Elliott lives on a tidal river in coastal Georgia, loves to fly, writes a bit, works in healthcare for the federal government, and is system administrator for the swiftpassage webs.
When this project got started, this uprooting ourselves from the daily routine of our jobs and careers to volunteer at Moran State Park, my first notion was that we should fly all the way there in our single engine airplane. Although I’ve been a pilot since the 70s, and logged almost 2000 hours of private flight, this journey would have been the longest trip I’d ever have made on my own wings. I was also thinking it would be handy to have the use of the plane to explore the region during the weeks we were there.
So when it happened that the plan shifted to “fly-and-drive”, I was wondering how I would feel about it. The reasons were practical: our housing at Moran will be an antique Class C motor home we found through Craig’s List on Orcas Island. It’s waiting there for us now, but it wasn’t going to serve as a “get-around” vehicle. The park is on top of Mount Constitution, with a narrow track of switch-backs and some 2200 feet to climb up or down. My friend, Bill Hawk suggested we borrow his older Audi station wagon, and use it for the time up there. Wheels, and damn nice ones, too! Thanks, Bill!!!
And here I am, blogging my way across Oregon and Washington this morning, as Ann manages the tiller. So, how do I feel about it? Pretty wonderful, actually. The road has been beautiful, stimulating and thought-provoking in ways flying cannot be for me. It’s restful compared to flying, which is intense and demanding of attention, even in preparation for departure, and after landing too, when getting the plane properly settled and attended to kicks in.
Driving, we’ve been able to savor our passage across this beautiful countryside. I do look forward to getting back to our bird next October, but I’m not disappointed at all with the journey as it’s shaped up. Today we will take the advice of our friend, John Strickler, and try the coffee at Twede’s Cafe, North Bend, Oregon, where David Lynch filmed Kyle MacLachlan waxing lyrical over the cherry pie in the tv series, ‘Twin Peaks’.
“Damn, good food, Diane. That cherry pie is worth a stop.” – Special Agent Dale Cooper, ‘Twin Peaks’
While it’s helpful to know that the journey began by air, the more interesting travels have waited for us to drive. I’m writing with Ann next to me at the wheel of a borrowed Audi station wagon, and we are rolling north of Moab, Utah. Today’s plan is to get somewhere north of Boise before we run out of steam.
The car belongs to our good friends Bill and Sharon who live in Placitas, New Mexico. They put us up as we arrived in Albuquerque. Our Piper airplane is now tied down at Double Eagle, where it will spend the rest of the summer. We dined at El Pinto, where the red and green chile pepper dishes are sublimely transcendent. This was New Mexican haute cuisine, not to be confused with paltry Tex-Mex hasheries. El Pinto has dozens of tables, many on open verandas adjoining the native gardens. The surrounding mountains were draped in rumbling storms, with a hint of distant rain scent mixing it up with our spicy dishes.
Bill and Sharon have a mountain retreat some 4 hours north and west of Placitas, in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and they treated us to a night’s stay there after our day in Placitas. This cabin home is sited atop a wooded ridge facing the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. We saw a flock of wild turkeys, herds of deer and horses, rabbits, a humming bird, and a lizard. Sharon boiled up a spicy spaghetti and salad dinner. I think pasta is just about the best food to bond friendships. The next morning, we awoke to colorful hot air balloons soaring over the valley between us and the distant mountains.
We departed Pagosa Springs and made our way to Mesa Verda National Park. At the park we concentrated on seeing the Spruce Tree House archaeological ruins, and also hiking the Petroglyph loop trail. Mesa Verde is a much larger park than we had imagined, requiring a 20+ mile drive simply to get from the gate to our chosen destination within the park. And I re-discovered what a mile can be while hiking, compared to a flat mile jogged back home in Georgia. It took something close to three hours to hike along the canyon walls above Spruce Tree house, where smaller dwellings could be found high above the trail, and a wall of rock carvings some 700-800 years old can be studied.
From Mesa Verde we made our way to Moab, Utah, but those notes will wait until next time…
So, it came to pass last April that Ann heard through the grapevine that a state park on Orcas Island, in the San Juan Islands of the Pacific northwest was in need of resident volunteers in August and September. To her utter astonishment, when she asked me if I thought this would be a good idea, I said yes.
We are now enroute to our job, having flown from Georgia to Albuquerque, and on to Colorado by car. Tomorrow morning we will see Mesa Verde, and hope to sleep near Provo, Utah by nightfall.
Most of my friends know that as a side-line I narrate books for Audible.Com, and they might also know that I’m a Linux nerd, too. Where those interests intersect, there is a wonderful open-source program called Audacity, which is a Digital Audio Workshop, that is, a program in which you can record, edit and master digital audio. Musicians, narrators and voice-over professionals use such programs every day. Audacity, in addition to being jammed with features and options, is free. It’s the very tool to reach for if you are a dabbler, or on a constrained budget, but serious about doing good work.
Unfortunately, Audacity lacks one capability which narration and voice-over, in particular, makes heavy use of, and that is a tool called “punch and roll”. “Punch and Roll” allows an audio book narrator to edit mistakes “on the fly” while reading. It works like this: the reader hears himself flub a line or a pronunciation, stops recording, places the start-point line just upstream from the mistake, and hits “punch and roll”. Then these things happen automatically: the start-point jumps upstream an additional pre-set number of seconds (2-3 seconds are typical), the system starts playing the audio for the narrator to hear. As the time-line reaches the marked “flub-point”, the system stops playing, and begins to record. The narrator picks up reading, correcting the error, and the recording proceeds, as before, with the edited audio right where it belongs.
Ideally, the program should preserve both the original audio (the one containing the error), as well as the corrected stream. That may sound odd, I know, but is no less true. It doesn’t happen often, but it can be very important at times to have the original stream of audio, to fix subtle issues found much later on. Being able to revert to the original version with the tool is called “non-destructive punch and roll”.
So, how can we do all this in Audacity? First know this: the Audacity DAW has versions that run in Windows and Mac, as well as Linux, and there have been a few clever people who have solved this problem for those systems already. My “punch and roll” solution for Audacity in Linux has been adapted from a solution posted by Steven Jay Cohen which works in Mac OSX. Cohen’s written a short piece of code that runs in AppleScript, to execute the correct keystrokes to allow non-destructive punch & roll in Audacity on a Mac. A bit of googling will also locate scripts that will achieve similar results using “AutoHotKey” on Windows computers. My solution for linux makes use of a powerful macro utility called “autokey”, which runs scripts in the python programming language.
Here’s how to obtain punch and roll in Audacity on an Ubuntu/Debian linux computer:
1. Install autokey. On a gnome-ubuntu machine, from the command line run:
sudo apt-get install autokey-gtk
2. From the desktop, launch the program menu, then Accessories, AutoKey. This should open the Main Window of autokey, and also place the autokey icon, a capital “A”, in your program tray.
The main window looks like this:
AutoKey Main Window
Now you are going to add a new script to the existing library you see on the left side of the main window. Do these:
1. Click where you see “+New”, choose Script from the menu, then give your script an appropriate name in the dialogue box. I called mine Punch&Roll.
2. Notice on the right side the box where you will input and edit your script. It’s marked # Enter script code:
#Enter Script Code
blogYou will be pasting the code right below where you see:
# Enter script code
For those of you unused to working with programs, understand that where you see a hashtag (#) at the beginning of a line, the computer ignores that line when running the program. If you are modifying this script to troubleshoot it, you could insert a hashtag at the start of a line to remove it temporarilly from the program, or to create a note for yourself about what the next line is supposed to do.
Here’s the script that works for me. It sets 3 seconds of pre-roll:
## Autokey script to enable Non-Destructive Punch&Roll
##in Audacity using AutoKey.
# BEGIN SCRIPT
keyboard.send_keys(“<shift>+k”)
keyboard.send_keys(“z”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<ctrl>+x”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<enter>”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<ctrl>+b”)
keyboard.send_keys(“?”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<enter>”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<enter>”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<up>”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<enter>”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<ctrl>+v”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<enter>”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<up>”)
keyboard.send_keys(“<enter>”)
#The number of “,” below sets 3 seconds of pre-roll.
keyboard.send_keys(“,”)
keyboard.send_keys(“,”)
keyboard.send_keys(“,”)
#Below, (” “) encloses one press of the space-bar.
keyboard.send_keys(” “)
#Number for time.sleep below should equal number of (“,”).
time.sleep(3)
keyboard.send_keys(“<shift>+a”)
#Delay for sleep below makes resume-record work.
time.sleep(1)
keyboard.send_keys(“<shift>+r”)
#END OF SCRIPT
After copying this into the script editing box in autokey, do three more steps:
1. Set a hot key for the script, by clicking on the button below the script marked HotKey….Set. Then in the dialogue box that opens, click on “Press to Set”. Choose a hot-key combination that doesn’t conflict with any other program or function: I recommend a combination of the <super> key (also called the <windows> key) and the “z” key. So press and hold <super> and then press “z”. Then press Ok. You should see <super>+z has been set as your hot key.
2. It’s wise to set a Window Filter, so that your hot key will only be activated within Audacity. Where it says Window Filter, press Set. In the dialogue box where it says “Regular expression to match”, type in Audacity.Audacity , just like that.
3. Lastly, save your work: Click up above where it says Save, or simply press Ctrl-s.
Now, to use “punch and roll”, you need to set up Audacity very specifically for the script. It expects you will have two mono tracks above a label (bookmark) track. Audacity will launch a new track as soon as you begin recording, so I do these steps to get started:
1. Make sure AutoKey is running in the background (the “A” shows in the tray below on the right side). Now launch Audacity, and make a short recording of 5-8 seconds.
2. Press “Ctrl-Shift-n” to make a second mono track below the first.
3. Press “Ctrl-b” to make the label track.
The top-most track is your production track. The next one down is your Edits track and will accumulate your saved mistakes as you stop, set, and then punch/roll to fix “flubs” on the fly. It should look something like this:
Set up these tracks: Production, Edits, Bookmarks
To try it, you need to start with the time-marker set within the short piece of audio you recorded to launch the production track.
1. Put it near the end, but not all the way at the end.
2. Press <super>+z, and you will see the time marker jump back 3 seconds, play those three seconds, and then append a new recording to the production track as it reaches where you started.
You will also notice that all audio AFTER your start point will have been moved to the second audio track, where it will be saved, in case it’s needed to fix something. Here’s what it should resemble:
After one “punch and roll”. Notice that my Edits track is muted, so it doesn’t distract me as I re-record.
So there you have it! Non-destructive punch and roll for Audacity in Linux. My deep appreciation to Steven Jay Cohen for his excellent post explaining this process for Macs, without which this technique would still be a mystery to me.
Hot on the heels of ‘Resister’, my second non-fiction audiobook has been released: ‘Dr. Sam Sheppard on Trial: The Prosecutors and the Marilyn Sheppard Murder’.
Marilyn Sheppard, four months pregnant and mother of a toddler son, was bludgeoned to death in her Bay Village, Ohio, home in the early morning of July fourth, 1954. The cause of death was 27 blows to the head with a heavy instrument. Who took her life so brutally has been the subject of much controversy and debate for over half a century. Was it her husband, Dr. Sam Sheppard, who was convicted in what was then called “the Trial of the Century”, in the case that helped inspire the TV series and the movie The Fugitive?
Or was the killer, as Dr. Sam claimed, a “bushy-haired intruder”? Or could it have been Richard Eberling, the window washer who worked for the family, as the Sheppard’s son, Sam Reese Sheppard, believes? Dr. Sam spent 10 years in prison before the US Supreme Court overturned the initial verdict in an important legal decision, determining that the doctor did not receive a fair trial due to excessive press coverage.
Defended by F. Lee Bailey in his second trial in Cleveland, Sheppard was found not guilty of his wife’s murder. And then in 2000, in what has been referred to as “the Retrial of the Century”, Sam Reese Sheppard attempted to prove in a civil trial, while suing the State of Ohio for millions of dollars, that his father had been wrongly incarcerated.
This volume presents a comprehensive and final analysis of this controversial case from the perspective of the prosecutors. Jack DeSario, together with co-author William D. Mason, the chief attorney for Cuyahoga County, Ohio, provides all the facts, evidence, expert testimony, both old and new statements of the principals in this case, which concluded in April 2000.
Please note this: If you become a new member at Audible, and make ‘Sam Sheppard’ your first paid purchase, it earns me a BONUS royalty that pastes a big smile on my face. (Let me know, and I’ll buy you a beer!)
You can hear samples from my other narrations at my professional site, Spoken-Arts.Swiftpassage .
This makes my third narration in release, and I’m well-pleased with it. It’s a story filled with a history I lived through, and close to home geographically, as well, set between metropolitan New York City, and Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.
The author, Bruce Dancis, tells of the commitment he and other student radicals of the ’60’s shared in their effort to stop the Vietnam war. The act of resisting conscription was deeply radical, a felony punishable by a crushing fine and hard time. Dancis and his fellows in the Students for a Democratic Society did their best to inspire thousands to follow their example of destroying their draft cards, and flooding the legal system with “resisters”; young men refusing to support the pointless and illegal war in Asia.
If you grew up in the 60s, and even if you didn’t, you’ll find this story engaging. The times it describes are relevant to today. The turmoil of an unjust and unjustifiable war then can be related to the shocks and stresses of today. The political and racial divisions of that time continue even now. I recommend Dancis’ book as a powerful and personal testiment.
Hear a sample from the audiobook at Audible.com , and please know this: if you are a new customer at Audible, and make ‘Resister’ your first paid purchase, it garners a BONUS royalty for the narrator. Thanks!
You can hear samples of my other audiobooks at SpokenArts, my production web site, as well. The are ‘The Calamari Kleptocracy‘ by Nicholas Sansone, and ‘Headwind’ by Christopher Hudson.
I just finished an eye-opening book today: ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City’ by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. It’s a journalist’s memoir of the occupation of Iraq which focuses not on the military aspects of the invasion but rather on the abject failure of planning and policy in the ensuing occupation. It’s a clear and well annotated account of a story that’s never been reported to the American people, except in the most vague of terms.
The Bush administration filled the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) with inept cronies, in preference to skilled non-partisan diplomats from the State Department. To rebuild Iraq’s health care system, they replaced an experienced ex-Navy physician-administator who had coordinated health care on a Kurdish mission with a conservative Michigan party hack, who devoted his time in Iraq to privatizing the country’s state-run pharmaceutical distribution system; an agency which due to looting had no drugs to distribute in the first place.
Six days before the hand-over of sovereignty to the Iraq-interim government, 2.4 BILLION dollars in US monies, IN CASH, specifically $100 bills, was transported into Baghdad, and transferred into purposes as yet unaccounted for. An additional 6 billion more in conventional money transfers can be added to that sum for the month preceding, also never accounted for. And those figures are a tiny fraction of the total squandered in the money-pit of the occupation.
The incompetance and corruption was everywhere. In instance after instance reported in Chandrasekaran’s book, it is clear that the CPA was focused on removing that which once actually served the Iraqi people, Saddam’s socialist infrastructure, rather than rebuilding that which two gulf wars had destroyed: the power grid, water system, and public infrastructure.
The occupation of Iraq completely destabilized that nation, led to the death of tens of thousands of their people, and now ten years after, has left a vacuum of tribal and civil warfare that continues with no end in sight. The greatest irony is that the Neo-conservative cronies in charge of the occupation are the ones most at fault for engendering the power of the present-day Shiite-led majority government.
Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq it could not be demonstrated that Al Quaida held ANY sway or influence in Iraq. Today they definitely ARE waging civil war in open revolt in Fallujah, while the government does what it can with the US trained and armed Iraqi
forces. As a nation, it seems we’re always “sewing dragon’s teeth” abroad. Oh, well. At least the oil keeps flowing.
I experienced this book as an audiobook offering from Audible, narrated by Ray Porter, whose work is very fine indeed. Non-fiction narration can often be terribly dry and disinteresting, but Porter’s cadences, voicings, and use of foreign accents where called for kept this book alive and fascinating throughout.
We spent a week at Cedar Key, getting home yesterday feeling rested and contented. We have a special friendship with a community of people who live the peripatetic life: They are nomadic, you see, working jobs they can perform most anywhere, most of them. Oh, some of these folks self-describe as retired, but in truth are roaming, seeking, and working at all manner of things along their paths. Many of these folks converged at Cedar Key for New Year’s Eve a year ago, and the same tribe (with many new representatives) did so again last week.
It was a colder winter there this year, and with a pair of rainy days that had our little camper, The LeSharo, dripping a bit from around the ceiling vent, but this didn’t dampen our spirits. We walked, and ran, and did yoga during the week, and made new friends every day of our stay.
We participated in ‘Bar Wars’ for the evening of NYE; an event where contestants made and served cocktails of every description, sharing favorite recipes. I fixed Vodka Gummy Worms, with hilarious results. Pro tip: I should have started them three DAYS earlier for best results. They are far too chewy after only 3 hours.
We read, and read, and read in our snug little camper on the slack hours, and dined here and there, sharing fixings and condiments in the rolling home of our friends. It’s easy to imagine doing this sort of thing when it’s time to hang up my clinical job, oh, many years from now.
In recent reading, I’ve learned that human beings were massively changed by the advent of agriculture, being fixed to tilled land, their nomadic ways arrested by cleaving to one place. For one thing, sharing basic needs was curtailed. Acquisitiveness, ownership, and guarding one’s “lot” came to replace general sharing of everything. Human “classes” came into being. Agriculture, while it sustains more complex civilizations, does not improve the welfare of all, but balances the improvements enjoyed by landowners and their “priests” on the backs of the balance of the closed tribe, and fully excludes “The Other”, all those wanderers who exist outside the fringes of the one tribe. Workers and Warriors support Landowners and Priests, unified in the task of excluding and defending against The Other, even if they all share the same basic DNA. Peace cannot be a part of this construct. Sadly, it always comes down to Us and Them.
It is so ironic that in The Book of Genesis it says that Adam and Eve were cast out of The Garden, to toil ever after in their own damned garden. God’s Garden was the free range, where Wanderers gathered of The Plenty, and shared freely.
Modern motorhome nomads tend to emulate God’s Garden and ancient nomads because it rapidly builds Community among transients in the moment of being together. It is warm, and lovely, and just the best thing ever. I’ll give you an instance: One afternoon this past week, there was a spontaneous “Swap Meet”: people brought things they’d found themselves carrying around that they had no use for. People laid stuff out, and people just admired, and conversed, and tried on old hats, and laughed over hip-waders and cookware. And eventually, everything was picked up, and stowed away in EACH OTHERS ROLLING HOMES! If any money changed hands in this process, I never saw it happen.
Nomads are like that. I just love being around them. As a lesson for the New Year, and all the years ahead, it’s one to bear in mind: Be open to others, share what you have, and love beyond the limits of your own “tribe”. If you drop your fences, and wander “outside”, you will be astonished at what you receive, and the freedom that you find.
