Christmas Ceilidh with The Gloworms & Cat Kelly

The publication of this vlog was fraught with difficulties - not least that the system prevented me loading images! The above link should work - sans image!
On Saturday 16th December BMM gathered with their friends and families for the annual Christmas Ceilidh in St Alban's Church Hall. This year we welcomed "The Gloworms" ceilidh band, with their caller Cat Kelly. Two thirds of the band and the caller were delayed on the M4 by an accident. Nick Cooke (with his Dad's amplification system) and Colin Cotter the Gloworms banjo player, together with caller Dave Leverton leaped nimbly in to fill the time gap until the band arrived - a little late - but well worth waiting for! Thanks folks and thanks Gloworms and 'Cat'! The party was well up to the standard that BMM expect!
My part in the festivities each year is too cook part of a Navrattan Pulloa rice dish, the large dish is assembled with the aid of two friends, Pippa Cooke and Paul Rosser. Pippa and Paul cook the "white" and "green" rices, and I cook the "red" and the core of the pulloa, then all three are combined at the ceilidh to produce the Navrattan Pulloa.

"The nine courtiers or the nine gems of the Emperor Akbar, the mightiest of the Moghuls. This pulloa is a pulloa amongst pulloas and a jewel amongst jewels - Mrs Balbir Singh, Indian Cookery, Fletcher & Son Ltd., Norwich, 1975"

The dish has evolved a little through the twenty or so years that we have between cooking it. It is very popular, many reckon that all one needs for the week of the ceilidh is a plate of Navrattan, coupled with Dave Byett's famed chick peas and Phil Butler's amazing black-eye beans (both Madhur Jaffery recipes). We have often been asked for the recipe for the Navrattan, it is on the web -try Googling it as well, but see my .Mac homepage for details, and some pictures to show how it is done - and of course this vlog.

A Happy Christmas and New Year to one and all. Don't forget the Keynsham Mummers Play on Boxing Day. 11.30am Keynsham Shopping precinct Clock Tower.

Bristol Morris Men's Practice Night

I'm a member of Bristol Morris Men who meet every thursday in the gym at the Q.E.H.. So a movie of one of our dances seems like a good idea! The dance shown is "Pepper in the Brandy", this is our own creation in the style of Ascott Under Wychwood. Ascott is one of our main dance traditions - since the early 1980s. "Pepper" was recorded during practice night, Thursday December 14th 2006. Starting at the top of the set on the left of the set, the dancers are Grant, Jack, Richard, Neil, George and Joe. The musician playing the tabor pipe is Phil. If you want to find out more about our 600 year old tradition check out the Morris Ring.

Me - popup!

Michael Verdi of FreeVlog kindly answered my query about an embeded video, suggesting three ways. I like option 3) especially since I may be able to use it for posting videos to my other sites - and it does not use a popup window. However 2) looks easy - and is! Michael's Ways:
1) Upload your videos to blip.tv and have them automatically cross-post them to your blog. Use the thumbnail flipper option. (this video is a bit out of date)
2) You can use the Freevlog pop-up maker The video gets embeded but it's in a pop-up window.
3) You can try vPIP which is very cool but also pretty complicated.
So in the local venacular, Yer Tiz! Click on my picture below. {The herring was very tasty}

No video yet! Then Success!

I have just sent off a note to say that the video has not arrived (24 hours has elapsed), so the link below to "Introduction" won't work! Maybe SpinXpress would have worked - next time!

Addendum 12/14/06. I loaded the video using SpinXpress, no problem, so the link below now works, moreover it is spooky to think this on the Internet Archive. My work is already on the archive from various previous incarnations.

My other blog concerns my morning bike ride and peregrine falcons (well sometimes!)

Now, how do I get a video panel like the one used to display the video at Ourmedia.

First Vlog!

I set up and account with the Internet Archive then logged into ourmedia and sent my (compressed) videoblog off to be stored. That was some hours ago, and so far it has not appeared online. So I'm not sure when (if!) the link to my Quicktime movie "Introduction" will appear.
{See above comments - and a better solution - 12/14/06, 14.30 GMT}

iLife '06 and iPhoto

I installed this and was sidetracked into editing my 8500+ digital 'photos. Before the digital camera age I used Kodak PhotoCD from 1994, and the older version of iPhoto did not allow renaming of the film rolls, so I set about sorting them all out. Nearly there, but the program wants to rebuild my thumbnail cache rather frequently (now about halfway through whilst setting up this post). Otherwise this version of iPhoto is very much faster, and it is relatively easy to re-arrange the contents of the film rolls, both by dragging, and making new ones.
Now to try iMovie with my iSight camera!

Success - well almost

After yesterday's problems I decided to pay a visit to PC World and treat myself to a copy of iLife, this has the updated iMovie version - and some other goodies. Installation on this 3 year old iMac is sometimes a bit dodgy, but the DVD read after about six goes. Now to find out about setting up a vlog with the screens showing Chris's poem sequence in the Sheffield Millennium Gallery.

A Preview of one frame:

Getting Started

I'm impressed with the Freevlog.org site, so decided to set up my own video blog. I have a Mac and a copy of iMovie (needed according to the guru for compressing a movie), also a camera (Canon A540), and a movie to try out (from a recording of Chris Jones LOST poem on the screens in the Sheffield Millenium Gallery. Part of the sequence 'A Museum of Work'(Podcast). Chris is my daughter Joanna's partner, father to my two grandchildren, Joseph and William, and Sheffield poet.

SNAG! My copy of iMovie is raaather old (3.0.3), and won't do compression! Seems like i will have to get an up-to-date copy. The latest is iMovie HD6 and is part of iLife.

Reading the freevlog site I see a program called AvidFreeDV. It should do what I want - and there is a Mac version. So, answer lots of questions, get the file and install the program. It starts OK after the password and registration are entered. A couple of new windows appear, promising. Then I get a notice 'Connecting to the Internet',funny, I'm on Broadband and permanently connected. The 'wheel of death' persists ... for so long that I check the program status. 'Not responding', so a Force quit is needed! I do this 3 times with the same result, so uninstall the wretched FreeDV program!