free, yes, but you almost need a computer science degree to use it. I wish we had a really great compression component and a really great uploading component that we could use in our Web-based apps. You should just be able to drag an MPG2 file onto a target and have the system do everything else for you.

Well, that's my video rant for the day.

John Porcaro tells the story of a company treating an employee pretty darn poorly (not Microsoft, he tells his own experience of how Microsoft treated him after his accident).

I wish I knew the name of the company so that I could permanently avoid them, but alas, naming the company might bring a lawsuit so it probably isn't wise. Sigh.

eWeek: Patent Claims are a Red Herring, Microsoft says.

This blog, done by Nathan on the Avalon team, shows a tiny bit about Avalon. Early next month you'll see more on Channel 9. I'd hype it up, but I don't wanna ruin the suprise.

Anyway, the flippin CD bitmap doesn't do Avalon justice. The designers over on Avalon are doing some killer work, though. Can't wait to see this blog evolve over the next year.

Eric Sink explains Visual Studio's new pricing structure.

O'Reilly's OnLamp.com published an interesting article by Stephen Walli. He used to work at Microsoft in one of the first open source projects done here. I interviewed him a while back. Anyway, his article is titled "Perspectives on the Shared Source Initiative."

My first blog post over on Our Media. But, that's not what's cool. Coming soon will be a video I recorded on that new JVC camcorder.

The Our Media experience was a bit rough. Had to get two sets of passports. Kim Cameron, please save us and give us an identity system that everyone will trust and use!

Then I couldn't get it to work from my office computers at Microsoft. Some sort of proxy server problem. At home it barfed too and wasn't smooth. Definitely we're a long ways away from having video blogs that anyone can do.

Scoble's new toy: a JVC GZ-MC200u (a camcorder that records video on a hard drive instead of on tape). Read why it's going back to Best Buy tomorrow.

Neat idea, though. But it needs to let you record in a compressed format like WMV, MPG4, Real, Flash video, or Quicktime. If it did that then it'd be a KILLER device for doing video blogs.

Thomas Hazlett, in FT.com: Is Microsoft toast?

Well, we are feeling the heat. That's for sure. Oh, but that's just cause we're experiencing a drought this winter and the sun has been out in abundance lately. Hey, Lenn moved to California and it's been sunny in Seattle ever since. Or at least it seems that way. You'll see in the Bill Hill video (airing in early April) that it was quite warm out yesterday with a stunningly blue sky (we forget what that looks like in Redmond on some winters).

I have a conspiracy theory. Apple ordered the sunshine so that we'd go out and play in the sun and forget to ship any new software (funny aside: I remember when my friends who worked at Borland would actually pray that it'd turn sunny in Seattle so Microsoft engineers would be tempted to go outside). Who knows? Maybe Steve Jobs has a new way of controlling the weather.

Funny line from Bill Hill yesterday: "Scotland voted for global warming."

Seriously, back to the article. I remember people counting Microsoft out before several times in my career. Almost as many times as people counted Apple out.

Here's a hint: I'm not planning on looking for a new job anytime soon.