I’m Tracking Santa

A few years ago Google got involved and updated the video (now festooned with the Google logo). All of a sudden the beautiful Santa video the network had sent was a YouTube download. It looked awful!

You want me to admit humbug? Fine. I was originally a jerk as far as tracking Santa is concerned. It seemed trite and stupid to me. I did it grudgingly. Is it too late to apologize?

Year-by-year I heard from people who enjoyed watching for Santa sometimes with their kids, often not. I got into it too! Now I look forward to Santa’s appearance. I look forward to it a lot!

NORAD’s Santa tracking video was sent to us via ABC News. A few years ago Google got involved and updated the video (now festooned with the Google logo). All of a sudden the beautiful Santa video the network had sent was a YouTube download. It looked awful! I called New York and was met by indifference.

I’ve given up depending on others. This is too important.

I called NORAD yesterday… or at least the agency they use to distribute their video. Justin (should NORAD have someone named Justin working for them?) gave me the user name and password for their FTP site.

Rest easy. I have downloaded Santa!

Of course nothing is simple. Their video is encoded as an mpeg. My weather computer can only play Quicktime.

There are lots of transcoders. Few of them convert to Quicktime. I downloaded PRISM and have spent the last twenty minutes making Santa weather computer friendly.

I will bring Santa to work on a memory stick in my pocket. He’s looking good this year.

3 thoughts on “I’m Tracking Santa”

  1. Too bad the forecast was tough today. Normally I make a nifty animation on ShowFx but today I just had to throw together a static shot of him over Europe. I better not get coal because of it!

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