Entries from July 2006 ↓

The church bells rang out at 10 this morning at St. Ann’s Catholic School.  Julia, John and I are at our new park (Jose Marti Park) on the Intracoastal, which is adjacent to St. Ann’s. We’re moved from Welly World, we’re far from unpacked but today feels like it could be a regular day and that feels like a good thing.

Today, we’ll watch The Open on TNT, we’ll unpack a skosh and we’ll whip up a killah web site for Rob’s hurricane window business. At least, I’ll move it along to the next level. The winds are up today at the Beach and the prevailing wind is uncharacteristically cool. Sitting outside without benefit of a shade tree at this time of year is akin to suicide but today it’s NOT. It’s lovely.

Mum and Neil have shuffled off to Copenhagen and left behind them a wake of Muesli and Tea. The house is different without them of course and we will miss them both. It was a nice visit and I’m so glad that all my kids and Shannon got a chance to be around them and vice versa. I’ll upload some pics from the visit shortly but for now time is too short for photo editing and the like. What are some of the highlights? Watching the Space Shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral on July 4th as we cooked hot dogs on the bar-b-q. That one we’re sure to remember.

Mum and Neil are visiting right now from Australia and we had a great time over the last week watching The Long Way Round. It was one of those communal experiences where we’d all gather around the TV and sit watch, and talk with each other about the fascinating events as they unfolded. Who said TV couldn’t be interactive!  I guess it depends on how good the content is and what you put into it.  It was the second time watching the series for Shannon and I but it was no less interesting. It was great to watch and see the reactions of Max and Charlie and Mum and Neil.  Max was very keen on it and he said that it was hard to wait for each evening when we would gather around the tube. He wanted to skip ahead when we were all asleep and watch the whole thing, being the nocturnal teenager (15) that he is, but he knew it would be better if he waited and watched it with everyone else. It’s just one of those nice memories that I know I’ll look back on fondly from this visit.  Our time together is growing shorter now and I can feel that unfortunately the visit will come to an end soon. There is never enough time with these long distance visits to pack in enough ‘visiting’ and this one is particularly short since we’re so busy getting ready to move.

Dad and I were talking yesterday about blogs and some of their communication characteristics and what makes them valuable. One of the things I love about my Dad that makes him truly unique is his ability to connect history with current events and topics in a highly entertaining and educational way. I reckon that he honed his oratory skills as a college lecturer over 20+ years and that’s why he does so well with it. On the other hand, his style wouldn’t get him anywhere if he didn’t have all that interesting content to go along with it. If you want to hear a ten minute snippet of this phone call just click on the Odeo link below and listen on your computer.

I just started a family wiki using the Wetpaint wiki service over at http://www.2gude2btrue.wetpaint.com/page/Home in the hopes of capturing family stories, pictures and maybe a podcast or two. For now, the contributors will be my cousin Jeanne Taysom, my Aunt Pat and my Dad Lorenz.

We’re moving Saturday July 15, 2006

We’re very excited to be in an old historic Spanish style house (1930) in the El Cid neighborhood just north of where we used to live in Prospect Park when we were on Westminster Rd. We’re about 1/4 mile from downtown West Palm Beach and just a block away from our beloved Intracoastal waterway. House has a lot of similarities to Pat’s old house in Alameda which makes it quite comfy. Mum and Neil will be helping us move before pushing off on the next leg of their world journey. At least they get 5 days in the new place to know what that’s like before they take off.

If you saw my previous post on Odeo you saw that I was going to use them for podcast recordings. I went through all the testing and found the setup to be very easy. The instructions on their site VERY clearly and emphatically state that you must hit the pound key on your phone when using their phone recording feature or the recording won’t save. I got my interview started, rang up Odeo and got the recording started (the tone telling me the recording was on came through loud and clear). I had a beauty of an interview, and VERY carefully hit pound at the end of the phone interview to save the recording and….nothing. Nada, Zilcho. I hit pound about 5 more times before acknowledging that I was done. I hate Odeo. Did you know that Odeo (actually Odiar = to hate; Odio = I hate) in Spanish means HATE. Shannon, told me this a few hours after I stopped screaming my hatred for Odeo around the house (this lasted for a few hours). If only I knew before I used their service.

Lesson learned: use a good old fashioned analog tape recorder backup if you’re going to use a digital solution. I should have done some more testing as well. Reporters say they always take physical notes as a back-up, even when they’re recording their interviews – this is clearly why.

P.S. I contacted ODEO tech support but they couldn’t rescue the recording. Big surprise.