Today was Worldwide Woodstock Day, a celebration of the international boarding school in India that I and many other devoted alumni attended. Alumni groups gathered in all corners of the globe, which for me meant a Nepali/Indian restaurant in Arvada, CO. Saw one old friend I hadn’t seen since I graduated, another I have seen several times because she happens to be friends with a Sun colleague, several I knew via email, and many I’d never met in any way before. And, as always, we all found much in common and plenty to talk about.
One of our assignments was to record ourselves sing the school song (preferably in the key of F – not sure we hit that) as part of a forthcoming video montage. What you hear above is mostly me, since I was the only holding the camera.
Whoops, messed up the lyrics – wasn’t that supposed to be “close of day”?
This week I trained four of my Sun colleagues in videoblogging. It was very hands-on training, with the intent that they actually produce a finished video by the end of the two-day course.
We started with setting up the cameras and mics right away, and I had them practice following an active speaker (me, imitating Jeff Bonwick’s pacing). I wasn’t really thinking about the fact that they were filming me, so I was completely unself-conscious. Which was good in some ways, not so good in others. But some of the material may be useful for videobloggers in general, so I’m editing and posting it in spite of what seems to be inordinate emphasis on my chest.
Tired of those baggy, boy-cut t-shirts we all get at conferences, Teresa Giacomini decided to do a run of OpenSolaris shirts for women. Much more flattering to the female figure. Want one? Well, they were very popular and went fast (lots of women in OpenSolaris). Join your local OpenSolaris User Group – maybe they have a few left. ; )
Recently realized that a dumb spreadsheet error (mine) was causing a serious undercount in the total views of my videos. My video stats for 2009 now read:
100 hours of video shot to date (and more to come before the year ends)
35 hours of video edited (mostly by me) and available (some of it only internally)
~16 events/locations shot
Total cumulative views on all "my" videos through the end of October is 88,672.
My first and last stops in New Zealand were in Auckland, where I stayed with Mark and Annie (Mark is Woodstock class of ’78, both have been on staff), though we barely knew each other – we may have met during one of my visits to the school, and Annie and I worked together (at a distance) on the Woodstock history, but none of us remembers too clearly.
At any rate, Mark picked me up at the airport upon my arrival from Brazil (via Buenos Aires) and remarked: “Whenever I come to the international terminal, it’s to pick up someone I don’t know.” Woodstockers are like that.
The statue of a woman on the rock in the water commemorates a local legend for which the town is named. “Whakatane” means (roughly) “does the work of a man” – she single-handedly saved a big war canoe from slipping out to sea. Or something.
