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“Just beginning to use wheels”

Colin Devroe — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:45:34 +0000

Another fantastic entry in the journal of Henry David Thoreau (which I’ve mentioned a few times before) this time dealing with being able to use “cars”, or wheeled wagons, in late-March in Concord, Massachusetts.

Here is the snippet from Mr. Thoreau’s March 26, 1856 entry:

“They are just beginning to use wheels in Concord, but only in the middle of the town, where the snow is at length worn and melted down to bare ground in the middle of the road, from two to ten feet wide. Sleighs are far the most common, even here. In Cambridge there is no sleighing. For the most part, the middle of the road from Porterâ€™s to the College is bare and even dusty for twenty to thirty feet in width. The College Yard is one half bare. So, if they have had more snow than we, as some say, it has melted much faster.”

He finished his entry with the fact that he couldn’t travel “in the cars” to Concord. There were no cars in his day so by this I can only imagine he means a horse-pulled wagon with wheels rather than sleigh runners.

If I was his neighbor in 1856 he could have borrowed my 4-wheel drive Jeep.

Me being Rocky

Colin Devroe — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:56:09 +0000

Viddler is running a little contest to see who can best impersonate their favorite actor and role. I’m no good at impersonations and I couldn’t find a box of chocolates quick enough to put together a Forrest Gump video, so I threw together this short snippet of me training as Rocky.

Me as ROCKY

This kinda stuff is fun to put together, I should do more of them. I used Keynote to create the “Rocky” slide, iMovie to cut up video of me punching the air and add effects, Quicktime to grab the audio from the trailer, and Garage Band to add in the audio to the movie and mix it all together. Not bad for software that comes free on all new Macs.

Submit your own, maybe you’ll get a little something out of it.

[tags]rocky, movie, impersonation, sylvester stalone, video, viddler, contest, entry[/tags]
[slug]me-rocky[/slug]

I need more storage so that…

Colin Devroe — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:25:34 +0000

I need more storage so that… I don’t have to make rash decisions on what personal data to keep (especially photos) just because I’m running out of room on my laptop. I love using a laptop as my main computer. It’s portable, compact, and works almost as well as a desktop. Currently the main caveat to using a laptop is hard drive space. Laptop hard drives are smaller and slower than their desktop brethren and as such I find myself making decisions as to what I can “take with me” when I’m on the go.

My laptop’s hard drive is 80Gb. Currently I have 5.17Gb free on the entire drive (see screenshot). How much space is that really? Considering that one of my passions is photos – and that I have two digital cameras that each have 1Gb sticks, this means that I only have the room on my laptop to hold 5 more sets of photos from these cameras. This is very depressing to me.

I’m hoping to find a solution to this problem by switching to Aperture and having it store my full-res photos on an external hard drive, while keeping decent resolution thumbnails on my laptop’s drive for viewing when not at home.

My main reason for wanting to win the Seagate “I need more storage so that…” contest, would be so that I could keep taking photos and not have to decide what personal data to keep just because I don’t have the room to store it.

[tags]seagate contest, hard drives, laptop, contest, entry, podtech, seagate[/tags]
[slug]need-storage[/slug]