Tag Archives: YouTube (Mine)

Videos created by me and posted to YouTube

Allen Hammock Interview

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In 1995 CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy started providing dial-up Internet access and people started getting online. In April some tech folks from the University of Missouri came to our offices in Jefferson City and gave us a demo of the “World Wide Web” and our first look at Netscape Navigator. I can’t speak for the others in the meeting but I was mightily impressed.

I knew a bit about the Internet but nothing about how to create a website or register a domain, so I contacted Mike McKean, a professor at the J-School at the University of Missouri, and asked if he could put me in touch with a student who knew how to do this stuff. He introduced me to Dan Arnall, a senior journalism major. Dan was technically adept but he brought along Allen Hammock who was majoring in computer science. Dan and Allen were high school classmates in Springfield, Missouri, and were in members of a student leadership organization at Mizzou.

In this 12 minute interview, Allen shares some of his recollections of the exciting three years that followed.

WordPress Media Library

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The screencast below is about one of the under-the-hood features of WordPress. So it’s going to be of zero interest to anyone who doesn’t have (or has had) a blog or website using WordPress as the content management system.

WP is great for searching. I have 5,000 posts going back 15 years but if I can remember a word or phrase, WP will find all references in a matter of seconds. If you include media (photo, video, audio) with your post, WP puts it in the Media Library. I had more than 1,600 pieces of media in my library but I couldn’t search because I hadn’t taken the time to give the media a useful name or any other metadata. This 6 minute screencast shows how I cleaned that up and why.

As I’ve experimented with various online tools for managing media (iCloud, Google Photos, Flickr), I’ve found myself drawn back to my WordPress blog. Let me hasten to point out almost nobody visits my blog. That’s been true since the beginning. It’s always been more journal/archive.

But when I put images online, I try do so in some context. If I have 50 photos of my mother as a young woman, I’d rather include those (as a slideshow or gallery) as part of blog post that might include links to other posts and images. You get the idea.

For me, the stories behind the images (if I know them) are as important as the images themselves. A blog works well for this. And because it is self-hosted, I don’t have to worry that Yahoo! or Google or Facebook might one day kill it.

Timeline 3D

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“Make timeline charts of world history, family trees, fictional stories or business deadlines.” I’m a sucker for timelines and I purchased this Mac app a few years ago to create a timeline for the company I worked for. Don’t think I ever got around to that but started playing with it recently. 5 minutes.

Nobody owns an oak tree

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Who’s got the most money now, Bill Gates? Donald Trump? If you got lots you can purchase a nice piece of land with lots of big, beautiful trees… but you can’t buy a 70 foot oak tree. Only one way to get one (in the sense that I’m talking about). You plant a seed and wait a long, long time and then, maybe, you get to look at a beautiful tree. But you don’t own it.

How I use Google+

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I’ve been making a lot of screencasts lately. (Sort of like the guy with a new table saw can’t stop cutting up 2x4s and sheets of plywood) I’ve done a bunch for a friend with a new Chromebook, but this one is just me cutting up 2x4s. It runs 15 minutes which is too long for a screencasts but once I realized nobody was going to watch this anyway I figured, why not? My imaginary audience is made up of people who insist Google+ is a dying ghost town.

CORRECTION: I was wrong in saying the “All” circle was posts from everyone using Google+. It is everyone in any of your circles. 

Warren Krech: 40 years behind the mic

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Warren (“Krech in the Morning”) Krech is retiring from radio at the end of the month, wrapping up a career that started in 1972. He’s been on the air in Jefferson City, Missouri, since 1984. Almost half a century of getting up every morning at 3 a.m. Be hard to find someone more involved in his community than Warren and it’s hard not think in terms of “end of an era.” He has seen and been part of a lot of changes in radio and talked about them in this 16 minute chat/shoptalk.