"I don't make home videos, I make home films."

I've been wanting to write about this for three months. Colleen and I finally gave our Christmas present to her family; the (nearly) comprehensive collection of their VHS home videos on DVD.

First, the how. Here's what you need:

Computer (I used my Mac)

VCR

Adapter with audio/video cable ports and USB ports (and included software for capturing video) (Elgato Video Capture Device for Mac users)

DVD burner

Blank DVDs

Video editing software (iMovie for Mac users)

DVD burning software (iDVD for Mac users)

Photoshop software

VHS tapes

In a nutshell, here's what we did. Recorded all the VHS tapes using the VCR and adapter software, loaded the raw video files into iMovie, edited all unwanted portions out, placed chapter markers on the files, grabbed still frames to use for menu screens and the DVD covers, transferred edited video files to iDVD, picked the specific menu template, formatted the menu and chapter selection screens so they would fit a normal television screen, loaded stills into the menus, double-double-checked everything and then burned the DVD. Time-intensive parts were capturing the raw footage from the tapes onto the computer and burning the actual DVDs because capturing the video required just starting a tape and letting it play the whole way through in real time and burning the DVDs took like 6 hours a piece. Thankfully they were time-intensive and not labor-intensive; I could get one started and go do homework or something. The labor-intensive part was the editing. The most frustrating part was making sure everything worked. The worst portion of this entire project was the afternoon I got a video down to the final edit and tried to burn it. For some reason, the software kept saying I wasn't putting in a recordable DVD in the drive when clearly I was putting in a recordable DVD. I couldn't find an answer anywhere, online, I called Best Buy, Staples, everybody's gave me the same answer, "Huh. Weird, it should be working." Thanks a lot everybody. So I ended up having Staples send in the drive and get me a replacement drive, which worked perfectly. But for that afternoon...yikes. I was not a pleasant person to be around. But for the most part, the editing went fairly smooth, the biggest hiccup was trying to find a version of iMovie that had a chapter marker functionality. For some insane reason, Apple removed that tool from the previous version of iMovie when they upgraded to the version I have on my Mac (iMovie '09). Thankfully, Colleen's Mac is still kicking four years in and that had the older version of iMovie so we used that. The only problem is that hers is wicked slow so the process was slowed down a bit, but we still managed to get it done.

The covers were easier; Colleen and I went to the UIowa Main Library and used Photoshop to create the covers. I found a free cover template online that I loaded into Photoshop and changed around to feature our chapter titles, DVD titles, and stills from each video. We also made the backgrounds of each a different pastel color so put together the set of eight DVDs looks awesome. We just had them printed at Copyworks after their graphic designers resized the file so it would print to fit an actual DVD case.

Now a bit of the why: this is very possibly the biggest gift I've ever given or been involved in. Not physically big but more in the emotional attachment Colleen and I have to it. I've given some gifts in the past to Colleen that I was excited about, but this one was different, because it was really a joint effort between the two of us. It connected me to her and her family in a way that I hadn't really expected. We spent many hours recording the raw video, figuring out chronological orders, adding clips together, editing out the many unwatchable, damaged parts of the VHS tape or random stuff like the 1988 Iowa/Iowa State basketball game Jim had preserved. In the past, when the girls would get out the old VHS tapes and watch them, I would usually watch and enjoy them to a certain extent, not as much as the girls but still laughing at seeing how they were when they were young. But working on this project connected me to this videos more deeply because the end result is ultimately ours. I wouldn't label us "creative" types, and I don't mean in the sense of being a unique personality (we are both pretty odd), but more in the sense of doing actual creating. We don't paint, never had many drawing skills, never been much for creative writing, and we both are very musical but we don't exactly create it. However, this project was an act of creation for the two of us. We took raw materials in an untouched form and turned them into something beautiful and creative. And finishing it up to give away is an emotional thing because it's like your baby.

What made this gift especially meaningful for me to give away is that it's exactly what I want to do with my career. At the core, librarianship is about getting information into the hands of people who want it and can't find it. It's about preservation of information and extending access to anyone who needs it. Colleen and I had a lot of raw information and a specific user set and we've connected the two beautifully. It was a very rewarding experience and I hope to do it again soon. The best part about it is that next time I do this type of a project, it will be so much more efficient because I've worked out 75% of the kinks and can visualize each piece of the process so much better than before. That being said, anybody who's interested in hiring me, I'll do a better job than Walgreens and for an insanely lower price. Just let me know. Seriously, I am itching to start another project.

But after all is said and done, can you really put a price on this?

That's what our kids will look like.

-Jon

Facelift.

Thought it was an appropriate background. I was close to choosing something else; it's almost sensory overload. I also figured out how to make the entire blog space wider so it will stop cutting off the right side of YouTube videos I embed. Niiice.

In approximately 4 hours, Semester 1 is done. Today Colleen said, "If you think of it like a pie, you're 1/4th done with the pie!" What a delicious metaphor. I would say my graduate school experience so far has been like French Silk.

Speaking of blogs, this is a super sweet one that was featured on Neatorama. These two guys decided to pick a random place in the world and stay there for three months, their thinking being that three months is a good amount of time to get to know the location, not as well as the locals but certainly better than the average tourists. The main reason it caught my eye was that their first 91 days was spent in Oviedo, Spain. Going through all their blog posts was very reminiscent for me, as I recognized tons of the places they visited. It was cool to see somebody else living in the place where I lived, taking pictures of foreign places that became so commonplace to me and my classmates. So it won't be nearly as great if you haven't been, but it's certainly worth a peruse. The duo are currently in Savannah, Georgia, taking pictures, chattin' up the locals, and experiencing Georgia as it's meant to be experienced. I guess. Who knows, I've never been to Georgia. Here's their blog:

Savannah & Oviedo

So that's cool. I also wanted to put up the final project I worked on for my computing class. I worked with a guy named Jon on it; surprising we didn't come up with some clever play on having the same name. Our project was to design a site or system that was interactive for web users and met some information need. Clearly, we went above and beyond that. Check it out: Live in Iowa City. Jon came up with the idea and I wrote a killer proposal and then we put the site together. That's not completely accurate. Jon constructed the majority of the site since he had access to an external server and had some experience in PHP coding and I contributed a few pretty simple HTML coding pages, Javascript, etc. Right now, the site has a lot of things to update and fix, but the functionality of most everything is there. Be sure to click the events to see the sweet drop down animation. After we presented our project to the class, our professor said this was like halfway through his next class' coursework as he didn't really get into the details of PHP in this class. So that's great. Even better, Jon and I are both the class in the spring so I smell a continuation project happening. Look out for this site to blow up soon. I'm predicting the Facebook of the next decade.

I hope we get snow soon.

-Jon

Rap Doc.

So...this looks awesome.

The audio is off, and it's directed by actor Michael Rappaport, which is unexpected. But other than that, this whole documentary looks super interesting. Tribe is almost certainly my favorite hip hop "group" versus single rap artist, and getting to hear thoughts and interviews by the group members themselves along with other prominent members of the hip hop community is bound to be very interesting. Sign me up for anything where ?uestlove talks about music. I'll keep my radar up for this thing on DVD.

-Jon

The Ghost Inside

This is awesome. Continuing the tradition of DJ Danger Mouse flipping conventional music media on its head, here is the latest video from Broken Bells, the pairing of Danger Mouse and Shins lead singer James Mercer.

The song is The Ghost Inside off of their self-titled debut album. This is the second video released for this song, and this one is far cooler in terms of being really off-the-wall zany. The whole thing is basically the entire video of Private Eyes by Hall & Oates, with Mercer's mouth interposed over Daryl Hall's. So you're watching what was a terrible video from 1981 co-opted to make a cool video from 2010. Very reminiscent of Danger Mouse's video mash-up from The Grey Album. The result is a little creepy looking, but man is it unique. This probably breaks several copyright laws of some kind. Danger Mouse rules.

-Jon

Lonely Avenue

Music review time. I recently acquired the new collaboration between Ben Folds and Nick Hornby, an album called Lonely Avenue. It has a different feel than previous BF releases, but that's a given as it's a collab. Still absolutely worth a listen.

I'm assuming most readers know who Ben Folds is. He has been releasing records for the last fifteen years, some under the moniker Ben Folds Five and later on a few solo albums. He has gained a niche among college-aged and young adults with his heinously catchy melodies and heartbreaking lyrics. And he is a whirlwind live performer. If you ever have the chance to see him, TAKE IT. It will be one hell of a show.

Nick Hornby is an artist not generally corollated with writing music. He has written about music his entire career as a writer, but this is his first instance of actually collaborating on a musical album. He is most well known for writing several popular novels, including High Fidelity, About A Boy, and Juliet, Naked, as well as the screenplay for the 2009 movie An Education, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. So the dude's got chops. I am not in love with every single thing he's ever done, but on the other hand some of his work is the best written material I've ever read. This guy knows how to pierce your heart through writing about normal people with real problems. He can capture dialogue so incredibly well and make you feel heartache you've never had.

So how do these two collaborate on an album of music? Hornby writes words, Folds writes lyrics. Sounds weird but potentially awesome. And in my opinion, it turns out to be mostly awesome. The interesting part is that it clearly sounds like a Ben Folds album, but the disconnect happens as he starts to sing. The lyrics are not Ben Folds lyrics, and you can tell. It feels more like a Nick Hornby book than a Ben Folds album. And on some songs that's amazing, some it doesn't completely work. I don't think Hornby has his complete songwriting chops down yet, like on songs like Your Dogs and Picture Window. The songs have great feelings communicated but they don't feel natural to me. And that's just me. The majority of the album works great. And I think the biggest reason it's great is because they chose the perfect pairing of artists. Nobody could've pulled this album off but Ben Folds. His music is the ideal vehicle for Horby's writing. Hornby writes in such a familiar way, with stories about real people, and that's how Ben Folds has always written his music. It doesn't feel totally like a Ben Folds album, but it's as close as you can get. And the off-kilter feeling you get isn't bad, it's just not totally Ben Folds.

One of the best examples is the song Password. It uses a really unique songwriting device, spelling of words, and at first listen it seems a little cheesy, but after a few listens and the songs sinks in, holy cow it just rips you apart. You stop listening to the spelling of the words and you feel the pain in the narrator. That is unique and weird songwriting. But it's awesome. The song changes gradually the more you listen to it.

Final verdict? Great album. Not the best Ben Folds album ever but that's because it's not purebred Ben Folds. What it is is a great listen for fans of either artist.

-Jon

P.S. The album comes with killer liner notes. A quick blurb written by Hornby about each song, and then four different short stories written by him as well. Super great. Cool photos too.

Hip, Hip, Hooray!

Yesterday, Colleen ran 26.2 miles. It was incredible. She participated in the IMT Des Moines Marathon with 1,634 other runners. She was running with the Iowans for Africa group from Orchard Hill Church in Cedar Falls. The group was running to raise support for a elementary school being built in Mozambique, in the region they sponsor. There were about 60 or 70 runners from Orchard Hill, all wearing bright yellow shirts. It was really cool to see so many of those shirts pass as we cheered the runners on.

It was a really cool experience, even as a spectator. As a runner, obviously it's incredibly physically draining and difficult, but ultimately rewarding. And as a spectator, it's such an interesting atmosphere, there is so much goodwill among the thousands of people around. Everybody wants everybody else to finish strong and do their best. We all cheered not only our small group of runners we knew but also the entire Orchard Hill team and all the other runners working hard.

Colleen ran with her small group of friends with whom she'd been training since May. They all finished great, each about three or four minutes apart from each other. I was able to catch up with them eight times around the course to cheer them on. Colleen did such a great job, her final time was 4 hours, 43 minutes, and 31 seconds, and her average mile time was 10 minutes, 50 seconds. So great. She kept a very steady pace throughout the whole race, and only really slowed down to a walk for a few seconds at most water stops. I couldn't be more proud.

So hip hip hooray for Colleen. She was very strong and determined throughout the whole run. Now if she could just get me to do the next one with her! *tuba noise*

-Jon

Metadata in the Real World.

Library school is in full swing for me. It's hard, but not impossible. Lots of reading, which is annoying only because when people ask me what classes are like, I have to reply, "It is a lot of reading." This furthers the stereotype that all the field consists of is reading. Wrong. Librarianship isn't about books, it's about information. One main concept we've started to talk about now is "metadata," essentially, data about data. Informally, metadata is "a cloud of collateral information around a data object" - Clifford Lynch. Metadata are the descriptions of items or records in a catalog that allow you to search by keyword or description rather than the search engine having to search loads of full text and taking much longer. Example time.

So for a particular album or book or DVD or journal article, metadata and data are different. Let's look at a random album to make this a bit more real, say, the album 19 by Adele. Metadata would include things like, album title, artist, record label, executive producer, and the data for the specific album would be 19, Adele, Columbia/XL, and Jim Abbiss. So that's metadata.

Metadata allows better cataloging and more efficient searching. But it's also super complex and confusing, far more than I ever really thought it would be, mainly because no specific format for metadata has achieved real standardization in the information world. So you've got millions of different individuals, corporations, libraries, and groups using all sorts of different search methods using different metadata. Confusing.

It's an interesting concept to me though, and it will be especially interesting once I learn how to apply it to real life or actually get to work with metadata in a real way. Since that won't happen for awhile, I've decided to undertake a giant personal project to get my head around the idea. I'm metadata-ing my iTunes library. Hawt.

I'm going to try to get one album a week catalogued, which means I'll have this whole project done by the year 2022. Not bad. To get more specific, I'm going to basically be adding info about each album I have into the comments section of a song or album's info. So I'm starting with some cataloging already done, a few standard fields all filled in:

1. Album Title

2. Artist Name/Group Name

3. Year released/recorded

4. Genre

5. Album Artwork

Five fields, all already filled for every song and album in my library. But I'm going a bit further. I'm going to add as many additional authors as I can for these songs. For example, I just catalogued the album of earliest release date in my library, the Columbia Symphony Orchestra's recording of George Gershwin's masterpiece, Rhapsody in Blue, and the New York Philharmonic's recording of another of his beautiful works, An American in Paris. Here's the metadata I added:

1. Additional author: Gershwin, George (1898 - 1937)

2. Add. author: Bernstein, Leonard (1918 - 1990)

3. Add. author: New York Philharmonic and Columbia Symphony Orchestra [each one labeled to the specific track they recorded]

4. Original recording date: June 23rd, 1959 (for Rhapsody) and December 21st, 1958 (for AAIP)

This will be unique for every single album, and very possibly for every single song. For these two Gershwin songs, they have different information because they were released and recorded before the standard "album" as we know it was commonplace and they were two totally different works done by the same artist; it's only for continuity's sake that I've put them together under one album label. Once I get into newer albums, there will be a lot of additional metadata fields for record label, additional performers (featured artists), executive producers, etc. There is tons of extra information I can add. If I wanted to go totally nuts, I'd start cataloging sampled works in the music I have. Holy cow that would be insane. I could label samples of samples and also do covers. The data is seriously unending.

So far, the biggest obstacle I'm running into is that iTunes isn't set up for this kind of data entry. The comments section of song info is really the only place I can put this much superfluous information, and I can't organize it as well as I'd like. I can't even put info into separate lines. Blah. The other main problem is that while iTunes is referred to as a "library," there is no good catalog setting through which to search. Anyone who pops onto my iTunes and is curious to see what items I have that have Leonard Bernstein somehow included in their metadata has to create a smart playlist that matches the following rule: "Comments" "contains" "Add. author: Bernstein, Leonard". Not a lot of room for error here. But it's a work in progress. And (I hope) it's getting me ready for some sort of real world work in the field of library/information science, whereas in all of my classes we're basically just gabbing at each other all day long.

Oh hey, if anyone wants me to completely revamp their iTunes collection, making sure no duplicates are there, everything has correct data entered in all fields, then add lots of metadata for better cataloging purposes, and you're interested in paying me hundreds of dollars to do it, just let me know.

-Jon