Has anybody else visited YouTube recently and noticed that there's going to be a historical day of film-making coming soon? Come July 24 2010, Kevin MacDonald (director) and Ridley Scott (producer) want as many people as possible to film themselves and their day, and then submit their footage to be considered for being in the first ever user-generated documentary, "Life in a Day".
The film will show what happened around the world during that particular day of July 24 2010, and will be a sort of "time-capsule" that shows what real people experience, what they think about, what they do for fun, special moments, mundane moments, moments that in the distant future might be considered golden. This project is a creative and cinematic milestone, and my family and I will attempt, on July 24 2010, to be a part of history.
If you want to contribute to this film as well, all you have to do is take footage during the day July 24 2010 (the footage can contain anything from watching a sunrise to commuting to work, from special moments to regular everyday chores, in a serious or playful manner, doesn't matter what you take, only that you take it), and then submit that footage anytime between July 25-31 to lifeinaday's YouTube Channel. Read the rules and guidelines provided on their channel and decide for yourself whether you want to be part of history too.
7.12.2010
Speech Number 5: Peace in the Desert.
Today I gave my 5th ever Toastmaster Speech! The basic manual has 10 speech projects in it altogether, so this means I am halfway there to attaining the rank of "Competent Communicator".
Objective: To use body language, gestures and facial expression to enhance the delivery of my speech.
Topic: A story of my first-hand experience camping out in the Negev Desert during the 10-day tour of Israel Bettina and I took in late May 2010. The underlying message of my story is that it's important to find quiet in our lives, and appreciate it when we have it.
Time Range: 5-7 minutes.
Compared to my previous 4 speeches, I'd say this presentation was my best. Still I have some improvements to make; I notice myself pacing back and forth unnecessarily when I could just be still, and towards the end I was getting a bit out-of-breath, losing steam so to speak. Plus, as my evaluator Salena said, I focused on one side of the room more than the other, so I need work on improving better eye-contact. These are all rungs on the ladder that will get me to being a better and more confident public-speaker!
Some extra news: Since the beginning of July, I became the Vice-President of Membership at my club. Yeah, for real; members voted, and they made me an officer. I'm now in charge of finding new members and also making sure our current members keep coming to meetings, which turns out to be a bit of a challenge during the summer. Still, it's a fun job.
Objective: To use body language, gestures and facial expression to enhance the delivery of my speech.
Topic: A story of my first-hand experience camping out in the Negev Desert during the 10-day tour of Israel Bettina and I took in late May 2010. The underlying message of my story is that it's important to find quiet in our lives, and appreciate it when we have it.
Time Range: 5-7 minutes.
Video Record of my speech:
Video Record of my evaluation:
Video Record of my evaluation:
Compared to my previous 4 speeches, I'd say this presentation was my best. Still I have some improvements to make; I notice myself pacing back and forth unnecessarily when I could just be still, and towards the end I was getting a bit out-of-breath, losing steam so to speak. Plus, as my evaluator Salena said, I focused on one side of the room more than the other, so I need work on improving better eye-contact. These are all rungs on the ladder that will get me to being a better and more confident public-speaker!
Some extra news: Since the beginning of July, I became the Vice-President of Membership at my club. Yeah, for real; members voted, and they made me an officer. I'm now in charge of finding new members and also making sure our current members keep coming to meetings, which turns out to be a bit of a challenge during the summer. Still, it's a fun job.
7.01.2010
Launching of Serve-A-Verse: A Triumph
This past week, Benny, Bettina and I have been working extra hard on a project we've been working on for months and months: revamping our Serve-A-Verse website's design layout and building a system that keeps a database of all registered users. In the process, we've added many more useful features, become multi-lingual in a handful of computer languages such as HTML, CSS, Perl, and PHP, gained competence in using programs in the Adobe CS4 software collection, and discovered what it really takes to be a web-master. Anybody can slap together text, graphics, and links and call it a web page, but it takes some real brains and creativity (not as mutually exclusive as you might think) to put up an actual useful web application.
What is Serve-A-Verse? It is an interactive website that allows a registered user to select a single or range of verses from the Old Testament Bible and see the verses displayed in English and in Hebrew, the original biblical language. Our updated web-service also allows users to play an audio clip next to each individual verse of "the voice of God" reading the verse in Hebrew.
To see for yourself how totally awesome this website is, follow this link (Serve-A-Verse) to the home page.
To read more about the launching of Serve-A-Verse, see the post my sister Bettina wrote on her blog about it: We have a launch!/Ready to Serve!
To make my day, leave a comment and/or tell your friends to register to our site.
For other options, press 2. (Just kidding.)
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