Gregory is taking an online college speech class. Actually, nearly all of his classes are online ones because it is such a long daily drive to campus. The only live, on-campus class he has is Biology Lecture with the associated Biology Lab. Now, you have to wonder, how do you do a speech class online. Well, it is basically the same as a face to face one except that you need to record your speeches before an audience at home and send the recordings in.

We didn't own a video camera, so Gregory spent his own money and bought a little $50 (after rebate) camera to use for the speeches with some money had been hanging on to for college expenses. Well, the $50 price tag probably gives away the coming 'comedy of errors' part. By the time the camera arrived he was in the thick of a heavy 16 credit hour load and couldn't do much more than basic video to computer recordings until the speech due date was breathing down his neck.

Getting everyone rounded up to play audience had its intrigues and recording with a 5 year old as one of the members of the audience was interesting, but the recording of the speech went pretty well technically - with a little creativity and a few rubber bands to attach it to the tripod. The camera didn't come with a hole to attach it to a tripod. No matter, the rubber bands worked great.

Then came trying to get the recorded speech into the required DVD or VHS tape format. OK, we are now on day . . mmmm, I don't even know what day we are on. LOL He has spent days and hours that he doesn't have trying to get this speech recording past technical glitches.

First, the camera's cable format was not the same as the VHS tape player. OK, drop back and punt, we have a portable DVD burner, a bit particular in its tastes for disk media, but a DVD capable burner nonetheless. Well, it turned out that we didn't have the software needed to record video from the computer. It would burn data, not video. Gregory is techno-savy, so he located a trial version of videosoftware to do the job.

That gets us up to today's adventure. All loaded up and in-process we discovered that the trial version was crippled in precisely the tool we needed. So off to the website to buy a code to unlock the trial. I input all the required information to use the family credit card and am stymmied by a new security feature from my credit card company. I like security. Good. Except that even though I put in all the correct information, it still wouldn't accept my payment. sigh. Gregory had to leave to go on to Biology Lab. So, forgive me if I feel that I MUST find some way to get this speech published to prove that he really did do it. LOL. Here it is:

This was my first time to use YouTube (or any other online video service). It was pretty painless . . . and right now we could sure use some painless success. hehehehe.

Not to be daunted, we WILL get this to the required format and future speeches WILL go off without a hitch even if it means buying a video camera above the $50 threshhold to do it. :0)