Ides rather not.
Sunday, March 15th, 1998
Sunday night, and the house returns to something resembling normalcy after a visit from good friends who usually can be found hanging around my hometown, Columbus, Ohio. Bob and Susan and son Sam even braved a connection through O’Hare to get here, and I’m proud to report that our famed Atlanta weather must have been looking in the other direction, because it was kind of warm and pleasant, and after the record cold of earlier in the week, that’s amazing indeed.
We had a short, but entertaining reunion, complete with bad puns and good food and long, wandering anecdotes. Add to that a stroll up Stone Mountain with Jim, Rebecca, and Brigid, and well, it was fun.
Simple as that.
It’s been a busy few days leading up to their visit, and will be afterward, what with actual client projects, and my continuing experiments with DV and DVCPRO video, my office has that increasingly-cluttered look that gives me a clear indication that Work Mode is engaged. (This television stuff reminds me that I should probably update some of these pages with comments and possible enlightenment about the continued progress we seem to be making toward doing high-end design for television on increasingly smaller and more reasonably-priced systems.)
And add to that the Georgia Archaeology Week poster has finally gone to press–look for it soon at a school or library near you–or just click here to take a look at my handiwork.
You see, things are cooking here. Heck, I even turned down a large project so I could do a better job for my current clients. Go figure!
So, I gotta go. But before I do, let me ramble on a couple of fine time-wasting links:
Think I’ve been doing this television stuff for a long time? You’re right. Check out a collection of Early Video Editing Equipment to see just how far technology has come, and the Media History Project takes a look at storage technology from a similar angle, and, well, there’s the Pig Latin Converter at my alma mater (one of them). Thanks to my sister (who has an entertaining site of her own) for that one.
Stay warm and dry..and survive the ides, OK?
What happened to that last three months?
Saturday, March 7th, 1998
Well, let’s get this out of the way: there’s a certain implied responsibility in having a web site, especially one that has a home page with a date on it and at least the appearance of being regularly maintained. It becomes a habit, a reliable fallback, an expectation.
And I’ve done a mediocre job of feeding that habit. Not too surprising, I guess.
Well. Why has my web-maintenance been so mediocre? Let me get my large manila folder filled with excuses…um…where to start? I do have a day job, complete with actual clients and deadlines and that set of expectations. And things have been busy on that front. I’ve been doing some of what I call ‘science experiments’, involving beta versions of software, lots of cables and connectors, batches of equipment shipped FedEx or UPS, and, of course, non-disclosure agreements.
At the same time, the software used to maintain this site, Frontier, has gone through a revision that has required me to open the digital hood, crawl inside, and do a bunch of stuff to get what should be an easy-to-update site going again. Don’t get me started on how annoying this has been, especially since the guru of Frontier, Dave Winer has been preoccupied with making his software work on Windows 95. Talk about your needless levels of complexity. Now that I’ve taken advantage of this rainy Saturday to painstakingly update my site based on their update, well, it should be..uh..easy..to keep it fresh. Famous last words.
I appreciate your diligence in coming back again and again to see if anything’s changed. Today it has, a bit.
I’ve got NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon on in the background as I write this, and it’s both a pleasure and a distraction. The program has substance–which makes it hard to concentrate on writing this while listening–especially now, as I get older. This show, i’m pleased to say, is now available for web-listening via RealAudio.
Very cool.
For someone like me, a long-time fan of radio, of the idea
of radio, the proliferation of ideas, stories, music, and creativity you can listen to on the WWW is a delight, a pleasure.
I was amazed this week to find that my college radio station–what was then a ten watt FM station–is now available to me here in Atlanta at the click of a link. WGDR, 91.1 FM, live from the Eliot Pratt Center, amidst the pines in central Vermont. Of course, they haven’t aired The Friday Night Arcane Activities Program in about 24 years…
This, to me, is the web as wish-fulfillment. I’ve always wanted to be able to read my friend Nancy’s newspaper columns–but I don’t live in Fort Wayne. I wanted to hear “CBC Radio”. I want financial information. I want to read the Washington Post some mornings.
And so I can.
Wish fulfilled. A useful tool.
But enough web evangelizing. You know it’s useful, that’s why you’re logged on, even as you read.
So, you ask, what’s new here? Well, the honest answer is nada mucho. I have indeed been working. Sammy has too. We’ve taken some nice weekend wanders. We’ve had friends visit from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and we have a couple from Clumps, Ahia coming next week. Spring is creeping up on us here in the sunny south…if you can see it out from under all that El Niño rain.
