Back from Ottawa

Back in T.O. after a short vacation with 3000 emails on the server, 925 videos in the mailbox, and 3285 soundtracks in the courier box. Well, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but there’s certainly stuff to do over the weekend that’s supposed to be a holiday weekend. At least it’s not one of those noxious holidays where banks & government agencies get the day off, and the rest of the populace doesn’t. Never understood why bank tellers deserve more holidays than a construction worker, vet, sales clerk, whatever.

Infantile (but not wholly unreasonable) rant over.

At present my netbook & files & images are at the office, so new stuff won’t appear until the afternoon or evening. Just didn’t want to tote along electronics at night and risk losing a lot of important data, particularly footage that’s irreplaceable. The paranoid component of my brain mandated backing up data on multiple sources just in case, although one medium – a micro SD card – crapped out yet again.

Can’t say I’m fond of the format; seems the movement of large files (.mov format in particular) hurts its brain and causes Windows to pause all actions and ask you ‘This disc is not formatted. Format now?’ Maybe the best word to describe the mini-flash card is, what’s the word… “Shit” ?

Both to and from Ottawa didn’t necessitate the use of the portable DVD-ROM to watch movies because there was actually a lot of little projects to do en route. Towards Ottawa, shooting a short film plus recording little chunks of sound easily killed 5 hours, whereas on the way back to T.O., editing Q&As from HotDocs for future online posting, logging audio for Short Film #2, and watching the Asus EEE 1000HE netbook handle big audio files killed another 5 hours.

Amazingly, you can open a 75 min. MP3 320 kbps file, chop off rubbish, add fades, knock down hot spots, boost volume, and do a quick DC adjust before saving without a full-tilt crash… but it takes 7 mins. to save the file, so make sure you’re sitting beside the window. Bottom line: the Asus can handle audio editing on a basic level without intermittent saves, but its processor power is perhaps on par with a Pentium 3. The program did crash after a big save, but not during, so that counts for something.

As for VIA’s onboard WiFi, well, I still couldn’t get it to work. The signal was strong, but there must have been some setting I neglected to use to enable a connection. Whatever. Maybe next trip it’ll be easier to latch onto.

I’ve no idea what happened in the world between Monday & Thursday, but presume Rob Ford’s still a buffoon, and Harper’s still an ideological taskmaster with Messrs. Del Mastro & Baird stirring up bloated verbal arguments to look Important and On the Beam for Canadians.

Four words: Blefuscu, Mully-Ully-Goo.

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Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com ( Main Site / Mobile Site )

Tags: Absolutely Nothing

Category: EDITOR'S BLOG