Here's a new portmanteau word:

"carnarcade"

It's the excitement of a carnival and the lights and sounds of an arcade smushed together. It's the best of both really.

I've searched for the word on Google with no hits so ... Copyright 2006, Ryan Olson. ;-)

My 10-year high school reunion is in August. I don't know why I'm getting excited about the event, but for some reason I'm eager to see my classmates and learn what's happened.

Of course, I went to two high schools (Roswell then Poway) and would like to know what happened at both of them. I might have to resign myself to going to just the one in San Diego, but hope springs eternal.

Since I'm a reporter -- a seeker of knowledge and storyteller -- I want to start the experience now. With the Internet, there are plenty of tools to do it (MySpace, e-mails, Web pages, etc.). With the rise of podcasting, there's a terrific tool to relay conversations and photos to a scalable audience. "Scalable" is a word I've learned in the past 10 years. :-D

Anyway, here's a letter that I wrote to my classmates. It refers to a previous letter where I encourage a classmate on the fence to come and share his experiences with others in August.

---

As I said in the other e-mail, I'm a writer and I love hearing good stories. Hopefully in August, we'll be able to meet in person and share our experiences.

However, that's months away. What do we do now?

I say we should do something now to start sharing our stories and recalling growing up in suburban San Diego in the mid-1990s. This Yahoo! Group is a start, but one of the first graduating classes with the Internet should be able to do better.

Let's do a weekly podcast.

There's so much ground we can cover each week. These are our experiences, and who would be better equipped to help share them than us?

We can catch up with old classmates and our favorite teachers. Whatever happened to Most Likely to Succeed or Best Dressed? Let's track them and others down and hear what their recollections and what's happened since then.

We can do a segment remembering what was big 10 years ago. TV, radio, computers and more -- there's so much ground to cover.

We can keep it relatively short, but we can reach out to so many people before August.

So who would be interested in helping out?

I'm willing to do a lot of work to pull this together. But perhaps I'm not the best person to do it -- I'm a bit out of the loop in Northern California. I also readily admit I was a bit of a loner dork in high school and don't know my class as well as I would like.

I don't think the podcast has to be overly involved or over-produced. I hope each week will be an interesting chat about the people and our times building up to the actual reunion itself.

Cordially,
Ryan Olson
Chico, Calif.
my.rtomedia.com
530-321-4114 (cell)
poway -at- rtomedia.com

It's probably an oxymoron, but it's possible to capture video with most consumer-level digital cameras intended for still photography. Here are two samples from my Connecticut colleague who shot these clips with her digital camera:

A steel-drum musicial group practicing its instruments:



A softball game:

Let's learn about the fun of Google Video with this clip from the Quebec Winter Carnival: