ToxinFreeTomorrow

I was a lead developer for this site. It was down for the past few years and I haven't republished it because it was written for use on a ColdFusion server (necesito mucho dinero). Well it wasn't until today that I finally rewrote the code to simple HTML. I thought it was a pretty cool website. At least it was my first and that worth a penny ;)

Well here is: ToxinFreeTomorrow

Lemme know if you likie =)

Some of my WGI productions

I wanted to share some of my professional audio-technician experiences. For the past several years I have arraigned soundtracks for competitive WGI youth organizations. I had a lot of fun and am very proud of them. My pride comes in part from the flawlessness (ya I said it =) of the integrated effects. Through the following tracks, I demonstrated the union of multiple main stream music titles and quality samples. These tracks were constructed using two of my favorite audio editing software: Nero Wave Studio and Nero Sound Tracks. Oh, and a couple times I used Adobe Soundbooth when I needed more advanced effects control and variety. Now without going into very technical explanations, or boring you with some sort of lab manual, I'd like to highlight key points of each Publication(if you will).

(Sorry, this is a blog in progress)

Tigard High School:
2006 - Scholastic Regional "A" Class (Coming Soon)

Highlights:

2007 - Scholastic "A" Class (Coming Soon)

Highlights:

2008 - Scholastic Regional "A" Class (Coming Soon)

Highlights:

2009 - Scholastic Regional "A" Class

Highlights:

2009 - Scholastic "A" Class

Highlights:

Artistry In Blue:
2009 - Independant "A" Class

Highlights:

Apple iMove

I love this software. I was given an opportunity to produce a short commercial on this software and loved it.
After being told I had to use it I was a bit disappointed because I was used to using adobe premier and Nero Vision to produce movies. Well after my experience, I would be happy staying with iMovie.
Ok, I can’t say using iMovie eliminates the need for Adobe Premier though. The differences between the two are that with iMovie you can whip up a professional looking movie in minutes and to do the same project in Premier, you could take hours. But, you’re not able to do a fraction of tasks on iMovie that you can do in Premier. Not that it matters though for the average user because iMovie has tons of audio and video effects/samples worth bragging about. Some of my favorite effects are: 3d screen credits, tons of useful sound files a 3d video scene changes.
These effects are great and all, but I think the most useful part if the iMovie program is the user interface. I found it very easy to manipulate all of the files and effects I added to my project. With only a few clicks I could cut scenes and apply/alter effect to my content. I also like that I only had to mess around with the program for a few minutes before I felt competent enough to produce efficiently.
After capturing enough video for the commercial and copying it to the computer. I only needed about 2 hours to produce the following commercial using iMovie. The sentiment to iMovie is that I did this commercial after only using iMovie for the first time ever.
And so, without further ado!
Dueling Cameras!

Media Literacy, Eight Guildelines for Teachers

I read this article about the importance of media literacy by Jason Ohler and would like to comment on it. The article uses 8 point to stress the importance of how media incorporated instruction provides for a more quality based education in the classroom. I could not agree more. As a personal testament I can say that the success of some of my courses in college would not have been possible had it not been for media support.
Many times I was able to use pictures and programming to express what I could not have otherwise said on paper. As Jason says over a few of his points, it is great to be able to engage my target audience into my essay or presentation be utilizing different types of media aids. In face I can’t think of an example where media would not be a benefit to its presentation. Even the most simplest of subjects that is to be written on paper could use the aid of the World Wide Web to make it more available to its audience.
As much of the article points out, I think that treating media literacy as a conditional additive or elective course is a mistake. Students should be given an education that promotes media expression and provides media rich instruction and order for this to happen I think the teachers in today’s classrooms should make use of the internet, music, video, etc... to enhance learning in the classroom.

My new website!!!

Ok. So this was a huge project for me. Not sure it meets grading standards for my class but I have the framework done, and lemme tellya. I spent tooooo many hours on this site. But hey, a box of lemon heads several sodas and a bag of chips and salsa later I am able to present to you my greatest web creation. MATH UNIVERSE!!
You can check it out here:

Math Universe

Now I know what your thinkin, "there's now way he came up with that on his own!"
Well I can assure you folks the design was pure organic cognitive brilliance by yours truly. Granted I started with a 3 column template in Dreamweaver. But believe me, it began with only 2 vertical lines and a whole lotta nonsense text. From there I spent huge chunks of eye torturous hours learning how to use css style sheets and tags in and html rich framework. I painstakingly discovered how fussy sub-sub-containers can be when you ask them to stretch 100% of the remaining space allotted from the user, while keeping a 15 pixel border and 1 in padded region. Well anyhoo welcome to my creation, The Math Universe.

My Google Earth Experience

My experience with Google Earth was bitter sweet. After installing the software I absolutely loved navigating it. The way you can see places in such detail and speed is amazing. How could this be free? Well for this post I am going to describe my time spent learning to use the touring feature built into the software.
After gaining the rudimentary skills needed to navigate I began using search box provided on the left to locate my places of interest. In this case I wanted to find 5 college stadiums in the US so I can relate them to my Blue Devil Championship Podcast. The search tool was great and helped me quickly find each stadium by just its name. Now to make a tour with Google Earth it is necessary to create a number of place markers for the tour to visit at your command. I found creating a maker was as right clicking (windows) the desired search result and selecting copy, then pasting it into the “My Places” box under the search box on the left. For my purposes I created 7 place markers (2 were duplicates) and placed them into a sub folder under “My Places”. Now for my tour I wanted the program to visit each of my places, in order, and display a picture with my descriptions of each. As it was, each place had Google’s pictures, links and descriptions pre-set because I had copied them from the search box. Therefore I went into each and re-titled them and deleted all gibberish (HTML code) in the info box. Before saving each new place marker I found it convenient to relocate each in a place next to the stadium so when the info box pops up in the tour it doesn’t cover the stadium. Also if you right click the place marker after saving the properties and select “snapshot view” it saves the look or exact position of the globe. So later when I click the place marker it travels right to that snapshot view.

Ok now that my places were set I went back into each place markers properties and added a hyperlink and picture into each info section using; <img src="http://picture">
for the picture,
and
<a href="http://hyperlink">hyperlink name</a>
for the hyperlink.

With the place markers ready I started to record my tour by clicking the camera icon at the top of the programs window and then the red dot to begin recording. This is the point where my Google Earth experience became bitter. To spare you the hours of debugging and cursing I did I will cut to the chase. While recording the tour, it is not necessary to have the place markers checked to travel to each place. However, it is necessary to have each place marker checked if you intend to have the info pop up so you can see the descriptions of the places checked during the recording process. This minor detail was an easy fix that took wwwwwaaaayyyy to long to discover. Anyhoo the fix allowed me to continue my project and record. All I had to do was press record and double click each place marker to traverse the tour and click the place markers description when the motion stopped to pop up the info for that location. When the tour was over it saved into “my places” and tada; I had a cool tour.

My podcast project.

This podcast tells a brief history of the Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps' past 15 years.

To build this project I used Windows Movie Maker and Nero Wave Studio.
Starting off with the wave studio I loaded my ripped CD audio files of each championship year used in my project. Since I only needed a few seconds from each 10 min file I looked for my favorite musical section and cut it out so I can past that segment into my project wave file which Nero Wave Studio produces by default. After cutting and pasting all 10 segments into my project wave file I added some effects such as; fade in, fade out, and reduced volume. I had to reduce the volume because later I need to add my voice commentary and the music was very loud at times.

After saving my new wave file I started a new project in Windows Movie Maker. The program allowed me to import all my pictures and my music file so that I can arrange them all together. After entering my audio file into my new project it was easy to add pictures into the specific time slots I wanted. Also for each picture added to the project, I could enter how long the picture would stay up in sync with the music.

Ok now with my pictures and music together I had to export the project into a single video file because I was only able to add 1 video source, 1 picture source and 1 audio source at a given time. Therefore it was necessary to start another new project and import the new video file so I can then add the next audio source; my voice over.

To record my voice I found an old mini disc recorder and condenser mic I had from years ago. I recorded the commentary I wrote down onto the mini disc recorder and transferred the each of the 8 sound files to my computer via the SPDIF fiber optic cable interface my computer so happen to have =) Totally unnecessary but useful non-the-less.

Ok with the voice over recorded and then imported into the second project file, had to arrange each commentary file to fit the music and picture changes of the video file previously created. This presented a new problem. My voice files were longer than my video file segments I previously produced. This was a bummer because that meant I had to reproduce my first video. This took some time because in some cases I had to use completely different music sections because the previous ones used were not useful in the new time slots demanded of my voice over segments.

Well, several audio files later I was able to reproduce my first video file and compile the production you see above. This project gave me an unexpected lesson. I had experience with both software’s but I had no experience using the two together like this. I enjoyed learning the pair will likely use them in the future, or at least know not to use them better. Who knows =)