Basketball Trick Shots in Silver Spring

I do live just a five-minute walk away from Downtown Silver Spring, but I didn't really want to film myself going into the movie theater, eating a Chipotle burrito, etc. because I thought there would be plenty of videos of that kind. Instead, I put together a collage of basketball trick shots. While I don't spend much time doing shots of that sort, I do really like to play basketball. This is my hoop but it has been a popular attraction throughout the neighborhood since we got it about eight years ago.

My brother filmed this for me using a Flip Video. I recognize it isn't in widescreen, I will try to fix that for future videos. I tried iMovies '07 for my recent video for English and had a terrible experience. I felt helpless at times: clips would change lengths at will, it crashed frequently, the transitions were not good, so I went back to iMovie '06. I found this upbeat song and thought it fit well in my video.

I had some shots planned out, and many of them took a while. The bike one was difficult for me because I had to maintain an acceptable velocity to make the shot look decent, I had to stay under control (I crashed into the curb several times), and I had to catch the ball and make the shot keeping one hand on the bike. This shot took quite a while. Then there were some other tough ones like the one where I juggled a soccer ball then kicked it into the hoop. I actually made it on the first try when I was demonstrating what I would to do. Then it took five minutes to do it again. In addition to the challenging shots, the cold was another factor. We broke the filming over three days because while I might have been in a t-shirt and shorts, my hands were freezing.

Other shots were improvised. I had a stretch where I did as much and I could. That's when I did the 360-layup and some other shots.

Dialogue never factored into the video. My brother was had some funny comments from behind the camera because he understandably got quite bored. I might upload some of his comments as well as some of my bloopers for a weekly post soon. Sorry my dialogue was not a little more creative.

Real News #1

This is a weekly blog post segment where I go over some of the recent "Real News."
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So... this is an outrage! I'm getting ripped off of one inch of bread. Time to boycott this business. Subway, you've lost a customer.
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Is Google Responsible for Killing a Donkey? I'm glad to see Fox is staying away from politics and giving that donkey the recognition it deserves. I'm sure its family really appreciates that act of kindness. Anyway, how did somebody get this footage? Who happens to be looking at a street view of dirt in Botswana? Anyway, the witnesses of this murder were unfortunately not able to attend Google's trial.
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Though the concept of somebody getting stuck like that is quite funny, it's hard to laugh after the experience she went through. That would be miserable to be trapped, unable to move your head for hours. Now she has a story she'll never forget.
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CBC adds a new twist to twist to the Lance Armstrong case: reportedly this criminal used rugs. I wasn't able to find the video footage of this newscast, but if I were to guess, I would say it was a typo. Most likely they were trying to give the viewer a new angle on the story, informing us that he used mugs to drink the water to swallow his performance-enhancing pills.

Speaking of mugs, would you buy one of these?

When I don't know what to do... ( Random Blog Search #1)

There is the occasional week when I have no idea what to write about. This is one of them, so I've decided to start a new series where I find a random blog and right about it.

Here it goes:

6:27 PM-- Well, I encountered my first problem. I've been to 5 blogs and they are all in other languages, including Spanish and Finnish.

6:35-- I give up!! There is so much garbage or stuff just pertaining to a person's life. I'm now going to try going to Google Blog Search and type in a key word.

6:39-- I plugged in "israel palestine documentary" into the Google Blog Search engine, not with the intention of watching a documentary, but with the hope that somebody may have reviewed one that I could later go and watch. Sure enough, I was linked to a Blog post with a review.

6:43-- I am now going to use the Diigolet to annotate this post. Haven't read it yet. Hope it's at least somewhat interesting.

6:45-- Well... it's hardly got any information. Time to return to the results page on Google and try again. I feel stupid.

6:48-- I found an article on the Huffington Post. At first glance, it looks to be a news story but I'll find out when I annotate it.

7:34-- I had to eat! But I'm back now...

7:42-- I am finished annotating! You can see what I did.

7:44-- In brief, this article talks about two Israel-produced movies and how they were so successful. The movies' techniques are very different. One was made with six retired directors of Israel's spy agency talking. They were informally dressed, but B-roll footage made the film appealing. The other was made by an amateur filmmaker with his camcorder, filming his daily life.

7:53-- Well... that wraps up this post. The process should be easier in the future now that I know what my approach is. I shouldn't have to make this into a log of my time. I did it this time because I knew I would go on a wild goose chase because I had very little idea what I was doing, as you can probably tell by my vague introduction. From now on, I'll go to Google Blogs and type in some key words related to something that interests me or just words that pop into my mind. I'll click on a link that seems interesting, glance over the article to see if it's worthwhile, then annotate it. I'll then write my post and summarize the article in a little more depth than I did today at 7:44. This post was more of an experiment. Going forward, I might do videos as well, but this is all if I don't have anything noteworthy to write about.

8:00-- I am out.