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Showing posts from December, 2004

One tank of fuel: $25

One tank of fuel: $25 Insurance deductible: $250 Christmas without mother-in-law: priceless. It's almost funny now, when my beloved Renegade is in the shop, I am driving a rental, and we indeed don't have to celebrate the holidays with granny, who I was supposed to bring from Cincinnati for that cheerful occasion. The trip didn't go all that well - some 80 miles south of Cleveland I hit an ice patch, lost control of the vehicle, spun across all three lanes of I-71 and bumped into guardrail. Twice. With both front and rear bumpers, don't remember the order. And, of course, I stalled, half way in the ditch, driver's side to the traffic, blocking the right lane. Am I just lucky, or am I simply not supposed to die in a car accident? That was my third time starring at the several sets of slowly approaching headlights, aimed at my vehicle, helplessly sitting on the way of the deadly flow. And, once again, somebody stopped, somebody steered away, and nothing happened. I tu

Otto Link STM 10*

It looks like my acoustic setup is finally complete. The sound (pun intended) difference between my old Amati Classic Super (290/2 facing, stainless steel) mouthpiece and newly acquired Otto Link Super Tone Master (10* facing, gold-plated bell metal) is impossible not to notice. It was clear enough even when I test-drove 8* about a month ago (I tried to be as objective as I could, so at the store I picked an instrument closest to mine - YTS62, and a Vandoren Traditional #3 reed), the sound was wider and fuller; that mellow fuzzy hiss I used to work so hard to produce, would come out effortlessly. Needless to say, that 10* does everything even better (I had no idea they make those, I thought 9* was the top number available), and the combination of 10* and #3 Vandoren ZZ (JaZZ) reed completely elimintated those nasty squeaks in upper register, which would pop-up once in a while, if I wasn't careful enough. Merry Christmas to me. That trip to the W 48 St. Sam Ash Manhattan Music Store

iLife Revisited

After several months of DV abstinence, partly caused by an unprecedented attack of GarageBand eiphoria , partly - absence of footage of any value, due to rather eventless existance, I finally decided to return to the most time consuming of all of my activities, and make a movie again. Following is a short summary of the experience. I promise to keep this rant as technically oriented, as I can, in hope, that it might be of some benefit to fellow users. During nearly half of the year, which passed since my last cinematographic endevour, there were a couple of QuickTime updates, iPhoto update, and several system and security updates. Current set-up: System: Mac OS X (10.3.6) iMovie 4.0.1 iDVD 4.0.1 QuickTime 6.2 (Pro) iMac G4 800MHz 1GB RAM Good things first: audio and video ARE in synk throughout the whole 1 hour and 39 minutes of the show. I would be thrilled, if it didn't happen before, but the good thing is that it's still there. This is about it. 1. iMovie is as sl