Here is a little video that I made recently. I am kind of talking about it if it is a sleight of hand trick with dice on the video but actually it is not. Although I do really like magic, in fact after teaching English it is one of my main interests, this video is not really magic video. Well it is, it is just not sleight of hand like I say it is. But then again magic tricks are rarely what the magician says they are. Normally whatever the magician says it is is normally a red herring designed to throw you off.
So It is actually just done with some editing software. I had seen some similar videos about how to cheat when throwing dice and I came across one which had a lot of views where a man would say some numbers and then throw those numbers. After a moment or two it became obvious to me that the audio was recorded separately when he knew what the numbers were going to be and then dubbed it over the original video. There were many comments in the video that were saying how obvious it was. So I thought to my self, how can this be less obvious? Well if you could see the person’s mouth at the same time as the dice it would be a lot more convincing. So I set about fiddling about with the masking options in final cut pro.
The final video was actually my 3rd attempt. The first 2 were dismissed due to problems with lighting and positioning that made the masks too difficult to cover.
So it was done in post production. Does that make it less magic? I am not sure. I am pretty sure that Magicians like Derren Brown have done similar things. Check out his trick with a goal keeper and another with a psychologist in America. They were basically the same trick but with different skins and it is similar to this.
In my opinion, the important thing is that people enjoy it.

In my next post I will be talking about how to make youtube subtitles in srt format for your videos.

Not a lot of books have been written about Paraguay in the English language and some of the ones that do exist are very academic often focussing on a sometime very obscure feature of Paraguayan history. But Paraguay 200 is an easy read with lots of interesting pictures (some of which were taken by me) separated into clearly defined sections.

We don’t expect to sell an enormous amount of them in the short term but hopefully we will sell a few each month over the next few years. You can order it from the books own website Paraguay200.com

Paraguay is a country that is too often misunderstood and there is not a lot of good information out there about it. As a result many people have not ever heard of it and it is easily forgotten about by travellers when planning their itinerary. But it really is the lack of information that is causing this and by no means a lack of interesting things to see and do.  This is changing though and Paraguay is making more of a name for itself. Recently Bradt travel guides bought out the first ever travel guide for Paraguay and hopefully that along with this book will be the first of many steps to putting Paraguay on the map.

What bothers me more is that after half an hour, when I was able to get on the plate was gone as were many others. I checked another independent number plate website and they were selling my plate for £1499. That almost 4 times the amount the DVLA were selling it for. There is no way that they would have been able to but the plate and get it on their site in that time when the DVLA servers were down without some help from inside the DVLA.

Someone is making a lot of money out of this and whether it is the DVLA corruption of someone taking backhanders or perhaps they have done a legal deal with the DVLA it is still money that is being taken unethically from the DVLA, a public body which is there to provide a service to the public. So either way it is the public who are being robbed.

I will talk about lots of subjects including teaching and learning English, making movies, the news, my family and anything else that inspires me to get typing.