The Green Pill Secret: Emotional Intelligence

Welcome everyone to a new episode of the Green Pill Secret, brought to you from lovely Reston, VA. This week we’re talking about Emotional Maturity through Emotional Intelligence. I, personally, am the first to admit I sometimes lose my cool. I don’t like it, but it happens. For instance, they inserted a new line item into my lease requiring me to pay for the common area at utility rates which would be more expensive than for a 4000+ sq ft. / 375 m²  home but divided among 100 or so apartments. There’s no way gas and electric for one month of the common areas is more than $3,500, it should be about a tenth of that for the given common area square footage.

Point being, something like that, dealing with it and reading a 66 page new lease agreement and trying to get this episode out, it’s a lot of stress. And when I went to export the video, would it just be my luck that Final Cut Pro crashed and deleted all my edits! So, I couldn’t export it when I was down, complaining to the leasing office and then had to edit it again when I got back. Needless to say, I was angry and as there was noone but me to complain to, I yelled at the walls as I headed for the leasing office to kowtow to their weird new amenities rider. And, it didn’t help that that the Adobe Reader was doing a terrible job with Text to Speech!

Anyway, someone called me while I was trying to negotiate my lease and I called them back for a potential contract to hire job opportunity—which is likely the best option opened to me at this point. And I’m late for this Maryland Tesla Owners event. So, just keep calm and carry on and you’ll be fine as long as you remember to regulate your emotions!

The Green Pill Secret: Convention Roundtable, Part 1

In the first episode of our Autumn series, I bring you the best I could do with the difficult recording I made at the L.I. Who convention on 25 August, 2024. When I recorded the episode, about half-way through, I noticed that the pickup mic wasn’t on and so the only audio being recorded was from the microphone next to Cat and myself. Consequently, the raw recording has Lawrence Neals, returning guest Alex Boruff, and Cat’s daughter Gracie practically silent. I tried to use Final Cut Pro to amplify our guests voices, but it was limited to only 12 dB gain. However, since Zoom records both video with audio and audio by itself, I used Audacity to amplify all the quiet sections by up to 20 dB and the normalize the audio to remove any of the pops. This is probably the best I can do without some Peter Jackson type AI Audio jiggery-pokery.

In part 1, we describe our podcast to our guests and have them each introduce themselves. Thanks again for your patience with the sound quality and we hope you can take one more episode as we bring you part 2, next week.

Hello from Texas

If all goes well, I’ll be in Texas when you see this post, and this video from August 2017.

The reason it’s taken me so long to share the video is because when I filmed it, I underestimated how far across the screen the sun would track, so when it was about to go off the edge, I had to reposition the iPhone 5S which created a discontinuity in the video. Now that I have a 2023 Space Grey Macbook Pro with the M3 processor, using Final Cut Pro. I was able to split the video into 3 sections, and then eyeball the adjacent frames to make the movement flow smoothly. I then shifted the whole thing so the entire arc would fit in the frame.

The other problem with the video is when the full eclipse occurs, no light gets through and so the sun disappears! This is what I’m hoping to do correctly right now, somewhere near Austin.

I don’t know where I will be, as I wanted to go to the Lake Buchanan reservoir but if it’s too crowded, my friend Scott Wilson does have an alternate location I may end up visiting.

Don’t forget to light and subscribe!