Before I leave...

Last minute projects

• publish fuji podcast
• edit audio clips for hanashi station
• make portable audio into's/outro's for podcast
• prepare stuff to burn DVD backups for Dad (and Lee)

Chillin' on the Podcast

Gotta get out at least one more show: the Fuji Downhill of 2005.

I wonder if I should try to publish a couple shows during the summer. It would be a kind of Kanaz@wee! on the road... like the podcast from Korea. Maybe I should make use of the Audioblog.com services I've already paid for this year. It sure does make recording shows a lot easier when I can just do it all from the computer. I can't add externally recorded material that easily, but I might be able to come up with a solution there using patch cables. Geesh another project. It's easy to come up with a show, it's easy to record and edit it... it's hard to be consistent.

4th & 5th Year Computer Classes

You can find links to my students' blogs from these two sites!
They've just begun them, so I hope to have them publish much more stuff as the year goes on!

• 4th Year Computer Class
• 5th Year Computer Class

Video in the Classroom

I'm trying to pull some ideas together about what to do with my 4th and 5th year computer classes. Right now, we're tackling PowerPoint, blogs, and Flash projects, but I'm trying to work the curriculum towards multimedia projects. I want to get the hardware to incorporate video and sound files into their work easily. I'd like to see the kids directing their own projects and really provide them with the resouces necessary to take off wtih their ideas. I'll have to check whether I can serve files from my computer on the network and by doing so make stuff available for the web. We'll need quick access to pictures, movies, and audio clips for our projects.

Workin' the Link Field

I was looking around at my students' blogs and saw that some of them had the "Link" field under their "Title" fields when creating new posts. I don't know why I didn't activate this feature earlier, but no big deal. This is the beauty of working online... things are easy to upgrade, relatively speaking.

Now, I really would like to add links to "Recent Comments" and "Most Frequently Commented". A few blogs have them and I have yet to figure out how folks add this functionality.

New chicklet

I figured since the podcast has been raking in over 40 subscribers I could finally add a counter that automatically updates that number. It seems a little self-promoting, but what the heck... I am trying to get the word out there.

Now, I wish I could figure a way to avoid the border around pictures in my posts. The "border=0" variable doesn't seem to remove the light border around images in my blogs. Oh, well.

Multimedia Video Projector

I found out a way to use my Canon S400 as a rudimentary video projector in conjunction with a TV.

1. Mount camera to an UltraPod II tripod so that camera faces directly downwards
2. Plug AV cable into camera and connection to the yellow video-in on the TV
3. Set camera to macro mode
4. Turn off the Auto Power-down mode
5. Switch display mode to off
6. Push shutter release half-way to focus camera on the surface of your materials
7. Begin your presentation!

This set up should work for any digital camera with a tripod mount, video out capabilities and a macro mode. It'd be hard to find a decent camera today that didn't have these three featues. Good luck!