Dec. 12, 2009
I finished two days of recording the narration for an online course on Remote Sensing, the cool technology behind Google Earth and other clever ways of figuring out what’s happening on this amazing planet. It was great fun working with Cody, the young man who wrote the script and is the technological wizard behind the setup, recording and online presentation.
We tried a little “dueling banjos” style to make the useful but sometimes dry information easier to listen to and understand. It was almost effortless, as Cody is confident and cheerful and I found it enjoyable to match his mood.
I always learn more than I expect from new things – the narration project has been a window into, of all places, Mongolia.
Cody is actually the link. He was trained as an agronomist and range specialist, a natural outgrowth of his interests and his life, which is split between the grasslands of Mongolia and a family livestock ranch in Eastern Oregon. His dad, a range management specialist, has worked off-and-on in Mongolia for two decades, using that relatively unchanged range-dependent country as a chance to see what the United States and many other areas of the world were like before the incredible changes of the last century. Cody has been flying back and forth to Mongolia between his work assignments, steadily putting together movies about the land and people but also about the way people who study and work in that country are changed by what they see.
Learning about Cody’s work has been a terrific outgrowth of this voice project. Take a look at some of his work here, at his Autonomy Productions website: http://www.autonomyproductions.com/Out_of_the_past/index.htm.
The photo I uploaded here is of a Mongolian village I found online, taken by G. Berger.
Dec. 23, 2009 
