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  1. cogdog

    Bring Your A Game to ds106 Assignments

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    | Syndicated
    December 29, 2011
    cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Gamma Man Among my favorite echos of Jim Groom-isms is the approach of bringing your “A” Game to whatever you do- be it presentations, animated GIFs, radio shows. Don’t just show up with your average stuff if you want to play in big leagues. So I want people involved in ds106 even those who shirk quickly to the benches, to bring their “A Game” to not only doing ds106 assignments but creating them. I will let you know that “A Game” is not just finding something on some web site and tweeting “this would make a good assignment”. If you are that inspired, the way to play “A Game” is: Actually first sit down and create your own version of it. Document your effort, process, method in a blog post. Tell us why this idea is creative. Checki first that it ...
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  2. cogdog

    Iconic [Animated] Moi

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    | Syndicated
    December 27, 2011
    Dog on a laptop. It’s time to warm up the ds106 assignment muscles, given that it is almost 2012, and things are already ramping up as evidenced by actual posts going on over at bavatuesdays. My plan is to comb through the assignments and find some that may have been lightly touched; but we are eager to see which ones might emerge as the Suprise Assignment That People Jump On Early and Go Nuts With. Last year it was the animated gif extravaganza, and in September it seemed to be the Messing with the MacGuffin. Regardless, tonight I almost randomly chose Iconic You- I find the description a bit vague: Create an iconic image/design for your own site that somehow represents you. As “iconic” could be taken as a descriptor of any image, like it is symbolic, or more in icon style. I already have my dog icon I use ...
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  3. cogdog

    Captcha Art (ds106 assignment)

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    | Syndicated
    December 23, 2011
    Among other TEDx Talk videos I have seen recently, the one by Luis von Ahn on Massive-scale online collaboration, Stephen Downes notwithstanding, generated a number of ideas for me. von Ahn is the man behind the idea of reCaptcha- originally a Carnegie-Mellon project eventurally gobbled up by Google. What I liked most is his example of looking differently at a problem- digitizing texts via OCR and turning a normally wasted amount of human activity- proving themselves to not be bots by entering the text into a box of scrambled letters– into a useful activity by making the captcha images not random, but ambiguous words in the proces. The video alone is worth watching for von Ahn’s description of his newest project, to translate the web into all languages via free language learning lessons (see the video or http://duolingo.com/) I signed up for to get an invite for dulingo, but it ...
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  4. cogdog

    Even a Dog Can Teach ds106

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    | Syndicated
    December 20, 2011
    cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by greenkozi Jim has already been dropping teasers but if he blogs, then it’s official. It’s been a year since the first open course version of Digital Storytelling (ds106) at the University of Mary Washington and in 2012 it’s going to DEFCON 1. Yep, you read it there- ds106 is open and you better get yourself geared up to be part of the action. And get this… I am officially teaching a section! After having the chance to participate from the internet fringes last year they are actually going to hand over a group of students to my care– which means I am calling on all of my internet connections to be part of this. I’ll be vague about the logistics, but Jim is teaching one section at UMW and I am taking on another. This is in addition to ...
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  5. cogdog

    Deconstructing Animated GIFS

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    | Syndicated
    December 14, 2011
    Via a comment on a recent posting of three photo animated gifs, I found GIF Exploder which might be a handy ds106 tool. It allows you to upload an animated GIF and it unbundles it into separate images. Whyfore might thou do this? Sometimes you don;t know in advance, but I took a play with one of the high end falutin cinemagraphs- I love this one of Edward Norton’s wake up in Fight Club from if we don’t, remember: It plays it well, because the animation fits the scene; nothing happens until his eyes pop open, and then he drifts back. I might see GIF Exploder as a means to explore the making of- or even if you wanted to do a remix, and say, introduce a pink stuffed animal in his lap (whatever). You could Explode it, insert new frames, and reconstruct the GIF. Or just to parse out ...
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  6. cogdog

    Jim’s Grooming

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    | Syndicated
    December 10, 2011
    Spotted this truck on the streets of Hobart- you always need to know where you can call for some good grooming: In honor of Tom Woodward’s deft outlining of the 4 pillars of ds106
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  7. cogdog

    Tree #106 and the Patchy Story of Sapper Kevin Gavan Ray

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    | Syndicated
    December 9, 2011
    cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This started out as one of my usual chasings of photos showing the number 106 in honor of ds106, but I am finding a lesson that you can keep peeling back layers of a story, find interesing bits, but maybe never get there. So I was doing a stroll on a lovely day in Hobart, crossing the open parkland known a “The Queens Domain”- when I oticed the memorial plaques to fallen soliders, the Soldiers Walk. Each one had an ID number, and I seemed to be in an area that would reveal one bearing a 106. I found it. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog the 106 refers to the tree planted in a fallen soldier’s name, and tree #106 is for Kenneth Gavan Ray, who died in France in 1916. That link I found ...
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  8. cogdog

    A Three Animated GIF Day

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    | Syndicated
    December 5, 2011
    Lastly, and I really ought to just finally go to sleep– today’s photo adventure presented three scenes that turned into animated GIFs. I am finding that keeping my T1i in the mode the shoots successive shots, I can get a series of photos suitable for GIFing. First up, while waiting for the bored barista to make our coffee, I spotted this lonely accordion player, and the scene was made funny when a woman popped out of a door next to him. it is only 3 frames, and maybe it would be better to isolate the central motion, but the jerking of the guys in front makes it comical to me. The next ones were done in the last bits of light during the day, I walked from my hotel over to the Shrine of Remembrance. I waited a while for some Euro-dudes to stop hogging the shot I wanted with ...
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  9. cogdog

    Lawn Art with Rowan Peter

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    | Syndicated
    December 5, 2011
    cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This may be the highlight of my trip to Australia. I came all this way to where a Team Canada hockey jersey to push a lawnmower.. But this art spells COGDOG! Woooooooot Cutting grass. I’ve not pushed a power lawnmower since sometime the 1980s, but as just a small part of a fun two days hanging out with Rowan Peter was getting this opportunity to mimic the feat he pulled back in March when he traced a ds106 into his grass. In fairness to the crying of Jim Groom, he can pump his pride knowing the reason Rowan discovered ds106 from its beginning almost a year ago was Rowan already a reader of BavaTuesdays. So Rowan demonstrated his craft0 he had been honing the canvas in anticipation of my arrival. We discussed the challenges of a capital “G:, and opted ...
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  10. cogdog

    Open Courses / Open Minds

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    | Syndicated
    December 3, 2011
    I did not catch the stream of the ds106 presentation at the CUNY conference by Mikhail Gershovich and Michael Branson-Smith, so I did not hear their response- but Mikhail’s tweet bemused me: Amusing because who can really say what a University “feels”? Nah. It really shows how thin the understanding is of an open course, in the assumption that the experience of the open participants is the same as the one that students are paying tuition for — a “course is a course of course of course” to misquote Mr Ed. Yeah, why should some people get for FREE what others are paying for? Opening your stuff pays back in the long run. That was my lesson first learned in 1994, when I realized a set of tutorials on web page creation I was putting online as a workshop for my local participants, could be useful to other people elsewhere– ...
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  11. cogdog

    Keep the Lease, ok? (Cropped Sign Story)

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    | Syndicated
    December 1, 2011
    cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog No one wanted to acknowledge that the Earbird family might stop running the Rook that had been a fixture on the streets of Fort Perry for three generations. Where would people go to replace their worn bishops or chipped pawns, or get the new copy of Chess Illustrated? Nowhere but the ‘Rook. And the weekly challenge matches that still packed the sidewalks on Saturdays– where could this go? But the Bradford clan that owned half the property in town had plans to install a new shop for pokies, claiming that “chess was for old birds and demented dweebs.” (Chester Bradford was feared for his power and influence, not for his literary accumen). Who would stand up for the Earbirds? They lived in one of the most run down houses in town, owned no cars or fancy clothes, all they had ...
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  12. cogdog

    Michael Branson Smith: The Horror

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    | Syndicated
    November 22, 2011
    How are mere mortals going to motivate themselves to produce videos given the epic quality of the ones by Michael Branson Smith? Must we shave heads and show dark ominous videos in the dark? The Horror! If you have no idea, check out his latest maste...
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  13. cogdog

    My ds106 Addiction

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    | Syndicated
    November 21, 2011
    I admit it. I have a problem. I can stop at any time, but why would I want to? Yes, I am addicted to ds106 since my first exposure. All the things i could say about it- the energy, the group of people i have become deeply connected to, the power of the radio community, the truly open-ended nature of the place (unlike any other “course”)– the fact that it is more than a course– all of these are things that people who have a similar addiction know without saying. The thing is, how do you express to the non-exposed? It is a lot to take in. For some ds106 has changed their lives, others their employment situation, and others have even gotten a religious confessional experience. There is more out there, more voices, more stories, and it could be yours too. Get bitten by the ds106 bug. What are ...
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  14. cogdog

    Metal Monsters

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    | Syndicated
    November 18, 2011
    Day four of the Fort Myers (FL) to Strawberry (AZ) CogDog Express. It’s been drive, drive, drive. Today was the stretch of Texas from Dallas to Amarillo, and the dry southwest land I know and feel just slowly, every slowly merged – the big sky, the sparse plants, the space- big wide space. With a population density approaching zero I cannot help buy wonder about the creatures that tirelessly pound away at the land, over and over again. Like giant metal dog monsters, they just cried to be animated GIF-like. What do they say to each other? You know what Freud said, sometimes an oil well is just an oil well… These are done in the same manner as my other photo animated GIFS- Taking a series on multiple shots on the DSLR, bringing into PhotoShop with the file menu script “import into stack”. spread out on time line, crop ...
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  15. cogdog

    Remixed Album Art

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    | Syndicated
    November 13, 2011
    I can hardly resist the ds106 call to Remix and Album Cover: Find an iconic album cover and remix it to represent a something different. It can be a play on the title, the image, the aesthetic, genre, etc. See the visual example featuring Snoop Dog and Dr Dre as Chronic Youth (a play on Sonic Youth’s album cover Goo). There is a whole google search results page of sources of album art, e.g. http://albumart.org/. This one was done in about 20 minutes, harkening back to the 1970s Rock Era of ds106: It’s hard to find a die with a 0 on the side! Based on Bad Company’s Straight Shooter, songs on ds106 Company’s GIF Animator features: “Good Giffin’ Gone Bad” – 3:35 “Feel Like Makin’ Mashups” – 5:12 “Dailyshoot No More” – 3:59 “Scottlo Star” – 6:16 “Deal With the Bava” – 5:01 “Wild Fire Haiku” – 4:32 “Macguffa” ...
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  16. cogdog

    Dad was a Bricklayer (Dear Photograph)

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    | Syndicated
    November 9, 2011
    What started out as another set of family pictures for the Dear Photograph (or Return to the Scene of the Crime) ds106 assignment sprawls a bit more as I find connection points– let’s see by the end if they lead anywhere. Perhaps a path. Made of bricks. It has to do with bricks and paths and making the latter our of the former. I start with this photo of my Dad doing what he enjoyed, an outside task with his hands. Here he is laying some brick for a walkway outside the patio of the house in Florida (or how they say it here, outside the “lanai”). Look at that smile. And he is wearing an ASU hat I sent him (which I found this week in the garage). cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, I see you Dad, carefully making a brick walkway. ...
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  17. cogdog

    Dear Photographs at Mom’s House

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    | Syndicated
    November 3, 2011
    The ds106 assignment for what comes below is “Return to the Scene of the Crime”: Take a photo from the past that you took in a particular location. Return to that stop, and take another picture, “framing” the original within the current view. The whole premise is to find an old photo, return to the location, and create a new one where you are holding the photo and lining it up with the scene. It is a nifty mixing of analog in the digital space. I’d done some toying with this same technique after discovering the flickr Look into the Past grpup, which does overlays of historic photos over current scenes- I had done a few around my home town of Strawberry and neighboring Pine, AZ. First of all, a wide angle lens is essential. It need not be a DSLR, but you need a wide angle to fit the ...
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  18. cogdog

    Still GIFfy after all these Animations

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    | Syndicated
    November 1, 2011
    The animated GIF still motivates me. I made two more today from photos that just cried out “GIF me! GIF me!). This first represents the loneliness of the road, it just goes on and on and on and on… I’d notice a large number of these log trucks heading north on US 19, and spotted one coming my way when I was stopped for a photo of a decrepit hotel. I snapped 3 photos, mainly hoping one might work to be interesting. Looking at them in aperture, the repetition cried “GIF” to me. The method I used was more or less same as I did for the window water reflection project I fund something was missing, that I really needed the last shot of the truck way down the road… or not at all! I took the first and last ones and mode copies of both layers. I then started ...
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  19. cogdog

    Lizard Revenge Headed North

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    | Syndicated
    November 1, 2011
    During my drive into Florida today I caught the last bit of Michael Branson Smith’s great Horror Cast for ds106 and I really enjoyed hearing the voices of his students. I get the sense they have bit off fully on the ds06 experience. The theme was horror stories from the classroom, bad things teacher and students have done that may cause a shriek in the night breeze. Jim Groom came on and shared his true life story of (?) grade school, where his teacher Mrs Lizardus apparently show her true form and mass attacked the students as the lizard she is. The body count was high, but Jim said he survived by quick thing and busted out a window. While stopped by the roadside, I noticed the grass in the media was moving more than just from the breeze, and managed to catch the brigade of gators heading north to ...
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  20. cogdog

    Music Mapped Video (new ds106 assignment)

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    | Syndicated
    October 29, 2011
    Here’s my idea for a new ds106 assignment- Sync up a song with an annotated google map, and mix as a video. It is a sideways step from using maps as stories. It’s easy to go literal, find a song that references geographic locations. To create an example, I went for Route 66, especially relevant since it passes about 80 miles north of my home in Arizona. There are tons of versions; I went for the Depeche Mode one. I created a new google map, and put in locations for the places mentioned – Chicago, LA, Saint Louis, Joplin missouri, Oklahoma city, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona (AZ), Kingman, Barstow, San Bernandino. For each, I added a map pin with an embedded image (I found the motherload in the Route 66 flickr group) which is keyword searchable (example = search for Winona). I used another published Google Map of Route 66 ...
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  21. cogdog

    Spaces: Haiku It Up

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    | Syndicated
    October 28, 2011
    From Tokyo we are seeing a nice ds106 activity surge in the Haiku It Up writing assignment created by Shinichiro- what is most lovely is how the author has elaborated on the meaning and structure of haiku beyond just the syllable forumala we learn in grade school here in the US. Haiku, known as the shortest form of the poetry in the world, originally started in the 17th century in Japan. It became international in the late 20th century and now people all over the world make haiku of their own. There are several rules in Japanese traditional haiku and many of them are also adopted into the international haiku. The common rules are: ?Use three lines of up to 17 syllables. ?Use a season word (kigo). ?Use a cut or kire (sometimes indicated by a punctuation mark) to compare two images implicitly. (From Wikipedia) People often think that to ...
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  22. cogdog

    The Jim Groom Post Keynote Recap

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    | Syndicated
    October 26, 2011
    cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe As one of the converted, its hard not to be electrified after Jim’s keynote at Open Ed 2011– I can only guess what the energy was like in Park City. I was fortunate to be listening in with Gardner Campbell from his office here at Virginia Tech And he was sure smiling a lot given Jim’s (well deserved) mentions Gardner’s way for his “No Digital Facelifts” talk, or as we ds106ers know it, the Bag of Gold talk (which was ironically or not so, at Open Ed 2009 in Vancouver). Check out the animated GIF representation ;-) As we walked to lunch in Blacksburg (that was at Chipotle’s, Jim!) I recorded a quick audio recap with Gardner reflecting on the talk. Recap of Jim Groom’s Talk with Gardner Campbell We love ya, Groom. We all do. We are ...
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  23. cogdog

    Are You [ds106] Experienced?

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    | Syndicated
    October 26, 2011
    This is a follow up on Gardner Campbell’s message last night when we did a ds106 radio show, echoed today by Jim Groom at his evangelistic Open Ed keynote. Gardner said something about “We dont need Open Education Resources, what we need ar...
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  24. cogdog

    Flag a GIFs

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    | Syndicated
    October 24, 2011
    Flags make for great animated GIFs- I spotted this set of flags in Cookesville Tennessee, a US flag at half mast and a MIA flag. The first one is only 2 frames, the second 4. I was not even planning to GIF these, but the camera was in the mode of rapid...
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  25. cogdog

    Mission Revealed

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    | Syndicated
    October 21, 2011
    I’ve lost any sense of what the search for the Center of the Internet means, but now, with the assistance of Obi Don Potter, I was able to get the message on the device left for me in Philadelphia. It appears I am needed to give a Storybox demo at Brock University, and I have to get there tomorrow. Some back tracking… cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog After traveling by buses from Philadelphia, I got to the Port Authority bus terminal in New York, and found my way to the pre-arranged meeting spot with Obi Don Potter, here at the Bleeker Street subway. He was confused at first by this device I brought, and seemed skeptical of who I was, but seemed to have a sense of what to do with it. “We do not have long,” he said. “Ride with me uptown, and I ...
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  26. cogdog

    Animated GIFs from Your Own Photos

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    | Syndicated
    October 19, 2011
    While in Nashville, I noticed these interesting series of reflections from the Cumberland River in an office building, literally twinkling in the windows. I wondered if I could take a series of these to create an animated GIF. I used the camera in multiple shot mode, but still felt like the camera moved slightly (it did). In Photoshop (CS5), I used the option Files -> Scripts -> Load Files into Stack.. This places each image in its own layer. I chose the option to “Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images” From here I crop to take care of the off alignment of edges, and resize to 500 pixels wide (the size of my main blog column). I can then use the Animation window to set up the timing, and preview the effect. I then Save for Web & Devices using the GIF option, and here we go: I like the ...
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  27. cogdog

    Message From the XO: Find Obi Don…

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    | Syndicated
    October 19, 2011
    I’ve had to keep moving around here in Philly to escape notice. There are way too many people walking around in dark shades, carrying radios, looking around. I apologize for my friends who are here for the EDUCAUSE conference, but I can’t be socializing or hanging around sessions. But I now know my next location I need to get too. I found a quiet spot to sleep 3 hours last night (thanks @pumpkiny for sneaking me some vendor food in a bag and @GardnerCampbell for the night cap) inside a closed up restaurant off of 10th and Race Street. I heard foot steps at 5:00am, and a gentle knock. By the time I pried the door open, the street was empty, but my eye caught an envelope sticking out of a grate at sidewalk level. All it said on the outside was @cogdog. There was nothing inside, but when I ...
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  28. cogdog

    Please Leave Your Message at the Scream

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    | Syndicated
    October 19, 2011
    In this week, Michael Branson Smith’s ds106 class is moving into the audio assignments, and I like the concept for a new one he designed, Movie Voice Machines: Create a voice mail message for a character in a film or tv show. Use samples, impressions, and/or music to create your message. See what Michael provided for that Vader dude with the breathing problem. I just gave it a go and made this one for a little guy named “Alfred” who likely is not the best at answering his phone. Alfred is Not Home I cobbled this together in Audacity, my main audio editing tool hands down. I downloaded two clips from YouTube (one for the intro music and the other for the closing tone). There are a gazillion ways to do this, I use a Chrome Extemsion- Download Youtube as MP4. It provides a small drop down menu to any ...
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  29. cogdog

    How The Heck Did I Get to Philly?

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    | Syndicated
    October 19, 2011
    Things are getting crazy here in the underground. Perhaps it is dark matter or super neutrinos, but I have somehow been transported through some sort of space/time dimension. Let’s recap what’s been happening. When I last reported, I was sticking to the instructions/clues provided by @0pcode49 and following the railroad tracks. Spooked by the scary dudes in the van, I decided to parallel the tracks but stick to the adjacent forest. This was, in hindsight, a bad idea, because I lost track of the tracks, and could not even back track to the tracks. They were gone. So I opted to continue in the same general direction (southwest if I am using the sun and my watch correctly), when I came upon a road sign that bore a clue. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Speed limit 49? Uh-huh. Written in marker on the rear of ...
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