Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Back to business after the holiday weekend

I’ve started putting photos of the UK trip up on Facebook. I’d put them on Flickr but they say I’ve already got too many and should start paying them. Didn’t they read that book about the internet being free? What I really need to do is figure out a way to post them to my own site. Some day, when I’ve got some time on my hands. As it is, editing the photos takes longer than going to England and taking them in the first place. The SLR is still new to me, and I seem to have taken a lot of pictures that are slightly askew, something I noticed late in the trip that I starting thinking about on the fly but meanwhile I’ve now got to fix it on the ground, and it takes forever. I’ve worked out a system using iPhoto and Elements alternately, and it’s very confusing and, trust me, you really don’t want to hear about it. I estimate that, at the rate I’m going, I’ll be done in time for the DDA. At which point I can start all over again.

I also managed to record a Nostrum over the weekend, but had all sorts of issues with the uploading to my site and the RSS and hearing it in iTunes. I ended up loading a couple of different versions, and never did understand the problem. So maybe, if you’re a subscriber, you’ll hear the same episode (with Botch and Wednesday) twice. Maybe not. It is available on the NostrumNation blog, in any case, if you need to get it. Which, I guess, stretches the definition of the word need beyond your wildest nightmares.

I wasn’t able to go to CatNats, where SuperSquirrel debated her very last round (always a gleeful moment). I’m curious to see how she and the Panivore did in the ballot count. And of course, the P has to prep for NatNats. No rest for the wicked. Anyhow, before the event we had a call for a TVFT from Rob Frederickson, as I like to call him, which Bietz set up, and I enjoyed that conversation a lot. Adam T was also with us, and in addition to CatNats we discussed NatNats, so if you’re running that LD topic, you might want to check it out. I also posted a segment of Fred trying to set up Skype. The man is not a technophobe, but he’s not exactly Mr. Skype either. And he does resort to salty language at times, so there goes our G rating. I’m thinking of making a hip hop recording out of it.

And, oh yeah, there is the iPad. It took me a while to get it set up, mostly because there was a whole new EULA that I didn’t bump into right away that was walling me up. Then there was the Apple store guy telling me to let it run down the charge, so I haven’t gone back and synched it again to see how some of the issues were working out. One big thing for me is reading books for the DJ, and that means getting mss that come into the office into iBooks, which requires, first, turning them into ePub format, and second, dumping them into iTunes on Vegas Elvis, then synching the iP to VE to get them into iBooks. A lot of bloody hoo-ha, in other words, but worth it. Something as simple as reading them on Stanza doesn’t work because the Stanza software for the Touch, while it expands to cover the territory of the iP screen, gets too fuzzy for extended reading sessions. And a simple pdf is possible, but it has none of the elegance of an iBooks title. Anyhow, my overall take on the device at the moment is pretty favorable, and I haven’t even tried to play iPad Civ yet. It’s a little heavy for reading, but not prohibitively so: it wasn’t so bad that when I virtually tried to turn the page that I fell out of bed or anything. O’C wants to use his for tabbing, which requires a virtual connection to your home machine, which seems to avoid the need to do something simple like print schematics, but that’s him and not me. I’m seeing him this Friday, so we can compare notes. I do need a name for mine, though. Nothing immediately comes to mind, but I’ll keep working on it.

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