Saturday, April 5, 2008
I found a Panda Express fortune from a fortune cookie but I don't remember which meal this was from (probably April 1): You are gifted in many ways. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Folded laundry, cleaned the bathroom, vacuumed, filed receipts, archived documents. Processed and uploaded photos. Why in Flickr do some of my photos now say "(null)"? Bad code somewhere is my guess. As of right now, there appear to be 63,419 photos with this tag in Flickr. Recently expanded Spaces in OS X from 6 screens to 9—so useful! Stretches. Weight training: super slow dumbbell press, front raise. Midafternoon meal: hot nonfat milk, chunky soup. Apple Mail is really screwy sometimes. I created a rule to move all messages containing the string "{Spam?}" and then ran the rule and it moved 5 messages that did not contain that string! I had to create my own rule because its built-in spam filtering doesn't properly remove spam messages from my inbox, and I can't figure out why. Thunderbird was much better at spam filtering, but it doesn't have the integration with OS X that I like. Installed Opera 9.2.7 for OS X. Started using Thunderbird again after not using it for a long time. Dinner: leftovers. Spent all of the afternoon and the evening helping Patrick create a DVD. He and Sam recorded martial arts exercises using digital cameras and wanted to make a DVD so that Simmone, who I think doesn't have a computer, could watch them. The process was alternately great and awful. The great parts were the video tutorials on apple.com—we watched maybe 10 of them related to iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand. The frustrating parts were: (1) discovering that iMovie '08 (7.1.1 529) would not import MPEG-1 which led to me install the free MPEG Streamclip 1.9.1 and converting them to DV before importing (should I get rid of the original MPEG files? they're taking up space I'd like to free up); (2) in iMovie, not understanding why you have to add clips to the Event Library before adding them to a project—why can't you just add them directly to a project? the Event Library seems like an extra step that's not needed; (3) discovering that iDVD does not permit one to create chapter markers so that individual chapters or clips could be played from the DVD menu which led me to a blog posting solution titled "Unlocking iMovie '08: How to add chapter markers" on imovie08.blogspot.com which involved opening the iMovie project in GarageBand as a video podcast, setting chapter markers in GarageBand, and then exporting to iDVD; (4) getting really crappy DVD menus quality and not knowing how to fix it (The "professional quality" setting is not); (5) iDVD burns one DVDRW successfully but then when I insert a second disc which is a brand new (blank) DVDR it spits it out prematurely (shortly after inserting it) with no indication of why it spit it out. I know I was inserting it right side up because I tried the other side and it was worse - click - whirr - click - whirr; (6) realizing that iMovie created copies of my imported video files in a folder called iMovie Events thereby wasting my disk space but I can't tell if I should delete my originals or not because I don't know what iMovie is doing with the files it imported. There were other annoying steps like figuring out how to remove the Apple logo, figuring out what you can and cannot change in the iDVD templates, and so forth, but we got something that worked—it only took about 6 hours longer than we expected since those friendly Apple commercials and tutorials say I can build a DVD of my digital life in just seconds. The web tutorial videos were invaluable—it would have taken us much longer to figure out tasks without them. Stretches. Reverse leg lift. Tennis ball massage.