Quote of the "month"
October 2006
"I still cry everyday," she says softly. "I think about Mary all the time. We've been to all these places with her," she says looking around the venue in which we're sitting. "Now we have to establish new memories without her and it's really hard."
"This album is many things, but it is mainly us turning our backs to the non-life that might be death or to depression turning your back to that. Not blocking it out because sadness is there and there are things that have happened that can take a long time to heal. It's not denial but certainly looking forward."
"Once you're in this process there is no going back. And there is no point anyway." - Laetitia Sadier, on recording the album Margerine Eclipse following the death of fellow Stereolab member Mary Hansen, from Umbrella Music interview, 8 May 2004.
You know it's going to be a bad day when the first thing that you do is spill half a cup of coffee on yourself. That was actually yesterday, not today, but today wasn't a lot better. Instead, today I forgot to change back into my boots before I went to class and walked around campus in the slush wearing a pair of Converse All-Stars with a hole in the right shoe. On top of that, I left my backpack at the People's Place when I got my coffee and bagels and was halfway across campus when I realized I didn't have it. So, I trudged back through the slush farm and the wind tunnel to fetch it.
Anyway, the year so far hasn't been too awful. Busy, but not awful. A few days ago, I saw one of my old friends. We hadn't seen each other for something like eight years. He moved to Rochester and I moved a lot of places and we lost touch. I found him again when Slashdot linked to an interview he did about the OpenBeOS project he's heading up. He and his wife and one of the kids (yikes! crap, I am old) drove to Syracuse and we had a lovely, if a bit noisy dinner. It was really amazing to be able to reconnect with someone I hadn't seen for so long and actually still have things to discuss past what we'd been doing for the last ninety years or so.
Apart from that, the semester's started up again and it's back to class. I'll be posting about interesting things I come across during the semester. I'm taking a class on online searching, so there should hopefully be something worth telling.
I'm also currently working on a sort of in-house project. I'm putting together a Fink Squad DVD comprised of footage from our last few shows. Liz shot four of our last six (or was it seven?) with her digital camcorder, and I'm using pieces from all of them. It's been a large bunch of trial and error. I've been working on not only getting a good capture, but also learning how to set up the compressors so that the video looks good, but the bit rate is still under the maximum the players can handle. And also balancing that with being able to fit a decent amount of material on one disc. I've been working on it for two weeks and I'm hoping to burn a test disc tonight. If that works out, I hope to have the menus done and the whole thing finished early next week. Not that it's really going any further than that at this point. Next I'll be doing the same with analog capture from some of the older tapes. Once I've got that all down, I should be ready for the real project, which I'll be working on in the Summer.
