Fiona, Kaisa & Nathan Judd

I suffered from a computer problem. No, I’m not talking about Computer Users anonymous (although if there was such a thing Fiona would freely admit me), I’m talking about the BSOD, Blue Screen of Death! I had a wake up call that could have been a lot more serious than it was. Don’t get me wrong, there were still casualties that couldn’t be recovered — Cousin Niki, I had 4 Gigs of video from your wedding that are still in a zip file on my backup drive that I haven’t been able to recover…I’m really, really sorry…and ‘Melodious NeverSeeYouAnymore-ious’, gone are your your TV recordings of So You Think You Can Dance and The Notebook…I didn’t try very hard to save them…sorry, but to a lesser extent.

My “backup” external hard drive wasn’t exempt from the BSOD fury either. I say ‘backup’ because I commited a cardinal sin of having a backup drive and fell prey to the vast tracts of space that it offered and used those tracts for my recorded TV shows. I ended up saving what I could, wiping the rest, reinstalling Windows, and then taking it in to the nice people at Computer Lane (crummy website, good service) to discover it was actually my RAM that had failed, but that it had obvious effects on the hard drives. Great excuse to get a new 1GB stick of RAM (and Best Buy was the cheapest, what will this world come to next?)

Here are some things that anyone with a computer should be do.

1. Run CheckDisk and Defrag often
2. Have multiple backups
3. Have an off-site backup

1 — Run checkdisk and defrag often. Okay, I’m really not sure that this will help a whole lot, but it definitely can’t hurt the overall health of your hard drive. Vista has an option to schedule defrag built in. With XP I’m told you can put defrag in a scheduler and have it done that way. I usually run it 2-4 times a month.

2 — Have multiple backups, especially of non-replaceable data like home videos, photos, and school/work projects. Those were the first things that made me sick to my stomach– wedding/birth/family videos, pictures of family (like grandparents not alive), and old photographs that have been scanned and digitized and I may have the only digital copies. Multiple means at least two, preferably 3 or even 4 isn’t neccesarily overdoing it. With as reletively cheap as hard drives are, external and otherwise, there’s no reason not to have at least one. Keeping it connected to the computer is okay too for automated backups. But what if the worst happens and the computer is detroyed in a fire or flood?

3 — Have an off-site backup. This never really crossed my mind because, being fairly young, I’m still invincible and that invincibility is obviously passed on to my electronics, rights? Maybe not. There’s several options here and more if you have nerdy friends that want to back up your stuff in exchange for backup up theirs. Although I do have very nerdy friends (thanks for the loan of one of your many extra hard drives Mark) I’ve been looking at Mozy and Carbonite. Both have pros and cons but I think I’ll end up going with Mozy for many reasons: I’ve heard great things about them, they’re local (in Utah, awesome billboard), they offer 2GB free storage (and I like companies that do stuff like that), I can pay monthly, and they have a ’set it and forget it’ mentality to data backup. Carbonite looks like an excellent choice as well and is quite comparable and slightly cheaper, but I don’t want my data to suffer possible hibernation sickness. Mozy and Carbonite are $60 and $50 a year respectively with slight price breaks with Mozy for paying upfront for a year.

And for the record…even with my limited backups, it’s taken well over a week to get things up and going again. What do you do to backup? Share your experiences!

Most of you know Fiona’s been in New York the past few days to perform John Rutter’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall (directed by John Rutter) with the Wasatch Chorale. The choir was highlighted on The Early Show on Channel 2 this morning. I got a text from her at 6:40 saying she had been interviewed! Awesome, right? I didn’t have time to watch it before work so I recorded it to watch later tonight.

My friend Hobby called this morning wondering if I had seen the show yet, I hadn’t, and he said that Fiona had “kind of made a fool of herself”. Oh no… We’ll let you see judge… I thought she was awesome. Read the rest of this entry »

The handful of people that read this know I was distraught, as a video camera newbie, that my video camera didn’t save in a commonly used Internet formats I was familiar with: avi, wmv, or/and divx. I’d like to say I’ve learned more and know there is a good reason for MP2 to be the standard…but I haven’t, I’ve just accepted it and really have no idea the reasoning behind it

Enter Sony Vegas Movie Studio 8.0, the trial version… After a week (plus) into the trial, many hours of trial and error learning & playing, and several YouTube video instructions I’ve learned that anyone, even beginners, can learn video editing with a little bit of tenacity. Although I consider myself pretty tech savvy, I knew nothing about video editing and ahhh’ed over friends’ video tributes. I’m more than happy to share my meager knowledge and experience and get tips from others. Below is a project video which I took with the intent of editing it when I still thought my camera’s software could do all that (Ha!).

I’m no videophile, but I don’t think it’s too bad for a second attempt (the first attempt was re-vamping this video). The “magic trick”…well, it’s kind of embarassing, I’m not much for theatrics.

Add this to my Christmas list! I’m pretty sure it’s on sale at Costco!

I’ve owned my Sony DCR-SR42 for eight months now and love it. Little background on me… I’ve never owned a video camera, used very few camcorders and never owned anything Sony but a PS2. I wanted something easy, fast, with great quality but little/no bulky or expensive media (tapes, CDs, MiniDVs, etc.) to purchase. After talking with a friend who I consider to be a gadget guru I decided to look at hard drive camcorders. Although they were a bit out of my price range at the time I called my loving parents who split the cost with me as an early graduation present, good thing I graduated! Besides, we were providing their first grandchild it was quite advantageous for them too.

Skip past all the boring price checks and model comparisons, although it was a close call with the Panasonic SDR-H18. Everyone is looking for different specs and features so it’s hard for me to impose my preferences. If you really want me to go into more detail comment or send me an email.

Likes:

• 30GB Hard Drive is Lots of space. You will literally have to charge your camera dozens of times to use all the space available to you, even at the highest quality
• Feels great in my hand, light and easy to hold.
• Awesome looking video. The quality really looks top notch, it’s not HD, but it’s still great.
• Low light and Night shots even look pretty good! I’m impressed with the night mode. Even in no light situations the red LED/infrared light on the camera will light up the picture, although in B/W.
• 2.3″ Touchscreen. I’ve really enjoyed the touchscreen. It even cleans fairly easily.

Dislikes:

• I wish there were software that came with this to convert the MP2 files into something a little more usable for those w/o expensive video software.
• Battery life is not too bad…it used to be about 120 minutes per charge. It seems though after six months I’m topping out at just over 100 minutes (which actually may depend more on the backlit screen than I though…hmmm).
• Still pictures are somewhat grainy, still printable on a 4×6 print…but a little grainy/blurry.
• Widescreen mode, not a true widescreen. Not a big deal to me, I can deal with black bars on my camcorder screen.
• MP2? I don’t know what to do with that. I have Finally found a program to use the files but it’s still kind of a pain. I’m open to any software recommendations anyone may have.

Final wrap-up: Good (not great) battery life, oodles of space, nice touchscreen and nightmode but not fantastic for still pictures. Oh, and let’s see if we can find an easy way to convert the MP2’s, shall we?

At Niki and Josh’s recent wedding extravaganza there were many times we were outside. It was all you could want - temperate, light breeze, a few sandflies…because we were in Medicine Hat! We enjoyed ribbon sandwiches, fruit, and soda. We think the problem was mostly the soda, which attracted the wasps. Mom swatted 30+, no joke! This one we trapped in the very thing that it was after…I guess you can have too much of a good thing

The magic of discovery is becoming more and more evident to us, mostly because of out 5 month old daughter (today!). Babies have a sense of wonder and infectious laughter that we seem to have lost as adults. Things as simple as mirrors are just the most amusing thing! Who is that in there?? How does that even work?? Seriously, do you know how mirrors work? Why do we see a mirror image instead of an un-mirror one? I must not have been paying enough attention during physics lessons, but I’m okay with keeping that small wonder a mystery (unless someone wants to do the research for me). When did we lose that awe for simple things? Let’s recapture some of that this week!

Especially at the beginning of the clip Kaisa’s cute laugh seems to say, “What the…!? I like her!”