Tools of the Trade

Since we sold The Local, I have been using a little Acer laptop that is extremely portable… and that’s about it. I bought it because my Sony was overburdened with programs and spyware protection that clashed with virus protection. It was also bulky. I was going to go on a motorcycle trip, and I wanted something really portable. Unfortunately, from the first week I bought it, when I closed it, it would stay on and overheat, and I would have to hard quit. I remember how freaked out I was when I got on an airplane and found an hour into the trip when I reached my hand into my bag, that the computer was hot enough to fry an egg (and I was afraid a motherboard, as well). When I took it back to Fry’s, they told me it was a software problem and that they wouldn’t cove it under the warrantee. It was frustrating, but because I didn’t publish a newspaper anymore, I let it slide and just took photos figuring that someday I would have another computer that was powerful enough to run Photoshop and had a screen big enough to actually see them.

The day has finally come! I’m now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro! It is a dream come true. I can run video and photo programs without the computer crashing on a regular basis, and virus protection is a thing of the past. My skills have fallen by the wayside, unfortunately, but Mac is set up to do things for me. I must say I don’t completely trust it, and it seems cheesy, much the way that buying a pre-made Halloween costume is, but it’s so intuitive that I just go with it. I just did my first project with iMovie and garage band, and it is reopening the doors of creativity that slowly shut over the past three years.

Open the video and give it a look and a listen, if you wish. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will recognize some of the photos, but many have just been sitting idle in a portable hard drive, and they are overjoyed to again see the light of day. The soundtrack is me playing one of the many songs that come to me when I wander, step by step into the unknown.

Enjoy!