The weekend was a lackluster one for the fact that both Vero and I were working on our resumes to apply for positions. Mine, a random promotional one, Vero, for her own job. That’s the big one. She put her heart and soul into that resume. Applying online is quite insane actually. For example, for a position, one would usually write a cover letter which outlines how you meet the experience points and then attach a resume of what you’ve done in your career.
The online process did allow her to copy and paste her resume into the box, but the cover letter was diminished to a box that said “In a maximum of 200 words, outline how you meet all experience points for the position.” Now, 200 words isn’t bad if you have one experience point to cover but there were more like ten of them. An impossible task I say! She wisely added the phrase “Please see resume for more details” at the end of that box and she wrote a novel’s worth of experience points in there.
I hate online submission for the simple fact that you go all out to make your resume look nice and in the end, they strip the formatting out anyhow! Or they limit what you can write? What the heck! Do people even know what 200 words are? It’s not much. In fact, I will probably hit 200 words by the end of this sentence. Or maybe the next one. Or maybe I”ll just keep writing and let you know when I hit 200 words.
On Friday I picked up a stack of comic books that I had waiting for me and read them while Vero worked on her resume. It was unfortunate that we didn’t have the right cable to transfer Samantha’s wedding videos onto the Macbook but I figured that could wait until another day.
Saturday had me start working on my own resume/cover letter and at one point, I was opening Open Office on the laptop and it froze (it definitely had that problem a few times in the past few months) so I had to power down. Unfortunately for me, when it booted up, all that I would see is the Apple symbol and then it shut down.
OH NO! I fried my hard drive! A sense of panic came over me as I realized that life with a laptop is not fun. It’s not easy to replace parts in a laptop.
I had to run home to get my operating system disc (and managed to forget the cable to transfer the video again!) and when I came back, nothing I would do solved the problem. I did research all day long and determined that the last thing I could try is to use a program called DiskWarrior to try and fix the corrupted files structure.
I downloaded the program (along with a CD burning program) and headed to Matt and Karilee’s housewarming party that night (with an ulterior motive of using their Mac to fix mine). I picked up Trish (a few hours after I told her to hurry up but then realized that the DiskWarrior program had not finished downloading. Woops! Sorry Trish!) and we headed over there around nine. I got lost in the back streets of Westboro but finally managed to find the only street with 43 cars parked on it. Clearly this was the party street. We entered, said hello, and I headed straight for the computer to debug my problem.
Mark and Mike helped out along the way and Matt came in near the end to try his widsom as well. I appreciated all the help and in the end, the DiskWarrior program DID fix my hard drive and all is well in the world. I also found this neat feature that Mark let me know about where you can connect two Macs via a FireWire cable and have one act as a ‘target disk’ or ‘an external hard drive’. This was very cool and allowed me to run the DiskWarrior program. I never knew it could be so easy to connect two computers together to transfer files!
The rest of the night was spent munching on some good snacks (man, those hot pepper snacks from Costco were delicious) and chatting with people downstairs while they played Wii Fit. Nothing earth-shattering in the news department from everyone, however I discovered the position I’m applying for is in Holly’s branch. Fancy that. I would have a friend wherever I end up.
When I was leaving the party, Karilee was definitely upset that I didn’t crack out the guitar so I pulled it out for a three song set – Fix You by Coldplay (in honour of them playing in Ottawa on Monday), an attempt at Detroit ’67 by the Sam Roberts Band (which failed miserably) and The Ballad of John and Yoko by your favourite UK band. Like any good troubadour, I whet their appetite for more and headed out the door.
On Sunday, I finished up my cover letter and resume and headed back home to get the cable I needed to transfer some video. Vero worked diligently on her resume as I transferred video. Let me note something here about transferring video. It occurs in real-time. Hence, for an hour cassette, you need to sit there for an hour for it to transfer to your computer. Plus, there are usually some error messages like ‘dropped frames occurred” so you need to keep an eye on it. It is quite the pain in comparison to…oh, let’s say a hard drive based camera. I got to use a hard drive video camera at the wedding and I was a little worried since there was no sound (seemingly) coming from the captured videos but in the end, I figured out the problem and let me tell you, it’s a sweet camera. All you have to do is copy and paste the video files onto your computer afterward and voila! It’s done. No real-time transferring there! It’s ready to edit! I will definitely be looking into a hard drive based camera in the future.
Anyhow, the afternoon and night went away and I managed to transfer seven hours of video and still have on cassette left. Vero managed to submit her resume around 10PM that night (with two hours to spare before the closing date). I started watching Troy in the meantime which seemed like a decent film. I will have to catch the end of it some other day.
On Monday, I started editing the film but realized my Final Cut chops weren’t up to snuff and I had a lot of playing around to do. I managed to get all the ceremony videos synched up (syncing meaning that when I was capturing the film from the tapes, sometimes it would cut so I had to start from a previous point. Now I have two clips that need to be synced up) and I need to pick Vero’s brain as to how I can watch two different clips at the same time to choose the right one for the shot. We had two cameras going for the shoot so I would like to stick with Vero’s camera for the most part as it was closer up and capturing the front of everyone but I would like to see if I have any great shots from the other angle at the same time. I think I need two monitors!
Thanks to Matt and Karilee for the killer party (and the great help along the way with fixing my computer!). Mental note: Back up everything!