Goodbye Sir Arthur

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Wednesday, March 19. 2008 in Personal

Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed away Even if all he had ever done was "2001: A Space Odyssey" then his reputation would have been well deserved. But in addition to being an exceptional writer, he was also a true engineer and visionary. He was also, by all accounts, a humble, nice man as well. A number of ASF friends and associates, while attending the Sri Lanka Open Source conference a few years ago, were actually lucky enough to meet Sir Arthur, something that I am still jealous of to this day. He is one of my favorite authors, someone who early on sealed my fate as a SciFi addict. Although I'm not a collector of books, I do enjoy owning them (it's just the difficulty of finding storage space for all of them), and I most likely have more ACC books than any others. One of my prized possessions is a signed copy of Sir Arthur's "The Lost Worlds of 2001". I shall miss his talent.
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Audio

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, March 14. 2008 in Personal

In my spare time (yeah, right!) I enjoy using my Macs to play around with various forms of digital media. I've spent time moving pretty much all of our home videos to iMovie, and using Lightroom to organize my digital pictures. I've created DVDs for people and slideshows and I have a great time doing it. But lately I've also gotten quite involved with audio. Partly it's due to my and my sons involvement in the Maryland State Boychoir, and also due to my middle son Tim being in a few "bands". But also it's due to the Mac making it all so easy, and the fact that you can do great things with a very, very small budget. Behringer in particular has professional equipment at really affordable prices, especially their Podcast Studio Bundle. It really is quite amazing that there are so many opportunities to be creative, and scratch that gotta-make-something itch, whether it's code or a CD or a DVD. And, as always, I love my Mac.
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Change

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Thursday, March 6. 2008 in Personal

I weep for a populace that is so eager and hungry for change, that experience and substance are secondary to simple, constant pronouncements. Certainly with the country in the shape that it is, both domestically as well as internationally, we need someone who can be President, not just talk it. BTW: I am a Libertarian, but here in Maryland you can't vote in primaries unless you are registered under one of the 2 main parties, so I am registered as a Republican. But neither party is where my allegiance is.
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Holiday break

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Sunday, December 30. 2007 in Personal

It's hard to believe that 2007 is just about over... My hope was to take a nice, relaxing, offline break during the holidays, but for one reason and another, it all didn't work out as expected (mostly in the "relaxing", as in stress-free, and "offline" aspects). But then again, I did kinda expect that as well. So the expectation of not achieving the expectation was expected, if you follow me... There was one thing I wanted to do that I did find time to do, and that was to better organize all my digital photos (a relatively small number but growing quite quickly), as well as digitize all our family videos into iMovie. Next on the agenda is scanning in a huge slew of old slides that we have hanging around, but that will likely proceed on an as-needed basis. One of our goals for the new year is to really add lots more photos around the house, which is nice because it not only make the house even more of a home, but it gives me the excuse to indulge in 2 of my hobbies: woodworking (for frames and shelves) and digital media (the latter being relatively new). As the kids get older, having more and more "on display" pictures around the house seems almost required. This also gives me the chance to lay around with Lightroom a lot more. But even with not being able to pull away from other things as completely as I would have liked, it's been a nice holiday. We had time to share with friends and family and had a really perfect Christmas day... and that's something to be very thankful about.
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Priceless

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, December 21. 2007 in Personal

So earlier today we were setting up our nativity scene. It's a special one to us, because I actually purchased it from a small little shop in Bethlehem (the Bethlehem... you know, the one in the Middle East) back when I was US CTO for Zend. Anyway, we're setting it up when Andrew, our youngest (he's 9) says, "Hey. How come Baby Jesus has a full head of hair?" I had no idea how to respond... But Andrew was right. He does.
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