Ale Boat

Radical idea: Ale Boat. A boat containing an apparatus that desalinates ocean water and cleans it or freshwater, then uses that water to make beer. Not limited to just ale. Would be most useful with a garden in which to grow barley, hops, and other beer-making plants.

Radical Ideas

Antibacterial Soup.

Pretty self-explanatory; it's soup that is antibacterial. It would come in regular and chunky style. For external use only.

Return of the Blog!

I haven't posted an entry on this particular blog since November, when I said that I was going to start posting entries on this blog more often.

Ahem.

Here's what happened, partly: Something personal came up in November, and I put a lot of things on the backburner. Things such as NaNoWriMo, blogging, vlogging, and even videomaking in general.

Since then, I've been getting back into the swing of those things. I've made a few more episodes of Miscellanea, posted a couple of vlogs and started work on some other projects.


I'm still not sure if vlogging (I still hate that word) will be a regular thing, but I feel better about it than I did in November. I just don't want to make vlogs that are just me talking into the camera about what I've done since my last vlog. I think it will be an occasional thing, something I do when I have something to rant about or an update on a project or something. (If you're counting 'somethings,' that sentence contained three.




I will continue to make episodes of Miscellanea, although I've gotten sidetracked form that recently. I'm working on a few episodes right now. The ones I've got going right now are mostly food related, but there will be more soon that concern other topics.

I'm also working on recutting and revising a video documentary I made in 2008 for Banned Books Week. That will take a lot of work, but I'm very much looking forward to it.

I'm working on other things as well, some video related, some not, but those are the main things that will be affecting my YouTube channel in the next few months.

I really hate the word 'vlog.'

What Happened to October?

Wow, October seemed to go by pretty fast. The latest episode of Miscellanea was uploaded during the first week of the month, then my video camera stopped working. I went on vacation the next week, and the week after that kind of flew by. I was sick for about half a week and I got better a few days before Halloween. I only uploaded one video during the month, and I didn't post any entries on this blog at all.

November is going to be different. I'm participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. I participated in 2007 and met the goal. I started it last year, but I didn't really get into it, and I gave up on it after a week or two. This year I'm excited about it, as I've mentioned in my vlog. That's right, I'm vlogging now. I frickin' hate that word, but it's popular, people online generally know what it means, and it's hard to avoid using it. It's interesting to note, however, that while 'blog' is recognized as a valid word by many spell check programs, 'vlog' tends not to be. I suppose that will change before too long. I digress.

The vlog is starting as a video log of this year's NaNoWriMo, but it may continue after the month of November. The main factors that that is dependent on are my comfort level with vlogging after NaNoWriMo, and whether I feel I have anything to ramble at a camera about. I'm actually kid of enjoying it. It's different from making videos like the Miscellanea series. I don't like it nearly as much as doing that kind of work, but it doesn't take nearly as much time, and it's more fun than I had expected. Here are my first two vlogs:





I wasn't expecting much of a response to these, but I have already gotten some feedback from various sources. I'll probably make one every few days during the month of November.

How I Spent My First Furlough Day

The library I work for, in the face of budget cuts from the state, has implemented rolling furlough days, which means that half of the branches in the system are closed one Thursday, and the other half are closed on the next Thursday, for ten weeks through November. That means that everybody who works in the system gets five unpaid Thursdays off. This is not an ideal situation, and it will put a bit of strain on most people's finances, but while the time off is not paid, it is still time off, and I intend to make the most of this situation. The branch I work at had our first furlough day last week, and the week since has been crazy busy. This is Banned Books Week, so preparing for that, dealing with the additional workload after the day off, and dealing with Banned Books Week, training and meetings this week have kept me pretty busy at work and at home. In any case, here now is a partial list of things that I did on my first furlough day:

-Stayed up until four o'clock in the morning the night before, practicing the keyboard.
-Slept until around eleven o'clock, which was later than I'd wanted to get up, but, you know, I'd been up until four AM.
-Did several loads of laundry.
-Removed a stain from a suit jacket.
-Did a great deal of cleaning.
-Made rice milk.
-Started a batch of sauerkraut.
-Made soup.
-Shot video for that week's episode of Miscellanea as well as some for a future episode.
-Watched the pilot episode of Freaks and Geeks, the complete boxed set of which I got for my birthday a few years ago and hadn't gotten around to watching yet. I'm enjoying it.
-Practiced the keyboard.

There were a few things I didn't get around to, like making bread, but sometimes overplanning your day can lead to being pretty productive. I got a lot of things done. Next week I might take more time to relax on my furlough day. I haven't been taking the time to read very many books lately, and I'd like to make some significant progress on my TBR list.

Two Kinds of Pretzel, Two Videos

I was going to make a post about each video I made as I uploaded them, but hey, I haven't made a post on this blog in over a month! I've got some catching up to do. I've made seven episodes at this point, and I'd like to have a record of the production of my projects to refer back to, so I'm going to gradually post about the episodes I've made in the meantime. These posts might only be interesting to me, but I'm going to post them anyway, so there!

This episode was the first, and the only so far, to be split into two parts. I had wanted to show the versatility of baked goods such as soft pretzels by making two different kinds, one savory, the other sweet. YouTube places a ten minute limit on user-uploaded videos. During the editing process, after I'd shot everything but before I'd done the voiceovers, I realized that this episode was going to surpass that limit by several minutes. There wasn't enough excess footage to make up the difference by making cuts, so I decided to make it a two-parter and insert an intermission as a transition from one to the other. Coincidentally, I'd already downloaded several public domain drive-thru theater intermission reels from archive.org, so I cut the beginning and end off of one and used that.



I finished the first part, then exported and uploaded it before I finished the second part.



It's not the most work I've ever done on a video, even in such a short amount of time, but I think it's been the most labor-intensive episode of Miscellanea I've made so far, and I felt justified in taking the next week off from the series, as I'd made the equivalent of two episodes in one weekend. This is the only episode I've put a teaser at the end of so far, but I'd like to do that more often.

Jeez, this post is wordy.

Candied 'Yams' Are Old Hat- Here's a Better Way to Enjoy Sweet Potatoes

This video took me two days to make, rather than the several weeks of the previous episode. Each of the two probably took a similar amount of time in terms of hours, but for this one I already had the microphone and the setup and stuff. I'm still trying to find the best format and settings for uploading to YouTube, but there are many variables to consider. I'll try something different with the next episode. I'd rather not have to spend several hours uploading a video, but for fairly high quality that would be unavoidable. I'm trying to find something in between. I'd like the uploaded videos to have quality somewhat higher than this one and the previous one, and I'd prefer not to spend more than an hour or two uploading.