Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

An Experiment: Making a DVD for the Holidays

I conducted an experiment today which turned out well. I decided my in-laws and my parents would enjoy a collection of family photos, and music that my son and I had recorded at various times during the year.

I pulled up the Windows DVD Maker under Vista, identified which photos I wanted to arrange in a slide show and then pulled in music that I'd recorded earlier this year for the First Tracks songwriting contest, along with with my recording of Calico Jack, a song written by two of my online friends.  You can listen to these recordings online here.  Then I asked my oldest son to contribute music that he'd recorded with his trio in the last couple of months.

In about two hours, I'd assembled the entire thing, a slide show with background music. The program has a useful preview feature, so I was able to weed out pictures with issues. Next, I burned the DVD. My in-laws were visiting, so I played the DVD for them after dinner. It provided an excellent way to share my travels and family pictures, not to mention the music. I've already burned another copy and printed out a jewel box cover to bring to my parents this weekend.

This technology stuff is pretty cool when it works!

Here's a couple of pictures that I used for the menu:  

Chinaman's Hat on Oahu, Hawaii

 

Carousel in front of Hotel de Ville, Paris, France

Happy holidays to all of my readers.  

Web 2.0 and Business Communications

TMC Editor Rich Tehrani just published an interview with me in one of the TMC blogs.   The title of the article is a bit misleading, I think, but the content is fine.  

In the interview, I talk about key trends for the year in Voice over IP and related parts of the telecom industry.   I tried to be consistent with my company's view on these matters, but the opinions are my own.  

The article is:  Dialogic: Communications Developers Should Focus on Web 2.0 and Open Source

If it were up to me, a more realistic title would have been:  "Coming soon: Web 2.0 Tools for a Business Near You".   But the TMC editors saw it differently.  

If you have any comments on the interview, let me know.   It also mentions that I'll be speaking at TMC's Communications Developer Conference on September 16 in LA.   My session is called "IMS and ATCA".   If you're in town, please stop by.  

Cloudy Day in San Jose

I got into San Jose last night to attend the VON show here.   It was rainy this morning, but is supposed to be clearer later.   I'm staying at the Sainte Claire, which is a really cute old style hotel, just across from the Convention Center.  It has in-room WiFi and other amenities like sitting rooms with brown leather furniture; pretty cool.   

After breakfast on the go at the little Italian eatery here, got my badge and went to the keynote by Jeff Pulver, venture capitalist Vinod Khosia and the master of telecom disruption, Niklas Zennstrom from Skype.   All of them seemed to be in agreement that IP Communications is in the process of changing yet again, as the widespread penetration of broadband is now making the addition of features like video as a media type possible and many companies are going out and seeking to innovate in both VoIP and related spaces.   Zennstrom showed the broad penetration of new apps for Skype, which has shown remarkable dexterity in the last year or so as a platform for innovation.  While the IMS community is talking about new services, the Skype community is making it happen, today.   There was also the interesting note that Skype can now be used to send money; this is one of the fruits of the EBay ownership, since Skype has been integrated with Paypal to produce this service, which should be a popular one between countries.      

Later in the show (Thursday the 22nd at 1:00), I'm on an pretty hot panel where we'll be looking at IMS vs. Peer to Peer for VoIP.  The participants include Jonathan Christensen from Skype, along with Moderator Stephane Teral of Infonetics, Ken Osowski from Pactolus and Frank Salm from Sylantro.   Hope to see you there. 

Multimedia Presentation

It's Super Bowl Sunday and it has been a busy weekend.   I'm getting ready for a trip to Vancouver for a 3GPP standards meeting this coming week, so I'm already in the mode of getting prepared, while getting things done around the house and in the office before leaving.   

Today, I was working with two boy scouts, including my oldest son, on preparing a multimedia presentation for an upcoming Court of Honor.   One of the other dads and I are the Merit Badge Counselors for the Computer Merit Badge.   As the coup de grace for the badge, we're working with the boys on this presentation.    We have a collection of digital pictures taken from a Klondike Derby held last weekend and these are being combined with incidental music which will be combined with the images to create a slide show.   

Today, we were collating photos and editing music.   I have a nice little music editor called Audacity.   I took some MP3s and stripped them down to include only the desired portion.  Then, these were copied onto a USB disk to load onto the other counselor's Mac.  He is using some Mac based tools to assemble the montage of slides plus music.   We'll finish it tomorrow and then do a dry run on a projection system at the church where our scout troop meets.    The neat thing is that the boys really like working with multimedia, so they have lots of ideas on story themes, use of the slides and associated music.   In turn, the other counselor and I have good software tools and lots of computer experience.   The result should be fun and a good learning experience for all.