HerdingChaos

First I want to say that I have been pretty impressed with the mac mini so far. It is very quiet and performs very quickly for something so inexpensive and small.

But… there is always a but. My mac mini came with iLife ‘05. I wonder if naming the product iLife helps all the geeks feel like they now have a life. I know I felt a little better. Anyway, back to the subject… I tried to work on a movie in iMovieHD for my brother. He is entering a tape for the new Amazing Race show. I have been editing video for the famliy for a while. My weapon of choice is usually Pinnacle Studio 9. I decided to try to do some video editing on my new mac since that seems to be all the rage these days. Well, I have a puny little 80G drive in the mini so I decided to use a portable USB drive for working on my videos. I have a 200G usb2.0 drive and it worked great. I copied the video over firewire from the camera and sent it out the USB to the drive and everything was smooth. I found that pretty impressive for such a little box. The I/O load was not affecting my web surfing and email. On the windows box, when I start to capture video, I leave it alone. Otherwise it tends to drop frames when spooling the video off to disk. +1 for mac.

Then I tried to edit with it. None of the effects seem to work. Then saving the rendered video, er excuse me "sharing" the video was failing and giving me some error message about the drive not having enough room. I finially tried to "share" the file and used the local hard drive as the destination. Everything worked. I suspect if I moved all my files over to the internal drive that everything would start working. I guess now I will get to understand how the apple support system works.

I spent most of the day today doing spring cleaning. Living in Texas, spring starts about right now. We relocated the office to give the kids a larger playroom about a year ago. During the move I never really put everything away. Over the course of the past year I have junking up this one room. Today I took most everything out of it and started over. Not only can you walk in the room now, you can see the floor! woohoo or something.

The new blog software appears to be working quite well. I was able to turn back on the comments for all of my posts. Within 2 hours I had around 50 comment spams that had been posted. Wordpress does such a better job with this. There are bulk interfaces for cleaning entries up. And Wordpress detected the spam after a few of them started looking the same, and moved them to a moderation queue. That made it quite easy to dump them before they were even posted. There is supposed to be plugins for spell checking and image posting and other nifty features. I do not have any of those working yet. But I will get them running as I have time.

It has been a few months since I have posted. Since that time we have been blessed with a new baby girl. Her name is Loren and she has been the best baby. I am not sure if we are just getting to be better parents at this point, or if the babies just get more laid back if they have a few older siblings. Loren has been sleeping most of the night since day one. Andrew and Tracy are both really enjoying playing with their little sister. Sometimes too much…

I just got back from traveling for a week. I was away for work and then for a memorial service. It was tough being away from the family for such a long time right after Loren had arrived. I’m glad to be back and I am really looking forward to this weekend.

I am going to try and keep up now that this blog software has pretty much taken care of the comment spam problem. I also would not expect the layout to remain the same. Expect more changes and more posts in the near future.

I have been way too busy to update the blog. I have a ton of new information. But before I spent anymore time updating my old MT blog, I wanted to migrate to Wordpress. In addition I did all of the work on this migration from my new Mac mini. I have been pretty impressed with it so far. I will post more about that later, but the short story: this linux bigot is impressed.