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Tue, 9 Dec 97 09:09:12 -0800
From: Tom Tate
To: tate@MIT.EDU
Subject: Comments on 6A26 web page

Hi Kristie,

I brought the laptop home last night to show Mom your field hockey videos. I think she wrote to you about them but overall she wasn't impressed. The big problem is that the videos are too small to see much; you can't identify players. I think she's seeing the limitations of current technology.

On the technical side, I downloaded your videos at work and brought them home for viewing. Transfer speeds were about 3 KB/sec as reported by Netscape. To put that in perspective, I regularly get 1.6 KB/sec download rates at home from Netcom using a 14.4k modem; the T1 link that Cadence has is almost a factor of 100 faster than the modem. Of course it is shared but I did this before 8:00 AM so the traffic should have been light. Incidently, it seemed to take forever to download because I would start it and then go off to do something else because I couldn't wait for it.

I took a look at your writeup today. I noticed that on "Tate's 6A26 Page" the links are white and the background is black. When I printed it, Netscape turned the background to white but left the links in white also--invisible ink! Suggest you change the color to fefefe or whatever so it is turned to black when printed. The monkey is cool.

Some suggestions:

• - grab some frames of good action shots and make them gif or jpg at the best resolution you can get, probably 320 x 200. Not everyone can look at video. If you put the photo next to the description of the video, you get a good index.
• - take the best video and make it the highest resolution possible. I'd rather wait longer and get something where I can actually see what is going on. Leave to current version but give the option to download a better quality one.
• - the video plays in a tiny window. I expanded it to full screen and it was really funny to see players made out of about ten pixels--they looked like stick figures.
• - It would be helpful to have a little more written description of the game in the introduction, like what the score was.
• - In the first page, there is a link that says "Onward". Yuk! Either place all the second page on the first one or make the link something like "MIT at Clark, 11/??/97". Then you have a place to link additional games.

Overall, nice work. It did give some flavor of the quality of play and since that was your object, it's successful. But it also whets the appetite and makes me want longer, better quality videos.

Dad
(Tom Tate)

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Kristie Tate
December 9, 1997
6A26 Seminar