Ron Lindeboom
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COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Todd Terry] “…plus I just prefer watching DVDs on a real television set, seen more as they are “meant to be seen,” rather than little embedded videos.”
You mean like this one…
Or perhaps the uncompressed full-weight 1080p version at https://reels.creativecow.net/film/11503, which if your pipe is deep and wide enough can give you higher than DVD performance. For mortals without 10gig-e pipes, they must wait for the download.
The way the web is going, Blu-ray quality is not far off. In some areas it’s already a reality.
The web really is whatever people choose to make it.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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I am, as ever, your friend, Jim — er, um, I mean, Nick.
(Sorry for the Star Trek 3 humor.) ;o)
No, seriously, it is an honor to know you, Nick, and to be your friend.
Nice to know that you read the magazine. 😉
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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[John Davidson] “Just about everyone you talk to has some gloom and doom story of how x is happening and we’re all so helpless to the whims of fate. These stories add to the fear and desperation that feed recessions – people hold back the little cash they have to weather the storm, prices plummet, businesses go under, and the sky gets darker by the day.”
Personally, when people talk like that, I ask them what are they doing about it.
Many Americans don’t seem to understand that they are now, by a vast majority, in a service economy — at least most don’t know what that means to them (if they did, they wouldn’t hoard their money and quake like lemmings running into dark corners to hide because the market’s “bad”). With no real manufacturing to speak of, it is hard to rebound when people are afraid to act and spend money. The flow of money is the life blood of a service-based economy.
Without that flow, things collapse fast. There is not much to fall back on at that point, other than government — and as I celebrate my 60th birthday, I find that idea laughable at best. It used to be government by and for the people, but the people aren’t reading, don’t act, and expect others to do it all for them. That’s a recipe for disaster. (Sometimes, I am really glad to be 60.)
Like Walter points out: if you live and talk like the sky is falling, then most assuredly it will fall…on you, the quickest of all.
I like strategies and plans. Things are always bad somewhere. It is what you do when things go bad that separates achievers from non-achievers.
If we had applied much of the rhetoric bandied about in this forum when we launched the COW with little more than a burning hope, vision, and blind ambition, we’d not be here today. Why? We had no money. We had no investors. To make matters worse, we had competitors that were sitting on many millions in the bank.
We didn’t have a proverbial pot to ____ in. We were recovering from three bouts of viral pneumonia. We had lost all our accounts. We had enemies who didn’t like us because we had built something before that they couldn’t. They lied publicly about all the money we “made” from our earlier site; with it, they tried to turn all of their friends — and many of ours — against us. I wish we had the money they claimed we made, because if we had, our struggle would have been far easier than the one we walked through for years.
Life kicks your ass sometime. Get over it. Suck it up and get on with it. Do something about it. Don’t take no for an answer. Build something. If it doesn’t work, quickly build something else.
Remember the dinosaurs, they couldn’t adapt. Little furry tiny-teethed (but oh so tasty) little mammals beat the giants in the game of life.
Creative COW is now bigger and has a larger footprint than every major multi-national trade publisher in this market. The Creative COW Magazine is now — at just five years old — the strongest magazine in this industry. As I have written in the magazine before, it was a gamble — we had no back-up and no money to fall back on. A year in reserve? We didn’t have a month in reserve when we launched it. It was all a gamble. After we announced that we’d be building a magazine, we heard that a competing website was also about to launch a magazine — so we jumped on it like a house afire. They never did release their magazine.
Did it work? Yes.
Creative COW is now, at long last after 15 years of work in this field, a real business that employs many, pays a bunch more sub-contractors, gives away over a million dollars a year in free services that we pay for, not counting the forums. And we’ve launched a foundation that awards grants to students at the American Film Institute.
Not bad for people who spent the better part of a half year in bed with pneumonia, then relapsed again and again for a couple more years. Those who know me know that I fight near-constant chronic ear infections because of it. It sucks. So what. My life is a cakewalk compared to the 3 year old girl I saw on Discovery Health Network recently who had so little spine that she was drowning in her own blood because her spine couldn’t hold her up — so her lungs were collapsing. Now that is heartbreaking. She had to have stainless steel rods screwed into her vertebrae to keep this from happening to her. And as she grows, she’ll have to have the surgery over and over. God bless that little girl, she has more courage than most men.
Fight back or lay down…it’s your call.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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[Tim Wilson] “re Bob Zelin: … Ronald and I were [some of] the people he used to rail against in 1995 — with cheapo $30,000 Media 100 cards and BetaSP/UVW … taking big money away from the Avid/DigiBeta/BVW crowd. He has also spoken on almost a weekly basis about how, if you don’t stay motivated to drive yourself into the ground learning EVERYTHING new, you’ll find yourself working at McDonalds, having been replaced by people working at McDonalds now. Bob has changed his focus for the same reason Walter has: the old wells are drying up, if not completely dry. But there are new wells if you’re able to blow everything up and start over.”
This has been the one constant in this industry: a level of almost soul numbing change that demands a near constant redefining and repositioning of oneself.
I remember the first time I met Bob Zelin 15 years ago online in the Avid-L listserv. I was an enthusiastic Media 100 jockey and he was easily the most feared and one of the most respected men on Avid-L. Let’s be nice and say that in my first discourse with him, he taught me the true meaning of the words: “Oh God, please help me — what in the hell have I gotten myself into?” (He gave me my introductory initiation into what many here in the COW today refer to as being “Zelinized.”)
One thing I know about Bob is that he knows more about this industry in his little finger than I do in my whole body. And like many here, he sees how greatly the industry has changed. In the number of phone calls I have had with him over the years, it is clear to me that Bob is all too aware of the pace of staggering change in this market — and its affect on both who we are, and what we can charge our clients.
Oh, and he’s actually quite funny and much more calm and listening on the phone, than some of you might expect.
Many here also already know the story about how when he began coming here many years ago, Kathlyn called me into her office and said that I think we need to close a guy’s account who is telling people he’s going to come to their house and spank them and take their dog because they are too stupid to have one. I asked who it was. She showed me a thread and there — lo and behold — was Bob Zelin in the COW. I said excitedly: “Wow, Bob Zelin comes to the COW? Kathlyn, it’s working — the COW is becoming what I hoped it would one day be.”
She thought I was on crack or something. But today, like the vast majority here, when she sees Bob Zelin posts in a thread, they are some of the first she reads. You can tell because she is laughing in her office and when you ask why, she is quick to say something like: “Listen to this that Bob Zelin just said…”
Change: at least it’s constant.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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Hello Eric,
At your request, we have added a forum for Lightworks and if you would like to be one of the hosts, we would welcome you to the Creative COW forum team. Interested?
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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[Mike Cohen] “Better for me to be linked to 1 surgeon than 10 soccer moms and a plumber.”
But what about a female plumber who is also a soccer mom and practices surgery occasionally on the side?
You remember the joke, Mike, about the doctor who needed a plumber for a stopped up sink and when he was given the bill, said “$430 for ten minutes work? I’m a doctor and I don’t even make that!”
To which the plumber replied with a smile: “Yeah, I didn’t make that when I was a doctor, either.”
Sorry. I’ll go away now.
;o)
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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[Mark Suszko] “Mike’s funny and pithy post would make a worthy bookend to Harrington’s piece, IMO.”
I was thinking the exact same thing, Mark.
When I grow up, I wanna be just like Mike Cohen.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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Crack is in the filter because people talk about getting “crack” software, or a cracked version, etc.
Cialis is at the heart of specialist, so that is what happened there.
Sorry for the inconvenience but we are not big on software piracy here, nor in pushing medication for erectile dysfunction.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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The ones who always amaze me, Mike, are the ones who when you suggest that they post online so that they get more than one opinion and also so that others may benefit from the discussion, they cuss you out as if you are being a jerk.
Oh well,
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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[Nick Griffin] “Calm down, Ron. I don’t believe it’s anything personal, more like the fact that the majority of the herd here is in film, video and motion graphics.”
I didn’t think it was anything personal, Nick. I am just always concerned when women say they are not comfortable at the COW. I pay particular attention to what they say because I am not interested in being only a “Boy’s Club” kind of site. In fact, we once killed the one forum that was quite trafficked and was avowedly Boys Town in nature.
That was my concern, no need for chill pills, I was just wondering if there were any comments made that we might have gained an insight from, is all.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen