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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Making a Virtue of Necessity

It’s Virtual Monday at FAR Manor, having come off a 3-day weekend. Mrs. Fetched has been working on a video (for a — wait for it — poultry convention!) and the client said they wanted widescreen after she showed them the first (standard screen) cut. Oops… we never did get around to upgrading her system (a G4 dualie “Quicksilver” that is only now showing its age after 7 years), but a copy of Final Cut Express 4 has been sitting around in an unopened box. Given the requirements, it had to go onto my MacBook. I plugged in my 1TB external drive, pulled all her stuff over, and let her get at it.

Of course, since we were starting with a standard (4:3) project, moving it to widescreen (16:9) involved more than opening the project and continuing. It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say the project fought us every step of the way, but Mrs. Fetched wanted to get it done so we did manage to wrassle it to the ground and hogtie it in the end. One of the hassles was that I had to install and run FCE as the admin user — a rather unpleasant surprise for a Mac user, especially when it’s one of Apple’s own products. We’re used to things not being so cranky. The upshot was, I was fenced off from my writing files for most of the weekend while Mrs. Fetched worked or left things for me to deal with.

Undaunted, I picked up my new replacement Kindle and finished reading Walden. Then I started on another book I transferred to the Kindle, one I hope you’re familiar with. I wanted to give it a once-over to note a few awkward passages, but then I remembered the note-taking capability…


This actually has worked pretty well so far, and I’m 2/3 of the way through the book. So not only did I make a virtue of necessity, it was a happy virtue. You don’t find many of those.

I’ve found that the AppleTV thing has been really helpful when Mason is tired but still fighting sleep. I can stream Groove Salad or Ambient Alternative, then the photos of the animals start a few minutes later. Mason watches them, gets still… and zzZZZzzzZZZzzz…

4 comments:

  1. Hiya FAR,

    Before my brother gave me this computer he went out and bought a new Apple. He said there's a learning curve with it, but for only having it a week, he's already singing its praises.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, indeed FM/Whit, they are generally nice machines. We quickly get spoiled and expect everything to "do right," and get a bit exercised when it doesn't.

    Hope your current computer works out for you though. Any luck getting your blog back?

    ReplyDelete
  3. No luck on the blog so far. They keep sending me the page I first filled out to fill out again. They said they need more information. Heck, the first and subsequent times I filled it out, I gave them all the info I had. I don't know, but I might try to start a new one.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Aw, bummer. At least the old one is still around and you can pull posts out of it (or just link to them if you think the blog will be around for a while).

    Ask them what info they need?

    ReplyDelete

Comments are welcome, and they don't have to be complimentary. I delete spam on sight, but that's pretty much it for moderation. Long off-topic rants or unconstructive flamage are also candidates for deletion but I haven’t seen any of that so far.

I have comment moderation on for posts over a week old, but that’s so I’ll see them.

Include your Twitter handle if you want a shout-out.

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