rebecca soble

I can probably chalk it off to post-holiday-back-to-work and pms coinciding but the past few days I’ve felt a seriously strong lack of desire to do anything combined with a palpable boredom due to not doing anything.

I’ve actually socialized a bit more than normal this week, going out for a few hours on Thu after work (10pm is after work, btw!) and also Saturday evening, but overall I just feel blah. The idea of leaving the house is totally unappealing, but staying home is almost equally so (except I do enjoy my balcony). There’s nothing I feel like cooking, all my knitting projects are in the blah-zone at the moment, I’m in a lull in my turkish language education, etc etc.

What I’ve done so far today:

• downloaded some podcasts and listened to On Point Week In The News while washing dishes (these days, any podcast on the economy has me entranced).
• cleaned and reorganized some cupboards and one drawer. oh, and another drawer in a different room.
• half-watched some biographical program on BBC while knitting and then put it away (and turned it off) mid-row/mid-show.
• randomly swept and dusted, managing to not complete any room except the balcony (by far the smallest and easiest)
• felted a wool sweater in the washer (it had already been accidentally washed and half felted), cut it up into trivet- and coaster-sized pieces, and started some blanket stitch edges.
• cleaned the filter in the fish tank, entertained myself stacking up the decorative rocks in new arrangements.
• put whites in the washer (they’re still there, I assume they will get hung to dry by someone in a while)
• reviewed photos, games, and commentary online from the 2008 National Scrabble Championship, happening this week in Orlando, FL. Rah rah scrabble-buddies! And then realized nobody would be around to play Scrabulous on Facebook with me for a whole week.
• Grated a zucchini in preparation for making some mucver for dinner, with yogurt, yum.
• More stuff but, i can’t recall anything else worth mentioning.

(Sorry, RG, for the boring list, but that was sort of the point.)

I’m really in a quandary with my knitting, primarily with the problem of the socks. I wanted to try a pair of toe-up socks, and I wanted to do a bit of stranded colorwork (though it’s very simple, just blocks) but to be honest, I’m just up to the first heel and I’m pretty much not enjoying it. It’s a great carry-around project, and I have a hard time giving up, but I think I’m gonna hafta frog it because it’s just holding me back. What I’d rather be doing is a pair of simple cable fingerless mitts in preparation for winter. I also seem to have a bit of a felting bug (despite the difficulty of a front-load washer) and might try some felted bowls. But I have a t-shirt that is lacking just one sleeve that I really should finish…

Everything I do these days, other than walking around the city, feels pretty sedentary, and I feel the need for some new active thing to do. I thought about a yoga or tai-chi class, but the social interaction required from that is anti-motivating, plus the idea of having to do it according to someone else’s schedule. I really like the idea of geocaching, but would need to invest in a GPS device (I had an old one but gave it away to a friend who is easily lost, not sure how it’s helped). I’ll have to investigate how much they cost here in Turkey and maybe after payday (7th of the month) I can afford to get one. Geocaching seems ideal because I can do it alone or with a friend along, it would GET ME OUT OF THE HOUSE, plus it’s both puzzle-y and earth-y, both things that appeal to me. Yes, it sounds good.

Finally, I also need to get some energy back for my actual work. With my students also taking holidays and feeling “summer blahs” these days, what lessons I’ve had have tended to be more low-key and I’m feeling like they haven’t been very directed or effective. So I have to find some inspiration to get some energy back into my lessons. Ideas welcome!

Blah-ly yours,
Rebecca

This is the epitome of the Turkish way.   Lounge around for a while.  Develop some good excuses for why it can’t happen.   Then at the last minute work incredibly hard and accomplish the seemingly impossible.

These players acted out their country’s temperament to perfection, which of course made for a hugely exciting roller-coaster-of-emotion game.  Congratulations Türkiye, I can’t wait to watch the quarterfinals.

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.

sigh. my hard drive bit the dust, and of course I never got around to doing “real” backups. I have random files on random disks in random places, but i’ve lost a lot of stuff. i do still have all my mp3s and contacts from my iPod but the guy at the mac store erased all my photos (albeit just thumbnails) when he thought he was uploading them.

oh well.

since i’m starting with a brand new hard drive and essentially no data files, i thought it would be a good opportunity for some new approaches. for example, i opened a del.icio.us account for better bookmark management. i’m also thinking about some modified approaches to file organization. if anyone has any fun ideas for me to incorporate into a new sleeker data management system, i’m all ears.