Computer time

So I spent most of the weekend in front of the computer.

I was getting regular phone calls from Matt detailing what was going on with Annabelle and Holly down in San Diego. I would then log in to update his blog so that all the friends and family could check in on their progress. One of those times when the power of the internet is really appreciated. There are so many people following Annabelle's story that telephone or even e-mail trees seemed insufficient to reach all the people in her circle. I'm sure there were many people leaving The Dawg Run up on their computers and hitting refresh every 15 minutes hoping for a new post and update. It was a blessing to get to talk to Matt so frequently. Annabelle really is a miracle in the making, and it was my pleasure to do my part to share the story.

When I wasn't on my laptop updating Matt's blog, I was in front of the new desktop starting work on the RAGNAR video. There is a contest for the best video, and the submission deadline is August 31st. I wanted to get started because I knew there was so much video footage and so many great photos to try to squeeze in. Even though it was a 30 hour relay, I think I need to keep the video submission to a reasonable 5 to 7 minutes. I will probably do a longer version for the year-in-review DVD so the participants can see more of the great pictures and videos from the relay.

Vista has turned out to be the memory hog it was billed to be. The video/DVD software was running incredibly slow, sometimes locking up completely. The computer came with 1 gig of RAM, and Windows Vista was taking up half of it at idle. The video software was too much of a drag to be supported by the remaining half. The new, faster processor was hardly being taxed as the flood of information was trying to go through the pin hole remaining in the Vista clogged arteries.

I found 4 gigs of memory on sale, so now everything is running much more smoothly. Even so, I needed to chop up the project into smaller bits as adding all the video files to one project overwhelmed the program. Just like wider highways will be ultimately filled with more cars, software will continue to grow to fill larger memory sticks and faster memory.