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Paintball: Urban Warfare

I started off the Spring break vacation by taking the family for some fun at New York City Paintball (http://www.newyorkcitypaintball.com). The break was just an excuse needed to arrange an early birthday outing for my wife who, believe it or not, had been asking me for months to take her to the paintball facility since it is located right next to LaGuardia. I thought this was pretty funny since my wife is one of the least violent people I have ever known. The kids are a bit more like me. My daughter is into the martial arts and my son is a Call of Duty/first person shooter veteran. To top it off, our good friend Tone Loc was visiting from Norway, so it Continue reading “Paintball: Urban Warfare”

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Visual Effects Course Development

On April 3, the New York City Investment Fund invited a group of educators and business people from the visual effects industry to a conference on changes within the entertainment sector. Over the past year the LaGuardia Media and Technology programs have been participating in discussions with the New York City Investment Fund (NYCIF) to develop a Visual Effects program. NYCIF has been working with local visual effects firms to help them to meet the current demand for VFX artists in New York City.  All of the firms have cited the shortage of skilled labor as a key restriction to growth and are interested in working with CUNY on developing training and internships opportunities for the next generation of NYC visual effects artists. It is my intention to research this opportunity to see if a viable VFX program at LaGuardia is possible. In order to make that determination there are key questions that will need to be answered  concerning funding, software/hardware, the structure of the program or option, and how to either attract or develop faculty to teach such highly specialized classes. We will see how this all plays out. But just in case I have been getting reacquainted with After Effects.

The audio recording from the meeting can be found below in mp3 format.

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Ready to Die….but he still lives on!

I can’t believe that it has been 15 years since Biggie was murdered in Brooklyn. When I really think about it this means it has been 15 years since I was really excited about any hip hop artist. Despite the demonization of hip hop and rap music in many circles, there can be no debate that this polarizing music genre has been a driving force in the lives of many youth. The above discussion is an insightful and intelligent discussion on the cultural relevance of Biggie and hip-hop.

It made me wanna pull out my old book or rhymes and grab the mic again.

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Attention Filmmakers: HDSLR Video & Audio workshop

HDSLR Workshop

This past weekend I had the pleasure of taking a workshop on capturing video and audio with HDSLR cameras at Student Filmmakers. The workshop was a two day event led by Patrick Reis, an independent filmmaker and cinematographer. Patrick is a veteran freelance industry professional with a great deal of experience working with the new Canon DSLR cameras. I had been wanting to jump into the DLSR video waters for awhile so I figured that Continue reading “Attention Filmmakers: HDSLR Video & Audio workshop”

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LaGuardia Academic IT Committee

Back in January of this year, I was asked to join the new LaGuardia Academic IT Committee.  This new committee has been convened by LaGuardia’Vice-President Katopes and Dean Arcario. Members of the group are tasked with the goals of creating a vision for Academic IT over the next 5 years by creating better communication between IT and Academic Affairs and  increasing on-line/hybrid courses. In many ways the LaGuardia Academic IT Committee is a reflection of what CUNY is doing and a more university wide scale with Committee for Academic Technology (CAT) of which I am also a member. While the Humanities department already had a committee representative, given my areas of expertise in digital media and technology, my participation was requested.

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LaGuardia Online/Hybrid Teaching Seminar

The above video is from a brief overview that I gave to some of my colleagues at LaGuardia Community College. I was asked to talk about some of the work that I am doing in converting my lectures from a traditional classroom environment to an Online/hybrid setting. This Online/hybrid seminar is a year long group discussion sponsored by LaGuardia’s Center for Teaching and Learning to assist faculty into making the transition to online instruction.

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Thoughts on Black History Month

Black History Month is here again and I find myself reflecting on how things have changed in just a few short years. For example, the story behind the above picture is that a little Black child visited the White House wanted to know if Obama’s hair “felt like his”, so the president obliged and let him see for himself. This brought to mind an exchange that my son and I had during the last primary season in 2008, before Obama was elected.

I took my son with me to vote, and as we were in the booth, he asked if he could grow up to become President one day. Now as a Black father this was one of those pivotal moments where you have to make a decision whether to tell him the truth about the world as you believe it, or allow them to remain innocent for awhile longer by painting them a picture of how the world should be. I try to always be truthful with my children, but in this moment I paused and decided to tell him how I hoped the future would look. “Yes, you can become the President one day”.

I just never thought it would happen in my lifetime.

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HTML5 Cheat Sheets

Some of you might remember that I took an HTML5 and CSS3 training class at Noble Desktop a few months back. The class made me acutely aware of how important the newest version of HTML will be terms of web design, video streaming and mobile application development in the future. I came across the following HTML5 cheat sheets designed by InMotion Hosting and figured I would share these documents Continue reading “HTML5 Cheat Sheets”