A Sound Investment

It’s pretty much an accepted observation that most movie going audiences will tolerate several minutes of slightly out-of-focus or scratchy film but will put up with less than 20 seconds of poor quality audio. The first defining mark between amateur and professional video production is the quality of the soundtrack and care taken with the audio recording. So, that’s what I was thinking when I decided that I needed some high quality speakers to connect to my MacBookPro.
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The Curse of Having Digitally Enhanced Memories

For whatever reason I seem to have been “gifted” with the ability to remember, in pretty vivid detail, all of those pivotal moments in my life. The time of day, the way the sun shone in the sky, the rush of the crowd going by, the split second when she looked at me and said, “oh, it’s you.” It’s quite a collection stored between my two ears. One doesn’t want to live in these past memories, but so much of today’s world was built on this stream of events, that having an active relationship with ones memories can add value to the moments one is experiencing at the present moment.

There are memories, such as my childhood with my older sisters, that I seem to remember, but admittedly are mostly remembered because of photographs that I’ve seen that were taken during that time. Even something as emotionally imprinting as my wedding, I seem to remember more based on the surviving pictures and recollections of friends. So there’s definitely a part of this that is triggered and stored externally in these photographs.

Another, more powerful, means of maintaining and adding to my storage of memories are the thousands of pages of journals that I have written. I have been writing some form of journal since high school. Thus, what others may remember through a fading collection of terse cards, snapshots and other memorabilia, I possess in written form in my own words in painful, explicit, sometimes silly detail. Now the reason this even came to mind recently was that one benefit of putting Windows XP on my MacBookPro was that I would then be able to pull up all of the journals I’d written from my pre-mac days (1985-2002). Naturally I spent a couple evenings reliving the events recorded when I was supposed to be A) finishing Pepperdine work, B) writing units for my computer classes, or C) grading work for my 6th - 8th graders. Gotta love how technology boosts productivity.
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The Thread

Things are hanging by the proverbial thread. Heading to Taco Beach for much needed libations & … well, tacos. I seem to be playing phone-tag w/ two e-harmonettes and seeing a bit less of you-know-who than I care for. She’s good about keeping me abreast of the latest development re: pending divorce etc., but here I am for the second or third Friday existing as if I were a “freeman.”

I can honestly say that I’m not craving the kind of continous devotion that requires that I lock the bathroom door in order to get some privacy, but when I can’t remember how many Friday’s it’s been, this is not good. JBB

Weekend in PV

So, the folks have moved their tent to AZ. It’s not too unusual for people to retire to Miami Beach or even Scottsdale, but where does one go if one is already in idyllic Carlsbad, CA? Apparently Prescott Valley, Arizona is the place. Thus brother Matt and moi made the eight-hour pilgrimage across the desert(s) to where mom and dad were now playing “house.”

We’d left on our journey Saturday afternoon so we didn’t roll into PV until late evening and then set about immediately to help the folks in their continuing scavenger hunt to figure out where they’d packed stuff. They’ve been at this for several weeks and dad’s underwear is still MIA. Matt went to work on their TV & stereo system and I went to work on mom’s new mac mini. By 2 A.M. they’d finished setting up and watching a DVD and I’d gotten enough things plugged in so as to determine that her cable “high speed Internet” was not working. Damn. So I called it in to the tech help line, was told that someone would look at it in the next two to twenty-four hours, and decided that it was time to take a nap

Technorati Tags: family, techtoys, travel

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XP on Apple macbookpro

As soon as I heard about it I had to do it. I even spent cash to do it (for a new copy of XP… don’t buy at CompUSA or even the local university unless you’re a student; I bought mine at PC Club).Anyway, putting XP on my mbp was actually fun and very simple. Of course no sooner had I done it than I heard that there was a way to run XP apps inside of OSX without having to reboot (Parallelz). Hmmmm. Truthfully, in that I don’t generally shut off my mpb, I tend not to reboot into XP. But it was more about having the option to flip into XP than whether I’d be using it every day.

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WarGames Reflections

The past two weeks we’ve been in “Testing” mode at my school, which means we’ve gone from our normal 40-minute periods to 2-hour block scheduling. As much as I enjoy my students (well, some of my students), 2-hours is a really long haul, so for the second hour I tend to put in a video and let ‘em “chill” a bit more than usual. One of the videos I played was an 80’s classic with a very young Ally Sheedy & Matthew Broderick, “WarGames.” There’s a technology theme in the film and there’s a boy/girl “B” story, so I thought that’d appeal to my seventh graders. They could care less. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed that movies that might really scare or grip the heart of someone, like myself, who grew up with the fear of nuclear war, seem to just desensitize younger eyes.

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Sometimes It’s Important to Maintain One’s Sense of Humor

Movin’ the Blog…

Tons to do… so it only makes sense that I spend part of today moving my livejournal blog to my own domain… It’s funny that I find myself almost impossibly busy, but because of what I feel is a lack of balance, I don’t know that I’m accomplishing much more than I ever have before. I mean, I’ve been “journaling” for years, but it seems that I’m really “posting” far less than I was even last year, for example. Granted, I think I’m doing more about dealing with the difficulties than I was last year, and that alone might be what is swallowing all of my available time. I remember an old “Cathy” cartoon where she was trying to hook up with some cutie at on the stationary bikes at the gym and over the course of the strip he seemed to miss understand her attention as a little competition and just started peddling faster. The last panel she mused to herself, “modern dating… peddling even harder, but still getting no where.” Hopefully my efforts won’t equate to working harder, but still not getting anything done. Ack. JBB