Week Seven: Not Feeling Clever Enough For A Title

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I’m not feeling up to a great blog post this week, and since I turned in my project, it’s going to be incredibly short, so I apologize for the lack of quality. Life has been horribly chaotic this past week.

For articles, Wednesday’s on the pope was my obvious choice for two reasons—one, I thought the red hats in the header picture were fezes because I miss Morocco and two, Francis, 76, is First Non-European to Lead Church in 1,200 Years. The last pope (I don’t remember his name, and frankly I won’t remember this one’s) was the first in 600 years to retire, and this one is the first non-European in 1,200 years. Not only is that two consecutive firsts, but one number is divisible of the other! How cool is that? Frankly—and I hope I don’t offend anybody by saying this—I don’t really much care about the pope, didn’t care about the last one, doesn’t really affect me at all until one or the other starts making homophobic comments. Anyhow, I think this is newsworthy because the guy’s Argentinian, and apparently this is big news. Maybe they’re going for diversity in the catholic church? (The pope is catholic, right?) Obama seems to be happy about the choice unless he was just feeding the media a line, which seems likely since he’s president. I definitely would not have seen this if it were online because the only reasons I was attracted to it were the fez-likes hats in the accompanying picture and the fact that 1200 divided by 600 is two, thus making the second pope the first in twice as long.

Class expectations haven’t changed. I wish I had more energy to put something more meaningful, but alas, I do not. I’m giving my presentation tomorrow, so perhaps I expect that to be an informative experience as I’ll get to know all the mistakes I made in the Soundslides and perhaps learn what I need to know going forward with the video project in May. Speaking of May, Maybe I’ll go sleep now. I know it would surely benefit others in my presentation, since being articulate is typically a good thing.

Midtern Soundslide

My actual blog is coming later tonight. However, in the meanwhile, I present that which you have all been waiting for: my midterm Soundslide! Enjoy with fervor.

Week Six: Soundswiped

All right, so I honestly don’t remember what happened on Monday, my head is so swamped. Soundslides blew everything to a mental wasteland. To be quite honest I’m not a huge fan of the program (though I am of the project—those are fun) because while it is very easy to use, it’s also a pretty basic program for seventy bucks. If I wanted to cut the audio (which I didn’t for the test project, but still), I had to do it in Audacity. Besides that, the program makes it pretty difficult to export a video file. I was fiddling around with the program for kicks and tried to export a video. The first one I got was cut off at the top, and the second I never received. Enough of my griping, though. The actual test project was fun once I got past the difficulty of downloading Soundslides, and I expect the midterm soundslide to be equally fun. For the test one, I messed around with other 70-80 second public-domain audio files even though I had a couple of the Bach cello suites on my iTunes, but Ravel seemed more suited to my pictures. As for the audio for the actual project, I’ve had that since early last week—talked to Stevie for my newspaper project and took video, and all I’ve got to do is rip the audio, then presto! Mid-terms made manageable (and alliterative).

My expectations for the course haven’t really changed, though I actually think it’d be quite nice to incorporate a print journalism product as well as the audio and soundslides—I know we studied some storytelling techniques of print journalists very early on in the semester, but it’d be nice to have something for everybody. While working with soundslides and video is new and exciting, I’m so technologically disinclined that sometimes I’d like to rip my hair out. It’s nice to have a home base, a bit of familiarity.

For this week’s article, I chose “Qaeda Relative of Bin Laden’s Facing Charges” for this week because the drones have been on my mind lately, and I played “Six Degrees of Barack Obama” and got to Osama somehow. (If I had a better way of explaining this, I would, but I haven’t slept a wink tonight.) I believe it’s Friday’s issue. Interestingly enough, it’s his son-in-law, so he can’t use genetics as an excuse. His charges are relatively tame—not involved in 9/11, purportedly not an Al Qaeda operative for years, but at the time of involvement, he was big. “He called upon ‘the nation of Islam’ to do battle against ‘the Jews, the Christians and the Americans,’” the article said, and he’s facing charges and a possible sentence for life. Perhaps another reason why I picked this was for that fact: life imprisonment. Nowadays it’s either about the death penalty or drones, neither of which I’m too keen on. I hope he gets life, I’m glad to hear that’s what’s on the table, and it’s nice to see some pressure off on this “eye for an eye” business. Also, based on his standing right now, I agree on a Manhattan trial and disagree on straight to Guantanamo. It’s not that he isn’t dangerous, but we picked him up, and we should be responsible for giving him a trial as long as he’s not an immediate threat, and the guy’s inactive—need I cite right to a fair and speedy trial? I might’ve seen this via a news alert online since it’s big news, but I wouldn’t actually have known about it were it not for the good old New York Times.

Lilly Slideshow

Enjoy!

Week Five: Video, Audio, and Mars

I’d like to start by saying that not only am I doing an audio/video project on the Lilly renovations, but the newspaper also asked me to write a story about them. Way to do this multimedia! *self-five

Classes this week were interesting—now I anticipate learning lots about audio mixing and using microphones (my computer audio is awful), as well as using B footage in videos to fill out the awkward spaces in interviews. Lisa Pratt’s lecture about Mars rovers on Wednesday was interesting—one thing that particularly fascinated me was her acknowledgment of science fiction’s influence on actual scientific ideas. That was something I didn’t expect, but, then, “truth is stranger than fiction” might hold here.

My article choice for this week is from Wednesday’s issue: “Justices Reject Legal Challenge to Surveillance.” It just caught my eye, especially since I grew up with the Patriot Act. I glanced at it before watching Charlie Wilson’s War and then finished afterward. With a five to four vote, a challenge to the government’s ability of further eavesdropping on phones and emails was overruled. What I’ve heard is that this type of power fluctuates depending on the national state, with power shifting more to the people in times of peace and sidling toward the government during war. This may be gross oversimplification, but the theory does make sense. Here’s a hard-hitting quote: “‘Absent a radical sea change from the courts, or more likely intervention from the Confgress, the coffin is slamming shut on the ability of private citizens and civil liberties groups to challenge government counterterrorism policies, with the possible exception of Guantanamo,’ said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University.” I do not like hearing this as an American citizen, especially when the answer is right there in improper search and seizure, fourth amendment. Maybe I’m getting a bit too political in these blogs, but I think these sentiments help get across what I’m taking away from the article. As usual, I wouldn’t have seen this if not for the New York Times. It seems like one of those things that might’ve popped up on my Facebook newsfeed, but if it did, I never saw it. This doesn’t make it any less newsworthy. Anything having to do with our rights is newsworthy. In fact, it seems that the more newsworthy something is, the less it will be circulated. Few people care about newsworthy stuff anymore, to sound off; it’s all about the ratings and/or entertainment industry. I agree with Postman—it’s horrifically like Brave New World.