TriState > Blogs - On technology

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Posted by: tristate	8/7/2008 1:19 PM
As young as I am, I think I’ve crossed over to “old-school” designation. Remember a few issues ago, I lamented throwing away all my old cassettes? All those mix tapes I labored over through high school and college. Well, this week I gave away my 6-disc Onkyo CD changer. I realized I will never put in 6 CDs and hit random ever again. I have an iPod. Who has time to load 6 CDs? And who would limit themselves to just six artists? Yeah, I know. I make myself want to puke just by hearing me say it. Ten years ago it was the apex of posh. I’m wondering how old I’ll be when I say, “Stop, that’s enough, this is my last piece of new technology. Anything after this I choose to deny the existence of.” That’s a joke you’ll hear Senator Chuck Grassley tell when referencing his new BlackBerry. No more new stuff for him. This is it. I got my first external hard drive for editing video in 1992. It was the size of a box of DingDongs, held 8 gigs, and only cost me just shy of $1000. And I had two! Today I saw a terabyte external hard drive advertised. That’s a thousand gigs, if you’re counting. It’s the size of a VHS tape (remember those) and was less than $180. I remember Richard Varn, a well known Iowa-based techie guru and former state legislator, talking about terabytes when I was in college. I honestly wondered when someone would ever need that much room. I got my first terabyte drive about two years ago. My friend Jon Ellis and I used to joke when we first heard about the amazing 8 gig drives, that someday we’d fit 8 gigs in our pen cap. We were being facetious. Well, that day has come and gone. I have more RAM now in my laptop than my biggest computer had in total hard drive capacity ten years ago. And I have the oldest computer in my entire office, I think. How is that fair? Someone’s getting fired. (LIES: Dan’s is older. --Tim) I’m taking to computer geeks now. Who remembers working in Photoshop before layers? Or before vector-based text? Fuggetabowdit! Remember that text box where you had to basically guess what it would look like when it was rendered? Oh, how painful, just thinking about it. But that’s nothing. I used to edit video tape-to-tape. I’m talking action-packed music videos with hundreds of cuts. I look at the kids today doing digital video editing like it’s nothing and I want to shake my finger at them like a crotchety old man and shout, “Back in my day....” And I’m only 35! We had to log footage! Uggg! For highlight music videos of a full sports season, we might have 50 tapes (analog, of course), all logged by hand. And every edit was permanent. If your cut is two frames too early and you miss the beat ... screwed! If you mess up the control track in the middle of a video ... screwed. Kiss a generation goodbye. Remember generation loss? You spoiled little turds! You put in a tape, find your shot, set your in and out points ... that takes ten minutes itself. Then perform the edit and include any effects, dissolves, audio changes, titles ... all on the fly. Oh, I swear a blood vessel is going to pop in my head just thinking about it. How painful. Only we didn’t know at the time it was painful because it’s all there was. It’s like drinking powdered mild as a kid. You didn’t know it was cruel and unusual punishment. It’s all you knew. Video Toaster 2.0, you were great, but I don’t miss you a bit. Well, I kind of miss you, Kiki Stockhammer (Google her). The Toaster ran on the world’s best graphics computer! Apple? No, no ... Amiga! Whatever happened to them? Sorry, Jennifer Tigges, I know you’re hatin’ me right now, but they went the way of the Commodore 64 (who also made the Amiga). Who had a 64? I miss you too, Choplifter, Lode Runner and River Raid. Wait, that was Atari 2600. “All your base are belong to us!” So I’m lamenting, but I know there are those of you who have twenty years on me and don’t even have a clue what the heck I’m talking about, even though my complaints are already 20 years old. How must you feel? There was a time when telephones had cords and televisions had dials and you had to get out of the chair to change the channel. Or, if you’re my dad, you didn’t have TV but a guy in town had one. He was the first in the county to get it. It got one channel you could kind of see through the snow if you squinted just right. I know how grandma would get angry when the TV reception went screwy whenever grandpa started up the Minneapolis Moline. For a guy who went to college before the Internet ... well, before Internet with photos and HTML design, I have to wonder how much easier the things I do with technology will get in the near future. I know this much. All the kids who have mastered Guitar Hero will be kicking themselves on day when I’m playing a real guitar on stage and they threw away their old video game system. And while I wait for technology to make my job even easier, I’ve taken a shortcut. This issue of 365ink is the first one I did not lay out myself. 365ink Editor Tim Brechlin has stepped up to the challenge. So all those hours of work that make for a long weekend every two weeks are now Tim’s problem. Hallelujah! But he’s got skills and I know it’ll look great and just keep getting better. So, if you see him out there, tell him he did a nice job. And better yet, when you find an error in the paper ... TELL TIM! Hmmm? I just cut my workload in half and didn’t use any technology at all to do it? Now that’s old-school.

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