Day 1213

It was another day of small discoveries. One of my doctors has been telling me for months now that I need start lifting free weights to rebuild the muscle mass I had lost to statin drugs. I never really felt that I had the time, and definitely wasn't looking forward to joining a gym. Much to my surprise, I discovered that I have all the time I need. I now have a set of small hand weights on my desk that I use whenever Photoshop or Final Cut Pro gets bogged down rendering something. With the nature of what I do most days, this provides me with a more than adequate upper body workout. I don't know if lifting weights while editing qualifies as multi-tasking, but it sure beats staring at a progress bar on the screen as my complicated video transitions slowly render.

While we're on the subject of video editing, I discovered an amazing app that turns your iPad into a sophisticated touch sensitive control surface for professional audio and video software like Pro Tools, Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, and Logic. Every time I get a big editing job, I toy with the idea of buying a dedicated hardware control surface. You can save a huge amount of time during an edit session if you don't have to use your mouse for everything. Unfortunately, the time-saving control surfaces can be quite expensive. The iPad app solves all that. For a small fraction of what you might pay for a dedicated controller, the clever app gives you full control of your editing software via WiFi.  It's all pretty amazing to me. Of course I downloaded the app. Now I've got a phone that can control my DSLR and a tablet that can control my editing software. Who would have thought?

I've been toying with the idea of trying some sort of vegetarian breakfast. I'm not sure what this would consist of, but I'll bet it involves Tofu. When you try to eliminate meat, dairy products, and wheat, your options become rather limited. Maybe eggs aren't so bad. Maybe a little meat isn't so bad either. I think the real problem for me had turned out to be wheat products. My body seems to convert wheat products straight into sugar. My love for pancakes and french toast is probably what put me right on the verge of diabetes. Now that I avoid bread, biscuits, pancakes and other things made with processed flour, my blood sugar levels are back in the normal range. I carry little packets of Stevia around with me when I go to Starbucks now. My somewhat impossible goal is to eliminate sugar from my diet entirely.

The weather is looking quite nice again. I'm not going to be able to put off mowing the lawn much longer. Maybe tomorrow I'll have time to take the dead lawn mower batteries to the battery store and have them replaced. I should get the batteries for the cordless electric drill and the travel shaver replaced at the same time. Everything seems to depend on batteries these days.

Tyson is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 930

I didn't think much would be happening this week, and I was right. There were no phone calls today. With the exception of the usual spam, there were no e-mail messages either. It was a very quiet day. 

Days like this are dangerous, because I get bored and inevitably buy something online. Sure enough, about ten-thirty this morning I found myself wandering over to the Sweetwater site and looking at gear. I didn't want to spend much money. I just wanted to kill time. After wasting way too much time daydreaming, I ordered a nifty little interface that lets me use my iPad as a guitar amp.

With no deadlines to meet, I got started on my new website project. It turns out that the goal of distilling a complex site into something simple is a bit harder than I thought. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of pages on the existing site, and they all have been online forever. Since the old site does very well in Google search, I really hate to scrap it. I decided that I will just leave the old site on the server for Google to find while building a parallel new site on the same server. In the end, only the index page will be overwritten. This means I can never build a new page with the same name as one of the old pages. If there is a page called staff.html, the new page that replaces it has to be called employees.html, or something that won't overwrite the old page. Eventually, when all the newly designed pages get popular with the search engines, I can scrap the old pages. This all sounds like a good plan to me, but somewhere along the way, my client will probably throw me a curve ball that will render the whole strategy useless.

I'm such a predictable person. If you could see what I fixed for breakfast, you'd know how my entire day was going to go. When I eat cold cereal with a little fruit on top, I'd usually just rather go back to bed. If I fix eggs and sausages, it's going to be a productive but largely uninteresting day. If I fix French Toast, I probably woke up with a glimmer of an idea and may even appear to be inspired. Days when I eat out are the best of all, but this is only because it's Friday. If French Toast inspires me, you may ask why I just don't eat the stuff every day. I guess the short answer is that my favorite French Toast, sprinkled with powdered sugar and drenched in real maple syrup is the equivalent of a giant neon sign that says "Welcome Diabetes."

I fundamentally don't understand all the earnest looking cyclists who whiz by me every morning while I'm walking the dogs. I don't understand people who can't wait to get back to the gym. Yeah, I've heard all about endorphins and all that. I still prefer butter. Did you guess that I had cold cereal for breakfast this morning?

Bud is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 408

I went to the seminar today about using mobile devices as broadcast production tools and was totally blown away by the array of products that are already available and being used by filmmakers. I started making documentary films using a 16mm camera and a Nagra sound recorder. I'm used to dealing with changing technology in the film industry, but it's still hard to get used to the total transformation that has taken place in the past few years. Today's seminar was mostly about how to turn your iPhone or iPad into a professional teleprompter or electronic slate. These two pieces of equipment used to be so expensive that you almost had to rent them for a production instead of buying them for yourself. There are still lots of companies that make a business of supplying teleprompter services for production crews because it's less expensive to outsource these services.

That's about to change. Now, anyone can download a few inexpensive apps from the Apple iTunes store and instantly turn their iPad into a professional teleprompter or time code slate that has the same features as dedicated equipment costing up to four thousand dollars. Equipment costs and even the cost of raw film stock used to prevent a lot of low budget film projects from getting off the ground. Not anymore. Slowly but surely, equipment costs are becoming negligable. These days, if you've got a great idea, you can make a great film. Understandably, all this is getting me excited about making films again.

I made good, steady progress on my website projects today. By this time next week I may actually be done with one of them. The dogs made even greater progress however. They learned how to go to a cocktail party today. Our friend Vhea was having a happy hour for her business after work and invited people to bring their pets. We thought bringing Dot and Dash to this event would either be a good way to socialize them or an even better way to get us kicked out of the place. There were quite a few dogs at the "Yappy Hour" open house and after some initial barking and counter surfing, our dogs became quite the party animals. I was proud of both of them. We let them off leash and they mixed well with the other dogs. Dash did try to steal some cake balls off a food tray, but that was understandable. The cake balls were quite good and I had a few myself. I think it is important to socialize your dogs. They actually adapt very quickly to new situations and are more flexible than most people I know. I need to remember how well the dogs did tonight. We all need to get out more.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day