On The Subject Of Kingsnakes

Daniel McKenna · Kingsnakes And Coffee

There hasn't been much activity on this here blog lately; as I have been devoting most of my recent waking hours to a flawed attempt at making a video to go along with the above song, but alas, my OpenShot Video Editor has been quirky and that might be because the latest and greatest version of the software may have outpaced this laptop that I use, perhaps requiring more memory and/or resources than the ol' dinosaur (which dates back to just after the turn of the century) can handle.

It was going to be great...

The video was going to be great, it was going to start with Kevin Bape, a musician friend of my friend Jacob Scardino rapping along with the opening piece: "That's Like All The Time," and then would go to a shot of Bob Carvajal, doing his "Current Word," show at the Christian radio station, which Jacob produces, and then would have a bunch of still photos that would transition from one to another in time with the music, and would even have had a clip of me dancing around in my room in time with the music for a few seconds here and there. I even might have gone so far as to have found a clip of a kingsnake devouring a mouse (in time with the music).

But, Alas...

Such grand ideas; and an impetus for me to try to get better equipment.

There is another computer here, called the "Claudia" computer, which was given to me by the same Bob Carvajal (sp?) and is about as old as my laptop, but is a Windows machine and perhaps I could put OpenShot on a stick and stick the stick into Claudia and maybe it would run. Part of the problem (and the blessings) of Linux is that you basically have to cobble together your own software and there are thousands of programs, written by the thousands of members of the Open Source software development community, who might have cobbled together a utility that depends upon, you guessed it, any of the thousands of other utilities in order to run. There are a thousand ways to do one thing in Linux. You can't even get past setting up your desktop without choosing from the multitudes of them.

Harold, in his can kingdom...

(none)

I installed another one of the many video editors (some of which have names that elude to the same conundrum, like: "Yet Another Video Editor" (The YAVE Editor). The one I tried is called Olive, which is most likely, as per the Linux tradition, an acronym (I'm guessing that the last two letters stand for "video editor" and maybe the "O" means "open source") but Olive one uses a whole different set of libraries to render everything on the screen than what I have loaded. When I ran the program, I got a screen full of placeholders that basically were informing me things like: Here is where your timeline would be, and here is where the icons for the different tools would be if you had the right libraries to render them. There were lots of parentheses that said (none) in them...

I just now got the idea of running the older (outdated) version of OpenShot, with which I have done videos in the past. Maybe that kingsnake will strike yet!