Blue Scream of Jeff: YouTube

Showing posts with label YouTube. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Making it look easy, isn’t easy

Putting together a good how-to can be just as frustrating as putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

“Woodworking for Mere Mortals”

It’s no secret by now that I’ve become a bit of a YouTube addict who enjoys spending his very late Friday nights perusing the channels of his favorite DIYers and Makers.

The amount of creativity shown by the likes of Steve “Woodworking for Mere Mortals” Ramsey, Matthias "Woodgears.ca" Wandel, Marc “The Wood Whisperer” Spagnuolo, Izzy “Think Woodworks” Swan, Frank “Frank Makes” Howarth, Jimmy Diresta, and April “Wilkerdos” Wilkerson always amazes me and is a constant source of project ideas for my ever-growing, things-I-need-to-make list.

These often well produced, always entertaining and informative how-to videos which show various projects’ progressions from concept through completion, was the inspiration for last month’s “Giving Old Tech New Life” post.

Matthias Wandel

And while I don’t have a really good video camera, studio lighting or the software needed to professionally edit video (yet), I figured, how hard can it be to put together a small how-to on my blog site?

After all, part of my responsibilities at my day job is creating step-by-step documentation – complete with lots of screen shots – that show both our users and our tech staff how to use a particular program, install it and/or configure it.

I was confident I could knock the whole thing out in an hour or so.

Boy, was I wrong.

Unlike taking a series of screen shots and writing a captions for them describing what a user needs to click on to proceed to the next step, documenting a build as “simple” as the clock in last month’s blog was a hell of a lot more complex than I’d ever imaged.

“The Wood Whisperer”

I never realized the way I work in my shop is drastically different from the way I do things at work.

Almost by definition, working with computers requires approaching things in a logical, orderly fashion; following an exact series of steps in a sequential manner until the task at hand is done. At work, this is exactly how I do things.

But in my shop, I just wing it. I rarely if ever draw any real plans, make a cut list or plot out the order of the build. At most, I have a few crude sketches with dimensions scrawled on them and an idea that I’ve been turning over in my head for a few weeks.

I am well aware that this isn’t the most efficient use of my rather limited time in my shop. I know that if I actually spent some time to create a set of detailed plans in Sketch-Up or even Quark Xpress, I’d be able to avoid the slowdowns that always seem to crop up because I hadn’t foreseen some problem or another when I had “built” the project in my head.

“Think Woodworks”

This never seemed important until now. As long as I was making at least some progress on my project and ended the day the same number of fingers I’d started with in the morning, I considered it a really good day in the shop.

Yet even if I had made detailed plans and followed them to the letter, the clock build still would have taken me twice as long to complete as would have if I wasn’t documenting it. After every step, I had to remember to stop and try to get clear, in-focus pictures that showed what I was doing.

Once that was done I thought I was home-free. All that remained was to write a short introduction and 20 or so captions for the photos, then post it on the blog. I was sure I could accomplish all that in an hour.

Yeah, right…

Frank Makes”

By now I really should know that my sense of how long it takes me to complete a task has absolutely no basis in reality. I’m really horrible at estimating time, and always think I can do something much more quickly than it actually takes me. So I was a little surprised when I finished the writing part in the time I had allotted.

“Cool!” I thought. “Everything’s going to plan for once.”

I should have realized right then and there that things wouldn’t be quite that easy.

Instead of the five minutes I’d thought it take me to upload the photos, cut and paste some text and write some simple HTML to get everything looking the way I wanted, it took me over three bloody hours!

I freely admit I’m no IT genius. I’m a generalist who has a very broad understanding of all the various specialties that make up the Information Technology field, and while none of that knowledge runs really deep, I sure as hell know how to create a basic HTML table!!

Jimmy Diresta

My coding skills won’t win any awards, and I know the use of tables to format a webpage went out of style with Netscape Navigator back in the late ’90s, but hey, it’s a quick, down and dirty way to do it.

So why the hell Blogspot constantly kept rewriting my code and completely screwing it up is beyond me!

Hey Google. Leave my #%$@! HTML code alone, damn it!

I could have built my own web server from spare parts, bought and registered my own domain and created an entire web site from scratch using only Notepad in the time it took me to get Blogspot to format my last post correctly! (Yes, I know there are third party slideshow plug-ins I could have used, but I mistakenly thought it would be quicker to build my own table rather than learning how to use one of those.)

April “Wilkerdos” Wilkerson

My frustration in wanting to get that post to look even somewhat professional gave me even more respect for people like Steve, Matt, Mark, Izzy, Jimmy, Frank and April. As easy as these folks make it look to provide content that, in many respects surpasses cable’s DIY shows, I now realize it takes a hell of a lot of work and understand why many of them quit their day jobs to devote their full efforts to making these shows.

So to all of them I say a hearty thank you for keeping me inspired, making me want to get back into my shop and for helping me to wind down at the end of each week.

And if you’ve never check out any of their channels before, please do. Maybe they’ll inspire you too.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Everything I Really Need to Know I learned on YouTube

As a writer and lover of the English language, it pains me to admit that when it comes to acquiring a new skill, I’m more a visual learner than a word guy.

It’s not that I can’t pickup how to do something by just reading an article or following a step-by-step guide in a book or magazine. But give me a series of pictures to look at, and I seem to instantly understand how something comes together (or, more often, gets taken apart).

I’ve always been that way, from the model kits I used to put together as a kid to the woodworking magazines I read today, which feature lots of photos and diagrams of projects in just about every stage of construction.

Even in my day job as a systems technician for a Pennsylvania-based news media company, I find myself turning time and again to visual guides to keep the company’s ever-growing array of high-tech gadgets running.

Contrary to popular belief we computer geeks aren’t born with an innate knowledge of how to breakdown and fix every piece of technology that lands on our workbenches. Sometimes even we need to turn to the Internet to find out how to repair something.

Lately my go-to site for this sort of thing has been Youtube. In just the past few months I’ve turned to the popular video upload site several times. First I needed to find out how to disassemble a Dell Inspiron 15z laptop, just so I could replace the inconveniently-located hard drive. (Seriously, what genius places the most failure-pone part of a laptop in a place where you have to completely disassemble the unit to replace it! Who does Dell think they are? Apple?)

Oh and speaking of Apple, my next trip to the site was to find out how to replace the digitizer (glass screen) on an iPad, that one of our employees had cracked – again. I’ve also used a Youtube video to help me replace the broken headphone connection on my third generation iPod and numerous times to find out how to accomplish a number of special effects in Adobe Photoshop.
also found myself turning to it for non-work stuff. I’ve mostly used it to find out how to do things in my woodworking shop, like cutting dovetails or tuning up some of my tools. But on occasion I’ve used it for more mundane things like finally figuring out how to fold a fitted bottom sheet of a bed, and that got me wondering what other “life- skill” videos I could find on the site.

So I recently went looking, and was somewhat surprised by the answer.

There were hundreds if not thousands of these types of videos! Now some of them are probably of dubious quality and I wouldn’t necessarily trust the self-proclaimed experts who made them, but the are still a staggering number of them. This reminded me of a book written back in the late 1980s, by a man named Robert Fulghum: “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”

In it, he postulated that everything one needs to get on in this world was learned in Kindergarten. Now admittedly, he wasn’t talking about things which my Occupational Therapist-wife calls Activities of Daily Living – or ADL for short – which are the skills a person needs in order to live an independent life. Fulghum was talking about rules of social conduct.

But just as important as learning how to share and “doing unto others as we have done unto us,” are knowing how to bath ourselves and taking care of our own personal hygiene; dressing; eating, feeding and cooking; doing house work; managing money; shopping; transport and even child and pet care.

And if you somehow missed learning any of these skills while you were growing up, YouTube has you covered. I found plenty of videos which cover these topics and I’ve sprinkled them throughout this blog. Some are down right amusing and some helpful (Yes, I did finally learn to fold that fitted bed sheet from a YouTube video).

So Mr. Fulghum, I respectfully suggest that you revise your book for today’s “Internet Generation.” I even have the title for you: “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned on Youtube.”