The Office

This is the space in which I should probably tell you about my new job. It's outside of TV (my first since college), inside a cubicle and if anything exciting enough to keep your attention longer than 16 seconds ever happens there I'll tell you more about it.

Progress

There are guys on the roof. That means there is a roof, or at least parts of one, on top of what will someday be my townhome. "Someday" might soon have an actual date attached to it.


This is a shot of the back of the building. And if you look closely, you'll see that it offers more than one rear view. Oops! I hadn't noticed that at the time.

Duffer

Golf was not the usual exercise in frustration today. My dad, my brother Jim and I went out and I, for reasons still unknown, absolutely hammered the ball at times. I hit the green on a par 5 in only two shots, the second a mere 5-iron after blasting a mammoth drive. Facing a treacherous 12-foot downhill put for eagle, I managed not to roll it too far past the hole and I made the 5-footer coming back for birdie, my first ever on a par 5. The 5-iron felt even better than the drive because I got to see it. If I hit a good drive it goes out of my sight, which is more of a comment on my visual acuity than it is the strength of my golf swing.


The 5-iron shot pictured above, unfortunately, was not the one worth remembering. Officials are still trying to determine if the ball landed in a neighbor's yard or in a neighboring area code to the one in which we were playing. Still love the follow through, though. Nice balanced finish.

Which I am sure is tremendous consolation to the homeowner with the "golf course view" who realized too late that his abode would become a frequent, if inadvertent, target for golf shots whose authors thought they were aiming at the putting green. At least we think it was unintentional vandalism.


Now this shot -- again for reasons yet to be explained -- actually went in the direction I hoped it would. It landed on the green from where I two-putted for my par. Almost like I knew what I was doing.

The luck didn't last and I ended up shooting a 98. Sort of. I only broke 100 because of a charitable score on a hole on which I lost one ball in the water and hit two others out of bounds. With all the penalty strokes, I ran out of fingers trying to count up my score but Dad wrote an 8 on the official scorecard.

Hirsute

She liked my beard. Not a compliment I get often. Of course, I have rarely sported facial hair during my lifetime and grew it recently with the idea that it would be a temporary appearance change. It's not terribly attractive, despite this one woman's opinion to the contrary. Since growing the hair on my head only emphasizes the spaces where there isn't any, I grew the hair on my face instead. It chafes and scratches and generally doesn't look or feel like me.

Yet now that I have it I'm reluctant to shave it off. It's not a part of me the same way, say, my fingers are but I'm oddly reluctant to part with it even as I can't wait to feel the hair clipper buzz its way through the thicket.

Marketing

I spend hours scouring the Internet some days. Nope. Not for free porn, however noble a pursuit that may be, but for broadcast journalism courses at this fine nation's colleges universities.

Because I need the lesson? Ha! Ha! You're a regular Seinfeld, you are. But no. I'm looking for places to market a DVD (A Reporter's Guide to the Art of Television Storytelling) I produced this past summer.

I look through a school's web pages, which in some cases requires quite the detective work, to find courses whose students can benefit from the DVD and the professors who teach them. I e-mail the prof, or the department chair, and offer to send a demo copy.

Technically, I suppose I'm spamming. Except I'm not sending random bulk e-mails. And the product offered is actually something useful. Even better for the targets, I'm not asking them to buy anything, just to require (or at least recommend) that their students buy it. So I suppose I'm not spamming after all.

How do I know I have a useful product besides the fact that if I made it it must be good? Because the first two college professors I asked to review it both adopted it into their course materials. And because all of the actual working professionals I asked to review it thought it was great too. Some even said they learned from it themselves.

Praise doesn't get any better than that.

So why didn't I start my e-mail campaign sooner? Because I know television storytelling a lot better than I know marketing, that's why. I should be happy the thought struck me at all.

I've sent out about 80 e-mails so far -- right during the holiday break when no one's in school to read them -- and I've still gotten more than a dozen requests for copies of the DVD. I've been collecting names and e-mail addresses for more contacts and will wait until after the new year to pitch to them. If the people I've already e-mailed come back next semester and flood me with replies, I don't want to run out of DVDs to send, especially considering I'm also filling some orders for paying customers.

I've got to set up a method for taking orders over the Internet. PayPal scares me. It's too much like a bank without any of the regulatory oversight. And I've read some horror stories. So I'm looking for alternatives. One recommendation I got was for 2checkout.com. It's got a low set-up fee and low commissions. If you know anything about this stuff and have ideas to pass along, please do!

Family Documentary

Still needing to acquire more pictures to complete the family documentary about my parents I've mentioned, I went ahead and finished the audio portion, minus any music I might decide to add later. I broke it down into eleven chapters and made mp3 files of each of them. Click on the title to play it.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11

Should I Worry?

Thanks to my new bestess buds at StatCounter.com, I can see how many people visit my web site (johnmcquiston.com) and even get some idea who they are. Don't worry, it doesn't give street addresses but it will say who the Internet Service Provider (ISP) is and what city it's based in.

That means if you visit me from an AOL account, it registers as coming from Reston, Virginia, so it's not like you're giving me the keys to your front door. Mostly it's a neat way of seeing that two people have come to my site from England and two from Canada.

Oh, and also to learn that my site's video page gets almost as much traffic as my home page thanks to people finding it by searching for things such as "girls fight," "kids fight" and "naked news clips." My apologies for the letdowns they must have suffered.

One visitor is apparently not disppointed. Thirteen times in the past two days, someone from the domain paulweiss.com has made an appearance. So I paid a visit to paulweiss.com and discovered that Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is a law firm with offices in New York, Washington, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong and London.

What on my site could possibly fascinate an international law firm enough that it would stop by more than a dozen times in two days? I don't know, either, but it's got me a little spooked. Maybe you can check it out for me and see what's on there that could get me sued.

Family Documentary

About a year ago, I got my parents to sit down and do interviews with me about their lives. Twelve months of procrastination later, I have finally finished a script for their story.

I put off recording my narration because I've had a cold and my voice isn't right but today I finally buckled down and recorded it. Looking at the .wav file of the recording in my sound editing software you can see my voice level weaken as I go through the 50 minute session. I didn't realize how much I had written but after editing it down to the takes I preferred, there was still almost 17-and-a-half minutes of my voice alone.

Never mind how much we're going to hear from my parents. This is a much more mammoth project than I thought. Maybe I wasn't procrastinating all year. Maybe I was working stuff out in my mind.

Oh, BS.

I have spent a considerable amount of time shooting video of and scanning the pictures going back more than 60 years that I'll use. I shot some video of Mom and Dad at the local horse racing track and some shots of Dad golfing. Plus, I discovered a video made from home movies my maternal grandfather had made when my mother was a child. They're in color!

Over on my video blog if you scroll down far enough you can see a couple of montages edited to music I made of my parents' lives. They run 3-4 minutes each.

This one will run 30-40 minutes it looks like.

Dover, Delaware is not a world-famous sports town. But twice a year it swells to accomodate tens of thousands of NASCAR fans who converge on Dover Downs International Speedway for NASCAR race weekends. The track began as a harness racing track for horse racing. A one-mile oval was added later for auto racing.

In June of 1989, Dale Earnhardt won the Budweiser 500 NASCAR Winston Cup stock car race at Dover with your humble correspondent on hand, shooting the race and later reporting the results.

Bud 500

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