Someone please tie me to the mast

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I make and receive about three phone calls a week. All to and from Barb.

"Want me to bring you some Chinese?"

"Pick up some dog food. We’re out."

"Did you try to call me just now? (No) Huh."

So I don’t really need a cell phone. Let alone an iPhone. But boy are those buggers cool? All my pals have them and love them. Can’t imagine going back to whatever they had before.

And next month we’ll probably see the new and improved (3G) iPhone and the flames of my iPhone lust will be whipped as by Santa Ana winds.

When asked why I don’t have an iPhone, I mumble some variation of what you just read. But the real answer has more to do with my MacBook Pro. I always have it with me and have big chunks of my life recordable or accessible there.

Motorcycle

Think of the MacBook Pro as a sleek, high-performance racing car. And the iPhone as a sexy, top-of-the-line motorcycle (Candy Apple Red).

It would be fun to ride the motorcycle (zoom! zoom!) but that would mean leaving the MacBook Pro in the garage. What a waste. Why not take both along? I could, but that would be like towing the motorcycle behind the sports car on a trailer. Cumbersome (and silly).

I’d love to see some data on this. Do new iPhone users tote their laptops less often? Perhaps at the molecular level, we are laptoppers or iPhoners. I think I’m the former.

Green screen with CamTwist

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Greenscreen

I finally figured it out. Sort of. If you can count stumbling on the right configuration and being unable to do it twice in a row "figured it out." But I now know that it can be done. (The background image is lobby of our new offices in Dallas.)

My setup is pretty crude. Two flood lights from Lowe’s and a few yards of green felt on the basement wall. It’s pretty clear that lighting is critical for this effect and I might have to come up with more or better lights before I try a video background.

And streaming (over the wifi) from the basement isn’t gonna cut it. Too slow. Gotta get an Ethernet jack down here or set up in the upstairs office. But hey, that’s what weekends are for, right?
I’m proud to say I PayPal’d the CamTwist guy $50. It’s worth far more than that.

Shredded memories

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Tornado2

My friend David, who lives in southwest Missouri, found some… I hate to call them scraps or debris… shredded memories from the weekend tornadoes that hammered parts of four states.

He posted them to his blog in hopes someone might recognize the photo and help get (what’s left of) it back to the owner.

Regular readers of this blog know I loves my photos and I keep iPhoto backed up nightly. And I take great comfort in having many of them on flicker or embedded in a post here.

If you have a shoe box full of photos but lack the time, tools or patience to scan them… send them off to one of the many services that will do it for you. I’d add: then hire a high school kid to put them up on flickr, but a lot of folks are just not comfortable with that. But it give me great comfort knowing mine are safely floating in cyberspace.

When the time comes, I’m going to figure out a way to see that they stay up (out?) there after I’m gone.

Brush with Near Greatness: Juli Crockett

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It never ceases to amaze me how many of the people I mention here find my humble little notes and get in touch. I could mention a few but it would be the worst kind of name dropping. Okay, I’ll mention one.

A week or so back I gushed about the song Fuck ’em All by the Evangenitals and how I had searched (unsuccessfully) for the lyrics. Well, guess who left a little comment love:

“I’ll tell you what…  I’m going to add Fuck ’em All to the Evangenitals website, and I’ll put the lyrics up there just for you. :-) Give me a few days, and as you wish, so it shall be. Thanks for finding us, for listening, and for hearing.”

Love, Rev Juli Crockett (lead singer/songwriter)

– The Evangenitals