I will be returning to spend a good four or more hours in the Experience Room. I’ll shoot better video then, I promise. But in the meanwhile, Janice’s expression sums it up. Playing music with friends is pure joy.

Bonus points if you can name that tune.

This message is set as an autoresponse to messages matching the following criteria:

subject contains “Course quota exceeded: SCC.MSTR.ART100.COLAN_C”

Your message has been rejected by the intended recipient because its content is useless. Your message states, in full:

“LS-CS quota manager alert:\nCourse has exceeded the absolute quota limit (250000 K): SCC.MSTR.ART100.COLAN_C (disk usage 2525371 K).”

As you can see, your message alerts me to a problem without providing any indication of what I should do to fix it.

I previously replied requesting that the course file be deleted as I no longer need it. No one responded, and I continue to receive your useless message on a daily basis.

I know my course quota is exceeded. I have been told by Maricopa’s Blackboard support that the course file itself was likely corrupted during the transition to Blackboard 9. After Fall 2010 I will discontinue any further use of Blackboard since it has been nothing but a nightmare this term. If it were in my power to remove the file, I would do so.

Please just delete the offending course file and quit bugging me about it. I will not be making any further attempt to remedy this situation. Further messages will continue to be auto-rejected by the district email system, which may not have been updated in a long time, but at least it actually works.

Good day.

Yes, I really applied this filter. After waiting two weeks for a response. Crickets.

It’s fun playing with my mom. We’re both decent players and neither gives up. Sometimes she whips my butt, sometimes I whip hers. Here are samples of our games.

It’s fun because we can text back and forth even though she’s not on a phone. Now I’m playing with my mom every day. That’s pretty special when you think about it.

Click image to enlarge

If this is for real, and I don’t have reason to think it isn’t, nor any confirmation that it is, the mom of a soldier serving in Afghanistan is asking for slingshots or wrist rockets for her son’s batallion. Because they don’t want to shoot the teenagers insurgents are sending with bullets. And the U.S. government won’t provide rubber bullets. There are so many things wrong with this that I can’t even start, but somehow this message on Freecycle, where my neighbors are normally trading mattresses and moving boxes, renewed the nightmare horror of the business of war in my head.

At the same time my dark side thinks there should have been a “Slingshots for Soldiers” scene of some sort in War, Inc. Perhaps just before the Tamerlane’s prosthetics kickline.

What I forgot to say in the video: Email from the Guardian gives brief article summaries and links to the full articles on the Guardian web site. If the full article text came in my email, I’d be happy to get the email. But I have to read the articles on the web site whether I get the email or not. So why can’t I just skip the email?

Update

I guess at least one other person has looked into this. These are not the results I’m looking for:

http://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/20325811564

http://twitter.com/robb1138/status/20326282271

http://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/20326514198

http://twitter.com/robb1138/status/20326898286

http://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/20327785699

And by “this” I mean, of course, the “Modify Your Subscription” statement at the bottom of every email stating that my account preferences are in my control and can be changed, which I linked to as a screenshot.

Anyway, many thanks and a follow to @robb1138 for at least replying. Still nothing from the Guardian. This isn’t going far to convert me to a paying subscriber. Why pay $30 a month when that comes with daily emails you don’t want to receive?

About a month ago my husband asked if I needed a watch repair. It was on his list of errands. So I gave him two that had stopped running for battery replacements. Off he goes on the errand running, and I forget all about it because I rarely wear a watch (I just look at my mobile phone).

Today, more errands are happening. Usually he tells me where he’s going in case I need anything from there too (see above). But today not so much, which I thought was very mysterious, but nothing to be concerned about. So I’m minding my own business when hubby bursts in and presents me with:

The Starkist 25th Anniversary 1961 – 1986 Charlie Tuna Watch

I think I got this watch by sending in a bunch of tuna labels or something. In 1987 I wore it every day on a month long tour of England, Scotland and Wales, along with my normal watch. My normal watch was set to local time wherever I was, and Charlie always told me the time at home. So I have odd associations of comfort and home attached to this otherwise silly branded item.

Evidently the watch had to be sent to Hong Kong to get a new movement put in it. I have no idea how much this cost. I hope it wasn’t much, but these days, it probably was much.

Love

Today I can’t think of anything sweeter my husband could have done than have this stupid thing fixed because, even though it’s stupid and silly, I love the thing.

Thanks, honey.

Classroom-friendly screencasts complete with captions and a full transcript are now an easy reality thanks to YouTube and Google Voice technology.

Every semester I teach three Intro to Computer Graphics classes at my local community college. I teach them back to back on the same day, which means I give the same lecture/software demonstration three times in a row. I have to make checklists to make sure I show each class the same things – it’s very easy to leave something important out and firmly believe I’ve already said it (because I said it to a previous class).

For the last two or three years I’ve been dreaming of offloading this repetitive part of my teaching duties to video. There are many advantages to screencasting these demonstrations:

• Each class will receive exactly the same information
• I won’t leave out anything because the screencasts can be scripted and recorded in advance
• Screencasts can be made available to students’ mobile devices and home computers
• Students can view, pause, rewind as many times as they need, at their own pace
• No one misses something by being embarrassed to ask me to repeat part of the demonstration
• Class and lab time can be freed up for more one-on-one attention from me
• Students become more responsible for their own learning (well, that’s the theory anyway)

But the big drawback has always been this: how to accommodate the hearing-impaired. Online video has been awfully slow to provide for this need. And captioning a DVD is such a tedious process, there’s no way I can do it efficiently, especially given the frequent need to re-record software demonstrations due to operating system and application updates.

(I know what you’re thinking: I’ve forgotten the visually impaired. No, I haven’t. I’ve had ability to provide HD screencasts, and zoom in to more clearly show a small part of the screen, for a couple of years now. That takes care of most visual issues, certainly all the ones I’ve encountered. I freely admit it won’t accommodate a blind student, but so far I have never had a blind student enroll in a graphic design / visual communications course. It may happen at some point, but then I will have the help of my campus Disability Resources office.)

Finally, this is my year. Google and YouTube have made captioning screencasts ridiculously easy. Provided you prep a script before you record, you can turn your script into captions and a transcript in one simple step.

Example screencast script (click to enlarge)

I always type out a simple two-column script for my screencasts, with what I want to say on the left, and what I want to see on the right. This works for me. Do it your own way. I don’t really worry about sticking exactly to the script. But it helps to have everything I want to do planned out, and I can refer to my script quickly if I forget what I need to do next. Use of a script cuts the number of times I use filler sounds like “um” by 99-100%.

In case you want to know the rest of my workflow:

With script in hand, I record the audio and video portion of my screencast simultaneously using iShowU HD. I have a decent USB mic, so I don’t generally have to worry about my audio quality.

Goofy but effective tip: make a title graphic and display it on screen while you introduce the purpose of the screencast. Then there is no need to edit in a title after you record. You can do the same with a credits graphic for the end of your video.

If I need to edit the video, my first choice is QuickTime Pro. I can mark in/out points around mistakes or long pauses and just cut them out. From QuickTime Pro I can just re-save as a stand-alone .mov and upload that to YouTube (I do export podcast versions as well). If I want to zoom in on a particular part of the screen or add overlay graphics I move to Final Cut Pro, where the workflow gets a tad more complex. Lately I just avoid that for efficiency’s sake, mainly because the HD version of the video allows viewers to easily see what I’m doing on screen. But if I really want the video to be clear on a smaller device, like an iPhone, editing in some zooms is the way to go. Since we have broadband Internet access on campus, I’m not sweating this too much, but I will rethink it if feedback from my students indicates I should.

But, the captions.

Here is how to do the captions: Save the voice-only part of your script as a plain text file. Edit your uploaded video on YouTube by going to the Captions and Subtitles tab. Browse for that text file, mark it as a Transcript, and upload it.

What happens? Google Voice technology reads your transcript while listening to your video, and automagically generates a caption file timed for your video. You can then download and tweak that file if you need to. But I find if I stick pretty close to my script, editing the generated captions just isn’t necessary. See for yourself in this example (click the up arrow in the lower right corner, then click CC to turn the captions on):

Or just check it out on YouTube, where you can also activate an interactive transcript.

For a more thorough how-to, scroll to the Captions by Voice Recognition section of this Mashable tutorial.

My hubby complains from time to time that the store only has apricot jam, no peach jam. So I decided to lease a peach tree from local Schnepf Farms – they’ve been growing organic peaches for 45 years. The variety of peach tree we got is Earligrande – they ripen early, and, man, are they ever grand!

Our peach tree ripened during the last two weeks of May, and I ended up with 17 boxes of fresh, juicy, sweet and delicious peaches. Probably somewhere between 100 – 120 pounds of peaches. I’d say we consumed or shared 3 boxes worth of them fresh. Plus I went crazy buying jars and canned pints and quarts for just under two weeks. I’ve become a peach peeling and peach pitting expert. I have a peach pit callous on my index finger. And I’m proud of it!

The final tally:

• 5 pints Peach Raspberry Freezer Jam
• 5 pints Peach Cherry Almond Freezer Jam
• 8 8oz jars Peach Butter
• 6 pints Spirited Peaches
• 4 pints Peach BBQ Sauce
• 11 pints Honey Spiced Peaches
• 1 quart Honey Spiced Peaches
• 2 pints Curried Peach Sauce
• 3 quarts Peach Pie Filling
• 10 quarts Peach Halves in Syrup
• 5 pints Peach Pistachio Chutney
• 4 pints Peach Cherry Chutney
• 5 pints Peach Jam
• 2 8oz jars Peach Jam
• 2 10in Peach Pies
• 2 9in Peach Pies
• 2 pounds dehydrated peaches

I have a new nickname. My husband now calls me “Peaches,” and I don’t mind one bit.

What was wrong? What wasn’t?

First, the pub isn’t an acoustically great environment. Sound bounces around off the tile floor and stone fireplace and off walls and ceiling. So if more than one person is talking, you get a cacophony and it’s impossible to isolate and listen to any one particular voice. The only thing you can do is try to talk to the person next to you. And among this group, everyone was talking. Dougherty remained standing while everyone else sat. He tried briefly to engage the group as a whole and then evidently gave up. I got to hear what he had to say when he was at my end of the table. And he had some interesting things to say.

But the conversation, driven by one or two people, kept reverting back to SB1070, which, topical as it may be, is not an appropriate issue to fixate on when you have the opportunity to talk to a US Senate candidate. It’s a state law, not federal. If we were there to learn about Dougherty as a candidate, why weren’t people asking what he would do to reform immigration laws at the federal level? And why keep the whole conversation focused on this one issue, when we could be asking him his views on economic reform aimed at preventing big banks from causing another meltdown, or what he would do to end lobbyist influence in Washington, or his views on Iraq and Afghanistan, or what he wants to do regarding energy policy?

For about twenty minutes, I listened as closely as I could to what others were asking Dougherty, and to his responses. The same guy who bragged about the great turnout talked so loudly that I only made out about half of what was being said. An older gentleman next to me kept looking up information on Google using his Blackberry, since no one heard when he tried to ask clarifying questions. During this time, all but four people at my end of the table were completely ignoring Dougherty, and talking so loudly that those of us right next to him could barely manage to converse with him. So were they hear to support him, find out about him, or what?

When I finally got a chance to ask a question of my own, Dougherty either didn’t hear it correctly or was completely unprepared to discuss the topic, because his answer didn’t directly address the question and more, was a pretty weak answer. I wanted to know more about his views on the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and the issue of corporate money and its effect on our elections and our lawmaking process. Before I could clarify or follow up, someone had routed the talk back to SB1070.

I stayed as long as Dougherty stayed. I shook his hand and thanked him for coming. I signed his petition to get on the ballot, which, by the way, he nearly left behind at the pub when he left. But I don’t feel like I got to know much about his positions on anything he would be able to influence should he gain the Senate seat. And that’s a failure on the part of the group hosting the event, and on Dougherty himself. I mean, honestly, how are you going to lead in the Senate if you can’t lead or inspire a group of 18 people to focus for half an hour and hear you out on your campaign platform?

My husband’s one-line assessment: “No one in this room has any political or monetary clout.”

As for me, I’ll keep an open ear and open mind. Hopefully I’ll have another chance to hear Dougherty, and hopefully he’ll be able to more clearly articulate some sort of vision of himself as a Senator. But for now, I’m not wowed.

Our 1943 Christmas

The food was good but the chicken was tough
But we chewed and chewed ’til we had enough
For health and food we all were glad
But best of all we had our Dad

Some hunted, some talked, and some even walked
At doing things for us none even balked
As for the children, naught could be finer
Than to stand in the yard and see the Streamliner

At games, puzzles and cards, all of us played
And far in the night soft beds were made.
The children were tired and sleepy – not cross
And we soon showed them we knew how to boss.

So soon they were sleeping quietly away
And knew nothing more ’til early next day.
While we silly old folks sat till our games were all done
Then we too retired, long, long after one

Next morning was fine and all in a glow
The children went out for a romp in the snow
Then late in the day to their homes they went back
Leaving Grandpa and I alone in our shack

We felt very lonesome and each dropped a tear
Wanting all of our children at home with us here
We can yet hear them calling “Merry Christmas” so clear
“Merry Christmas to you and a Happy New Year.”

12-27-43
Grandma Warner (Anna Warner)

Roasted Butternut Squash and Apple Bisque, that is, as concocted and published by PJ Mullen, who says, and I completely agree, that “a dad’s place is in the kitchen.” I made a big bad batch of this soup today, and my taste-buds are singing!

Like Mullen, my dad did a lot of the home cooking while my mom toiled away at the office. Like Mullen, my dad loved to experiment in the kitchen and was always tweaking recipes, figuring out how to make them better. Unlike Mullen, my dad got stuck on the zucchini end of the squash spectrum, and spent way, way too much time figuring out different things to stuff into them. Unlike Mullen, my dad never got around to butternut squash.

Which is why, having bought several pounds of Maya’s butternut squash, I needed recipe ideas to use it up, and gratefully found myself ogling Mullen’s beautiful bisque. Thick, hearty, creamy, good for you and resonant with the flavors of fall. The longer I watched him make it, the more I had to make my own. And I have to say, after tasting the soup, the vanilla bean was truly a genius move.

Of course, like my dad would have, I tweaked Mullen’s recipe to what I had on hand. I was out of celery, so I threw in an extra apple. I let my onion really caramelize in the pan before adding the apple. Instead of using 6 cups of broth I used four. I replaced the remaining 2 cups of broth called for with the zest and juice of three oranges, because here in Phoenix, citrus is a Fall Flavor, too. I had no fresh ginger, so I tossed in a little ground ginger just before blending the soup. Being too lazy to go get celery, do you think I went and got mascarpone? If you guessed no, you are right. My finishing touch was a simple sprinkle of toasted walnuts on top.

But the soup is it’s-rainy-and-cold-out-and-I-want-something-warm-and comforting-inside-me heaven. We ate it for dinner, I’ve got two more servings in the fridge for later this week, and six more in the freezer for the next rainy day. And a new blog, peaches en risotto, to drool all over whenever I need food ideas.

Kath published some intriguing thoughts about time, the data-body, and outsourced memories along with her video. Her piece begins with a quote from “Time Squared,” a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Which is kind of funny because when I think about time, I always come back to Delmore Schwartz’ poem Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day, which, of course, provides a big theme for the Star Trek Generations film: Time is the fire in which we burn. And I also come back to Don Charles’ song, “Little Pieces,” performed by D-Squared, which I used as the soundtrack. As Charles says, we’re all just “walking, talking, burning little pieces.” And for the origin of both, you can always look back to Heraclitus.

I can’t help it, friends. He’s still new to us, and it’s a delight getting to know this little guy. I may as well share my delights. I hope you understand.