Friday, November 6, 2009

Thing #19 - My White Trash Weekends

As many of my colleagues know, with in the last year, I have been inducted into the ranks of white trash sports . . . also known as off-roading. It started simply enough. A friend with a Bronco and another with a four-wheeler invited us to join them for a weekend in the East Texas mud (actually, it was dust. Red dust. LOTS of red dust). We borrowed my "brother-in-law's" four-wheeler and had a great weekend. This, however, spawned. We now own an 87 Jeep Wrangler (our 4th vehicle), take at least a day trip into the backwoods once a month, and are now part of what the boys in our group refer to as "4x4 Fridays" (my favorite part because I get the house all to myself for an entire evening every other Friday). I'd like to somehow differentiate what we do from what Rednecks call Muddin', but it's the same damn thing (sometimes there's mud, sometimes not). In all truthfulness, I do enjoy riding the trails with Paul and hanging out with friends; I'm also an undercover gearhead. I even like the parts where we have to winch others out of precarious predicaments; it's just a lot more fun to pretend I suffer through to make my man happy.

So where is this story going and what does it have to do with Voicethreads? Well, this: for some unknown reason (and for probably the same reason young men video tape themselves doing stupid stunts that result in broken bones - see my post for Thing #18), off-roaders frequently take one guy with them to hold the video camera. They then take it home, mess around with it in iMovie (or the equivalent), drop in "Sweet Home Alabama" and then post it on YouTube. We haven't gotten to that stage yet (thank God!) but Paul is a gadget junkie so the Voicethread video is inevitable. As I mentioned in Thing #17, I'm not real keen on my recorded self, so I'm not really looking forward to the day when my fat butt ends up in one of these things.

The bottom line is this: Much like the infamous Summer Vacation slideshows of the 60s & 70s, we can now torture our guests with the slide's modern cousin (and, thanks to HD TVs that hook up to the home laptop, we can take them with us to friends' houses - They think they can avoid us, but HA! They are wrong). Any time and for whatever reason you might create a video, you have an excellent opportunity to create (a) Voicethread. As a matter of fact, many people are already doing so and they don't even realize it. Assuming one has the technology at hand, one can easily create his/her own presentation whether for personal, professional, or spousal abuse use. Groovy the things you can do with technology now-a-days ain't it?!

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