{"id":538,"date":"2003-03-31T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2003-03-31T20:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lee.org\/blog\/archives\/2003\/03\/31\/3-31-03\/"},"modified":"2006-04-03T23:49:12","modified_gmt":"2006-04-04T07:49:12","slug":"update-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/2003\/03\/31\/update-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I spent an afternoon and <strong>dinner at the home of my old G&#038;T teacher<\/strong> , Cassie Lewis and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.photojordan.com\/\">John Jordan<\/a> on Saturday night. The company and food was soul-freshening. An image of Cassie&#8217;s fantastic lemon meringue pie being held out to me still lingers on my mind like a gentle dream. I think that the entire evening revolved around that piece of pie. The bread and cheese, the intelligent conversation, seeing John&#8217;s orchid photos, cutting red, yellow and orange peppers, laughing about Sally&#8217;s taxes, the wine, listening in on two interesting conversations at once, admiration. A fantastic evening!<\/p>\n<p>I just got a callback from Assemblywoman Connie Myers about my letter concerning the <strong>YES Network <\/strong>(see Journal entry for 3-10-03). :-) She tells me that she was already opposing the bill and values my opinion. :-) Thanks for the callback, that&#8217;s very stand-upish! In the (boring) continuing struggle between the YES Network and Cablevision, talks broke down on March 28th, so it looks like we won&#8217;t be getting -any- YES network. Actually, the dispute won&#8217;t have a direct impact on my family. We&#8217;ve been planning to switch to Direct TV for a few months. It&#8217;s cheaper and the picture quality is better. Dish Network is less expensive still, but they don&#8217;t offer YES Network at all. [insert confused head gyration here].<\/p>\n<p>I just read <a href=\"http:\/\/espn.go.com\/mlb\/news\/2003\/0328\/1530781.html\">this article on ESPN<\/a> where YES stopped simulcasting a WFAN radio sports program for 45 minutes because, mostly due to a minor scheduling issue, the president of Cablevision was going on the show before the YES Chairman even though YES asked to go on first. What friggin babies! &#8220;If I can&#8217;t go first, then I don&#8217;t wanna play!&#8221; Remember &#8220;Everything I Needed to know I Learned in Kindergarten&#8221;? The article was originally reported in Sports News Daily concerning the &#8220;Mike and the Mad Dog&#8221; radio show.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.syntrillium.com\/cep\/\">CoolEdit Pro<\/a> <strong>to convert a bunch of my aunt&#8217;s older records to CD<\/strong>. The digital filters on this thing are sweet. After just a few minutes of configuring (and figuring out what all the pretty buttons do) I was able to run one filter to eliminate clicks &#038; pops. Then I configured my own custom filter to get rid of some hums (likely from the turntable motor and\/or a power supply). Filtering takes about 2 hrs per 30 minute album side; overnight batch processing to the rescue! The restored tracks sound just about great! I&#8217;m a little unhappy that the sound right off the record is a little muddy. That might be due to an old needle, or maybe that the records are like 20 years old and have been well enjoyed many times over that period. I know that chasing that beast could take forever so, you know what? They sound pretty darn good!<\/p>\n<p>Ha! I got the .mp3 settings adjusted just so. The .mp3s are indistinguishable from the originals but only take 0.5 meg per minute&#8230; 15 meg per album side&#8230; 25 albums per CD! The entire collection will fit on one CD! Wow, you&#8217;ve come a long way, baby! I&#8217;m encoding at 64kbps mono. The albums are in mono, I considered sticking with stereo to keep the &#8220;fullness&#8221; of the sound but after carefully listening to some, the only thing I could hear in full stereo on the vinyl were the skips! I also thought about doing simulated stereo but that doesn&#8217;t do too much for opera.<\/p>\n<p>I just wrote a review of some software from Eric Berntson&#8217;s company, Clonesoft. It is very practically named, <a href=\"http:\/\/download.com.com\/3302-2347-10139412.html\">&#8220;Customize Folder Shell Extension&#8221;<\/a>. If you run Windows and use File Explorer, you really want this software. It&#8217;s the bees knees! Get it!<\/p>\n<p>Today&#8217;s fun statistic: According to American Greetings, <strong>Women ages 35 to 55 purchase 92% of all greeting cards<\/strong>. So you know how your mom is always better at sending cards than you are and she always rails you about it? Well it turns out that she has a decided advantage, she&#8217;s genetically predisposed to purchase cards! Source: Baseline Magazine, March 2003, p. 44.<\/p>\n<p>Comment []<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent an afternoon and dinner at the home of my old G&#038;T teacher , Cassie Lewis and John Jordan on Saturday night. The company and food was soul-freshening. An image of Cassie&#8217;s fantastic lemon meringue pie being held out to me still lingers on my mind like a gentle dream. I think that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-notable"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}