I’m no horticulturalist. I think these may be the “Flame of the Woods” flowering hedge I would like to see replace the Morning Glories (which grow wild here anyway). My reference booklet says the plant will grow three feet wide and six feet tall. Perfect, since anyone in the house can see over them as we are a foot and a half off ground level. The City of Hollywood uses this ornamental all over downtown, tipping us off that it is cheap to buy and can be maintained by unskilled labor.
Remember, I am not seeking to renovate this place to my own liking, that has never been my plan. I am thinking ahead. And I mean far ahead to the inevitable. This place must be ready to become self-sustaining when the time comes.Since we now have leftovers in the house, if you show up late, you get twice as much food. So this afternoon Wallace got addicted to that big bag of gingerbread cookies. He wanted me to take them away. I did, and replaced them with a bag of donuts. Some guys just don’t have a “legal” mind.
Probably, I’m doing something wrong, but none of my video editing software is adequate to produce a cheap amateur movie. I’ve got Presto! VideoWorks, Pinnacle Studio 10, Microsoft Windows Movie Maker and Cyberlink Power Producer Gold 2. Not one of them can input an editable file from my camcorder (an ordinary Sharp 8mm). I have a Pinnacle Dazzle direct to DVD attachment, but the file thus produced is not editable. My software either cannot import that file or cannot accept input from the camera. Presto!, which can use the camera, produces a weird .RDF file that nothing else can use. This should give you some idea of the state of affairs in the home video software market.
So there are no fuzzy goals, I’m going to put in writing what I want. I need an input device which accepts almost any input signal (camera, camcorder, another disk being played, whatever) and creates an editable file on my spare hard drive. Then I need software that goes in there and really edits (not that lame “automovie” feature). I want to go in there and cut, paste, rearrange and add titles, subtitles, effects, backgrounds and most importantly, assemble edit.
For those not familiar with assemble edit, it is the ability to go in there and rearrange the scenes. Very little of my footage is shot in the “correct” order. I must move chunks of the file into a new sequence. Most systems use the idiotic method of establishing “links” to the file locations and assembling the links. Not good enough. If any one of the hundreds of files is moved or renamed, the entire project has to be restarted.
Arnel was in the shop to examine the results of the laptop repair. It turns out Toshiba sound cards are also dependent on a properly configured modem card. What is Toshiba trying to pull? Fred donated a disk of file conversion software but most of it works backwards – it converts AVI to other formats. Plus the disk was laced with hundreds of Trojans. (It turns out the anti-virus software spots all Key Generators as viruses.)
An interesting exchange occurred when I asked Arnel to show me the lyrics function of Cakewalk. Am I not supposed to be the computer genius? I am. That’s why I know the quickest way to do something is often to just ask somebody who’s already done it. Except on the Internet. Neener.
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