Green Day for Darfur?

So Green Day has dedicated their music video for Working Class Hero to raising awareness of the horrific situation in Darfur where allegedly government backed militias are systematically eliminating the local population. We have heard about the horrible problem in Darfur for a few years now, but finding a solution remains elusive. In the video, one of the people who fled Darfur states that he does not want military might, but that he just wants UN peacekeepers to protect the civilians. Come on, what does he think UN peacekeepers are other than military might? I would even go so far to say that peacekeepers are ineffective at best. In my view the better approach would be for the people, like Green Day, who care about the people of Darfur to contribute money to arm them so that they can defend themselves. The problem in Darfur is certainly ugly, but the solution is equally ugly. Thinking that there could possibly be a clean solution borders on fantasy.

Skiing: Day 7 Watterville Valley

Lori and I skied Watterville Valley last Sunday and had a blast! I have not been to Watterville Valley in the last three years so it was nice to ski it again. We only had time to take a day trip so Watterville was the perfect place to go. We spent most of the day skiing off the Sunnyside Triple. We liked Gema, True Grit, and especially Bobby's Run. The video below has some shots of us skiing the bumps on Bobby's Run. My run looks a little rough due to the size of the moguls, but we still had lots of fun!

Warbeats

Ever wonder how music producers create the interesting beats featured in popular music? Well now nfxbeats has created a series of tutorials on YouTube illustrating how they actually do it. My favorite is this his remake of In Da Club. Enjoy

Australian Wildlife

Check out these two videos of Australian Wildlife that Lori and I shot on our honeymoon last month.

We took these videos with our Panasonic VDR-D300 video camera. I used a combination of Panasonic's video editing software and a trial version of Adobe Premeier Elements 3.0 to edit the video and create an MPEG file for upload. We used DVD-RAM disks to record all of the fotage, which turned out to not really be a clean process because Premeire Elements cannot talk directly to the camera when the camera is using a DVD-RAM disk. The process that I had to go through was to use the Panasonic video editing softare to pull the data onto my PC as an MPEG file and then import that data into Premeire Elements for editing. Premiere Elements is a much better video editing product than the Panasonic program.

When I switched to a DVD-RW Premiere elements was able to talk to the camera because it appeared like a DVD drive so for the future, I am going planning to use DVD-RW disks.

Beach Takeoff

This YouTube video shows a plane taking off from a sand beach in Fraser Island in Australia. I have never seen something quite like this, so I recorded it for everyone to see. My Dad is a professional pilot so he was really interested to see this as well. Enjoy...