All right.  As a result of none other than Secretgeek himself commenting here, I decided that it might be better if I actually recorded some audio against these screencasts.  Unfortunately, Camtasia will *not* record the output of a pre-existing AVI file, instead choosing to display a blank, black screen!  DubIt doesn't work either, given the initial video output was intentionally fast; after all, I had the luxury of being able to pause, rewind, and fast forward during my presention. 

My initial thought was that I should re-record the entirety of these screencasts only with my talking over top of the video.  In fact, I would have done this if it were not for several problems:

• re-recording these with audio drives up the file size like *mad* in Camtasia; from 1 meg to *53*!!
• I wasn't too sure if the world was ready to hear just how arousing my voice actually is; I get enough riots as it is over my good looks and this would probably compound my difficulties.  Trust me, I've got enough stalkers already, I don't need any more!
• most importantly, we are in the middle of a festival called "Mrs. L Days" in the Gray household - and my wife politely informed me that a) she thought I was done sexing up that Ruby b!tch and b) it was perfectly fine for me to continue working on these audio screencasts during the festival as long as she could rip off my testes and hang them from our ceiling.  Sorry to my audience, but I *do* love my testes more than I love my blog, believe it or not!  Thus, there will *not* be any screencasts with my voice on them until at least a week from now.

Here is the initial silent screencast of IRB, finishing on Hello World with a twist!!  Yes, it is somewhat Charlie Chaplin-esque but I like to think it adds to its charm - that and the ridiculously rapid-fire nature of a video sped up to twice its normal frame rate.  That's right, I'm not wasting any of your time with *THIS*!!!

Download the first lesson here!