Sunshine Village

andreaMarcStephanie,
originally uploaded by dougsymington.

Here's a picture of Andrea, Marc and Stephanie that I took yesterday at the top of the Wawa Quad chair at Sunshine Village.

Back in YYC

Greetings from Calgary.

I'm back in YYC to do some skiing with Phil and Marc, and hope to get some of the "usual suspects" to join us.

From the looks of the temperature it'll definitely be skiing of the spring variety.

Today's high temperature is forecast for 16 celsius with a high of 20 for tomorrow -- definitely sunscreen weather to be sure.

I'll do my best to get some pics posted over the next couple o' days.

Maeve_top

Maeve_top,
originally uploaded by dougsymington.

A picture of Maeve "on top of the World" at Sunshine Village near Banff, Alberta.

Learning about multimedia

In terms of my own learning about multimedia...the more I work i do with video, the more appealling and "audio-only" approach becomes.

I don't have to worry about how I look on camera >;-) and the files (especially MP3) are more easily distributed and accessed. By my intended audience.

That said, I need to experiment with open source video and get away from proprietary applications that are constrained by cost and accessibility concerns.

The Audioblogging Manifesto

Yesterday and today I've been experimenting with low resolution video. My goal is to make videos that are accessible to dialup audiences, albeit ones with faster connections. Most "stakeholders" of online media will tell you that connection speeds of at least 56 Kbps are needed for access of online (multi) media.

As outlined in The Audioblogging Manifesto muultimedia -- voice and video recordings -- change the dynamic of the online experience. For instance, the "four minutes of your life" MP3 tells us that such "media" posts:

• are invisible to Google
• hold the audience captive
• and deliver content at about 1/10th the speed an accomplished reader can read, let alone skim the content

Notwithstanding all of that. I think that media files have a distinct ability to humanize the 'net. As I've mentioned in this space. Multimedia is worth the effort in terms of "the buzz" it generates. I know this because of the weekly videos Dr. Clare has been posting for our class, although it would be interesting to hear from colleagues with slower connections as to their experiences with the *.MOV (Quicktime) files.

I've been experimenting with Windows Media Video (*.WMV) files in this test video. NOTE: Clicking on the link will begin the video download. Efforts have been made to reduce file size and streaming rates to facilitate "access" by those with slower connections.

Interested Macintosh users who haven't already done so, will need to download and install the Windows Media Player 9 for MAC OS X, or this version for MAC OS 8.1 or better.

Please post comments regarding your video experiences (be sure to include operating system (OS) type and connection speed information, if you know it, otherwise just tell about your experience) by clicking on "Post a Comment" near the bottow of this page.