Summer in Killington can be deceptively busy.

During the winter months, when local activity focuses on the mountain, I usually find myself on a pair of skis 4 or 5 days a week. (7 if I am real lucky). Most of this is programmed into our lifestyle. We specifically decided to live and work less than 1 mile from the mountain so we could ski. We are on the hill about 3 hours each day, so in addition to being great recreation, skiing is also very efficient from a time standpoint. Another advantage of living so close to the mountain.

In the summer, it is a little harder. A round of golf runs 4 hours. Add commute time to the course and the requisite lunch after golf, and we find ourselves away from the inn for 6 hours at a time. Not that I am complaining about golf, mind you. It just establishes a different routine in the summer.

What is also interesting about running an inn in Killington is the amount of "office work" that takes place in the summer. One would think that being at a ski resort, one would be able to play all day in the "off season". Of course, there are 2 fallacies to that concept... First, Killington is not a uni-season resort. The inn is still busy (thank god) with guests. Second, and somewhat hidden from view, is that all of the new marketing activity for the coming fall and winter seasons gets done in the summer months. I easily spend whole days programming websites for our businesses, and other clients, during the summer months to promote Killington later in the year.

One of the projects I have been working on of late is the integration of video onto websites. Mary and I do joint marketing with several other properties in Killington under the banner Killington Country Inns. The website, www.killingtoncountryinns.com has been used for the last several years as a landing site with various search engine pay per click programs. Last fall, a group of us worked on a project with the Killington Chamber of Commerce and a Fox television station serving the Boston area to produce a 30 minute program about Killington. One of my summer projects was to take the video that was produced, chop it up, and create 30 second clips for the inns of Killington Country Inns.

At face value, it seemed like a pretty straight forward project, given the rise of video on the web. (They tell me Youtube is a popular website after all.) In reality, it is just a little more complicated than it all seems.

The process of starting with a video source on a DVD to creating a 30 second flash video clip for the web is not really documented in any one place. Google helps, but you still need to sort through the pieces, that is of course unless you want to spend thousands of dollars for various packaged video programs. But, I do all my development work on an Apple PowerMAC and here is where the MAC shines. Buried in the middle of Mac OS X is a very good implementation of the Unix Operating System. I was able to download 3 different open source programs to do all of the work. (One to convert the DVD to MP4 so I could do edits in IMovie; one to convert the edited MP4 to Flash Video, and one to add Flash Video Metadata.) Part of the result you see above in a video clip on Birch Ridge, built into this page by a feed from killingtoncountryinns.com.

I made four video's in total for this project. Feel free to browse over to www.killingtoncountryinns.com to see them all if you are interested.

With this project done, the queue has been filled with others. Later on, I will tell you about the work that is taking place on the Killington Economic Growth Initiative....but that is for another day.

Keep it in the fairway, and don't forget your sunscreen.