YouTube and Other Stuff

A few weeks ago I posted a couple of videos on YouTube and linked to them from my blog. One of them I called “Pocatello Overview” which was a pretty poor video taken from my little handheld Sony point-and-shoot camera. After processing and downsizing to fit YouTube, the video quality was pretty poor. Since it was a learning experience, I put it up on YouTube and blogged about it.

Surprisingly enough, that little piece of video has been viewed 147 times and been commented on five times (four were pretty negative, one wanted to contact other members of a women’s track team from about 27 years ago). The couple of segments on the Garden of the Gods have been viewed about fifty times and the first segment I did from inside the camper in the campground in Colorado Springs has been viewed over a hundred times.

In order to link to these little video pieces on my blog I had to set them up as “public”. The other options (private or by invitation) wouldn’t play in my blog unless the viewer had a YouTube account and logged in. I don’t know what these statistics mean, except that there are a lot of people with plenty of time on their hands and nothing to do. I’ve found some pretty good content on YouTube. For instance, a recent posting is “The Cremation of Sam McGee” (see the Entertainment category) and is very well done. I’ve found two or three pianists playing classical music and find them to be very good. I found one video of an artist who took a picture of her face every day for three years and then strung them into a video giving each picture less than a second of airtime. That was quite fascinating. There is also a lot of junk and I’d put my short videos into that category as well. I think it’d be fun to do something that would be at least interesting … but I don’t know yet what that would be. Meanwhile, I’m just ignoring the comments on my meager contribution.

We’ve had some visitors in the past couple of weeks. Last Saturday morning mom and dad along with my sister Eileen and her husband Phil came over for a few hours. While mom, Nina and Eileen went to a quilt show in town, dad, Phil, and I did some shopping. I wanted to get a couple of bicycles off the garage floor for the winter and Phil suggested we go to a bicycle shop. We did and I found exactly what I was looking for! http://www.hoister.com/ is the company. The bicycle shop only had one of the devices and I needed three. The other two are on their way (thanks to Internet shopping!).

Last night our niece Ashlyn and her girlfriend came down from BYU-Idaho for a couple of days of R&R (they’re out getting a video… or two or three… from Blockbuster to watch tonight). Our daughter Dawnmarie’s in-laws also came over this morning on their way to Idaho Falls. We enjoy Boyd and Jo a lot and we had a very good time visiting. We took them on a short tour of Pocatello and had lunch at a local eatery. Then I was on my way to a Church meeting and they left for Idaho Falls. We like visitors!