Prehistoric Ruins in AZ

Near Sedona Arizona we visited ruins of the cliff-dwelling native Americans of this area. This is in the "red rock" part of the state. Access is via dirt roads which are very rough but passable although at some points out Ford Focus did drag on the rocky road. I was fun to drive on the hard packed roads with minimum traction. The two locations had different archaeological artifacts to offer. One was primarily pictographs.The park service employee gave and interesting lecture about the pictographs and what they told us about ancient people. Some could have been considered pornographic by some modern standards.

The other ruin was a dwelling, one of those large buildings, multi-family housing. It was constructed of rock with mud mortar. We were our own guides at this site. Some of the walls are shown in the photograph.

What Would You Do?

What would you do?  Would you follow the logic of the FBI agent and condemn the torturing procedure or follow H in all his methods of inflicting human suffering? I think you should look at the reason for the torturing. Is one life, in the event that the prisoner is killed, worth the lives of many?  Some people will question if torturing really works to extract information.  I believe it does.  Some argue that the prisoner will say anything to escape torture.  This is probably true, but does it benefit him to lie?  Perhaps. in the short term he does benefit, but after his interrogator discovers the lies I believe the prisoners suffering will be increased significantly. These are current questions that are asked today.  If it were you, and you had the opportunity to inflict severe pain on someone in order to save the lives of the ones you love, would you do it?

I would>

Travel

W
e've been planning our trip to Arizona. As usual we try something different. Usually, on domestic trips we try thing new travel ideas before using them in foreign countries. For example, when traveling to AZ via air we will be using new bags. When we travel overseas we carry all our needs in a carry-on bag and a personal bag. We've done this for trips on our four week trip to France and England. This way we don't waste valuable time waiting for our bags in a foreign airport. Time is valuable and  the best way to use it isn't waiting for your bag. So, we'll be checking out new luggage. This particular bag is the exact size as the maximum allowed by the airlines for a carry-on bag. It also converts from a carry bag to a backpack. We'll see what happens. We bought them online from Rick Steves



Photo

U

pload. To blogger The preceding photo and the words "Upload. To blogger" were sent via email from my LG Android cell phone.  The title of this post. "Photo" was the subject of the email. I am getting all my electronics ready for vacation.  I can upload to facebook and now my blog from my phone.  But I can only upload to facebook from my iPod. Experiments with video were unsuccessful.

It is my intent to blog on our upcoming vacation to Arizona.

My Latest Video Adventure

This is my latest adventure in video-making. This, with the exception of titles was of shot footage. Of the 10 minutes I video I shot, I only used minutes. I should have been more brutal, but had to have some footage.




I tried a few new techniques. One thing I did was to strip all the audio from the images and process it in Audacity. I was lucky none of it had to be lip-synced. In doing so I was able to improve the quality of the sound by editing. I edited out pops, other extraneous noises and dialogue where needed. The levels were equalized as well. The background music was created in PhotoStory 3.



The other thing I did was to create my title in Photoshop. This gave me more variety. For effect I added the hawk shadow flyover on the title shot with Ulead's overlay feature. All video work was done inwith Ulead Video Studio 9.



I think I was reasonably successful.