Mostly True Tales

I’ve been searching for a nice way to integrate my home movies with the blog. I ran across a fairly new video hosting site called Vimeo.

Vimeo is a pretty nice site that, at least so far, is not filled up with a bunch of crap like YouTube. They allow 500MB of uploading per week, which is more than enough for me. As usual, Vimeo, converts your videos to flash for streaming, but it seems to me that the end result is cleaner and faster than other video sites. Vimeo also embeds quite nicely into Wordpress.

So, I am experimenting by going back to the master of my movies and exporting them in a higher quality than I had online before, once uploaded, Vimeo provides the code to embed the video. The end result is pretty nice.

It’s a slow process though, as the export from dv takes a while, then the larger file has to be uploaded. It will be a while before I have all the movies online, but look for a movie page from the main menu soon, and drop me line telling me what you think.

Meet Marina, a 26 year old philologist (the study of linguistics and etymology) and the creator of the Hot for Words Podcast.

Hot for Words, is an incredibly interesting, fun, and educational video Podcast presented in Marina’s sexy, but tasteful style. Watch it once, and you’ll be hooked. After discovering this Podcast, I found it so interesting, I downloaded all the previous shows.

Armed with her Oxford English dictionary, Marina takes suggestions from her viewers and explains the history and true meaning of the word. Often the featured word pertains to the time, for instance, she just finished a series on Halloween.

The Podcast is more than just another case of, sex sells, it presents useful and interesting information that could or should be valuable to anyone. I wish I had a teacher like her when I was in school!

You can subscribe to Hot for Words via iTunes with this URL,

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=265783864

or you can watch her online here,

http://www.youtube.com/hotforwords

Apple is once again, about to rock the world with the release of it’s new operating system Leopard. I’ve pre-ordered my copy and hopefully it will arrive tomorrow even before it goes on sale at the retail stores at 6pm.

When Panther was released a few years back, my Brother and I went, and stood in line, along with several hundred other people, awaiting it’s 6pm release, and our turn to purchase it. I’m going to skip that whole hoopla this year, and hopefully, I will already have Leopard installed by the time it goes on sale to the general public.

Leopard sports a healthy dose of groundbreaking features that are guaranteed to impress and amazing just about anyone, especially Windows users. Apple has a guided tour of the new features found it Leopard than can be watched here.

It’s one thing to read about, and another to watch it demonstrated. Even as an experienced Mac user, familiar with the concepts of the new feature set, I was blown away. Windows users, will cry in their corn flakes.

If you haven’t checked out the world of podcasting yet, you’re missing the boat. Regardless of your interests, there is probably a podcast for you. You don’t need an iPod to listen to podcasts, just iTunes installed on your computer. You can listen to podcasts on your computer, burn them to CD, or of course, listen to them on an iPod.

There are a lot of junk podcasts, but there are an equal amount of outstanding podcasts that cover the widest variety of interests. There are a lot of comedy podcasts, but I prefer the educational variety.

One of a few podcasts I am enjoying right now is Coffee Break Spanish.

That’s right, I’m learning Spanish. Coffee Break Spanish is a weekly podcast that teaches you Spanish in small 15 or 20 minute segments. The show is produced in Scotland by an excellent Scottish linguist named Mark. Mark is accompanied by a student named Kara who is learning Spanish right along with the listeners.

At the time of this writing, there are 42 episodes of Coffee Break Spanish available for download from iTunes. I am currently on episode 12 and perhaps progressing a little faster than one episode a week, but not by much. I doubt the day will ever come that I’m waiting for the next episode to come out.

The learning format is very interactive, you repeat after Mark and Kara repeats after you. Each show is meant to be listened to several times over the course of the week. Because I don’t have a decent iPod hookup for my car, I burn several episodes to a cd and listen to it while I’m driving. The show is fun to listen to and I feel like it is really working. I’m learning Spanish!

I’ve been making Coffee Break Spanish part of my daily routine. I find I can learn without really thinking about it. I can be cleaning house or doing something else while I listen to the show and find myself repeating after Mark without effort. The first time I hear a new episode, I might think, “Oh, this is getting hard,” but after hearing it a few times it becomes easy and second nature.

Lately, I’ve been supplementing the podcast by watching classic movies in Spanish. Most DVD’s have a Spanish soundtrack. It’s challenging, but great fun. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Young Frankenstein in Spanish (that’s Frankenstein Junior in español), it’s a whole new perspective.

Coffee Break Spanish is is part of the Radio Lingua Network which also offers podcasts for learning French, German, and Italian.

So check it out, broaden your horizons, stimulate your mind, learn a language. If you decide to learn Spanish, drop me a line, perhaps we can practice with an iChat.

Today is the 1 year anniversary of Mostly True Tales. In that time, I have posted 90 times. Not too bad, but a far cry from every day. Still, I guess on average, that would be a post about every 4 days. Plenty of room for improvement. We will see how I do in year 2.