This past week has been split mostly between two distinct but obviously related activities:

1. Creating video presentations about GATE Village in time for the Open House

2. Creating GATE Village in time for the Open House

I'm happy to report that we've accomplished both tasks and, if you'll allow me to say so, we've done really well! We've created 6, count 'em six!, new slick video presentations. We were shooting for “medium production quality” as we can't realistically afford anything else – and I think we hit the mark, at least we are all happy with the results and I don't mind saying that I'm a tad surprised at how well they do look.

We have literally only cracked the final HD versions today, ready for the Open House but we've not yet put them up on YouTube for your Internet Viewing Pleasure, but we'll do so soon and post the URLs in next week's GATE Links. I could go on and on about video editing, oh the things I am learning! But I'll save you the effort of my words and instead just leave you with a few facts:

• 6 good quality videos (HD 1080p – BlueRay DVD)

• 24 minutes of production video

• 900 minutes (15 hours) of filming

• 1,200 minutes (20 hours) of editing

• 720 minutes (12 hours) of rendering (producing the final videos)

  • A 4 minute video takes about 1.5 hours to render on our quite fast, new computers – CPU is pinned at 100% the entire time

• 2,420,182,092 total bytes for the final 6 files (that is over 2 gigabytes)

  • at least 10 times that in copies, half-takes, out-takes and other goof-ups. The hard drive storage industry must LOVE the YouTube world!

• 4 very happy employees

GATE Village LIVE!

With all this video production going on around him, Gary has worked overtime in getting the first revision of GATE Village ready for the Open House. Its all well and good to have all these fancy commercials, but without a GATE Village they are nothing more than those numbers I just posted.

http://www.gatevillage.net is on the air – note the “.net” domain – the Village is gatevillage.net, the corporation is gatevillage.com – we know we need to get that .com domain into shape and these new-fangled videos ought to help out there, but it is the Village that GATE is all about and so it is the Village that Gary had his attention focused upon.

The bad part about being in IT is that you get to spend a lot of time and energy doing things that, if you've done your job right, nobody ever knows happened. Gary has to worry about load-balancing, redundancy, backups, replication, notifications, and, well the list seems endless from my perspective. I'm quite familiar with what Gary has to do and just how much work he has accomplished, and I'm very appreciative of his efforts! And a call out to Tibi as well! Thanks for your programming efforts, GATE and I appreciate it.

We now have a site that will accept users, provide them with the Membership Sign-Up Package (a suite of policies and agreements describing the relationship between them and GATE) and a place and way for members to pay us! It's still pretty bare-bones, but it is solid, scalable, and extensible; it turns out we've chosen well with Drupal, even Gary is impressed with the choice.

Anyway, again our heartfelt thanks go to Gary for his hard work! We appreciate it even if nobody else will.