My first week in Roanoke is complete. It’s a transition, I suppose, but a good one. I’m all settled in the newsroom and super anxious to start telling some gosh darn stories.

They put me to work for the first time this Friday night to shoot a high school football game. I had to shoot video, interview a player, escape from the deluge of people leaving the game, get stuck in traffic in a high school parking lot, eat Sonic tater tots and drink a Diet Dr. Pepper, capture an hour of tape, edit the game into a short video, encode in Flash, upload and post that same night.

In summation, here’s what The Roanoke Times newsroom looks like at 3:30am…

It was a long, but enthralling night. Editing video on a PC, Windows-based machine for the first time ever, using a program called Edius.

It really wasn’t bad at all, but I didn’t have enough time or sanity left to sweeten the audio and smooth out some things here and there. But overall, I’m happy with the outcome, which you can view at http://www.roanoke.com/varsitycast.

And this weekend, after I caught up on sleep, there was an adventure up to Roanoke Mountain, where I took more pictures of pretty, mountainy things.

You can actually see the back of the giant star on Mill Mountain from Roanoke Mountain!

This is basically the new Windows default desktop background… at least that’s what I was going for…

A leaf bug

This bug typically likes to hang out in my apartment, but here he is, alive and outside for once.

The valley.