Roblog

It really shouldn't be this hard. I wanted to have my daughters describe some photos, which I would overlay as a narration to a slideshow of those photos. I have a Mac, so that should be easy. Indeed, you can add an audio track directly in iMovie, but you can do that only against an existing video track, and I don't know in advance how long the girls will talk about each photo.

What would be great is to have iPhoto (or iMovie) record the audio narration along with the timings of when I advance to each picture, so this information can be used to generate a slideshow that is synched-up with the narration. Alas, despite much Googling, I was not able to find an easy way to do this.

But being stubborn, I did get it to work, although in a rather laborius fashion:

• Collect the photos you want to use in an iPhoto slideshow
• Set the slideshow settings to show the title, manual controls, and transitions between slides to 60 seconds (this sets the maximum amount of narration per slide to 1 minute)
• Open up a sound recording program (e.g. Audacity) and start recording a new file
• Go into iPhoto and start the slideshow
• Record your narration, advancing to the next photo as you wish
• When finished with the slideshow, stop the audio recording
• Edit the audio recording as needed (remove any unecessary silence, technical glicthes, or daughters bickering)
• Create a new iMovie project, importing both the pictures you used (from iPhoto) and the audio file with your narration
• Manually change the duration of each photo in iMovie to match the narration
• Export the iMovie project to iDVD and burn to a DVD

Although this is a lot of steps, it's really only the next-to-last step that annoys me. Since I already used the computer to advance to each slide, it should be able to store and transfer those timings to iMovie.

It's not all bad, though. This long method does allow me to edit the audio to take out the bits I don't want to be there. And having the stream-of-conciousness narration from 2 six-year-olds is pretty neat, regardless of how I had to get there. I especially like the part we recorded before the slideshow starts of them asking me what they're supposed to do (I'll have this playing over a black screen) and the time when we had to stop the slideshow so we could snuggle.

I think it will be one of those things that will be fun to listen to 10 years from now. Assuming old-fashioned DVDs are still playable then.

Ever since my car accident I've experienced some vertigo of varying degrees. Except for the week after the accident, it has been very mild and only when I moved my head in certain ways. It was so mild, in fact, it never prevented me from doing anything - I continued to play soccer (and broomball) without any ill effects (although I wasn't very good at either to begin with). But since it had lingered for all these months, I scheduled a doctors visit for this week (tomorrow).

As luck would have it, though, I recently realized my symptoms have disappeared. I can't say for sure when it was (since they were so mild to begin with, I may have been symptom-free for several days before I noticed), but it seems like it was late last week. So now, I think I'll be canceling my doctor's visit.

There's part of me that says I should still go, but it really feels like this is a permanent state, rather than a temporary cessation of symptoms. And if I have no symptoms, there's really nothing for me to say at the doctors office. If the symptoms recur, I can always schedule a new appointment.

Donna and I are planning our first vacation by ourselves without our daughters since they were born. We have been away from them overnight before, but that was for a conference Donna was attending, so our days were spent apart.

This time, we'll be away for three nights, with no obligations to anyone but ourselves. Donna has some frequent flyer miles with Continental to spend, so we looked to see where in the country we'd like to fly to for this first romantic getaway since the twins were born.

We chose Cleveland.

The reasons are practical: since our daughters will be staying with their grandparents in Richardson, Texas, we wanted to fly from Dallas, and the only places Continental flies non-stop from Dallas are Houston, Newark, and Cleveland. As we live in Houston and have too many relatives in Newark to make it a getaway, I chose Cleveland.

Perhaps not surprisingly, even though we are flying into Cleveland, we are not staying there. Our first night we're staying in Michigan, mostly so that Donna can check-off another state on her list of states she's visited. The next two nights we'll be staying on Kelleys Island, the largest US island in Lake Erie. From all appearances, Kelleys Island (notice the lack of apostrophe) is a laid-back island with not much to do except walk (or bike) around enjoying the trails and small beaches. That sounds just perfect.

But I get a kick out of telling people that our romantic trip without the girls will be to Cleveland. The unsaid implication is that it will be romantic not because of the destination, but because of the company.