Because my TiBook has a pretty tiny hard drive, I bought a FireLite drive to use as additional space. This was a year or so ago. Much to my frustration, the little drive died on my last business trip. Suspecting that it was the enclosure and not the drive itself I bought a 44 pin to 40 pin IDE adapter and slapped it into a full sized Firewire enclosure. Much to my delight, the drive itself is fine.

I'm working on a little project that involves converting old audio and video tapes into an Internet friendly format. I captured the video using a ReplayTV and pulled the MPEG file locally using DVArchive. The challenge is that ReplayTV MPEGs have a slightly off format that makes them impossible to open up in QuickTime. The solution was to reencode the file using ffmpegx, a great little piece of shareware.

I’ve bought a bluetooth headset for my cell phone. I’m really pretty sick of using a wired earbud. Unfortunately my phone isn’t a native bluetooth phone. I’ve bought a bluetooth dongle which will solve this little problem.

In the meantime I’ve added bluetooth to my computer and have been using Skype to make VoIP calls using this dandy little headset.

The call time is amazing. I was able to get through an 8 hour work day with out any problem.

I think the quest is, at least temporarily, finished. I am very pleased by the comfort of these headphones. They are light and small—much smaller to carry than Bose Headphones—with excellent noise cancelling ability. Airplane noise is reduced to a dullish hum. I was very impressed.

It seems like my homelife ends up overlapping with my professional life. About 4 or 5 years ago my brother, Alec called me up and asked if I wanted a ReplayTV. I was pretty clueless about what he was talking about--I vaguely remembered the contraption at his home--and said, "Uh sure." Turned out that he had gotten a larger capacity one through some corporate swap out.

I'm working on a project right now which requires that I rip MP3s from old cassette tapes. I love the open source community and have made use of several software packages housed at SourceForge. Currently I'm using a fabulous piece of software called Audacity that really shines as a capture and editing tool.

I've been travelling a lot in my job. I work for the Western States Arts Federation WESTAF as the Senior Director of Technology. We've been developing some pretty interesting new Web based software, the latest for street Art Fairs.

Over American Thanksgiving my wife and I went to Belgium for a short vacation.



Here is the full set from the vacation on Flickr