Back at one of my favourite places on campus. After walking in the woods with the class and so close to my home, I return to the Mac lab in the Scarfe building— one of the quietest rooms I have been in class plus there’s lots of computers to use! During my BEd and my masters, I could spend hours working on videos and other projects on Mac12 which is tucked far enough in the back so that I can peek out the windows. It seems like a poor trade-off, being able to walk around in the woods compared to be stuck in a stuffy computer lab, but I got used to it. I hope that I can be equally fascinated by the outdoors as well as the digital environment. At any rate, I have got one of my videos completed, and I might be able to finish off another two before tomorrow’s class. And who knows how many rainy August afternoons I will be in here to complete the rest of the album.
When I started my PhD, I had one of the coolest jobs in this building: AV Services. Not only did I have to help students and faculty with their powerpoint/projector problems, but had access to all the digital equipment stored in room one – now locked up for good. At AV Services, we had access to the latest apps and equipment, now that it is shut down and I am out of this job, we have to wait for someone from Technical Services to come from wherever they are on campus to deal with a problem easily solved with the proper password nobody in this building seems to have! Even the computers in the Mac lab, with all their storage space, prevent me from copying files created on the computer onto my hard drive. I will have to hurry to post all the videos from Mother Mother’s album The Sticks onto YouTube, since anything saved on each of computers will be wiped by August 18th.
The thing I like most about this online technology, however, is that there are creative ways to get around locked out and copyrighted material. For the Inception/Sticks project, I found a way to record from my iPad onto the computer using iMovie’s voiceover recording. Necessity being the nature of this business, I will have to see how long my first video survives on YouTube before it is taken down or mutated again. I figure by the time I finish the album I will have amassed a bucketload of tricks for uses previously recorded material. Right now those greedy Google people have tracked down that I am using a previously recorded song, and are threatening to post ads in the bottom of the screen unless it is removed. Thankfully my iPhone and iPad don’t seem to be having this issue – let’s see what happens tomorrow!
Video One: Omen Saito