New Blogger

This is the first post on the new blogger. Hopefully, everything looks exactly the same as the old one, but it should be easier to post and customize things, etc. This post is more of a test than any actual useful information.

Christmas Concert

Last weekend, I went with Stacey and John and Ashley to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas Concert. It was so awesome! The guest singer this year was Sissel. She is an amazing singer. Last year, the guest singer was Renee Fleming. Renee was good, but I was not a huge fan. This year was so much better. I think my favorite song was called "Like An Angel Passing Through My Room". Stacey, John, and Ashley all enjoyed themselves also. It was a great night with great music.

DVDs

Lately, I have been creating a lot more DVDs than I usually do, all for charity. Stacey volunteered my services for the Young Women's In Excellence night (I don't mind, really). I created a picture slide show put to music for it. It was only about 10-11 minutes long.

Then, Sandi (Stacey's Aunt) asked us to record a little program that their primary did for a Christmas program and put it on a DVD. It wasn't too bad either. This one was about 10 minutes long.

I enjoy doing the editing, I enjoy seeing the finished product. Now do understand that I am not ready at all to take over any editing positions at KSL, but I do think it's pretty good for someone with little experience. I have been looking around for some good video editing software. I have tried quite a few including a couple from Ulead, one from Pinnacle, and one from Avid. I wanted to try one from Roxio, but they don't offer a free demo for download. I found, however, that the easiest and most flexible to use was just the free Windows Movie Maker that comes with Windows.

I was also trying to find a good DVD Authoring program. Again, I tried quite a few, but the one that I found to work nicely was Nero Vision Express. I chose this one mainly because I already own the license for Nero and it seems to do almost everything that I want. I found that if I plan ahead and create the video in a specific way, it works quite nicely.

If anyone has some good software that they use or know of and think I ought to try it, by all means let me know.

Gaming...All Night

Last Friday, at about 10:30 or 11:00 PM, I decided that I wanted to do a little gaming. I recently found a new game called Company of Heroes. It is very similar to Starcraft, but is based around World War II. Anyway, I thought, "I'll just play for an hour or so." Well, after much longer than an hour, I realized that it was pretty late and I should probably go to bed. I thought it was about 3:00 or 3:30 AM. I closed the game and saw the clock...6:00 AM! I couldn't believe that I had been playing all night. I paid for it, big time. I was supposed to go play some basketball Saturday morning at 7:00 AM. I did not make that. To make matters worse, starting Monday, I work the next week on the early shift at work (4:30 AM - 1:00 PM). That means that I have to wake up at 3:45 AM. I totally should not have done that gaming thing all night.