Lunch with former students brings back the memories

SAN RAFAEL, Calif., USA - Catching up with former journalism students is always fun, more so when you can span two generations.

Friday, the Admiral and I dined with Natalye Childress Smith, Josh Stabb and Bill Meagher - all students who suffered through my lectures and bad jokes over the years. Natalye and Josh are relative newbies, having just graduated and who are now working as writers for Crittenden Research in Novato, Calif. Bill works there, too - but as an editor.

And while Josh and Natalye caught me at CSU, Sacramento in the last couple of years, Bill is a alum of Chico State where I taught back in the mid 1980s, before make the long academic trek down the valley to Sacramento where I have been since 1986.


A class reunion or a reunion of class?

Bill was a student columnist for the campus newspaper, The Orion, and had (and still has) great news instincts. His columns about then Chico State President Robin Wilson got Wilson so angry that Wilson would call me late at night (because I was the faculty adviser) and rail about Bill's work.

Wilson never said any of the columns contained information that was inaccurate, he was just totally pissed off that Bill had printed anything about him. And Bill broke many good (journalistically speaking) stories about Wilson, which kept my phone ringing.

Seeing students succeed - as all three of them have, they have jobs after all - is one of the rewards of teaching. I suspect teachers at all levels get the same kick out of seeing their former students out there, practicing what was once largely a classroom exercise.

The only sad part about such reunions is that they are usually way too short, as this one was.

But I know the solution to that problem.

One video post and already we are starting to FLIP

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - The video added to yesterday's blog triggered a certain receptiveness to the new technology that ended with not one, but two new video cameras in the media arsenal of Captain's Blog and From Where I Sit - not to mention Writing for Money, the Class of '66 and the Tenacatita Bay Bugle.

But I digress.

After viewing the video of both granddaughters posted Saturday and pondering how I could use video more, we wandered into Costco this morning on our weekly food run and there it was: A Flip video camera, a small camera that is as simple as anything I have seen on the market, small and easy to use - and very inexpensive, too.


Flip video camera

Naturally, we bought one and after playing with the unit for about an hour at home, we decided that we needed to upgrade one notch to the next version.


Flip Ultra - more bells & whistles

The software is in this $109 camera (Costco's price). It normally retails for $119. The upgraded version - already in the mail on its way to our house, I believe - is about another $50 but has just enough additional memory and features to make it worth having.

So, what-the-hell? Video?

Since making the decision to move to Mexico for part of every year, I have been in search of the lightest gear possible: lightest computer, lightest camera, lightest video gear, lightest bag to carry all of the aforementioned - and light clothes, of course.

I know that while we are planning on building a beach house, the same wanderlust that kept us pulling up anchor will have us crashing all over rural Mexico in our Isuzu Trooper, exploring riverbeds and climbing the occasional mountain.

I'm still in search of a lighter computer, but this new Flip camera might be the ticket for both video and stills, just the thing for a Backpack Journalist exploring Mexico. More on that concept another time.

Here's the link to the Flip camera site:

Flip cameras

And here's a short clip taken with the camera we bought this morning which is unedited - if it works at all - because there seems to be a snafu in the software!

Was the camera too good to be true?

Maybe...

Que lastima!

So, after many attempts at getting the blogsite to run the video, I have given up (as of 6:10 p.m. Sunday...)

But you can see the first Flip attempt here on YouTube

YouTube debut with Flip camera