Ah the joys of a clean office...

or at least, that's what I told myself today as I scrubbed my office from top to bottom in preparation of the bosses arriving. Winter is nice at work, since my immediate supervisor and the married couple at the top head to Florida to tape the teaching material that we edit the rest of the year. The pace of life slows down during these months, and while life at Lakeland isn't the most stressful existence in the world, these months from January to June are cherished.

So now, after working all day on cleaning my office, I have to say that things look pretty good. That's not to say that everything's perfect, but the extra papers have been thrown away, the dust has been vacuumed up and things have been put in as proper a place as they can be.

I set up a separate area in the office today to record voiceovers in. My Dual Gigahertz G4 is primarily a graphics box, and the Dual 1.25 is my editing machine, but I had a corner of my office that was being unused. It's not unused anymore. I took a cassette deck that didn't really have a place, and wired it up underneath a Mackie soundboard that didn't have a place, then ran a microphone to the mixing board and the output of the board to this MAudio MobilePre box that we bought for mobile audio production in January. I have to say that it actually works pretty slick. There's a 15 foot USB cable that spans from the audio area to the Dual 1Ghz which let's it be in it's own area. I like a clean workspace. Having everything bunched up doesn't really serve that very well.

I've still got to figure out what to do with our hard drives. When we originally bought our editing stations, we decided it was cheaper to buy firewire drives than build a RAID. It worked really well, but now we've got a collection of twenty or so firewire drives that are sitting on the other side of the office hooked up the Dual 1.25. I'd love to buy a couple of
THESE
I've got a nice rack that our AJA IO is sitting in along with a couple of old decks, and it would be nice to mount two of these into the rack. In a single swipe, I could wipe out twenty drives and have more space in two. Sounds nice.

Ang sent a Bass to a friend from one of the mailing lists she was on in exchange for postage that never seemed to come. We forgot about it, writing it off, and were pleasantly surprised the other day to see the $50 worth of postage show up. Since we've paid our bills this month, we decided to use it to check things off "our list". So, in a period of 30 minutes or so, we added the following to our DVD collection...

Capturing the Friedmans

X2

Vanilla Sky

Heist (which I'm anxious to see. I missed it in the theater, and I've always been a big fan of David Mamet)

Under the Tuscan Sun (Angela's mom is coming for the Memorial Day weekend, and since her parents are in the process of splitting up, we figured that Under the Tuscan Sun might appeal to her.) It's not a great movie, but Angela and I both enjoyed it when we paid a $1 to see it at the discount theatre. Can't beat .50 cent Tuesday.)

Lost In Translation - Angela's choice. I liked Lost In Translation, or more appropriately, I liked BILL MURRAY in Lost In Translation, but it's a nice little Tone Poem of a movie. It's a little movie, and sometimes that's a good thing. There doesn't need to be an explosion every five minutes, and sometimes being restrained can be as artful. Restraint is something I try and practice in my design. I have various levels of success in this. Most of the time, my exercise in restraint stays restrained, but within the restraint is quite a bit of complexity. Other times my restraint is a complete failure and it's a mash of everything.

I'm soaking in the cleanliness and quiet right now. Angela should be heading home from work, so I should leave too, but with a little bit of music on (right now it's from the Desperation CD by the worship team from The Mill at New Life) and my reorganized workstation I'm having a hard time getting off the Aeron. I wish there were a way to record atmosphere. Sure, you can record ambient sound and even shoot video of a scene, but it's hard to near impossible to capture the feeling inside that the atmosphere is creating.

Anyway, I'm blathering. It's more cleaning tonight as we prepare the apartment for Angela's mother's arrival. Life is good.

Bri