more storage

This morning I woke up early in William's bed because he was in mine and I couldn't sleep so I got up at 5 and made a few espressos to begin my day. I worked my way to the end of act 4 of A Midsummer Nights Dream, then at 8 started feeling very tired again. I met with Chrystene later this morning, her animation is looking great. She's been working on Kalevala sequences - Finish folklore - that are interspersed throughout her film "Sisu". Janine had to postpone this afternoon so I went Saskatoon berry picking then went to the store and bought a terabyte external drive for $160 (the two 500gb drives that I have in my 8 month old Dell computer are almost full and $160 seems cheaper than taking the time to thin out what I no longer need on them). That's 16 cents per gig, like Kool-ade - pennies a glass.

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Last night we watched Across the Universe (I bought it, keeping up my collection of Julie Taymor films). I loved it. It was solid eye candy, all the way through. I'm not always into that, except when it is done as well as this. Choreography was amazing. The use of the Beatles songs for nearly the entire soundtrack (not score, but actually all the dialog) worked for me. I grew up with all this music and she found a way to use the words not only to draw upon your memory and nostalgia but to give the words a new context and a new life. These songs were written to be seemingly general (all you need is love, etc) but every person listening to them and connecting with them brings their own specific meaning to them (that song that reminds me of...) . Taymor made every song very very specific, never general. This gave it real heart. To connect to people in general, you need to talk in specifics.

This morning I installed my new 500 gig drive, giving me a full Tb internal now. I don't know how I managed without it.

I helped Margaret set up a Flickr account and upload photos from the Ice and Fire Carnival from the weekend. Check it out here.

I also put about a quarter pound of hair product in and shot a video of myself for my self portrait section of my Warhol series. Here it is (about a minute long and silent).

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William got up today thinking about dragons. He wore a dragon shirt and a necklace Margaret assembled for him with a metal crescent shaped earing that could be a dragon tooth hanging on it. He drew a great dragon. Riding on that interest, I took William and Daniel (Leesa's son) to "Water Horse" today, as it is a provincial holiday (family day). Pretty good film. I'm glad the two boys were together, otherwise it might have seemed a bit intense at times. The previews don't indicate much about the WWII setting and the attempt to shoot Nessie with a huge anti-sub gun. Otherwise, it was light fun, well made, and worth my $3.

I uploaded my new "She Said" video. Margaret actually watched this one before it went out. She didn't watch "Make Up Sex" until it had over 600 hits (it just reached 1000 today!) and wonders why people aren't saying anything to her about them. Upon watching today's, it is quite apparent they are not about her. She asked me how I come up with this stuff and I had to name one of my ex's as an inspiration, I guess something good can come out of any situation (if you consider months of pain to be worth a few 45 second long videos on youtube...?)

Thanks Paul for leading me through the SATA issue, I found that it is compatible so I'll install it this week.

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I got back to my Warhol videos today, did one with William in 7 colours with him showing off two cans of Campbell's soup that we were donating to the pyramid of soup at the MacKenzie a couple of weeks ago. We all went back to the park today to collect scarves and hats and wire sculptures left with the snowmen. It sure turned told over night. William got to climb a bit and I think appreciated some of the park more today, even though he got really cold, really fast. I bought a new hard drive because 500 gigabytes just isn't enough anymore. I've not installed it yet because I need to figure out if my new Dell computer takes SATA drives. We didn't do the crossword in bed this morning like we'd planned, so we going to do that now, so good night.

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I spent the day trying to complete my annual information forms for work (a summary of my activities, screenings, committees, classes, and other stuff I did last year) but instead I fussed around with my two computers. I finally got them to both access the internet via the wireless router, and the laptop will also have access. With Paul's help, we also got them both to be able to access the printer. I imagine we'll be able to send things from the laptop as well, although that isn't set up yet. Anyways, finally at the end of the day i got back to my forms and got them mostly done, but for the information I forgot at the office. I can easily finish it up tomorrow since I'm not being reviewed this year and a day more or less won't kill anyone (the paperwork is looked at only by the department head and put on file until peer review next year).
I talked with Deric for a while, he called out of the blue just to chat. He's teaching down in Montana now, things are going well. We mostly talked about the kids. He's won an award at a festival in Calgary so he'll be going up to receive that next week.
I saw the thinnest icicle I've ever seen today. It looked like a strand of glass hanging off the edge of the deck railing. When the deck was touched, it shimmered and vibrated like a tuning fork. It was sublime.

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I think I spent the whole day in the house. Margaret goes a bit crazy when she does that, which she did on boxing day. By the evening she was cracking windows open to get fresh (-30 degree) air, but I don't mind much. William and I finished watching "The Batman" season 4 this morning and then did some Lego time. This evening we were trying to wind down after some active running around the house and I wanted him to read a bit of a book. He decided he didn't want to and actually said "I'm out of here" as he left the room. He then surfed the net for a while (yes, he is six). Actually, he just carefully types in the site listed on his Lego package: www.bionicle.com and he can watch the 2 minute videos and try to play the game. We sat face to face in the computer room and he tried to navigate that site while I continued to try to figure out the sound problem on my new Dell computer. There is a severe echo in the sound and I can't find the control to adjust it. I think it's the Vista operating system that is crippling my attempts to fix it. I can't seem to figure out the help site, as far as I can see you have to either phone them or on-line chat with them, rather than sending them an email. If a help person isn't available, you sit on your ass until one is, and I just don't have that patience right now (or perhaps I just cranky from not getting any fresh air today). Anyway, William ended up staying up really late; I finished reading some of his new Mythology book to him at 10:15 and turned off his light, but he called that he was scared of the dark (the batteries for his night lights are all dead and on the chargers) so Margaret let him turn his reading light on and he eventually picked up and I Can Read "Little Bear" book that he's never read before and began reading it out loud. We could listen to him from our bedroom, trying to be quiet so he could sleep. It was 11:30 before he finally did. I caught up on a bit of my own reading then finally watched another episode of Supranos (thanks Kevin). I'm watching the first half of the last season, it's been really good, probably the best stuff since season one.

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I went to the office for the first time this week, it's really really cold. I'm sure glad I'm not one of the striking CUPE workers out there on the picket line. The strike has been funny, the CUPE reps don't seem to be getting quoted very much, all I see is clean, clear press release statements from the universities and passionate and/or annoyed comments from students. There were 3 articles in the newspaper today and only one cites a CUPE rep and in it he just comments on how their people do 80-100 per cent of the work towards getting final exams together. I think they've chosen their rep poorly as I'm certain that there are more pressing issues and more dire/realistic situations that our attention should be on than photocopying. So anyway, while I was at the university I was trying to get a dvd of the conference made but I starting getting a sample rate error, which means that something was wrong with the sound. However, I started to export the video in portions, as there are 6 sections that make up the 2.5 hours, and each section exported fine until the last. I was then able to export it one piece at a time until I found one shot that was corrupted. I wasn't able to solve it before I had to leave so I deleted it and I'll re-insert it on the next draft. This evening I installed all of my software in my new computer so I can start doing something with it tomorrow.

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Lately I've been writing this blog late at night (the posting time is off by at least 2 hours) so I have begun to forget what I even did with my day and really just want to post and go to bed. Tonight I'm at my new Dell but since this was one of my rare days to wear my contacts (actually I was only wearing my right contact as the left one makes my eyesight worse) and since I just took it out, I'm feeling a bit blurry. It's Wednesday so "Life"was on, the only show Margaret and I watch together these days since it is the only one I felt strong enough about to convince her to try. We look forward to it every week, it never disappoints. I finally let go of my old computer, I removed all the components I wanted and dropped off the remainder, the shell with motherboard and 390Mb of 1999 RAM, at PC Place. They sell old bits and pieces, so he didn't turn down a free toy. It was the Duncan computer that I did a lot of stuff on for about 6 years, and I always have trouble parting with things that I develop attachments to. However, I put it in my entrance way where I had to struggle around it to get on my boots, so it seemed a relief to get it out of the way. Then I bought a bottle of shampoo.

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I put my new Dell computer together today. The big screen is killer. William helped by plugging things in while I was out of the room, or should I say "helped"? It's really cold out, so I'm happy to be able to stay home, but I'm dying to start some creative project as this furniture moving and computer assembling is driving me nuts. I still haven't installed my various programs, so I'm in for another couple hours tomorrow.
The other day Margaret and I were listening to old radio mysteries on cd from the library, including some Nero Wolfe staring Sidney Greenstreet from the early 50s. I was disappointed to find that they told you the title of the next episode but then didn't include it, so I looked on line to see if I could buy a complete set. Instead, I found all of the episodes to listed to off the web for free.

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After some morning work on the End of Life conference (the final chapter on respect) I spent the afternoon and evening concentrating on the new computer. I've not opened the boxes yet, I'm still setting the stage. I had to clear more of the junk out of the current office, preparing for it to become William's bedroom. Since our new office will be William's old bedroom, a much smaller space, I've had to find new homes for much of the stuff we have. These homes include the attic (where I moved things and resorted the space yesterday) and the basement edit room which has been a dumping ground for a few years now. In the basement, I deposited the short filing cabinet and combined it with another cabinet and some discarded shelf boards to create a table onto which I could put the abundant boxes of Christmas decorations. The previous home of the decorations, a crummy bench with screw on legs, was disassembled to be put into William's fort (the area under his tree house) in the spring. Other similarly complicated moving followed including the reformatting of the hard drive of the computer I stopped using last year but has been sitting in my dumping ground since then but that I need to get rid of. Tomorrow I'll probably disassemble the old desk and build the new one, then I'll be close to opening those boxes.

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I committed this morning to getting rid of my virus by reformatting the C drive and reinstalling the operating system. However, while I had the software on hand and all necessary files backed up, I just couldn't figure out how to do it. I put a call in to Paul and while he was looking into what my problem might be, I followed a different path and went to a virus protection software site ("stopzilla" or something like that) suggested through some "nerd" site and did what I swore I'd never do - I gave credit card info for a download that I know nothing about. While it cost more than I thought (the "on-line rebate" was actually a mail in rebate, so we'll have to see if I get my 20 beans back) but it worked! Virus free for the first time in weeks!!!
And then the doorbell rang and my new Dell computer arrived. I spent the rest of the day moving things around to start the process of moving William's bedroom so that I can set up this new computer. I will need to move my filing cabinet and you would be shocked by how much paper I save. I have two more filing cabinets at work, so this one isn't as full as it could be.
I listed to the first disc of one of the "Series of Unfortunate Events" books while sorting papers, then we took a break and watched the movie. The film seems highly compressed. It looked good and was basically satisfying, but I think some more inventing and chewing was in order to really connect us with the characters. I love the Snicket voice over, although it also distances us from the characters, a balance is difficult and a series of films would work better - perhaps a tv mini-series?

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Today was William's last swimming lesson of the term, we'll sign him up to continue after Christmas. After the lesson I took the screening fee I received from the One Take Film, which I certainly have to share with William, and bought some Lego. There is a good deal on the Creative Box, 480 pieces of general Lego in a plastic bin, at the Bay for $13.60. I bought a couple.

This afternoon I ordered a new computer from Dell. I've been frustrated for too long with my last one, and it also seems that William's computer won't run a game I just got for him, so it's time for upgrades all around (he'll get my old one). I didn't see a time frame on delivery, but I assume I'll have it by December when I intend to spend more time at home working on it.