The Big Think

Yeah, there’s a lot of pro-Apple stuff here. Can’t help it. When you use a great tool, you want people to know. According to this Wired article by Leander Kahney, Apple’s brand is ranked first among American youth. Not the first computer brand, not the first gadgetry brand — the first brand, period

Apple rereleases the 10.2.8 OS X update. For real this time.

“What we do for a living should be an inevitable consequence of who we are. What we determine to be should strongly influence what each of us decides to do to earn a living. Furthermore, we are only kidding ourselves if we think we can earn a living in a way that contradicts the kind of person we want to be.”
Tony Campolo Everything You’ve Heard Is Wrong, p. 25

Busted my palm pilot yesterday. I guess it finally couldn’t take all the travel. It’s an original PalmPersonal with only 512k of memory and an old style screen. The screen cracked down the middle and the only thing holding the glass in is the touch-sensitive membrane. The membrane sort of works, but often registers touches at the wrong place (i.e. tapping on a specific name in the contact manager will often generate unpredictable results). I’ll be able to salvage all the data as soon as I dig up the old cradle.
It was a loyal little box and I carried it around on my belt every single day for about 7 years. I guess it’s time for a replacement. This unit currently comes closest to my dream PDA except I’d like to have 5gb of iPod-like storage for MP3′s (okay, I’d REALLY like about 80gb for MP3′s and photos). Still, carrying one device instead of two would be great. I’ll probably just get a $50 refurbed neo or something similar for now.

Wired magazine has an article about how modern laptops are getting fast enough for musicians to work on the go. 7 years ago I had to spend $3500 on a top-of-the-line Mac with enough horsepower to do serious audio editing professionally. Nevermind video editing – pro video editing on anything less than a hundred grand was still a ways off. Today, the bottom-barrel new Mac is much, much faster than necessary to do just about any kind of audio work I need to do. And my 2 year old laptop handles most things I throw at it. I recently did a spate of audio editing from my laptop and had great results. And now most computers are capable of the kinds of bandwidth required to do video editing (see the story below for how NBC is using laptops to edit Scrubs).
The upshot of this is that companies like Avid Media are feeling the pressure from low-end editors that are starting to eat into the high-end business. If I can spend $1,000 to get pro-level editing software, and run it on a $1,300 computer, why spend $45,000 on an Avid? Granted, there are still a few things that the Avid can do that Final Cut can’t, but most people never need to touch those features. People who cling to their higher priced tools because they claim the bourgeoise tools aren’t ‘pro’ enough are fooling themselves. Or trying to justify four figure loan payments. Whoops.
The good side of this is that the tools are opening doors for all sorts of people who didn’t have the opportunity to tell stories and create media in the past. The bad news is that competition is forcing prices and quality down. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, however, as the cream still rises to the top and the good clients are still willing to pay for quality. It just adds motivation to turn out work in the “quality” bracket, and motivation is always a good thing.

“We became beta testers for Apple to see if it was capable of doing what we needed it to do — it worked for us and we felt comfortable making the switch for this season.”