March 10 - Lisa's Musings From Every Day Life

S-u-cc-e-ss.

After two extremely painful weeks, I have officially birthed my first video.

Not sure if that makes me a mouse or some other small rodent that’s able to pop out young following a two-week gestation period, but … this is my first born.

All one minute and 37 seconds of it.

Please, please, go view the darn thing.

It’s at www.A2Journal.com and look for the video button at the top of the site, or go to the story about 4-H kids and a cattle weigh-in under the Life Section.

So, let’s recap what it took to get that less-than-two-minute video finally published this afternoon.

There were no less than 10 phone calls to the IT guy, Jason, which got progressively more and more frustrated on my end.

There were hours and hours of my time trying and trying and trying and trying to make all these programs work.

There were hours and hours of my great friend Becca Burk’s time (she worked for a half a bagel with warm ham and cheese).

There were numerous phone calls to my editor -- at times whining; other times downright uh, “complaining.”

And, it wasn’t just shooting the video. Once I figured out how to turn the Flip cam on, that part wasn’t such a big deal.

It was the editing and uploading to the newspaper Website part that was the bug-a-boo.

We couldn’t get the darn programs to load.

And we tried and tried and tried.

So, Plan B.

Bring in a computer wiz and I knew just the person. Sheng Han owns Core Components of Ann Arbor.

And, it took him an hour and cost me his hourly rate of $75 to have the appropriate programs installed in my computer; oh, that included the one-on-one tutoring I received to operate them.

I came home, fired the laptop up, and after several tries, did finally figure out how to upload the video to the newspaper’s Web site.

So … in this victorious moment, like an Oscar winner, I’d like to give thanks, in no particular order, to:

My friends, (and I include you, Kathy) who listened to me whine, snark and complain about this process; but didn’t hang up on me; rather encouraged me to forge ahead.

My editor, Michelle, who didn’t fire me, when it took me forever to figure out how to do this.

My dogs, who will keep their mouth's shut about what I said while going through this excrutiating process.

And to Sheng, the computer genius of the day, who was finally able to make these interwoven programs work. And simplify them so even I could figure them out.

Is my five minutes up yet?

Cue music … oh, wait, this is print – there’s no sound.

Or video.

But there will be in the future.