On May 20, 2008, the Eau Gallie High School Combined Choir (Concert Choir, Women’s Choir, Encore, and Finale) performed one last show together — the EGHS 2008 Spring Choir. Their instructor and mentor, Mr. E. Jason Armstrong, announced earlier this year that this would be his last year in the Brevard County school system (after 14 years of service in the music program).

His students (and some returning alumni) put together quite a show for us to enjoy, and gave him a fantastic (and entertaining) sendoff. To watch the whole thing online in one shot, view my YouTube playlist for the event. Here’s the program and links to individual songs/scenes (note: if you’ve got the bandwidth, set your YouTube preferences to “High Quality” to get better versions of all these):

1. The entire Combined Choir opens the show with Duel of the Fates.
2. The Encore Show Choir performs C’mon Everybody.
3. Finale singer Laura Diebel performs Hymn.
4. The Encore Women’s Choir performs The New Girl in Town.
5. The Women’s Show Choir performs California Dreamin’.
6. Encore singer (and my buddy) Shannon Biagi performs What I Did For Love.
7. The Women’s Show Choir performs More Today Than Yesterday.
8. Finale singer Olivia Frost performs My Almost Lover.
9. The Men’s Show Choir performs Two Too Wet!, a medley.
10. The Finale Show Choir performs Thanks a Lot, But No Thanks.
11. The Encore Show Choir performs The Song of Purple Summer.
12. Alumni Mallory Gleason performs Why.
13. The Concert Choir performs There Once Was a Man.
14. The Concert Choir performs To Where You Are.
15. The entire Combined Choir closes the “formal” show with You Can’t Stop the Beat and takes their final bow together with their instructor.
16. EGHS Alumni return to perform I Will Be Here.
17. The entire group offers Mr. Armstrong some parting gifts.
18. Finally, a bit of a Tricky stunt as Mr. Armstrong and his Choir close out the show.
19. After the show, students get a closer look at the collage presented to Mr. Armstrong.

Enjoy the show!

Technorati Tags: Media Video Youtube

For a whopping 20 seconds or so, NASA lit up the night sky with its launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor this morning (at 2:28am). Then it vanished into the clouds and the show ended quite abruptly (not because anything went wrong with the launch — it just wasn’t visible behind the cloud cover that had earlier represented the biggest “threat” to the launch window). Here’s the video I shot of the launch, from Space View Park in Titusville, FL (it’s about as close as a lowly “civilian” like me can get to the launch pad — there is a theoretically “closer” location, that NASA sells tickets for ($52 per head, ugh), that immediately sell out within minutes of being made available). Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Cool Geeky Video

I’ve recorded a few things here and there and uploaded them to YouTube (let them handle the bandwidth requirements so I don’t have to ). For now, there’s only a few things there, but I’ll update this page (and my YouTube collection) as the pile of videography grows.

• The EGHS Spring 2008 Spring Concert
• Space Shuttle Discovery launch on October 23, 2007
• The EGHS Fall 2007 Talent Show
• Space Shuttle Endeavor launch on March 11, 2008 (a night shot — amazing fireworks!)

Technorati Tags: Media Video Youtube

In case anyone is even remotely curious (and, to my astonishment, 157 people so far have been ), I recorded a (decidedly amateur) video of NASA’s launch of Shuttle Discovery on Tuesday of this week. You can view it on YouTube. While you’re there, you can catch another video of my friend performing Stuff Like That There from her talent show appearance this past Thursday.

I’ve got a couple gigabytes (yes, that’s with a “g”) of photos from the last year uploading as well … that takes a long time since the United States is mired in this laggy, bullshit asynchronous broadband hell in which I can snarf down a CD image at almost a megabyte per second, but can only upload stuff back out at the snail’s pace of 50 or so kilobytes per second. That’s okay, because I’m also assuming my web host is going to shit a brick when I set the gallery off to the task of importing those 4,500 images It’s set to de-prioritize all of its work, so it won’t step on anyone else’s site performance, but who the hell knows how well this will work

The new camera has been well-behaved so far; it’s capable of taking 3 megabyte pictures (with JPEG compression), but fortunately it has more sane settings that drop that down to 500-600k or so while maintaining the same resolution and picture quality.

In the meantime, enjoy the videos!