Fire-Wired Blog

When you start a new job inevitably you get asked what you miss most about your old job.  Easy, writing music for kids. In December of 2009 CRI started producing a show for kids aptly titled "Kids Show." Jon Hoffmann, the shows producer came up with a long list of cool segment ideas, one I threw in the pot was music videos. I teamed up with my coworker A.J. Hodgeman and started working on some song possibilities under the moniker PB & AJ . First we tackled the standard public dominion tunes ( Old MacDonald , ABCs , Hickory Dickory Dock , etc) but that well ran dry rather quick, so we had to come up with our own songs real quick.  Of the 11 songs/videos we produced the children's standards were the most popular but not my favorite. Below, in no certain order, are my favorites. I do wish the child's play could continue but sometimes you trade one hobby for another. Where I used to write kids tunes and produce music videos, now I make absurd short films . May...

Obviously I'm a  pretty big geek for web video , and relish every opportunity I get to produce a video for the web, but most of the video I upload is procedural for my job. CRI produces 5 shows and throughout the week there are various short clips to be uploaded. Still, about 3 or 4 times a month I produce a video that makes me excited for public release. Most recently that excitement came from a clip I produced for the travel show I co-produce, " One Day Getaway ." Of course I do have other passions and beliefs outside of my web video obsession, local food is one of them. A few months ago a local cooking show approached 1DG about teaming up for a special cooking/day-tripping episode. After a short brainstorm I proposed the winning idea of heading to the Des Moines Winter Farmers Market , check out a unique getaway opportunity, and find the goods one needs to cook up a delicious meal ( here's the cooking segment ). Fast forward to the episode being fi...

My most recent Tech Beat report for my day job explains the importance of backing up your digital information. Click here to read my "Around Osky Blog" post on my personal experiences with data loss .

It's time for my coworkers to sink or swim. The next two Fridays I won't be in the office to upload and form everyone's work so it's time to see who among them has been paying attention. This past February I install Joomla 1.5 on our webspace to manage our website. It's an outdated software but sadly we're locked into the space we use (bureaucracy...) so we can't use Wordpress. Joomla provides a CMS that almost anyone can pick up and contribute to. The problem is... some people don't want to play ball. Last month I attended the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas and heard a lot of speakers talk about multi-platform data delivery. The world of news has been segmented forever into Radio, Print, and TV. Well thanks to the omnipresence of social media they're all colliding and if you don't like it, basically you don't want to be a journalist.  Every GM, reporter, documentary producer, and journalism at NAB said the s...

Today my work packed up our stuff and closed up shop... BECAUSE WE MOVED INTO A BRAND NEW OFFICE! YEAH! Considering this is my second post, I haven't been able to talk about my job very much, but I work at a nonprofit television station in Oskaloosa, Iowa called the Communication Research Institute . WAY too fancy a name. Anyways, we moved from an old, rundown building on the square of Oskaloosa to a 4-year-old building on the local college campus. It is super nice and I'm really excited to get to work in there. Well moving into the new digs reminds me one of my pet peeves; people who are "stuck in their ways" and refuse to let go of their inefficiencies. Why stay in an old building that doesn't fit your needs correctly just because you are used to it? (You should know none of my co-workers wanted to stay at the old building.) Well as it turns out... I'm one of those people who likes his inefficiencies, and my hang up?   MiniDv tapes! This might seem ...