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.