Bottling Night

From Beermaking

Bottling night was last night at the Brew Kettle in Strongsville. Here's the whole darn group of brewers. We now have more than enough India Pale Ale and Vienna Lager for all. I thought it was a bit crazy trying to keep track of all the bottles with six guys and two kettles worth of beer in a very tight space. A good time was had by all.

I Love Maps

Wow. This contains all the functionality that I only dreamed of creating the hard way when I wanted to start MedinaMultimedia.com. And it's free. I initially wanted to do a series of my favorite hikes that incorporated audio, photo and video, that I could then share. Stay tuned for some cool mapping to take place here.

The Blues

From David Dye's "World Cafe" from WXPN.
Guests: The Swell Season, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irgolva, podcast released 1/4/10. Partial transcript of the interview with Glen Hansard speaking.

..."And when I read the poem, the reoccuring line in the poem is "because the poet makes grief beautiful". And the idea is that by singing, you sing your sorrow into gold. And his whole idea is that when we dig into ourselves, we speak about the sadness and we speak about the stuff that is kinda ugly and dark in ourselves and we speak about the shadow places, that there is and alchemy in the expression. There's an alchemy and it turns into good stuff."
"The idea that you're in a bar and listening to the guy singing in the corner saying "I've lost my girl. I don't know where I'm going to sleep tonight. My job is ending in a week." We're sitting there drinking beer cheering him on because somehow we're connecting with him on a very fundamental level. The blues. For some reason when people express the blues, we enjoy it. And it's about honesty. Because when you are honest that when the transformation can happen. If you're lying and you're just putting pretty words together then, generally speaking, no magic is allowed through."

The Times They Are A-Changin'

"Robert McGarr,

Per your request, we have cancelled your account, domain [robmcgarr.com, medinamultimedia.com], terminated the billing and deleted the site from our server.

We hope that if we can ever be of service to you, that you will allow us to serve you again. Thanks from all of us at 3Essentials Hosting."

From General blog images

This shows how it was for me to structure that first MedinaMultimedia.com flash piece on the New Year's Day Bike Ride. Everything was timed off the mp3 audio. But what really makes all this crazy is that all of this was sequential. So, if I wanted to have a photo up a second longer or rearrange the order of photos, it would require retiming the audio or renumbering all the photos accordingly. Not very intuitive to edit.

The columns from left to right are seconds on the timeline, the original photo source number, the transposed flash timeline value, the slideshow photo number, audio description and photo description.



It's true, I shut down MedinaMultimedia.com. Mostly because the hosting was going to cost me another $212.00 for another two years and it lacked my interest to support it. Though it only had a short run, I count it as a personal success. And just wanted to share a few things I learned from the project.

Be realistic.
I put all sorts of crazy pressure to produce as much as I could and to make MedinaMultimedia.com seem not so stagnant. Producing content from scratch doesn't come easy and I take my hat off to those who make it seem so consistently easy. The reality of the situation was that the project was set up to be fueled by my ambition and/or available time. Both of which would fluctuate wildly. It didn't take long for my unrealistic pressure to get the better of me.

Have fun and don't take yourself too seriously.
Sure, I selected subjects that interested me. The whole of the project could have been helped by being playful and lighthearted. It's something that I now try to build into this site. So if I'm not having fun with what ever is in front of me, I just need to stop and switch my interest to something else.

Find like-minded people.
I've had great fun meeting new friends or reacquianting myself with old ones as a result of the site. Many people were more than willing to take a look at the site and give me their two cents. But more important, were the ones that helped me see my work from a different point of view either creatively or technically. I just hope I have the opportunity to return the favor.

We never stop learning.
It could be argued that one of the main reasons I created MedinaMultimedia.com was to teach myself web skills. And I certainly did that. I had to learn how to record my own audio, take my own photos, and produce a final piece -- editing all the way. I learned how write Flash ActionScript many times over and how to place Flash on a page. I learned how to use a content management system, how to write cascading style sheets and hypertext markup language.

I've still got a long way to go, but the basics are behind me. And ultimately this knowledge helped me move into the position I now have at my day job. That alone makes this project worth it's weight in gold.

Work smarter.
When I think of all the time I spent trying to find a better way to program/script something, I ache. I must have tried countless ways to script a basic Flash slideshow, never quite getting exactly what I wanted. There were constant technical tradeoffs. I should have bought Soundslides from the beginning and not worried so much about the technical hurdles and just focused on the creative work. That was really what I wanted to focus on anyway.

There's also financial smartness to consider too. Everytime I would announce to my coworker Jon that I spent more money on a new piece of software, he would roll his eyes just a little inside and then suggest a few ways that I might be able to something similar for free. I scoffed at this at first, but I have yet to spend a dime on this site and I think it looks pretty darned good. The Picasa slideshows were his idea and they work great.

Sledding

With family in town at the loss of my Dad, we took to the hills to find some joy. We went to Medina's Reagan Park. Present are Mike, Amy, Katie and Lauren. As well as Ally, Danny and myself. Mom handled the camera and is not shown. Not present were Scott and family and we missed them. We'll look forward to catching up with them real soon. Photos are courtesy of Mom.

Some Backyard Pruning

From General blog images

We had another tree taken out recently. We hated to see it go. The above photo shows the damage at the stump level that we were worried about. You can see the cavities coming into the heartwood from the top and left. Further troubling is the dead wood in the center. I know the water travels up the trunk on the outside of the tree, but that's a lot of dead heartwood. Anyway, I'll sleep better when the 60 mph January winds blow knowing we've done everything we can to make ourselves safe.