After preparing some study notes in the morning, I ended up spending the rest of the day studying along with fixing up the external hard drive that Vero just purchased for video editing.
The problem we were having was that when you attempted to capture the video from the video camera and put it into the hard drive, it would hang while ‘trying to allocate disk space’. After some searching on the Internet, I found out that it may have been the case of the drive just being too slow to capture it because it was part of a daisy-chain. Video Camera -> Computer -> External Hard Drive. I found a solution in just going from Video Camera -> Computer (Hard Drive) but this proved to be a pain because a) I had to pull a lot of data off of the computer’s hard drive and b) Vero didn’t have this in mind when purchasing the hard drive.
With the thought of having to return the hard drive, I redoubled my efforts that evening after studying some more and found out that if I (geekspeak warning!) formatted it into a Mac file system, then it may fix the problem. Lo and behold, it solved it partially, although now it only took 15 seconds to allocate the disk space needed to capture the video so all we had to do is rewind the tape 15 seconds before the area we wished to videotape. Not feeling that this was enough of a success, I then partitioned the drive so it wouldn’t have to scan the entire 500GB, but only scan 120GB and voila! It solved the problem! God bless the Internet, for it made Vero and I happy.
On Sunday, Vero returned to the house and started capturing the videos from her sister’s wedding. While there were some hiccups still (in the fact that the process would hang a few times and you would have to restart the computer), I believe she may have more luck through the week in capturing the video. We are working on a deadline as Vero’s grandmother is leaving on Wednesday and is bringing back the video camera.
In the evening, we went over to Eric and Annie’s for some pizza and salad which was excellent. It was too bad that we all had other plans in the evening as we had to bail on them after supper to go to our respective events. I headed towards the University of Ottawa to meet with my project group in Quantitative Methods. We hashed out the beginnings of what work needs to be done and we will be looking into surveying residents of the Glebe area to determine whether or not they would care for a footbridge across the Canal to be constructed around 5th Avenue. The one further up the Canal around the Elgin Street area has proven to be quite popular.
I then headed over to Mike and Melissa’s house for Melissa’s birthday party. There was quite the spread of food available which was amazingly delicious. You can’t go wrong with chili and some beef concoction. Too bad I had already eaten or else I would waited to eat my entire supper there!
Melissa was pleased with the gifts she received (like the dancing flower!) and we all had a good time chatting with one another. Vero and I headed home around 10 and retired for the evening.
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story – Krista lent me some Chuck Klosterman novels which I thoroughly enjoyed. Chuck is an editor at SPIN magazine and his writings are chock full of pop culture references and gets into the minutae of music. I love it. It felt like I was sitting with a friend who is equal to me in my thoughts of music…I have yet to find a person who talks about the little things they love about a song…I have my suspicions that Karilee may fit that bill on the music scene. Or Sara. But I have yet to have those conversations with them. You know the conversations I’m talking about…the ones where you are sitting in a living room listening to some tunes and then comment on a random part of the song and thoroughly dissect it like it’s a frog in Grade Ten biology class.
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs – Another Chuck Klosterman great epic with essays on random subject matter ranging from Star Wars, Breakfast Cereals, the beauty of Saved By The Bell…such obscure subject matter which needs someone to talk about it for an entire generation. I enjoyed his essays although there were a few I skipped altogether (like when he talked about The Real World which is a TV show I hadn’t seen before). In the middle of book laid the Top 23 Questions I would Ask a Person to Answer to Determine if I will Love them. These questions are amazing and I actually have photocopied them and carry them in my backpack for a boring day at the pub.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Thanks to Trish for lending me this novel. Even though I heard the ending inadvertently on the bus one night, I still was anxious to read the last great novel in the Harry Potter series. While I won’t spoil anything here, I will say that it was quite the page turner and I finished it in a few days while in Sudbury with Mom and Dad over the holidays. All in all, a fitting end to the series. While a lot of people have spoken to me and indicated they didn’t care for the last chapter, I thought it was great. My only qualm with the novel is that fell outside of the standard formula of the other novels; in that there is a year at the school, there’s trouble with a new teacher, etc. So it was a different read and at some points I was feeling that the novel wasn’t moving along fast enough. There was literally a few chapters dealing with them wondering what they should do next while they camped somewhere. Meh, that’s a minor point really as we all knew the novel structure had to change. While I am disappointed that this is the end of the Harry Potter train, I was pleased with the last novel…much like I was pleased with Revenge of The Sith.
Moonraker – I picked up a few James Bond novels while in Sudbury and just finished reading Moonraker. From what I can remember of the film, it is nothing based on the novel whatsoever. I believe this had to do with the fact that Moonraker was created for a population who wanted some outer space action ala Star Wars. Nothing of that sort in the novel. It follows our great spy James Bond keeping an eye for sabotage on the Moonraker project and it’s fraught full of suspicion at every turn and red herrings. Can I point out that so far in all the novels of Bond I’ve read, James really gets a number done on him in the final chapters. That never happens in the films! Except for Casino Royale which faithfully reproduced the final torture sequence. But imagine that happening in every novel! It’s true! In Live and Let Die, he gets dragged behind a boat and thrown through corral all the time which slices him up badly. In Moonraker he gets his skin burned by steam. Gadzooks! If this is what being a spy is all about, it isn’t all that glamourous. Either way, I enjoy Ian Fleming’s writings as they keep the pace moving and it’s also interesting to see how the film compares with the original novel (in some cases very faithfully (Casino Royale) but in some cases, not so much (Moonraker).
Last night Vero met me at Place D’Orleans and we headed to Future Shop to pick up a new hard drive to outfit our video editing suite. Let me tell you…this hard drive is pretty sweet. It’s a Lacie 500GB drive which was designed by Porsche! Way nicer than my old hard drive. Sits out the way also and is unobtrusive. It was also only $129 which is pretty well unheard of for a 500GB drive (this particular model usually goes for $259.