Five hours with David

This morning, I spend five hours with David.

No, he was not here, only his speech, his voice was with me.

Yesterday, on the spot, in a few minutes only, he prepared a speech named "Be prepared" - at the Meridian Speakers meeting in Greenwich,

My small dictaphone registered it.

This morning, I listened to it and was enchanted.
Funny, inspirational and instructive at the same time. And what a voice variety, too!

First, I opened it with Audacity, to clean out the outside noises, like the bus outside or the cough of someone. Then, as he sometimes went farther from where I was recording Amplified those parts. Finally, exported the new version.

I did succeed then without problem to upload to my Box.net account, but when I put it into a blog, Box refused to send it if I do not upgrade. Too many people used my Bandwidth at the same time.

Deleting some old speeches of mine, did not help.

What to do?

I am a persistent person and I did want to put the speech in my Competent Communicator blog.

Ok, I can do a movie from it, with some pictures.

On my PC, which does not work for the moment, I have a great software easy to use, PhotoStory by Microsoft. I have now a Mac that I can use but I did not succeed to use imoovie for what I wanted. Ah!

I tried then Picassa.

First, failure. Second time around, it did create the movie and then, ok, send it to YouTube. Failed. Ok, exporte it then to send to my usual Dailymotion. Upload there. Wait until it uploads and until they put it then in the 'right' format.

It worked!

It still did not want to give me the code to embed it in my blog.

Why?

I had to wait until they added a short advertisment, very short, indeed, to recover, finally the Embed code and to put it on my blog!

It is on it now - even if not with the best pictures.

Do not look at the pictures, listen to the tale!

It was a great speech and it was worth five hours of work to offer it to you. Not here, but on the Competent Communicator blog. I hope, to have another time more patience to put better pictures, for ex like the one in this post, with it.

But today, five hours with David are enough, as great a speaker as he is. David Thomson gave me also my first opening: my Icebreaker delivered at Croydon to be evaluated by 6 other Toastmasters.

Listening to his speech, I realise how much my umbrella has to grow and me to learn and practice until I arrive at that voice modulation as he has effortlessly.