rebecca soble

yesterday, day one of my weekend, was spent mostly asleep or half-way there, working through a head cold most likely picked up at my new university job (read: teeming masses of teenagers). today, day two of the weekend, I woke up feeling less congested and slightly more energetic, but still happy to spend the day at home. here’s how i entertained myself:

Made breakfast, which actually was brunch because I took the time to do the hashbrowns right.  Peel a potato, dice and boil the bits until soft, saute with onions, pastirma (a turkish dried meat like pastrami), salt, pepper, paprika.   While the potato bits were boiling and frying I tidied the balcony and sat out there for my meal.  Earl Grey tea.

Planned some lessons and marked 30+ student papers. The students had done an experiment in class in which they were in groups of 8 and within those groups they had to put themselves in order from who liked technology the least to who liked it the most (these are students at a Technical University, so most of them were on the technophile end of the scale).  Then they had to write up their methods and results.  Considering it was the first week of class, I was really impressed with what they produced.

Knitted.  A few inches on a couple different socks, sitting on the balcony listening to my favorite weekend podcasts “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”, “Best Of The Left”, and “Car Talk” (I save the heavy newsy podcasts for falling asleep at night!)  Actually before the end of the day the purple sock was finished.  It’s for mom.  It’s done with Classic Elite Alpaca Sox (60% Alpaca, 20% Merino Wool, 20% Nylon) and the pattern is Embossed Leaves from Interweave Knits Winter 2005.

The yellow one is for me. I love the yarn, Plymouth Yarn Sockotta (45% Cotton, 40% Superwash Wool, 15% Nylon), because I like the cotton which adds a bit of definition to the yarn. However it can also make the yarn a bit less elastic. I chose the Hermione’s Everyday Sock pattern (found on ravelry) but modified the top to have a picot edge instead of ribbing. I think the picot edge plus the scaly texture of the sock makes it look like fish. They will be my fishy socks, for wearing on days when I feel suspicious of the world.

Watched the rain. No picture because I blanked out, but there was a nice bit of rain midafternoon that was hard enough to be refreshing yet light enough I could still sit on my balcony (with the overhang) to enjoy it.  And then the sun came out briefly.  It was lovely.

Did some yoga! Yay for the yogadownload.com podcasts – they are 20-30 minute audio accompanied by PDFs that include pictures of the poses in order.  Very professional and useful for do-it-yourself-yoga when you need a little guidance.

Took a shower. Evening showers for me these days, because I get up early and don’t want to waste time with the blow dryer or go to work with wet hair.  The shower was improved by my newly knitted washcloth combined with my newly purchased Body Shop Satsuma Shower Gel.  I think I really like evening showers, the hot water relaxes me and prepares me for evening mellowing and eventually sleep.  I also really like how it shortens morning prep time.

Plans before bed are to turn off the computer* and read.  Currently reading “Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith” by Gina Nahai, kindly left for me by my friend Jenney when she left Istanbul.  That was a while ago, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get around to this book, but I’m very glad to have it now.

That’s all, a quiet peaceful day to recuperate and prepare for a busy second week of classes.

*I mean it about turning off the computer, but it’s much easier said than done.   I can only do it if the mp3 player is fully charged and ready to provide a droning voice in my ear to fend off insomnia.

Some things absorbed from the internet.  I’m a serious political news addict at this point – I predict withdrawal systems will start Nov 6 (I’m 7 hours ahead of east coast news here, and probably won’t sleep next Tuesday night)…

1.  An opinion post from Slate.com discussing the difference between a President’s need for cool-headed thinking and judgment and a fighter pilot’s need for bravery and skill, and how the latter doesn’t necessarily qualify one for the former.  It includes a really interesting abbreviated historical look at how JFK made his decisions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Worth a read!

2.  Check out these photos of Obama taken by Callie Shell.  They are mostly from the primary campaigns but are very touching and give more depth to Obama’s image.  The one of him with the mother of a solider killed in Iraq brought tears to my eyes.

3. Taking advantage of the building election excitement, I’ve been discussing the topic in some of my English lessons — not just Obama/McCain bio and policy differences but also the US Presidential Election process, our Electoral College system being the only of its kind in the world, I’ve found most students are fascinated by it and eagerly discuss the pros/cons etc.  There’s a very clear video from www.commoncraft.com called “Electing a US President in Plain English” (also available here with subtitles, great for weaker students, and there’s even a transcript here).

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PS.  It occurred to me the other day after hearing the phrase “working across the aisle” for the umpteenth time that perhaps we might have more bipartisanship in the US Senate if in fact they de-segregated themselves.  Why do the Democrats and Republicans feel the need to sit apart in the Senate Chambers?  Wouldn’t there be more cross-party discussion (or at least opportunity for it) if they all intermingled?    From Wikipedia:

One hundred desks are arranged in the Chamber in a semicircular pattern and are divided by a wide central aisle. By tradition, Democrats sit on the right and Republicans to the left of the center aisle as viewed from the presiding officer’s chair. Each senator chooses a desk on the basis of seniority within his party.

I’ve started taking Turkish lessons again, but now for the first time they are private lessons (hi Aslı!) that I’m paying for as opposed to joining classes offered at school (free for English teachers if they are available at the right time, which seldom happens).  So this represents a new level of commitment for me.

One activity Aslı recommended in order to improve my writing (and, to follow, my speaking) is to keep a diary, but make it an imaginary diary so I wouldn’t feel limited by my own actual life’s events.   At the same time, I have started working on a lesson plan for my Advanced English students related to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where they can read some of the winning entries (crazy or funny or dramatic opening lines for novels) and then try to make up some of their own, in various genres (spy thriller, romance, historical fiction, etc).   So having these two things come into my consciousness at the same time made me think that I could do the same thing for myself – instead of diary entries, I could write short fake novel openings.

So here’s my first go.  I’m posting it here without anyone else having first looked at it, so all the mistakes are mine (as well as the things that are done right).  After Aslı reviews it, I will update this entry with a followup corrected version.  The theme for this first attempt is Ramazan-film-noir.

Akşam yemeği başlamadan önce ekmeği onun getirmesini bekliyordum, ama gelmedi.  Çok zaman bekledim, o yüzden yemek soğuk oldu.  Ya yolda çok aç ve çılgın bir taksi şoförü ona çarpti (beş dakika sonra iftar başlayacaktı) ya da benden nihayet ayrılmaya karar verdi.  Her ikisi aynı derecede olabiliyordu.

Here’s what I am hoping it says, in English:

I was waiting for him to bring the bread before starting dinner, but he didn’t come.  I waited so long the food became cold.  Either a crazy starved taxi driver hit him on the street (iftar was just about to start) or he finally decided to leave me for good.  Both were equally possible.

Okay at this red-hot moment I’m a bit nervous about posting this for the whole world to read (Yuck, her Turkish sucks! the crowd hisses) but Aslı tells me it will be motivational, so here goes.  (Click.)

This is an extract from a CBC Radio podcast called Comedy Factory, a short weekly compilation of funny skits etc from CBC Radio. It just made me laugh so I thought I’d share it. Anyone who follows both politics and hockey will enjoy it.

Hillary wins the Stanley Cup

The original podcast was about 11 minutes, I used some free* software called Audion to extract just the 1.5 minute portion that I wanted.  I didn’t do this just for the fun of sharing this link, but also because I was testing the software for its usefulness in preparing listenings for ESL classes.  Often there is an interesting portion of a podcast that would be much more manageable as a smaller extract.  The benefits are that you don’t have to save the entire podcast, but just the extract (disk space consideration), you can use tags or genres to pull the extracts together into teaching resource playlists, and of course, you don’t have to spend class time fiddling around finding the portion of the listening you want.

In addition to doing this for audio files, I’ve happily also been successful doing this for video clips as well.  Because often we only want to show a short pre-prepared portion of a video to a class, it could be useful to have just that portion available on a laptop rather than carry around the entire DVD.  Another bonus is that lesson plans can be created for small pieces and then the pieces can easily shared among teachers.  The good news is that it was remarkably easy to do what I wanted, using only free software.

For teachers who want to extract a short clip from a DVD, here’s the steps I used.

1. Find a DVD that you want a portion of.  In the DVD player, take note of what chapter(s) you want, and what format of subtitle and audio track you want.

2. Use a free* program called HandBrake (mac and win) to convert the DVD to another format.  I used AVI format but there are also some others available (MPEG4 most notably) that I haven’t yet experimented with.  In HandBrake, select your source material (the DVD) and choose the chapter(s) that you want to convert. You can do them all but you will have a big file.  I tried chapters from two DVDs, one 7 minutes long and one 3 minutes long.  The 7 minute clip ended up being 90MB but it didn’t include any subtitles or extra audio tracks.  The 3 minute clip was just 39MB but it did include subtitles and two audio tracks (English and Turkish).
3. Choose your preference for audio and subtitle tracks.  two audio tracks are allowed, from whatever is available on the DVD.  Just as usual, when viewing the final clip the audio tracks can be turned off and on as desired.  Unfortunately, subtitles are actually burned directly onto the video so there is no way to toggle them on/off while viewing.  If you wanted both you would have to create two separate files, one with and one without.  Of course if you have them on, you can choose whatever language subtitle you want, as available on the DVD.

4. Click to start and it takes just a minute or two depending on the size of your selection.   I couldn’t detect any difference in quality between the clip and the original.

There is another free* program for the Mac called Explicit which can take an AVI file and split it into smaller pieces.  So if the final AVI you get from HandBrake still isn’t small enough, you can use Explicit to get exactly the part you want, going by the time markers.  If you take a 2 minute segment out of a 7 minute chapter, you have to run split twice, first at the time marker for your beginning (you will end up with a part 1 and part 2) and then again on part 2 splitting at the end time marker.  Your final selection will be part 1 of the first part 2, if that makes sense.  I tried this and a 3.5 minute extract was just 25MB.  But if you don’t have a Mac you can at least get it down to just a chapter with HandBrake.

I haven’t yet tried clipping VCDs because I don’t have any samples here at the moment to try but I will try soon as I know we also have lots of things in that format.   Also there must be other software out there that can do a better job with the subtitles, but probably not free software.

Finally, I watched the completed AVI files with VLC, a free* video viewing program for Mac and Windows.  Other players like Quicktime and Windows Media Player would probably play them as well.

I hope this is helpful for you!  Also, don’t forget about existing short videos like video podcasts or youtube videos that can be used for ESL lessons.  These days it is possible to download videos from YouTube and keep them on your laptop in case you are teaching in an internet-free-zone.  I do this with a mac widget called MyTube (free!*) but I’m sure there are other applications for windows that do this too.

*I’m sure all the people that provide this terrific free software would love a donation if you feel so inclined.