Attention anyone who works with disabled children!
In response to the budget shortfall, the Governor’s Reduction Order has included the reduction or elimination of most services provided to children with developmental disabilities. The Order includes the elimination of all family support, elimination of comprehensive in-home supports for children, reduction in foster care, residential programs, proctor care, and raising case management ratios from 1-45 to 1-300. We need your story to help inform policy makers and the public about the impact of these cuts on real people!!
Name: (We will use initials only if we use your story)
Address: (the address is only for purposes of identifying legislative districts)
Contact Information: Phone / Email
Please describe your child / family:
Please describe the services / supports / funding you receive to help care for your child:
Please describe the impact on your family if you are no longer able to receive these services / supports / funding:
If you respond, please return to: Kweit@ocdd.org
Converting GotoWebinar recordings to Flash to embed
For work, I had to put a recorded GotoWebinar webinar on our website so people could see it anytime. Easy, right? No.
For one thing, GotoWebinar will only record the webinar on PC. At my all-Mac job, I had to drag in an old XP laptop. Once I brought it up I saw what I was missing in the Mac version - lots of features and a better interface. Oh, well. GotoWebinar Mac works fine.
The recording went off without a hitch. I had been warned to choose the WMV format rather than the native GTW format and I did so.
But then - what the hell! The video will play, but refuses to convert. Final Cut? Nope. Compressor? nah. FFMPEG? zilch. These files use some strange codec that doesn't play well with others. Lots of others have the same problem. Finally I found away that worked. My goal was to get it up on blip.tv, and then embed it on our site.
Here was my solution:
- Record in WMV format.
- Copy the file onto the mac.
- Download Flip4Mac WMV.
- Open it with Quicktime.
- In Quicktime, File-> Export for Web and select Desktop
- It will create a folder; open the folder and find the .m4v file
- Upload the m4v file to blip.tv
- It works, great quality, small file size, and audio too!
I bet you could also convert the m4v file to .flv using ffmpeg and then host it yourself using Flowplayer.
Flip4mac's free version will put a watermark on your video. If you can't live with that, buy a license for $29. I did. Well, my company did anyway.
Good luck!
“A friend is one who sees through you and still enjoys the view.” -Wilma Askinas
-Wilma Askinas
Burning one of my Penguin candles
Holidays at Kahneeta
We had a wonderful couple of days at Kahneeta. Snowball fights, hot springs, rolling in the snow, good food, Wii games, and good movies.
Bill Bradbury on Climate Change
I had the opportunity to see Bill Bradbury, the outgoing Oregon secretary of state, deliver a presentation on climate change today at Celilo Media, the publishers of the Chinook Book and Ecometro blog. My friend Carissa, the Ecometro blog editor, invited me because they had extra spots. Bradbury had attended a training session at Al Gore's Tennessee farm, where Gore, in the family barn, trains large groups of people to deliver the same speech on climate change that became the basis of the movie An Inconvenient Truth. Bradbury adapted the presentation to an Oregon audience with before and after photographs of the glacier on Mt Hood, the newly forming delta at the outlet of Hood River into the Columbia, and images of floods and landslides created by melting glaciers. He did a great job, and the intended effect - making me want to do something - definitely worked.
I had the good luck to see Gore give his original presentation at the Oregon Convention Center in September of 2005, before the movie came out. Gore gave the presentation twice in a row because of the large number of people who couldn't get it to see the first presentation. It was shocking then, and things have gotten even worse in the last few years. The ice caps have been melting faster than anyone predicted, and the unusually hot years have continued - of the hottest ten years on record, 9 of them have occurred within the past ten years. Since I saw the presentation, Australia signed the Kyoto Protocol, leaving the USA the only industrialized nation to not sign it.
Another, more welcome addition to the presentation was a short clip from Barack Obama about climate change being a huge priority for his administration. I am sure he will push signing the treaty though Congress, and I hope the minority Republicans don't block it.
Bill had mentioned Cap and Trade schemes as a solution to the problem. I asked Bill if he thought they were a viable method of controlling greenhouse emissions, and isn't there an inherent compromise built into the idea. He responded that he did not see the compromise, and thought they were a good way to control emissions since they would bring down the average amount of greenhouse emissions. I said that, if the system was meant to distribute the pain of compliance fairly across businesses in the economy, that it didn't make sense, because the most profitable companies would continue to pollute, while the stated goal of making the transition easier would only be true for companies that can afford to buy carbon credits from less polluting companies. I agree with the 'cap' part, just not the 'trade'. Someone else suggested a carbon tax, and the Secretary admitted that was anther viable approach, but was unpalatable to voters. Frankly, after the shocking evidence he had just presented, that's not a good enough reason to compromise on solutions.
I probably didn't make as good an argument as I could have to go head to head with the Secretary of State on his favorite issue, so I'll do it here n my blog. Read Against Cap and Trade Carbon Trading Schemes here.