A Collection of Daily Wisdom by Dennis Sylvester Hurd since September 2003.

In 1979, I was a sophomore in college. Although only a few hundred miles from Manhattan, little Keene New Hampshire was a world or two away. I didn't see the movie then but The Warriors is now a guilty pleasure.

The film has such a ... well ... indie feel. It also is so analog. I'm coining that term here to mean, 'non-networked'. I mean there were no cell phones for God's sake. If you introduce Verison thirty years hence, the whole premise of the movie falls apart. It really was a simpler time. And the NY subway was rough, scary, and had graffiti. It kinda makes one nostalgic for the good old days!

Labels: analog, movies, New Hampshire, technology

There are times when I'm reminded I've another birthday rapidly approaching. I've talked about growing up analog here. Today I was reminded of that when I ran across the term carbon paper. It was in some ancient BCIT materials I discovered which talked about acceptable classroom materials. Carbon copies were not permitted. When was the last time I saw a sheet of that? For a while 3M or somebody invented those multicoloured forms but I haven't seen those for a while either as most of my paperwork has gone digital. Now the form is likely on my monitor with the instructions to tick the box to show acceptance with this or that policy.

If carbon paper is from a time long past, then yesterday, I found more proof that I have vast experience to draw upon. The movie, Car Wash, arrived on DVD. It has Richard Pryor and music which won both a Grammy and a Golden Globe Award. It was released the summer which I turned 17, which incidentally was thirty years ago. What a fun film, what a strange time, and what a lot of hair!

Labels: analog

The world was analog when I was a baby. Probably the largest change that has occurred in the last four and a half decades is the development of digital.

Here, I'm not thinking only in terms of photography for that's a shift in paradigm that's obvious but didn't begin in earnest until after the new millennium. I am talking about a whole mind-set. The plots of some movies from the eighties and before would fall apart in a remake. Imagine not being able to get in contact with someone! Now, we'd have explain how the cell phone batteries were dead. In another example, the phrase, a mixed tape, sounds like an anachronism.

What made me think of this topic was I am readying this week's final exam. It was easy to find the exam copies I've used back through the late 90's. They are all in C:>My Documents\MS Word\BCIT\COMM Exams\. I remember how in 1985 the English Department at the Taif Ordinance Corps Center and School didn't have a PC. We used typewriters and that's the epitome of analog.

Labels: analog, Saudi Arabia, technology

I grew up analog. My first wrist watch was a Timex with hands.

The first video tape I ever saw was 1/2" reel-to-reel B&W in high school.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon converting an hour and a half of 8mm analog camcorder tape to DVD. (There are hours and hours left.) This particular trip was a summer spent touring India.

During retirement, I'll probably be able to dump all archived video, text, and images to IP-accessible, personal data storage. Will a copy of the blog reside there too?

Labels: analog

Posted by: Dennis S Hurd / 6:12 AM 0 comments

I plugged a firewire connection from my digital camcorder to the computer. Inside, it had a tape which I'd just copied from my old analog camera. I captured one hour's worth of events from the summer of 2000 to the hard drive. The resulting file was about 13 gigabyte.

In order to find these old tapes, I had to hunt through the closet shelf and open a bulky and unwieldy box. It contained all sorts of old, computer paraphernalia. I took a breath and threw away an old Quantum disk drive. You see, the one-hour video file was larger than the entire 12 gig drive! I really should've chucked it out long ago.

There was also a zip drive (pictured above). It had a parallel port connection because it was used before the days of USB. The cartridges held only 100 meg. I wondered if it would run under XP and I did manage to find an iOMEGA driver. It worked fine but the device is fairly useless. Why couldn't I gather the courage to throw it out too?

Labels: analog, camera, Hardware

When one copies sound or video in analog format, the process takes exactly as long as the event did. As you may know however, when throwing around digital files, the copying process can take a small fraction of the actual, linear time.

'Trying to cope in analog' is similar to how I've felt when entering my missing eJournal entries. The actual events took place during September and October, but I've spent near an equal amount of time getting it blogged. Never again, shall I leave on a 2-month vacation without a notebook computer! From the next trip forth, I will keep the journal entries and edit the journal photos while the events are occurring!

Regardless, I'm finally pleased to announce that true to my blogline, every day of 2004 is now contained here. Each week of our trip is complete:

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

If you're a frequent visitor to my eJournal and images, you may have seen some of the entries and photos from our trip to Sri Lanka. It is now completely online and available, so the numbers above link to the weeks away. In order to read sequentially, you must start reading from the bottom of the pages.

Labels: analog, blogging

I have started using my capture card to convert years of analog camcorder tapes to mpg files. This is the first step in eventually creating DVD's.

Tape forces one into 'linear thinking'. Trying to find a specific event on tape is a mess as one generally has to fast-forward through lots of tape in order to get to the desired part. DVD menuing will make that a thing of the past as one captures into 'clips'. Each clip can appear on the DVD menu. It will take just moments to locate and play the correct scene.

Remember trying to carefully drop the 'needle' into the 'empty space' on a vinyl LP?

Labels: analog

Undoubtedly, the current news of the Mars Rover Mission has prompted a rekindling of my interest in space.

When I was growing up, there was a concerted effort to involve kids in the study of science and, more specifically, the space program. When I was in elementary school, I remember NASA came to the gym where my most vivid memory involved the guest scientist playing with liquid oxygen. If I can write about it today, it was surely a high-impact demonstration. At home, I can recall assembling a plastic model of the Apollo LEM. The first moon landing occurred during the summer before I entered Grade 5. Because cassettes hadn't been perfected yet, I captured TV audio on my small reel-to-reel tape recorder. Educational interest in space seemed nearly universal during my youth.

The very year I graduated from high school, Voyager escaped the bounds of earth. Now, twenty-six years after the fact, it's the most distant human-made object in the universe. Those words look simple enough; but imagine, nothing touched by a human has ever gone as far! Although we're still in contact, it left our solar system a few months ago and is speeding into the blackness in excess of 40,000 miles per hour. I fear trying to fathom its 8.5-billion mile progress is next to impossible.

What I also find fascinating is the Golden Record of humanity that Voyager contains. (Voyager 2, hot on its twin's far-flung heels, contains a duplicate.)

NASA's Flash Animation and Site

Some of the Recording's Content

Physical Aspects of the Recording

Because we are so used to CD's and DVD's nowadays, we have to remember that Voyager's 12-inch, metal disk is more akin to an old LP. It is analog and contains a stylus and set of intergalactic, 'pictograph' instructions on how to play it. Voyager has been journeying for about 60% of my life and this seems long to me. However, it will be 40 to 60 thousand years before it approaches another planetary system!

Labels: analog