Cold Days - I'm 43

My unemployment ran out a month ago. I'm already in school, already on the dean's list. But this time of winter is usually the slow season for freelance. Less productions happen because, well because nobody likes to work in the bitter cold. But really, how is it you see people walking around like it's another day when it's -15? You get used to it. Here's a couple Minnesota Cold Secrets:

• Once it gets below 0, it all feels the same. -35 degrees feels the same as -5 degrees.
  
• We're all fat , we ritually add a layer during the holidays to keep us warm.
  

However, January 2008 has been unusually productive (not quite profitable) and affirms the massive amount of capital needed to start my flash/web design career, along with rebuilding my G5. Being productive usually makes me happy. But stepping back from myself (how does one do that?) I have seen that I am more irritated, almost all the time. Things that I might openly complain about when they happen around me, I first think about how to frame it in a diplomatic way, delay the response, then when the time is right, release the irritation through humour.


The more Self-Deprecating I am, the more Self-Esteem I have.

When I am directing, I nervously jump into master of ceremonies mode, and become a comedian. This helps keep the crew happy, but also has landed me in trouble when a wisecrack about the talent gets around (not that they didn't deserve it). Most of the time what I do when I'm in charge is expose my faults. I apologise to the satellite people because I don't know enough about the technology to understand why there is breakup. That kind of thing. Directing live shoots are fun because it's the closest I'll get to being a submarine commander. (Nevermind). As I try to keep people's attention, I normally don't feel they are interested in what I have to say. Although this is probably not true, it helps keep my ego in line. Therefore, when I speak to others, I treat them as equals, or better. They are graciously providing their help (as many volunteers on an access shoot do), and I can only humbly beg for them to fulfill my bidding, knowing their contribution is recognised.


Tension and Release

Having spent a year working mostly by myself at home(along with my cat), now I am back in a working environment. Even though it is a technical school, I treat it exactly the same as a job. As someone who has taught classes in the past, and as someone who is the same age as the instructors in class, I cannot help but critique their performances. I may talk to the dean about my thoughts, but they are comments about improving the school experience, not about teaching styles. One thing that I think many instructors don't realise is the power of humour. Technical school can be very challenging, and for many of those that are around 20, they are in the prime of their lives, where a whirlwind of experience of life after high school is at it's peak. I frankly envy these people, especially since they are in peak physical shape as well (I was once that age, really). These people are not settled, and many have not worked out their life situations to get into the rhythm of doing homework on time. Of course, I talk from personal experience. I also get the impression that many of the instructors may have had a messy past, (possibly even being in punk bands). So it is important to release the tension of the hard work through humour. God knows, back at my last full-time job, each problem was a source for a bevy of jokes. Humour was the only thing keeping us sane.

Am I Depressed Yet?

There was an interesting bit of psycho-babble on the morning TV news about how it is common for people my age to go through a "mid-life crisis". A chart was displayed on the screen of a smiley face. You are gleefully happy until after high school, then it is all downhill from there. Once you get deep in the rut, only then do you rebound and have a golden retirement. I was convinced that I went through my mid-life crisis when I was thirty. That's when I knew that I had to get a second job while I was still struggling as a freelancer. So by my age, I have firmly placed myself where I want to be, creative bliss with little overhead. But yet, the TV is right. Even though the lady with way too much make-up didn't explain it too well, she did hit upon the fact that people who suffer from depression get it the worst around age 44. So that explains my added irritability. I figured there was something going on, because I don't need to be irritated at all. My life is exactly the same as it has been for years. It's all good. So when I think I'd like to complain, I'll save it as chance to crack a joke. As for this irritating depression, I'll ignore it.

Diary of a Dying Machine

The Inconsistent Blog Entries
Many months since I posted to the public my thoughts. I have been updating a journal privately, however. The purpose of my posts is that if I have something to say for which someone else may benefit, then I want it to be public somehow. I do this also with my cable access programs. It doesn't matter to me if other people care, or even if 99% of the word's population doesn't know about my blog, the point is that I have something out there.

It's Below Zero Outside
Today is DVD Backup day. I take time out every few months to do a massive backup session to preserve all the hours of work toiling in my studio and edit suite. Today is particularly appropriate, because the high today may have reached zero, but the winds were in excess of 10 mph, making it officially JESUS GOD cold. I happened to have no obligations today, so I pumped up the thermostat and wore my jogging shorts. This day was also a good time to back things up, because the main hard drive of my G5 died on me. The first signs of it's demise occurred yesterday, when my OS X would appear to boot up OK, only to display a nice blue screen instead of my desktop. My second computer was hauled up from my studio to perform some triage. Using a firewire cable, I slaved the G5 to my studio G4 and saw my two internal hard drives. OK, so they were still alive. I began to look up on apple forums some treatment for the sick patient, and tried various 'safe' startup modes. I also got wise, and figured I should start backing up my G5 internal drive while it was still responding. I got about halfway through.

The Library is a Church
One thing my life depended on getting was my brand new media library. Since I religiously backup my work to data DVD every couple weeks, I have accumulated over 300 gigs of work (not including umpteen hours of digital video stored on tape). With this simple indexing system, the Media catalogue saved all the file information for all 300 or so backup discs I have in my library. I have gotten to the point that I have been sucking in so much raw media that I have to offload a ton of stuff to keep my precious hard drive space available for ongoing projects. Because of my computer programming background, more specifically my first job out of school at a data centre, I am pretty thorough in keeping my projects organised. So I was able to retrieve about half of my hard drive, saving me from reloading all 300 backup discs again.

Rampart, This is Squad 51
Next, were all my personal notes. About a month ago, I decided to backup some of my personal notes for the sake of having them available as I dreamed up my new website( Eyeball on the News - look for it in 2008!). I continued with my backups, but then I decided to try some other remedies. Maybe this backing up was unnecessary if i could just get my G5 to come up again. So I stopped the backup of my G5 hard drive and tried to use a disk repair utility (like an EKG). There was a notion that perhaps it was some login error, and could be eliminated. Easy enough. As I rebooted the ailing G5 this time, it powered itself down. Uh oh. I plugged the firewire from the G4 back to the G5, now my G5's startup drive did not appear. No more hard drive. I pulled it out of the machine, dusted it off, checked all the connections (think the scene in "2001" where Dave is pulling the memory out of HAL). Another reboot: Charging... Clear! - - - nothing. Couple more reboots. Damn You! Live!

R.I.P. Boot Drive
My Western Digital hard drive died on me at about 12:30 p.m. on 1/19/08. I still lost many hours of work. I also lost a few applications that I no longer have access to install disks. I had few options. Since I couldn't afford health care (apple care) for my G5, I would have to pay through the nose to take my baby to a clinic. The last resort I left for myself when the hard drive was still showing a pulse was to wipe it clean and start over. But now, I'm sure even if I transported it to any repair shop, they would call it DOA. There is a service out there can retrieve missing programs on my dead hard drive, but I could easily just buy the lost applications for a little more than they would charge. So open heart surgery was out.

Software Parenting is Expensive
After consulting a fellow G5 owner Vince, I concluded that I had to accept that my hard drive was gone, save the hospital bills, and rebuild the G5 on my own. It'll cost me about $600 to buy the lost programs. If I didn't do this, then over 200 hours of work on projects would be lost. Ironically, I just became a proud father of the full CS3 master collection, which took two tries to load on my G5 last week. Now I am getting slapped with another hefty fee to get my other software package. Karma works that way, and the ying of the yang of it will be that owning these programs will pay for themselves at some point in the future.

More to blog in the near future...