Merry Christmas to my family on 12seconds.tv

Starting to make Internet video on 12seconds.tv

That’s right. I’ve now got the IceCam2 made by Macally and the DV316L digital video camera made by Mustek. I got the latter for free in the mail today from Travelers Advantage. I signed up for a trial of their service to get this free gift and promptly canceled my service with them. It’s a very cheap camera, but at least I have something to make video with now.

So now you can catch me on my YouTube channel and my 12seconds channel. I’m really excited about my 12seconds channel. I just signed up for it and created the above video with it. The site is in alpha right now and you need to get an invitation to create your own channel. I have a few invitations left. Let me know if you want join.

UPDATE (12/18/2008): 12seconds.tv has moved from private alpha to public beta. Of course it had to be the day after I got my alpha invitation. You can now sign up for an account without an invitation. Just go to their registration page and fill out the form.

I got probably the best white elephant gift ever given at an office holiday function — a complete Santa suit! Help me come up with ideas of zany things I can do in my new costume.

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

I heard the above radio story this morning while listening to NPR’s Morning Edition on KUOW. During one of the breaks, the station filled the time with this story from Sean Cole of Marketplace.

The story delves into the issues folks are having with stress and anxiety over the current economic debacle. 

After highlighting a few case studies from therapists, I figured the journalist would steer the story toward ways people can reduce stress and get their anxiety under control.

The solution? DENIAL!

From the transcript:

COLE: Turned out the guy had been checking his retirement balance every day. Hollis’s advice?

HOLLIS: He could choose to not only stop tracking his financial balance sheet on a daily basis, but he could also choose to not open his monthly 401k statement, for example.

COLE: So the guy stopped. And it helped. And that might sound like denial, but Arnis Berger says denial can be healthy.

That’s right, everything is going to be fine. No belt-tightening required. Go back to sleep, America. Nothing to see here.*

* Sarcastic comments

King County GOP chairman Lori Sotelo has a new blog for her county chair re-election campaign. She is giving updates of all the district meetings she is attending around King County ahead of the Dec. 6 party reorganization meeting where we will meet to elect the party’s new platform and leadership.

She wrote the following in one of her most recent posts:

If Republicans don’t stand by our nominated candidates for office WHO WILL? I was very disappointed to hear that the other candidates for Chairman did not support or vote for our nominee. I wonder why they are running for Chairman of the King County REPUBLICAN Party . . . .

If Republicans don’t stand by our nominated candidates for office, maybe they’re not good candidates who deserve to be supported.

Support and votes for our presidential nominee should be earned, not given away. If our candidate expects our votes, he should follow our party platform and stand for something we believe in.

The candidates running against Sotelo see what she obviously doesn’t — blind support for a bad party doesn’t make the party any better.

Think of it in terms of the auto bailout. If we continue to prop up mismanaged companies, we will fall into a slow and agonizing depression. The best thing to do is let those companies go bankrupt so they can quickly be rebuilt to perform in a 21st century marketplace.

Now we need to stop propping up this mismanaged county party. It’s time to elect new leadership and rebuild the party for a 21st century political landscape.

It seems like everyone wants to make the county party better, except for Lori Sotelo. She seems willing to let the party die a slow, agonizing death into irrelevancy.

I originally wrote most of this post as a comment to on her blog, but I have a feeling it will somehow get deleted by the “moderator.” Go check and see if my comment is there.

The sharp-witted Mike Longaecker, a reporter at the Red Wing (Minn.) Republican Eagle has launched a blog called Cinema Logic.

The site’s tag line declares, “The Hollywood machine drops hundreds of flaming bags on America’s porch each year. I’ll let you know which ones really are the poo.”

I was first introduced to Longaecker’s movie review talents while we were both students at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and working at the campus newspaper The Student Voice.

Though I can’t pick even one memorable review out of my mind, I do remember them being far too good for the college paper.

When I was editor of the Voice, I pushed to make the content more campus-centric. My aim was to showcase local entertainment for local students. I also wanted to report on arts and entertainment happening on our campus, because nobody else would report those stories.

In the same vein, I figured that it wouldn’t do much good to the campus community to have space in the paper dedicated to a movie review that they could get in the Minneapolis Star Tribune or the New York Times. My thought was, “why try to compete with so many others on this when we have stuff happening on campus that nobody else is in a position to cover.” So, music and movie reviews were pushed out of the paper.

In hindsight, I think I may have missed the point of the college newspaper. While it is good to serve the campus community, that is not the only mission. I should also have been helping to teach and develop aspiring journalists and offer a forum for well-developed work to be published.

Perhaps if I had taken another approach, folks like Mike Longaecker could have emerged as top-notch film reviewers.

Hopefully somebody stumbles upon this new site, recognizes Longaecker’s film-reviewing talents and offers him a prestigious job with lots of free movie tickets.