But still, here I am and here are some notable numbers to give some cold, hard scale to my and Team Great Job’s adventures over the last two months.

I don’t know about you, but my life is pretty hectic right now. I apologize for being completely MIA from this blog; today was the deadline for an article I’ve been working on through Spot.us about school meal programs and the challenges in offering more nutritious food, which has been sucking up all of my time. More about that to come shortly, but alas, it is out of my hands — at least for the moment — so let’s talk about some of my audio mishaps and discoveries throughout the process.
So, if I haven’t already made this clear in previous posts, I’m broke. Consequently, I’m also very cheap in terms of the equipment I use for reporting. To record audio, I still use an old-school tape recorder or an $80 voice recorder that attaches to my iPod, which I bought four years ago to record lectures in college. Both of which have been doing an adequate job, aside from the times my iPod is full of music and doesn’t have space to record. But what’s not broke, I can’t afford to fix. That is until it breaks…
So a few weeks back, I started noticing that some of the interviews I proudly conducted and recorded on my iPod, would skip and conveniently pause, usually amid the most golden of quotes. I’ve been getting more interested in posting audio files online and using interview clips to accompany photo slideshows, but these glitches have made editing an absolute nightmare.
Then I discovered Cinch, a service of BlogTalkRadio, which allows easy recording from the convenience of your cell phone. What’s more, the recording is automatically uploaded into an mp3 on your personalized web archive making it easy, a cinch even, to use in digital projects.
So, when you find yourself out in the middle of nowhere for an interview, as I was recently…

…searching for an office among greenhouses and acres of farmland, with nothing but a dead iPod and tapes full of interviews that I hadn’t transcribed, all I had to do was whip out my cell phone, dial a prearranged number and voila–I was recording…the sound of trucks bouncing down the dirt road…people giving me directions to the office…and ultimately the subject of interest.
I’ve also been using cinch for phone interviews by three-way calling the cinch number and then my sources. Just make sure you have reception and a phone plan with enough minutes, because I had some serious overage on my  last two phone bills—probably around the cost of a new recorder…
Aaaanyway, register your phone number here and give it a try.
I’ve also heard that Utterli and FreeConferenceCall have similar recording programs, but their websites are not nearly as user friendly. Let me know if you have any other affordable suggestions because Izzy the iPod is definitely seeing her dying days.
I don’t know about you, but my life is pretty hectic right now. I apologize for being completely MIA from this blog; today was the deadline for an article I’ve…

Day three of my epic, 11 person, 1 dog, three car road trip. We have been to Chicago, taken a chilly dip in Lake Michigan, put our toes in the Mississippi and taken over a bar in Omaha to throw a dance party. Next is Gothenberg, NE for some rope swings and then on to Boulder. I am sending photos to my photo editor at Nerve.com to see if we can do an end of the summer photo essay, so cross your fingers for me!

Day three of my epic, 11 person, 1 dog, three car road trip. We have been to Chicago, taken a chilly dip in Lake Michigan, put our toes in the…

We arrived at the Mongolian border after driving all night, passing through frigid Russian mountains just before dawn. At around six in the morning, just as the first light was making a jagged outline of hills visible around us, we found a circle of Mongol Rally cars parked in a circle like Conestoga wagons, protecting a handful of tents.

…is doing a week long blitz on how to “make it” as a freelance photographer. While its geared towards photogs who left their staff positions, its giving me grants to look up and ideas to pursue. Check it out now.
…is doing a week long blitz on how to “make it” as a freelance photographer. While its geared towards photogs who left their staff positions, its giving me grants to…

Greetings Comrades from Moscow,
I’ve taken thousands of photos thus far on our journey, but I can only edit a handful every several days, so here’s just a few to get the ball rolling.
We finally escaped Latvian purgatory by making minor repairs to the Team Great Job! car and getting it reinspected, thus obtaining a crucial holographic sticker that some guard looked at for about two seconds at the Russian border.  The delay since our first failed border-crossing attempt had been two weeks.
After taking all night to cross the border and then driving all day without a good night’s sleep, we arrived in Moscow with our little yellow Nissan Micra.  Think of the most hectic freeway junctions in Los Angeles, stick them in the middle of one of the world’s largest city centers and then subtract eight hours of sleep before trying to imagine me at the wheel on Sunday afternoon, trying to find our hostel.  Russians don’t feel obligated to obey lane markers, which is too bad because in the heart of Moscow there can be eight lanes in one direction at a time.

Our hostel is called Godzillas and is run by a man who appears to be American, and who runs around micromanaging his green-shirted staff as they replace screws that are the wrong color and clean up the laminated board of registration FAQ by the reception desk.  Moscow is an expensive city, the most expensive in the world actually, and so even though the hostel isn’t the cheapest we’ve seen, it is quite popular.
We walked to the Kremlin and took in the sites, enjoying the light at dusk as we danced around in front of the Basil taking group photos like any other tourist.  In fact we were set on being tourists just one last time, because for the next two weeks we will be rushing to reach our goal in Ulaanbaatar.

Greetings Comrades from Moscow, I’ve taken thousands of photos thus far on our journey, but I can only edit a handful every several days, so here’s just a few to…

I am slowly but surely taking over Village Voice. I shot for an article on NYC’s pop up putt putt (say that five times fast) courses and two weeks ago the paper had me hanging out with an Italian pop star. The photos above are what ran. I’m posting some of the other shots I liked so they get to see the light of day.

A week from Saturday I start my “Forever Young” roadtrip with a group of 12 (plus 1 dog) across these great united states all the way to Boulder. I am definitely looking at Ryan McGinley’s “I Know Where the Summer Goes” to get inspired.
I am slowly but surely taking over Village Voice. I shot for an article on NYC’s pop up putt putt (say that five times fast) courses and two weeks ago…

Will hasn’t had time to e-mail any photos or write a post, but he did manage to get quite a few shots up on the good ol’ flickr. Even though they are from earlier in the trek and not the Eastern European photos I eagerly await, they will do for now. Check them out here.
Will hasn’t had time to e-mail any photos or write a post, but he did manage to get quite a few shots up on the good ol’ flickr. Even though…

I reluctantly subscribed to Gawker two days ago, reluctantly only because my Google Reader feed is out of control and they are notorious for posting. A post this morning made my increasingly chaos-theory-proving Reader worth the headache.
A Gawker blogger made fun of an article in the Washington Post about a “generation guru,” a woman paid obscene amounts of money to explain to adults how us kiddos think and work and all that rot. Gawker pulled three excerpts from the article, with the longest one hitting 93 words. Unlike some reposting, however, the Gawker blogger put in commentary and analysis instead of just block quoting the article. Fair usage, right? Guess not, at least not for the Washington Post. The journalist, Ian Shapira, is furious that his hard work is being ripped off and making someone else money while pulling the best (ie funniest) bits and he said as much in a response on WP’s Outlook and Opinion page.
Gawker’s Gabriel Snyder brought the pain in her take on the whole thing to my utter delight. Railing against the old media’s stifling style, she calls Shapira out on actually just being upset that Gawker got to write the funny piece he couldn’t. Ouch.
Then, like any good story, the end shocks and awes. Washington Post had actually sent Gawker the story! So they would blog about it! AND they send stuff all the time! Fancy that!
This whole journalism cat fight puts the new (blogging) vs the old (newspapers) perspective in a different light. Blogging isn’t as esteemed as being printed on dead trees, but that whole mindset, for me at least, is changing. ESPECIALLY when such smackdowns occur with newspapers coming out so bruised and bloodied.
I reluctantly subscribed to Gawker two days ago, reluctantly only because my Google Reader feed is out of control and they are notorious for posting. A post this morning made…