Jeff made a post about memory and the fit between blogging and reflecting with pleasure. In that spirit, I offer two items. The first is from my personal collection, an official KGBS CB Radio Guide. I actually sent off the SASE to have this thing mailed to me--must have been 1977. The second is a link to my own television memory item. No comment.

If you've got an extra twelve minutes and a decent Interent connection, feel free to take a look at a screencast for an upcoming NCTE presentation. The sound is not quite right, but the root of the problem is I recorded it too hot in the original Camtasia files and I'm not going back and have had enough tweaking.

47.5 mb movie

My son's stopmotion in honor of the day:

Came across this while sweeping the Web for mediawiki tips.

I've posted a video reflection of a recent annotation assignment. The Flash video is about 35mb, so click the image or use the link below only if you have a decent Internet connection. For the assignment, we used a CommentPress text set up by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Lot's of good things happened. I pretty much stepped out of the way (my favorite teaching style) while students worked with one another to pick apart the text. We wove in video clips from the film version of the story, so we got to think about media and narrative and a hybrid interpretation of the story. Great interaction among commentators. You can check out the online edition of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge we created or watch my video reflection on Student-Centered Literary Studies on the Web.

One final post from last week's trip to New Mexico. Opening day at the 2007 Balloon Fiesta. You can't hear it in the video, but as we were walking by the Spam booth, the woman inside was harking, "spam, get your spam here," which would have made the day, except the day was made by the time together with my family--something only hinted at by the magical colors, shapes, and movements of the balloons.

So, I was totally unhappy with the Youtubing of my chile roasting video in the previous post. Not only was the end result too grainy to make out the titles, it took an hour-plus for the video to be processed and made available on YouTube.

As an experiment I offer this version, self-converted to flv format using Flash. I tried working with ffmpegX, but the files kept turning out choppy. Any recommendations for free converters are most welcome.

Ultimately, I want to get the ffmpeg running on my ISP account so I can use the flash upload module for drupal and convert videos on the fly as they are uploaded to the blog. I spent about two days with that effort a few months back and threw up my hands as I hit the wall. Again, insights invited.

Scenes from last night's dinner. If you ever get to Albuquerque, you must go to Sadie's. Of course, the perennial question is red or green (chile), to which last night I responded with both. In retrospect, the carne adovada pork rib had enough red chile in the meat to get that kick just right, so a bit more green sauce over the relleno might have worked. Not that I'm complaining.

1:12 minutes (503.49 KB)

Westward ho!!! Four days in New Mexico!!!