Wow. Long time, no post.

This will just be brief, since I have tons of other things swimming around in my mind at the moment.
Several weeks ago I had a problem with Movie Maker, the audio bar kept disappearing so there was no way I could edit without totally losing my mind. I had the color scheme on my computer all these funky colors, and as it turned out, I just couldn't see the bar because my colors were off. As soon as I went back to plain old blue, Voila! I could see it again
I've interviewed Cindy Burke, she is Catie and Brian's riding instructor. That went well. We chatted a lot after I stopped taping which I wish I had taped. Oh well, live and learn. I still want to interview Cheyenne, she is Cindy's intern and has known Catie and Brian for several years, and their parents Joyce and Paul. I have chatted with them quite a lot, but I don't have any of it taped or anything.
I had a wicked fun time doing my story map, it was really helpful. I need to see everything all at once to be able to make decisions about ANYTHING. I even categorize my grocery list and prioritize what I need... I know, I know.... It could be an issue.
Well, I need to get back to some awful, grueling homework. I'm taking a class on just William Faulkner *shudder*. I think it's giving me ulcers.

Editing...

I really enjoyed Tom's visit to our class last week, he was definitely the best speaker we've had. I think he was the only one who actually showed us how to do stuff.
It took me a while to get used to using Movie Maker, plus I was having some technical difficulties. The little line thingies weren't showing up when I played my clips, so I emailed Sandy in frustrated tears this morning. We weren't able to get that straightened out, but I did go to the IT desk in the library to get some other issues with my computer taken care of. I used one of the computers in Ham-Smith to edit and wasn't able to finish, which is why my interview isn't here. Surprisingly, I had a lot of fun editing when I became a little more comfortable with movie maker and I'm pretty excited to finish editing my interview...

MIA-- Two weeks in a row

Put bluntly: I am a slacker.

I finally did my first real interviews today with Catie and Brian. I was really, really nervous, but it was pretty fun. Catie was a little difficult to talk to, she spoke very quietly and didn't seem to want to give me much information, I really had to pry stuff out of her. I think she was picking up on my nervousness though. I learned a lot of things about her though that I probably never would have guessed. She referred to herself as a bit of a daredevil, and when she did she got a very scheming look on her face.

Brian, on the other hand, was so, so, so chatty. He's very smart and totally blew me away. He's twelve or thirteen I think (He just started middle school), wants to be a pilot and spent about twenty minutes telling me about how he flew airplanes at summer camp last year. He also had to explain to me what a G-force is and was rattling off the mathematical formula like it was his phone number. I haven't edited either of my interviews yet, I'll save that for another (less stressful) day.

Learning to use Movie Maker in our last class was pretty fun, but once again, frustrating. I'm definitely not the most computer savvy person out there, and when I don't pick up on something right away, I get really, really annoyed. Once again: A personal flaw that I'll need to learn to deal with. I can't really remember all of what Sandy wanted us to write about, so I guess I'm all done for now. I wanted to go to bed early tonight since I had a wicked long weekend, but it's 11:30 and I can't sleep. This is going to be like the Friends episode, "The one where they're up all night".

Is anyone going to Pumpkin Fest this weekend???

I've been MIA

I have been totally MIA this past week, unless of course you know the right place to look. I've been wicked busy-- class, work, and such. I did a lot of things that I didn't want to do, and I didn't do a lot of things that I wanted to do. I had a really hard time finding people to cooperate with me for this weeks assignment. People are either too busy or don't want the entire class to see pictures of them, oh well. Whatevs.
Anyway, I did two little last minute stories, but I'm not really sure which one I want to use. The first one is photos and audio of my friend Riley playing his guitar. I really liked some of the pictures, but they were all the same. I also didn't have a lot of time to take pictures of him because he had to study for a physics test. (Side note-- He's tried to teach me a little, but I'm not a very good student!!! I guess its hard to learn new things at the old age of 20). We actually went to the PCAC late last night to play the pianos. He gave me a solo, but I screwed it up-- go figure.
I cornered my roommate Allie right when she got back from work, before "Private Practice" started at nine and got her to go to The Wildcat Den in the MUB and play some pool with me. (Did you guys know that it used to be a bar? Or so I've heard.) I got some pretty cool pictures, but the audio isn't that great. There are some cool sounds of the balls (or whatever the term is) hitting together, but other than that its a lot of muffled voices and bad music.
I suppose which ever one I use in class tomorrow will depend on what I think matters more: good photos or good audio.
I really enjoyed the presentation in last weeks class-- particularly the Twizzlers from Sandy :-) The chicken catching video was awesome. It's wicked hard to catch a chicken, to anyone thats never had to do it.

Update and TR story

I went back down to the train station tonight while it was still light and had a pretty cool idea. I stood about three feet away from the edge of the platform and videoed the train while it was coming in. It was pretty scary because I was watching the train through the screen but could see it out of the corner of my eye, but not well enough to know exactly where it was. It was wicked loud and windy and I was afraid that I would lose my balance or something and fall into it and die haha. I took some pictures of people getting on and off the train (I was actually brave enough to ask if I they would mind, yay me!!). I haven't looked at them yet, so I don't know how they came out. I videoed the train leaving in the same way. So what I'm going to do, I hope, is start with the train coming in, have a slide show and some of the speeches that turned out okay, and then have the train leave. Kinda fun.

I also went to the horse barn tonight to watch Catie (Catherine) and Brian ride and meet their mom, Joyce. I learned a bit more about Catie and Brian, chatted with Joyce a bit and took some still pictures and videos. I was also talking to Becky, one of the volunteers while I watched Catie groom her horse, Paige. Becky started talking about how much she enjoyed helping with that class because the kids were better riders, and she could see the progress they made through each week and the different things they had learned. I took some pictures, but they all came out really bad. It was really dark in the arena and I didn't want to use my flash. I would feel really bad if it scared one of the horses and one of the kids got hurt. They were also really blurry. Maybe by next week I'll have figured a way to fix that...

Atleast I got a free coffee...

When I read our assignment for the week, I was at home, about 140 miles from UNH. As we all know there are lots of things going on here over the weekend that have the potential to be turned into some multimedia story. Knowing that I wouldn't be back to campus until Sunday afternoon, and then having to work until 10pm, I found myself in a little mini-panic about what I was going to do for a story. Sunday night I was flipping through TNH while I waited for a ride home from work. I didn't want to walk back to my apartment in the dark, much less in the pouring rain. So anyway (I tend to make my stories really long) I found a story in TNH about the construction of the new train station and that they were having their ribbon cutting ceremony on Tuesday morning, today. I thought that might be kind of cool, maybe a video of the train coming in, people getting on and off, speeches, and the best part: The big ribbon and a giant pair of scissors!!!! Did I get what I wanted?? NO!!!!!
Before I start talking about everything that was wrong, I will say that I got a few pictures of some nice looking people waiting for the train. Perhaps they were going home for Rosh Hashanah, but maybe not. Whatever. So I was going to photograph the train coming in. I missed it, as I had my back turned and my camera off. Good timing on my part, right? I did get a picture of it leaving... Ohhhhh goody. Fun..... As I was videoing President Huddleston's very nice speech, a rather large man stepped in front of me. Fantastic. I guess it's not really a big deal though, the whole thing was pretty boring.
So I didn't get my video of the train coming in, a clear video of President Huddleston's speech. Since things always come in threes (or if your me, fours, fives, or sixes...), did I get an actual ribbon cutting? No, BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T HAVE A RIBBON AT THEIR RIBBON CUTTING! I suppose I have until noon tomorrow to find some way to salvage this...

On the plus side, I did learn that my camera has an undo-delete feature. Wicked awesome. And I got a free coffee.

Landscapes, Portaits, Campus and others....

I spent a few hours Monday afternoon walking the Harbor Trail in Portsmouth, which is where I took all of the landscape pictures. I liked most of them, but there were a few that I felt were very busy with no focus at all. If any of you know about Art in the Park (I believe thats what they call it), I saw the giant red ant, which was pretty cool. I wanted to go see the other things they had around town, but I didn't feel like walking that far. Instead I had a coffee at Breaking New Grounds, yum :-)
I felt really self conscious about taking pictures of people around campus though. I felt like a bit of a creeper. I just noticed when looking at the few pictures I took, they're all of peoples backs... I suppose that was me unconsciously being self conscious.



I had to add this, everybody loves
a cute groundhog :-)