Dr. Pollack MD

[curtiscarter]

I loved the screencast but have an itching question. I've been
having hemroid problems lately. I have already tried preparation H to
no avail. Do you have any suggestions?

[Jason Seifer]

Hi Curtis, Have you tasted your urine for any possible clues?

[Gregg Pollack]

ROFL... glad you liked the screencast Curtis... Thanks for supporting
what we do...

You know.. at first I wasn't so sure about the doctor bit, because it
is a little off topic.

But staring at code can boring after a while, so I figured if I taught
two things at the same time, one being more entertaining, that it
might help keep people's attention.

People start to daze off every 7-10 minutes, so I hoped that having
the little jingle and something refreshing might keep people engaged.
Then another part of me thought it was too distracting, and a waste of
time.

What did you think?

[curtiscarter]

Not lately. What should I be tasting for?
Hold up. Your not Dr. Pollack. Whats your title?

[curtiscarter]

Ah Dr. Pollack. Yes the little Dr excursions worked "ok" and I
believe as long as you leave them short and sweet they add to the
screencast. The only other minor quibbles I have are some issues in
the sound. The Loading Large Data Sets portion was obviously recorded
differently than the rest and it has background noise issues. I
believe car is driving by at 4:07 and at 4:23-27 there is some sort of
low frequency that rattled my brain, but most people are not going to
watch a Rails casts on an audiophile setup. As far as the video
recorded sections are concerned, I am no recording studio expert so
I'm not sure how you could pull off a higher quality recording without
speaking directly into a nice mic.

So to rate your first screencast against your typical Peepcode cast.
Audio is not as good but I'm sure 99% of the people that buy this will
not care nor can tell a difference.
Visually I like how you show related data on the screen at one time.
It's easier to understand more complex associations when you can see
them all on the screen at the same time and aren't flipping around to
multiple files in Textmate.
Anyways, I'll be buying more of your casts.

On Aug 26, 2:19 pm, "Gregg Pollack" <greggpoll...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ROFL... glad you liked the screencast Curtis... Thanks for supporting
> what we do...
>
> You know.. at first I wasn't so sure about the doctor bit, because it
> is a little off topic.
>
> But staring at code can boring after a while, so I figured if I taught
> two things at the same time, one being more entertaining, that it
> might help keep people's attention.
>
> People start to daze off every 7-10 minutes, so I hoped that having
> the little jingle and something refreshing might keep people engaged.
> Then another part of me thought it was too distracting, and a waste of
> time.
>
> What did you think?
>

[Gregg Pollack]

Yeah.. I feel your pain with the audio quality. We tried placing
our podcasting microphone right under where we were speaking. The
audio quality that resulted was "good enough", but yeah, for people
like us who enjoy high quality audio, it wasn't as good as I would
have hoped.

Next time I'll be using a Lavaliere, no doubt. Should be much
better quality. Well, not that most people will notice that much.
hehe.. but we will!

-Gregg

[Max]

Enjoyed the screencast very much, you presented some classic database
design patterns within the context of Rails very nicely :), liked that
you use migrations to illustrate DDL for your models, looking forward
to part 2, especially plugins and gems.

The elephant sounds and bird calls in the background were wonderful,
especially the cockatoo, and i thought I heard an Emu as well .. or
maybe that is just my anti-depressant.

Anyhoo ..

What kind of car was that? I am fine with car sounds in the
background as long as the cars making the sounds do 0-60 in under 6
seconds and you get them doing a fast start, preferably with some good
wheel chirps and turbo or supercharger sound.

I have always enjoyed the humor you two inject into your
presentations, however, I would prefer more computer-geeky
interludes .. how to make self-migrating Rails virii with ruby, things
not to do with Rails / ruby, or examples of really poor 'in the wild'
ruby code accompanied by your witticisms .. anti-patterns ... that
kind of thing.

Any plans on doing Merb presentations? Would really like to see a few
of those! :)

Thanks again, looking forward to the next screencast with more faster
cars in it!