Yo Hablo Español

Many years ago, I studied Spanish in junior high and in high school. Though I have far more opportunities to practice my Spanish here in California than I did during my childhood days spent in Kansas, I have to admit I rarely make use of what little Spanish I remember - aside from "taco", "burrito", and the like.

Somewhere in my busy schedule I apparently managed to find time to bust out my rusty language skills, dust them off, and do this video in Spanish. Here's the original video in case you missed it when it was first released. My accent is muy bueno, don't you think?

In high school, I switched from Spanish to German. Here's a German video. I have to say that the pitch of my voice is a bit higher than usual.

And I even dabbled a little in French at community college one summer during high school. Here's a French video.

My memory must be fading with age. I don't recall learning to speak Mandarin, Korean, Russian, and Portuguese, but apparently I did. The proof is right there on the Internet, and we all know that everything on the Internet is true.

Okay, so the speakers in those videos are obviously not me. But I have to say that it's cool to see (and hear) that my work (not exactly War and Peace I admit) has been translated into numerous languages. [ Full disclosure: Some of the slides in videos were created by my talented co-workers. ]

For me, being translated is especially cool because one of my majors in college was Linguistics. I've long been fascinated by languages and enjoy the opportunities I get to practice (a.k.a. "mangle") them when I travel. I don't speak any language (with the possible exception of English) particularly well, but I've always felt that the locals give me credit for trying (a.k.a. "butchering").

My other major in college was Computer & Information Science. CIS + Linguistics is a big factor behind the languages that I do "speak" well:

C, Bourne shell, Korn shell, BASH, Csh, Perl (Tk and DBI), PHP, CGI, HTML, Java, ASP,
SQL, TCL, Expect, sed, awk, Visual Basic, PowerShell, PowerCLI, Orchestrator, Javascript, ActionScript,
SwishScript, and x86 assembly.

Time to pick up one more language: Polish. I'm doing a mileage to Warsaw run in December. :-)

First video for my work blog!

After months and months of getting bumped by higher priorities, I finally posted the first of what I expect to be many training videos on my work blog.

You can see the first video now. Why wait?

For those who are interested (and some have already asked), I used the following:

• iPhone 4S (yep, iPhone 4S)
• Camtasia 2 for Mac
• PowerPoint 2010

The final result isn't perfect, but I think it is pretty good.

Somewhere in New York

I landed at Rochester around 6:30pm yesterday. The sun was already setting, so any hopes of seeing the fall colors were dashed.

What to do? What to do? Manhattan's 350 miles away - too far.

So I opted to visit Niagara Falls. I've been to the Canadian side with Alicia, but I've never been to the US side.

The first thing I was struck by is that the Canadian skyline is much more colorful and picturesque than I remember the US side being.

I like the skyline in this shot, but I love the way the blackened water drops into the glowing abyss.

In this shot, the lights from Canadian side backlights American Falls with a reddish glow while the falls themselves are forever stopped in a blurry motion caused by the slow exposure.

I love this shot for the way it captures the lighting. Not quite sure how I managed to capture this shot. The lights slowly shift between different colors. Somehow this shot captured bluish green, purple, white, orange, and red lighting.

FYI... The falls in the foreground are American Falls, and the red/purple/orange falls one-third of the way down the picture are Bridal Veil Falls.

I enjoy the way this shot draws my attention to American Falls and the ghostly mist while topped by Bridal Veil and the skyline.












I wanted to to use the 30D, but I left it in the trunk. I would have needed a tripod and the park was darker than I'd have liked. Perfect for great photos, but perfect too for camera snatching. I'm happy with how my little Olympus pocket camera performed. BTW... I didn't modify the color in the photos. That's just how the light looks. Great for night shots.

The Olympus also takes (decidedly non-HD) videos. Be sure to turn down your speakers before viewing. The audio isn't very good and the falls are quite loud (as were some of the tourists who - though muffled - can be heard over the sound of the falls!).

I'm sitting in the Red Carpet club in Dulles, and the WI-Fi is slow. I better stop uploading photos. I've got a plane to SFO to catch.

Having see both the US and Canadian sides of the falls, I'm ready to render my verdict. Both sides are are spectacular, but I'm going to have to give this one to our neighbors to the north. The impact of standing right beside Horseshoe Falls as it gushes past is profoundly striking. In fairness to the US side, I didn't venture onto Goat Island; it looked too dark and uninhabited. Here's the path I did take. Maybe the view would have been better from Goat Island. I'll have to find out the next time I visit.

Go to either. Better yet, go to both. Remember to bring your passport to get across the Rainbow Bridge.

Shout out to my parents... They honeymooned at Niagara.