Random Ramblings
Created | Updated Apr 11, 2008
Rollin rollin rollin
[...]
Rawhide
The song line isn't connected to this Random Rambling in any way, other than that it's been haunting me for a few days now, for no obvious reason. As I can't seem to get rid of it, I thought I'd share it with whoever reads this, hoping to spread the 'virus'. Yes, I'm mean like that.
It's been a very busy few weeks since before we launched the first official Beeblecast clip. The feedback was tremendous, which is really encouraging. Sure, you'll never get them all, but overall, the feedback showed that it was a great success and worth every minute all the people involved spent on making the clip and The h2g2 Post. Let's look forward to more of this.
Hands up: how good are you at reading a given text aloud? I guess that those with small children will have some practice, but what about the others? I recently had to find that it's not as easy as it looks. Although I 'hear' all the words in my head when reading or writing a text, it's a whole world apart from actually speaking them. I found that I mispronounced the simplest words, put the stresses wrong, got my tongue in a twist while saying things like 'both species', rolled the 'R's as if I was from Bavaria and so on. I ended up writing myself a script for the text, marking all the words that caused problems in different colours, another font, etc, according to where my problem was. It made me aware that not listening to English on a regular basis, and only very occasionally (about once a year) actually speaking it, is a huge disadvantage when trying to read aloud. But if you think you're good at reading aloud, pronounce clearly and have a nice voice, why don't you offer to help making the Beeblecast grow? We at the Aviators have some more ideas for the future.
Meanwhile, in our little corner of hootoo at the Post Office, we've been tremendously busy, too. As you probably all know by now, EMR is no longer our Editor, and Skankyrich continues the good work. Now the Post is not a one-man show. On the contrary, I think it is safe to say that the Post volunteers have been the only group where it is absolutely necessary for everyone to work as a team. This means that once we knew when exactly EMR would leave, we started to discuss who would do what in the future and how we could fill the gap EMR left. So OK, everybody offered to take on a few more responsibilities for now, but we agreed that this wasn't feasible on the long run, and we'd want to have a new assistant editor for the Features as soon as possible to take strain off Skankyrich, whose job this has been until now. After some brainstorming, we had found the people who we could imagine joining the team - but would any of them be interested? Would others be interested, whose names hadn't come to mind but whom we could imagine working with?
No sooner said than done, and the job was offered in last issue's Editorial. It didn't take long, and we had the first reactions from interested Researchers - and guess what: two of the people we had considered applied for the job, among others. Hmmm, tricky, just what to do now? As ever, Shazz had the answer: why not take both?
Well, that's exactly what we did now, so please, welcome our new Assistant Editor, Features: Mina, and our 'Content Editor1', Uncle Travelling Matt! Matt will be some 'Jack of all Trades': he will mainly be our link to the community, hunting for new submissions and submitters - old and new, spread the word, and generally help with everything else in the Post if we get busy, or somebody of the other Assistant Editors is not available for some reason or other.
A heartfelt Thank You! to everybody else who has applied, and whom we had to turn down this time around2. It is wonderful to know that there are a lot of people interested in the Post and ready to offer some of their spare time to help us keep it going!
And some great news before I let you off: the Entry of the Month is back with a vengeance - maybe I bemoaned its supposed death loudly and often enough?
Please, go and give your nominations and votes, after all, this is not a solo show of Mu Beta, but from the community for the community, with B being so nice as to write the column and suggesting a shortlist of his favourites to give you something to start with. Have a look at the Entries that have so far been awarded with the outstanding badge - your Entry could be the next, but only if enough people take part!
