A Scoutmaster's Blog

Whether you like it or not, I am back! I have not posted for awhile because I have been on vacation for the last week. My parents, my brother and his family, and myself all went to Florida to visit Mickey and friends at Disney World. We also swam with the dolphins at Discovery Cove, and watched the killer whale show at SeaWorld. It was a great, but very busy trip.

It is also great to be back home. Time to get back to a regular retinue. Time to get back to work. Time to get back into Scouting, this blog, and the podcasts. Before I left, I began work on the next podcast video which will feature that rascal Buttons being asked questions by a few Cub Scouts. Unfortunately, you probably will not see it until next month because I am working on making albums and dvd’s of the pictures and video taken while on vacation. Family comes first, you know.

Next month, March, I plan to get back into the regular blogging and podcast schedule. Stay tuned.

I don’t know about you, but I take plenty of pictures when I am on an outing with the Boy Scouts. It was not too bad when I used a 35mm camera. If I filled one roll of 24 pictures on an outing I considered that a lot of pictures. Now that I have a digital camera I have been know to take a LOT more pictures per outing. Hundreds more. The boys dread seeing me coming with the camera these days. Yet, they always enjoy seeing the pictures.

I use an Apple Mac Pro computer at home so I use iPhoto to store, label, and sort my digital photographs. And there is a lot to sort. I have nearly 9000 photos of Scout and events. That does not include any family photographs. I will usually label the photos right away by event and date to make them a bit easier to find, but it can still take awhile to find that one picture I may be looking for to use in a project.

This week Apple came out with their new version of the iPhoto software. It has a couple of features that I am looking forward to using. The first is called Faces. It is a program that will recognize the faces of people in the photos. After applying names to those faces the program will label other pictures in which it finds that person and create an album for that person’s pictures. This feature could come in quite handy for preparing that Eagle court of honor presentation, or a family birthday or anniversary show.

The second new feature is called Locations. If you have a camera with a built in GPS feature (like some cel phones) information about the location of the place the photo was taken could be embedded in the photograph. The new Locations feature will group photographs taken at locations. Want to find all your pictures taken at Many Point Scout Camp or Philmont, just ask iPhoto to find them. I do not see myself using this feature as much as Faces, but it could come in handy.

I hope these new features work as well as Apple says they will. This could save me a lot of time when working on future projects. After all, it can be quite challenging finding that perfect picture when you have hundreds or thousands of pictures to scan through. My program arrived this week and I am looking forward to playing with it this weekend.

In honor of the fiftieth video posted to the Melrose Scouting Productions Podcast at the beginning of October, we decided to hold a drawing. One person who left a comment at the iTunes Music Store, or a comment at PTC Media under forums post MSPP #50, during October would win a dvd of Buttons videos. It is time to announce the winner.

The winner is… LibertyF.

LibertyF left a comment at the iTunes Music Store. I now need LibertyF to contact me with an address to send the dvd.

I would like to thank those of you who took the time to leave a comment at iTunes or the PTC Media forums. I really do read them and appreciate you leaving the feedback.

There is a lot of talk today in the media about “being green”. Isn’t it funny that Scouting has been teaching some of these principles for decades already? Like conservation and recycling. But just in case you need a few more things to keep in mind, here are a few more green statistics.

If just 25 percent of U.S. families used 10 fewer plastic bags a month, we would save more then 2.5 billion bags a year. (Yes, that is billion.) -www.thinkquest.org

The average person comsumes twice as much as fifty years ago. (No wonder we have an obesity problem in this country.) – www.bikeroute.com

Every ton of recycled office paper saves 380 gallons of oil. (Not to mention how much trash it keeps out of our landfills.) -www.thinkquest.org

And here is one fact that I found to be pretty interesting: There are more roads in our national forests than in the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system. (I am not quite sure what to think about this one.)

I have collected dozens of videos over the years that were produced by the Boy Scouts of America. Some od them were commercials, some were training films, and some were inspirational films. A few were a bit corny, but that only added to the charm.

One little piece of video that seems to have caught a few people’s attention is the animated BSA logo that I use at the start of the Eagle Scout slide shows that I make. A few months ago I posted one of these slideshows to the Melrose Scouting Productions Podcast as an example of an Eagle Scout video. A few of you have wondered where they could pick up a copy of that animation to use in their own slideshows.

I found the video on a VHS tape produced by the BSA nearly twenty years ago. I have a VHS tape deck near my computer so I copied the animation onto my hard drive. The full size video, 640 x 480 pixels, is a Quicktime movie that is 32.4 MB in size.

I couple of you have contacted me if I would be able to email the video. Well as you can see, it is a bit large to email. So, I have now posted it online for you to download. If you have access to a way to download Quicktime movies (like Quicktime Pro) you can find this animation at
http://melrosetroop68.org/QTmov/BSALogo.mov
Of course, if the BSA sends me a letter telling me to remove it from this site then I will have to take it offline, so I hope they do not mind if other troops use it for their Eagle court of honors and other Scouting films.

That’s right! Today, August 17, Button the radical Boy Scout celebrates the two year anniversary of his first appearance in an online video that appeared on Youtube. It has been quite a ride since then. When I look back at those first videos it almost makes me cringe. His talk was slow. His movement were stiff. To tell the truth, at the time I was not sure what I should be doing with him.

What a difference two years can make. Buttons has developed into a somewhat hyperactive teenager who loves Scouting. He has appeared in videos by himself, with real Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, and recently starred in a video with other puppet friends. He has conducted interviews of people in Scouting, gone camping, stayed physically fit, and even tried playing broomball. So far, Buttons has appeared in sixteen videos.

Buttons has also been a guest on two audio podcasts; An Hour a Week, and Akela’s Adventure. Both podcasts are part of the PTC Media family of Scouting podcasts. Buttons also made a live appearance at Pack 68’s School Night To Join Scouting in the fall of 2007.

So what is in the future for Buttons? More videos, of course. Plans are in the works for Buttons to star in videos about Leave no Trace camping and internet safety. Two more “Buttons and Randall Show” videos are being planned. And there is a rumor that Buttons could soon launch his campaign to run for the presidency.

Buttons and I have enjoyed creating these videos over the last two years. We hope you have enjoyed watching them. We invite you to leave comments for Buttons by clicking on the link below, or at the iTunes Music Store (by clicking HERE), or at the PTC Media forums.

Thanks for watching!

I could not pass up sharing this comic with you. It is a Family Circus comic and asks a very important question about the Boy Scout Slogan, Do A Good Turn Daily. I actually saw it in a newspaper over a year ago, but only recently found an online version of it, and it is in color!

This note is more for myself then anyone else. The counter hit 20,000 visitors this morning. It has only been a little over three months since hitting the 10,000 mark, which took five months to hit. Thanks everyone!