After much research and scraping, bought a new windows workstation which I’ll use to cut the NGO gig; nice machine, fast Asus motherboard, nice graphic card, etc…problem is I’m a Mac guy and never owned a Windos machine, thus many quirks and annoyances…two hours spent trying to network them together til my eyes got sore from the screen, felt like throwing both into the bamboo pool…

Lots of stuff happening though, new gigs appearing based on the first one, which represents lots of cas$h if I get them. Paradoxically, I’m once agaiun down to my last few dollars after getting the machine setup, after getting my visa extended (another six months, in case I head up NOrth again to do something remote, want to have it already)…also offered a gig (tentatively) as a game producer for a reality TV show which will be shooting in Vitenam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.

The job of the game producer is to skip ahead of the rest of the crew with a technical sidekick and translator and set up the various games and challenges that are such an integral part of the realkity TV genre: decode the monk’s hidden riddle; swim the swamp to the nearby temple; swing from vines til you reach the amulet; wade thorugh a pit of vipers til you exit the labyrinth. Etc.

Anyway, many new giigs sprouting, but I’m still teaching and shall derive much needed bucks from the next paycheck as the cash flow dribbles to a halt–unless the NGO can make a new advnace before the rough cut is completed. Wasn’t poor planning really, just the back to back expenses of shooting and then setting up the edit system exceeded the estimate for the amount of advance money I’d need.

My BDay tomorrow. May my 37th year be less tough than the last, I honestly don’t think I can survive another year like the last one…

Now I take a brake from grading papers and listen to Robert Johnson in my lair:

“Correct the following jumbled sentence: We had replanted after the garden the walked through it elephant.”

Ah yes, almost as an afterthough. Had to separate the rough cut of Susan Hero in to four parts, since my laptop is still not fast enough to handle the whole thing otherwise. Making tweaks and sweeping through all the tapes from the first pass of digitizing in preparation of the second and last batch of tapes (another 16 hours or so).

My ultimate goal will be to migrate the cut from the Mac onto the more robust and faster Windows machine which is now running Premiere pro, and that will likely involved transferring via homemade network almost 200 Gigs of material from the Mac.

Fun fun fun. I think next time I’ll cut with film again for old time’s, tactile sake.