Heads or Tales

Read These Books If You Want To Travel or If Want to Travel from Your Chair

A few months ago I was listening to Rick Steve’s travel show on the radio. Well, I wasn’t really listening, but he was on and he was talking.  His guest started chatting about her favorite travel books.  I ran and got a pencil.  Since then I’ve read all of them except two, one which I thought I couldn’t get from the library or on my Kindle and the other I have but haven’t read yet.  Every one of the books the lady recommended that day was great.  Here’s the list:

 

                        Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane.  Two newly graduated students travel to just opened China to conquer the world but the world conquers them. (That last part is a quote from Amazon's description.)

 

                        Tahir Shah is a writer.  The lady on Rick Steves said anything he writes is great.  I read The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca.  The book turned out to be a description of the author’s buying and restoring a house in Morocco.  I could not put it down.  I felt like I was there listening and smelling.

 

                               A Pearl In the Storm: How I found my heart in the middle of the ocean by Tori Murden McClure.  The author describes her attempt to be the first woman to row across the Atlantic.  It’s a great study in character and great to just read about.

 

                         Teatime With The Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart Of Sri Lanka’s Civil War by Mark Stephen Meadows.  The author made this journey after 9-11.  He wanted to get an idea of what makes a terrorist tick. 

 

                        Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett.  This is a mystery thriller with a great deal of detail about the red light district of Bangkok.

 

Two which were suggested but which I have not read:

            Travels in West Africa by Mary H. Kingsely.  I have this book and have renewed it once.  It is the true accounts of the author, a Victorian woman, as she ….traveled in West Africa.  It’s very long and I haven’t opened it up yet.

 

            The Lions of al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay.  This is the one I thought I couldn’t get on my Kindle or from the library, but I can order it on my Kindle after all.  It sounds great and it’s next on my list.

 Here’s the Amazon description: 

Hauntingly evocative of medieval Spain, The Lions of Al-Rassan is both a brilliant adventure and a deeply compelling story of love, divided loyalties, and what happens to men and women when hardening beliefs begin to remake -- or destroy -- a world.

 

Making and Uploading a Video to Your Website From Youtube

This Halloween, I participated in some spooky telling at a local gallery and performance space called Wild Goose Creative, and we invited Deb Gregory to film us.  I’ve been wanting to put some footage on my website, but shied away due to the cost.  With the idea of sharing with the other tellers, I interviewed a bunch of video outfits before finding Deb through a Wild Goose referral.  Boy, did the estimates vary.  The most expensive was around $4,000.  That quote came from a high-end organization that works with other high-end organizations.  I used the yellow pages and called everyone under Video Production, and I even called some funeral agencies.  I guess it’s common to film funerals?  I ended up with several folks in our price range, which turned out to be $130 a piece.  It would have been cheaper, but we all agreed to chip in for one of our members who had paid for the hall.

 

Deb came for a look at the facility before the performance.  That night she filmed us and within a week provided us each with a DVD of our own performance, plus a DVD of the whole show, plus a tape we could use for editing.

 

I now have two movies up on my website, and, since they are both spooky stories, I would like to add a third.  I use Verio to host my website and I use Contribute to edit my website.  I spent hours messing around, however, before I understood I had to update my version of Contribute and then more hours working with Verio to recognize it.  Both Contribute and Verio were prompt to answer my calls and my questions. I look at working with technical problems that I don’t understand to begin with like chipping away at a boulder with a small pickaxe.  Eventually, things crack. Both groups worked with me until the problems were solved.

 

To get a video on your website, you have to get it out there to be easily accessed.  I use Youtube.  To get on Youtube, you need an account, but once you have it, uploading your video is easy.  For me, uploading the first video took quite awhile, but the second was much faster.  It's important to remember that the time limit for a piece on Youtube is 10 minutes...it used to be 7.  If you go over 10 minutes, you'll spend a long time waiting for it to load only to have the whole thing rejected.