Journal Entry: August 21, 2002
The big catch up. Since I haven’t been keeping this updated, I figure there’s a lot to write about. Here goes.
Wedding Plans. It’s now less than two weeks until Beth and I get married. I thought we had everything squared away until I realized we still have about 20 things on the To Do list between now and then! I won’t go into any more detail since you can learn all about the wedding on its own page.
404 Not Found. The band has been busy lately. We did a photo shoot a while back at Lakeside Amusement Park. We’ve played a few gigs here and there, but not steadily, unfortunately. I bought a BOSS SP-505 desktop sampler, which I’ve used at a couple of performances so far. It’s OK for the price, but has a few shortcomings. You can see my thorough review of it here.
Bats. Back in July, I went on a very fun field trip with the Colorado Bat Society. We visited the Orient Mine in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. There, we saw the largest colony of bats in the state. I wrote up a pretty thorough photo journal of my trip.
More Photos. I bought a digital camera this summer. The main reason I wanted one was to take to Hawaii with us on our honeymoon. But I’ve made pretty good use of it in other ways. For instance, I took a lot of pictures of my bat trip (see above) and some of the pre-wedding barbecue party we had in early August. After the honeymoon, I should have lots of pictures to share with you.
Mini Cooper S. Ever since March (see my March 24 journal entry below) I’ve been thinking about test driving a MINI Cooper S. But they apparently don’t have any available at the Colorado dealership yet. I sent them an email and they never wrote back. Lousy marketing!
Digital Video. My band 404 Not Found recorded a couple of 30 minute TV segments for Denver Community Television (DCTV). It’s a show called Innervision TV and the sound quality was so bad on the first one, we went back to tape another show. Anyhow, I have videotapes of both performances, which I bought from the host of the show. I really wanted to be able to show the videos to other people on the website, but I didn’t have the equipment to digitize a VHS tape into any computer format. After some research, I found that Mike’s Camera in Boulder will transfer VHS to DVD for $80 an hour. Since this was going to be just under an hour (two half-hour shows) I thought about that for a while. But then I found that you can buy a USB device to grab video for anywhere between $40 and $150. So I thought, “Why pay someone $80 to do it when I can buy something for the same price?” So after researching a lot of these solutions, I bought a Pinnacle LINX. It plugs into an RCA video and left and right audio in one and and a USB port on the other side. And it comes with software to grab video. Admittedly, it’s not full TV resolution (640 by 480). In fact, it’s half that, but I figured that’s good enough, for two reasons. First, if I want to show this online, it has to be low res. Second, the video is fairly crappy to begin with so having it at lower resolution won’t hurt anything. Anyhow, since trying out this new device, I’ve found that it consistently locks up my PC every time I record video using it. Not instantly, but after an insidious delay of anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes. After crashing my PC (which runs Windows XP and isn’t ever supposed to crash) a few times, the Microsoft crash agent thingy suggested I update my video driver. So I got the latest NVIDIA GeForce driver and installed it. When I did that, then suddenly my PC would then lock up consistently within about 2 minutes of starting Windows! Boy that’s frustrating. So I went back to the old video driver. Windows doesn’t crash anymore. Except when I try to capture video. I wonder if I should buy a Macintosh. I definitely want one of the new iMacs with the big screen.
Recommendations. I recommend reading Interface by Stephen Bury. That was my summertime sci fi book, I guess. I hope to take more fiction on my honeymoon with me, but most of my backlog of books is nonfiction. I’d also recommend Paris to the Moon. We’ve seen lots of movies this summer, but the ones I most recommend are The Bourne Identity (maybe just for the very strange two or three lines of non sequitur dialogue) and Cable Guy (which I watched on DVD and was surprisingly impressed with). I had a dream about Milla Jovovich last night, so I may have to rent Resident Evil. (I’ve secretly loved Milla since Chaplin, though it was her role in The Fifth Element that really cemented her forever in my heart along with Gena Gershon and Madchen Amick.)
Finally, I just can’t get over the impression that Donald Rumsfeld (“Mr. Secretary”) looks a lot like Richard Couch (“Mr. Bankruptcy”).
Don
Dick
Did I ever tell you the story about Richard Couch’s Gay Son?