Beeees! And Kino to the rescue.

This weekend, I put my first videos up on YouTube. Here's why.

Three Saturdays ago, May 30, Kristina and I were in King Soopers when my cell rang. It was Kristine Smock, a mandolin player from Lyons.

There's a swarm of bees in the alley behind my house. Do you want them?

We hurried home. Kristina grabbed a cardboard filing box, shoved in a frame with old comb, tossed it in the car, and we drove out to Lyons. After she'd gotten the swarm in the box, she put on the lid and duct-taped both handles shut. Once home, she put it on the deck, pulled off one piece of tape and -- presto! -- one new hive.

I'd gotten her an observation hive for Christmas, which was still unpopulated. By last Wednesday, it was set to go and she'd drilled a hole in the wall.

A flip videorecorder was waiting for me on the porch from Amazon, so its maiden voyage was taking a video of the installation.

Okay, I had it captured. My first, little, 15' home movie. Now what? It'd be nice, for example, to show it to Kristina's parents.

Can't mail it, it's half a gig. YouTube? Uh-oh. YouTube has a 10' limit. Other services? Turns out there's a reason YouTube is popular -- they're slow and hard to use.

By the next night, I could get someone at the BLUG meeting to show me enough rudimentary Kino to chop my video and post the pieces to YouTube.

The trickiest part was figuring out to download the jmpegtools package, so that Kino would export the files in a format that YouTube liked. Figuring it out required actually reading the error messages on the screen, which told me to install the jmpegtools package. Duh.

Here's the result.

And here's the first one, in embedded form: