Family of free agents, wandering the world

Cindy and I hung out with some journalists from Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and Paraguay when we were in Bogotá, Colombia, recently. We spent an afternoon at the country house of our hosts, Carlos Eduardo Huertas and his wife, Lili, at extreme right and left.

Christine the mathematician is on a three-month visiting scholar gig at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and has been giving lectures around Germany and, most recently, London.

She has started blogging. She´s the funniest member of the family. I liked her take on the low-cost airline RyanAir´s service from Berlin to London.

Potsdam is near Berlin, about six hours by train from Stuttgart, where our other daughter, Bridget has been dancing with the Stuttgart Ballet for some 14 years (here´s her website).

Bridget is now a guest artist with the company, so she has been booking free agent gigs to dance and choreograph in various cities around Germany. Here´s a description in English of of some of her latest choreography.

So the two daughters have had a chance to hang out together a bit on weekends.

Which brings us to Patrick, the jazz saxophonist, who has been out playing jobs in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, etc.

The jazz scene in Madison, Wis., where he and his girlfriend, Emily, are living is not providing enough work for him. So he´s been on the road a lot.

Cindy and I were recently in Bogotá, Colombia, for about a week. It was our first time there. The Colombian organization of investigative journalists hosted an international conference and invited me to give a series of seminars and classes to their members.

Cindy has become a professional tour guide. She puts together briefing books on every place we visit, with a list of all the sights, the history, maps, etc. Without her research, I would have been ignorant of the significance of many recent events in the country.

The wars between liberals and conservatives depicted in Gabriel García Márquez´s "One Hundred Years of Solitude" have gone on intermittently for most of two centuries, in different guises with different names for the players. They´re still going on: right-wing paramilitaries vs. the left-wing guerillas, the FARC.

Cindy takes hundreds of photos while I´m in conference rooms.

Here´s a garden in the heart of Bogotá.

Bogotá has a dramatic skyline. It´s set amid mountains 8,600 feet above sea level. Climbing stairs leaves you short of breath.

May Day demonstrations in Bogotá brought out activists who occasionally clashed with the police.


We spent a morning inside the cathedral of salt, which was built in the depths of a mine near Bogotá.



Santiago, Chile, nine hours in the air from Guadalajara

The skyline of Santiago, Chile, city of more than 5 million, a third of the country´s population. Smog is a problem.

Cindy returned to Guadalajara and I went on to Santiago, Chile, where I had been invited by the Universidad Mayor to give a two-day seminar on new business models for news, which has become something of a specialty for me.

The University of Guadalajara, where I´m working, is trying to get an agreement with the Universidad Mayor to offer a joint master´s degree in digital journalism, completely online. I´m working on the design of the Guadalajara master´s.

The Santiago folks took me to a couple of very nice restaurants and treated me to lobster and fish of all kinds.

It is hard to describe just how far south Santiago is. It´s about nine hours in the air from our home in Guadalajara, Mexico, about the same distance from New York to Warsaw, Poland, 4,300 miles.

Signs of wealth

The city´s streetscapes reflect a history with the British, who exploited the country´s nitrate deposits, and other European powers.

I enjoyed using Santiago´s subway system. Chile is among the most developed and wealthiest countries in the hemisphere.

There were few visible signs of the February earthquake, although I heard from a reporter that quite a few apartment buildings, especially those built in recent years, were ruled uninhabitable.

It´s fall in Santiago.



College students (not mine) are the same everywhere.

The Boy of Sax

I´ve been messing around with a program called Soundslides to create an audio slideshow, and because I had photos of Patrick, our son, I decided to use them as a basis for a little story. People I know who do multimedia say it´s simple. Well, for me it wasn´t. Watch the slideshow first, and then read about my little ordeal.

Ths slideshow with music and voiceover is here..
















Jamming with Phil Woods. Baltimore Sun photo


Whining about technology follows

Soundslides is easy, all the multimedia people told me. You just load in the pictures, load an audio file, move the photos around and basically you have an audio slide show. In theory.

Audio
First, I have an Olympus digital recorder that records in a format used on PCs called WMA. You can´t use files in that format in Soundslides. You have to convert them to MP3s. I tried converting the files in several programs on my Mac (including iTunes and Garage Band) without success, so I bought a little program called EasyWMA, which was, as advertised, easy. $10.

Then I tried using a free software program called Audacity to edit the four sound files I had. All of the multimedia people say Audacity is easy, a piece of cake, but I couldn´t get the thing to work on my Mac, even after retracing my steps and downloading it more than once, restarting the computer, etc. Wouldn´t work. So then I loaded Audacity onto Cindy´s PC, shipped the MP3 files to her computer, and everything worked fine.

Then I loaded the audio and video into Soundslides on my Mac, and again, not all of the functions work, despite my paying $69 for the super version of Soundslides. Among the functions that don´t perform are some that have to do with captions and credits.

Then when you´re done, you find that you can´t just publish your Soundslides project to your blog. You have to post it to a server somewhere. That was a complicated process that had more than 15 steps to it (Webng.com). A little tutorial on Soundslides´ website was invaluable. Thank you for that.

It´s easy, if you know how to do it. So here´s the slideshow. I´m not even that concerned about its quality. It´s my first time editing sound. I´m just glad I was able to do it at all.

Also an update on daughter Bridget

She is the dancer who lives in Germany. She was in Santiago, Chile, in July and August to perform in a gala. She choreographed a pas de deux that she and a dancer from the Stuttgart Ballet performed. She got a nice review in the local paper.