11
Oct 23
Oct 23
There are so many keyboard shortcuts out there
After Monday night’s and Tuesday’s computer updating sessions, I spent today … on the computer. All day, tinkering with Adobe Premiere Pro. Guess what we’re talking about in class tomorrow? Premiere! That’s right! How were you able to divine that? You’re so keen. So sharp minded and clear eyed!
Why, if there’s one thing I tell everyone I meet, it’s that they should read this site, so that they, too, could be among the most keen, sharp-minded and clear-eyed people on the world wide web. I tell so many people this that I forget who I tell, which inevitably means I tell the same people over and over. And the ones that get it, they’re reading this, right now. Thanks, friends!
I tell everyone this.
I don’t meet that many people, though.
Anyway, it took about seven hours of Premiere today, trying to figure out how I would distill down almost two decades of sporadic video editing, several years of goofing off with, and critically working with, Premiere — including the seven hours of considerable focus today — to figure out what to do tomorrow. This is an intro class. They’ll be using Premiere a few more times this term, and throughout their college experience. How much is enough?
The great thing about Premiere, which will be one of my initial truisms tomorrow, is that there are about 10 ways to do everything. The other great thing about Premiere is that you can use this program daily and still learn from other people.
The downside to Premiere is that you can use this program daily and still learn from other people.
Also, some people in my class have some to a fair amount of experience with Premiere already, but most don’t.
Oh, and I can do about 60 or 90 minutes on this (because I am a highly dynamic speaker) before I lose their attention.
So, I’ve decided, we’ll talk about the project panel, the source panel, the program panel, the timeline panel and eight of the nine tools on the modern Premiere. We’ll talk about audio next week. And all of this took about seven hours to figure out today.
Time now for the 11th installment of We Learn Wednesdays, where I ride my bike to find all of the local historical markers in this county. Why by bike? So glad you asked. You learn new things and see new stuff by bike that you won’t discover at the speed of a car, even a slow-moving car, making the bike the ideal way to undertake a project like this. Counting today’s discoveries I have listed 24 of the 115 markers found in the Historical Marker Database.
Today’s markers are down by the big river, in a beautiful and beloved and quietly neglected area. The sort of place people couldn’t find without a map unless they grew up. The kind of place where nothing opens on Sundays. The kind of place where there aren’t stores or gas stations. People live and love and farm and commute and remember their heroes.
The memorial itself is rather generic, but around these markers are engraved bricks. (The local Ruritan Club offered them in 2013 at $55 per.) Memorials and honorary stones filled with names and units and the wars and conflicts in which the men served. I counted about seven dozen of them.
This memorial sits beside a T-intersection. It is surrounded by two fields, a private residence and the municipal building, which I showed you a few days ago.
It seems a quietly proud little place. Some 2,580 people live in that community, one of those sprawling sort of places that covers a lot of ground, but distant folks all share the same small post office. The day I was out there, it was quite lovely indeed.
There meaning the Alloway Creek Watershed, where I found this marker about the restoration of more than 3,000 acres of wetlands and upland edge (land at higher elevation than the alluvial plain or water). One of the bigger parts of this project is, apparently, trying to control Phragmites an invasive plant that is trying to choke out more beneficial marsh plants. They call it foxtail around here, and that reed grass is beautiful, but not ideal for the local ecology.
This marker also tells us the Native Americans called the area Wootsessungsing, which is a word you’ll find five times on the web. Two are in reference that marker, two referencing the old fort that was built nearby (believed to be offshore of the modern river’s course) and once, here. Wootsessungsing saw the Swedish build their fort, Helsingborg or Fort Elfsborg, in 1643, and then the English rolled up in 1675.
Some of the old English homes are still in this area, the sign tells us, including the Abel and Mary Nicholson House – a 1722 patterned-end brick house (which is nearby, but a world away) and the Hancock House (which we’ll see in this space next week).
Early in the recorded history of the region, the sign continues, portions of the area were diked and farmed. Hunting and trapping were dominant activities in the 20th century.
PSEG, by the way, is a giant group of old electric and transportation companies. Formed in 1903, they grew so big that the government busted them up in 1943. Ultimately, they serve 1.8 million gas customers and 2.2 million electric customers. Like every big concern, they do some good, and they receive some well earned criticism. NOAA gave PSEG a big award a few years back, for instance, for this estuary program.
The day I was there, the weather was mild, the water was up, that little corner of everywhere felt peaceful, three old friends were sitting under a shade tree catching up on their latest stories and I enjoyed finding myself out among some small bits of history.
There was another marker in that same spot, badly sun-damaged, titled “Waving Acres of Grass.” It read.
Salt marshes are one of the most productive habitats in the world and possess many surprising qualities and benefits – protecting the mainland from flooding and the effects of erosion, filtering sediments and some pollutants from the water, and providing a safe nursery for many species of coastal fish and shellfish.
Nearly half of New Jersey’s 245,000 acres of salt marsh is found along the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic coast of Cape May and Atlantic Counties. Salt marshes may appear as only waving acres of grass, but are in fact, a critical link in the coastal food chain – providing vital nutrients for crabs and other crustaceans, for nearly all of New Jersey’s coastal fish, and for huge flocks of shorebirds on their spring and fall migrations.
It featured carefully detailed drawings of local plants and animals, like the beautiful Marsh wren (Cistothorus palustris), the Snowy egret (Egretta thula) the annoying horse fly (Tabanus nigrovitatus) and the Northern diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin).
Speaking of terrapins, let’s go back to Baltimore, for a few more Queen songs. “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” The song was their first number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US in 1980, topping the charts for four weeks. It was atop the Australian charts for seven weeks. It peaked at number two in the UK Singles Chart in 1979.
Freddie Mercury said he wrote that in 10 minutes, while sitting in a bath. The band recorded it for an hour or six, depending on which version of the story you like. Either way, it still feels like a timeless tribute, and that isn’t bad for a day’s work.
“I Want to Break Free” was a moderate hit in the American charts, but it moved a lot of records. It was certified platinum in Denmark, Germany, Italy, double-platinum in the UK and it was a platinum single here, as well.
Aside from that rising guitar lick I never really cared for it. (But I did enjoy the disco ball used here.) There’s an extended version out there that runs seven minutes and 16 seconds, and I don’t know why that was though necessary.
We’ll wrap up the Queen videos this week, but there are still a few great songs to go, so be sure to come back tomorrow.
10
Oct 23
Oct 23
New OS, same ol’ me
Most of today was spent doing class prep. Grading camera shots. Studying the latest editing tricks. Also, updating my computer.
I deleted about 600 words on that experience, but it goes like this. To download a program I need, I had to upload my OS. To do that I needed to create some space on my machine. Somehow, there’s a bunch of system files, dozens and dozens of gigs of system files. So I bought a program for that last night and freed up 60-some gigs. Then I backed up my computer to an external drive and updated the OS. There’s never a more tense moment than that update, but I learned that if you do it really late at night, it is difficult to muster up any real energy with which to worry.
The new OS loaded fine. It looks slightly different. That’ll be a mental adjustment. It also wiped out four of the programs I use regularly. They’re all old, but I don’t want to find and download or pay for replacements.
So, today, I found and downloaded replacement programs which will work, but, being new, they’ll work more slowly. Technology! Also, I got the program I needed which started this whole thing after last night’s late dinner. In the long run it all worked out pretty smoothly.
Now my apps have ballooned in terms of storage space — 144 GB, somehow. The OS is now 15 GB of it’s own. But those pesky system files are down to “just” 37 GB. Whatever is going on in here, at least it is moving fairly smoothly.
And that’s the shorter version of the story.
Otherwise, today, the task was figuring out how to get a bunch of editing tricks downloaded into students’ brains in one class. You could spend a lifetime working in editing and continually learn new things, new tricks and new shortcuts and techniques. Fortunately, I have tomorrow to figure it out, as well.
Oh, and I’m feeling fine after Sunday’s small bike accident.
I rode my bike today, in fact. Just did the same little 10 mile route. I wanted to slip a thank you card into the mailbox for those nice people that helped me. And, also, a small box of Band-Aids. The little boy gave me two of his Batman Band-Aids, so I picked him up some Avengers. I hope he isn’t exclusively a DCU kind of kid.
Their mailbox, it turns out, is up there drive and right by the door. Their door was open, someone was home, so I had to be quick and sneaky, so I wouldn’t get caught. I hope they giggled at the Band-Aids.
I rode to their house and back slowly, because I have this special bandage on my leg. I didn’t want to get that sweaty. Plus it was a beautiful day to be outside, and I didn’t mind extending my class prep break. That bandage is wrapped up in an ace bandage. And so that it stayed in place as I pedaled, I wore one leg warmer. It looked silly, but I was all in black, so it looked cool at the same time.
As I pulled into our driveway another cyclist was coming by. I waved at him and he came up for a quick chat before setting out for his own ride. Turns out he lives directly behind us, and I’m sure we’ll get an occasional riding partner out of the proximity, eventually.
Most importantly, the ride was great! Except for bumps, my wrist didn’t care for those, but that’s no reason to not start daydreaming about what a longer ride on Friday.
Do you think rock shows need more drum solos? Rock shows need more drum solos? At the end of his drum solo, Roger Taylor said he was getting too old for this. The man is 74 and doing just fine.
But it brings into focus some darkly funny thoughts about old people and rock ‘n’ roll, right? This was going to happen, whether they knew it in their decades or not. Now, whether any of those older acts could have imagined sticking with this, doing nostalgia tours, filling venues and still keeping time … that’s an open, and unlikely question, but — oh, here’s a song Roger Taylor wrote. OK, he wrote the early version. It wasn’t working, the band bumped into David Bowie, as one did, and all five of them got together and created a pop masterpiece.
It was double-platinum in the UK, and has been certified as four-times platinum in the United States.
“Under Pressure” was Queen’s second number one in their home country, and Bowie’s third. It cracked the top 10 in a dozen or so countries. It peaked at 29 on the US Billboard Hot 100, but charted again globally in 2016. Then, it climbed to 45th on the US Billboard Hot 100 and number five on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart. I’m not sure that chart knows what it is. But it was there, after Bowie died that January.
I remember where I was when I heard it again that first time, after they were both gone. I wanted to turn it off, but it was a public place, a deli, and they weren’t my speakers. I haven’t listened to the whole song since then, which is odd because this is not the sort of thing that affects me. Watching them sing it live, though, with the joy and verve that they did, makes that feel a bit better.
Queen played it for the rest of their touring days, though Bowie didn’t put it on stage until the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, singing opposite the great Annie Lennox, in her mascara phase.
After that, Bowie played it almost all of the time. And if you think the last few paragraphs and videos were all a set up to introduce you to Gail Ann Dorsey, you are correct.
I’ve yet to hear her do anything that doesn’t impress.
As for my version, above, I only included part of the song because that’s the most important part. To me, the song belongs not to Bowie or Queen, or even Dorsey, but to Grosse Pointe Blank.
But that’s just me. A Rolling Stone readers’ poll has it as the best duet of all time, so it means a lot of things to a lot of people.
