video

Friday / video — Comments Off on Excelsior!
25
Aug 17

Excelsior!

Sometimes you start a sentence and you don’t know where it is going to go. Sometimes you just leap off into the thing and you trust that the words will be there when your lips are ready to form the next set of letters. That happens to everyone, right? Can’t just be me.

Anyway, today I tried a new version of that. I just launched into a series of wholly original analogies and hoped they made sense at the end. The best one was explaining how a series of meetings — I had a note card full of people to sit and talk with today, which was delightful, really — managed to pile up. Once one goes long, that tends to impact the next one and so on.

So I said something like “You know how when the weather is bad over the airport and that can stack planes up over four states waiting to land? This New York-bound plane is waiting patiently over Ohio.”

Because my meetings kept running over, basically. But that’s OK. It’s a beautiful day, and more importantly it is Friday. Riding my bike from work into the weekend, I passed one of the local barns and thought There should be a slow motion video of this.

And now there is.

To the weekend!

IU / television / Thursday / video — Comments Off on First live show of the year
24
Aug 17

First live show of the year

So here we are, on the fourth day of classes, presenting the first live broadcast of the year. It was an almost-four-hour broadcast. There were about 11 students running the production and, after the first few minutes, they really found a nice groove and made a neat little show covering various media topics du jour. Four locations, eight cameras, four hours. This was broadcast on my students’ campus cable station, syndicated on the campus radio station and one of their internet streams and pushed out to Facebook Live. Again, this was the fourth day of class.

You can watch it here:

Having been in the studios and the control room, I hope I managed to in no way sneak onto a camera.

IU / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on Eclipsed by the hype
21
Aug 17

Eclipsed by the hype

Today was my third eclipse. At least the third that I can recall. My first was in elementary school, when they took great pains to coach us into not looking up. We made the little cardboard pinhole thing and it was underwhelming. (It was only a partial eclipse where we were.) Then, in middle school, I was working one summer for a teacher and we were outdoors and watched another partial eclipse. It was underwhelming.

But this time, so much more of the sun would be eclipsed! A vast, vast majority of the sun where we are! And the hype machine had, of course, reached Mayweather-McGregor proportions. I’d said I wouldn’t bother, but if you hear the drumbeat long enough you’re liable to start dancing. So I got my gear and got ready:

Eclipse

Today was also the first day of classes for the fall term and everyone wisely avoided making ominous omens out of the two parallel events. But we put the eclipse up on the big screen for any curious folks who wanted to save their eyes and enjoy some really top-notch air conditioning:

Eclipse

And when I was walking into the building from elsewhere a student let me borrow his little eclipse card the school was distributing to several thousand people:

Eclipse

If anything, that’s just a terrific demonstration of the “size of the sun” in the sky. That’s in partial eclipse, but look how tiny it is, compared to what you normally think of as the sun’s size, which is really just pure radiation beaming down onto our heads and into our eyes — with which we are, I am told, never to use for solar contact.

Also, I made a video. This is 360 degrees, as I am still playing around with the camera to see what it will and won’t do. (Audio is a consideration, I realized this time out.) So move it around and see a few things:

I would have started the video a bit earlier, and caught more of the eclipse, but I encountered the two most clueless people I’ve met in some time. They whelmed me, but not overly so.

cycling / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Sometimes it is easier to sit than to do
17
Aug 17

Sometimes it is easier to sit than to do

This is a video I shot last weekend. We were at the Olympic Distance Triathlon National Championship where The Yankee was racing. She was out on her bike at the time, which gave me a few minutes to sit and enjoy the nice weather and the shade. Those are two things, I think, we don’t do often enough.

So there I sat and I looked up and this was above me and I decided to make a video. I’d intended it to be a meditative thing for the front page because sitting under a shade tree and watching the sunlight blink through it. That’s one of the most relaxing things I can think of doing, roughly ever. When I sat down to edit the video last night I found that the file size was just too large. But I really liked the video. Fortunately, in this age of wonders, there are more places than just the front page of your website where things like this can go. So it is going here:

There, isn’t that better?

Well, it was, except for this:

Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Take it away, parrot!
16
Aug 17

Take it away, parrot!

This was from downtown Omaha. They had an art exposition in 2004 and after that was completed the artist donated this to the city. It sits in a mall park and is quite the popular installation.

But that’s because the good people of Omaha haven’t seen this bird perform yet!

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