Interesting Technology

For Christmas, I got a 4 track portable digital recorder (Zoom H2) for field recording. It will record in both MP3 and Wave formats in stereo, mono, or 4 track. In addition, there is software to convert 4 track into 5 track surround sound. The main purpose for me will be to record live music. I used it last weekend at the Snow Hill Blues Jam and it worked great. It writes to an internal 2 gig SD card. I used 2 cards to record the whole 4 hours of the concert in cd quality wave format. Then I used a card reader to move the files onto my hard drive where I manipulated them with music production software and then burned them on CDs. For instance, there was a lot of crowd noise but I was able to use a vocal reduction feature to remove some of this low level noise without negatively affecting the vocals of the musicians. The unit is about 2.5 x 4 x 1.25 inches and contains 4 microphones, 2 on each side. By selecting 4 track, you can effectively record the ambience of the hall. Neat little tool!

liddy walk

liddy walk, originally uploaded by elebashdavidh.

This is Liddy, my son's American Pit Bull Terrier. She is a great dog and is very gentle and submissive around people. As you can see, Liddy is lanky instead of short and squatty. If you look at breed photos, you will see both body types. She does have incredible muscle tone. This picture was when she was about one and half years old although she doesn't look too much different now, other than being more muscular. She is definitely attuned to people. Pit bulls have a different hip structure than many other breeds. She often sits in a chair like a human (many pit bulls do this). She can also lay on her stomach and extend her legs straight out behind her. She loves the water, tug of war, and retrieving balls. She is territorial around other female dogs. She was brought up with cats in the household and gets along fine. She does have a strong prey drive for squirrels and rabbits and would also run deer if she was not always on the leash. I would not choose a pit bull for myself because of the widespread prejudice against them. Owning a dog should not cause stress, and because of her breed, I am always thinking about what could happen. When she was young, she would go next door and play with the kids on the beach at the campground. Children and parents always told us how wonderful she was but since she has grown up and the campground has expanded, it is not responsible for us to let her run. This photo was uploaded from Flickr.

Flickr

So far I have been unable to register for Flickr because the Yahoo registration screen has an error on it as of 10:00 PM. The dropdown menu for month for birthday doesn't work. I have emailed Yahoo about the error so hopefully it will be corrrected soon. I have created a trading card on a Flickr mashup which I can put up on Flickr once I can register. I spend a huge amount of time collecting images of boats, bikes, trucks, and I am looking forward to see what Flickr can offer.

Getting Underway

I'm finding it difficult to concentrate on the minimum required to complete 23 things because there are so many links that take you to interesting areas but are not part of the assignments. Another difficulty is that YouTube and other sites are blocked at work and my connection speed at home is not broadband. The first YouTube video took 45 minutes to download.

My first post

This is my contract for lifelong learning. I will learn whatever I want to! So there.