Today was a fairly productive day, mostly but not entirely tech-related. First Georg and I went to the Durham Farmer's Market. We hadn't been over there since they moved into the new building, and I must say I was impressed. It's a lot bigger than I remembered with a good variety of vendors. We bought tomatoes, fresh garlic and Chapel Hill Creamery cheese. There were booths selling pork, beef and goat, and we thought long and hard about trying some goat loin. But we decided that we wanted to look up recipes first, and also bring a cooler with us if we were going to buy meat.
Back home Georg weed whacked down by the road and got about half the bank done before the weed whacker gave out. Weed whacking out there is really hard work, and it looks so much better. Meanwhile I mowed the lawn. The mower has developed a distressing tendency to stall over and over. We just replaced the battery and we're concerned that it may be something more serious. It would stink to have to replace the whole mower right after investing in a new battery.
Wait, I was going to talk about my techie day, wasn't I. I'll save the gardening for another post. Okay, so I spent some more time with MT4. I like it a lot. The only glitch so far is that plugin with all the date functions doesn't work in MT4. Dates seem to be handled differently now. In older versions, there was just one "entry date." Now in MT4 there's a "creation date" and a "publication date." Which is a good change, I can imagine reasons I might need both pieces of information. But it means that this date plugin needs to be rewritten.
I wrote to the plugin author and asked him if he's planning to update it. I'm sure he is; he already posted on his website that he's working on an update to the RightFields plugin. (which I also use, & which is much more critical to me, so yay for that.) In the meantime I set up the new site in the old version of MT, where the date plugin works great. I still want to play around with MT4 and I think I may go ahead and move this blog over tomorrow.
After that I set up Skype. It took me a little while to get the headset working -- I didn't realize at first that I had to tell both my system and Skype to use the headset, not the computer's built-in audio -- but then it worked great. I don't know anyone on Skype so I couldn't make a real call, just a test call to their testing line. But I did that and recorded it with Audio Hijack and the sound quality was really good.
The purpose of all this Skype stuff is to record a telephone interview so I can play it on the air. I think this setup is going to work. I'll have to pay Skype some money (it's free to call another Skype user, not if you want to call a real telephone line) but just a modest amount. And thank goodness I didn't have to buy a headset. That would have been more expense than I want to take on for this one project. The headset I borrowed is really nice too.
While I was fooling around with Skype, Georg took on the heroic task of moving the couch and vacuuming behind and under it. After that neither one of us felt like cooking, so I got takeout from the Q Shack. I love their cobb salad. Where else can you get a salad with a mountain of brisket and smoked sausage on top of it?
It reminds me of this ad I heard on the radio a few months ago. (Don't ask me why I was forced to listen to commercial radio, that's beside the point.) The ad was for light beer, but it pretended to be an ad for a chain restaurant salad. It was a taco salad with a pound of ground beef, bacon, cheese, and sour cream on top of some lettuce, all in a taco shell. This booming male voice, the kind you would expect to hear in a beer ad, said "Is it good for you? Of course it is! It's a salad!" The point of the ad was that drinking light beer would allow you to gorge yourself on something like that, and still pretend you were eating healthy. Or something. Anyway I think of that ad every time I get a Q Shack cobb salad. Is it good for me? Of course it is! It's a salad!
After dinner I did some work on the massive archiving project. Which is going pretty well. After that marathon session last weekend I decided to spend a little time on it every night. I'm trying to get 8 CDs -- two pages in the book -- done every night. I skipped last night, so tonight I did 16. It's mostly easy to print up the label cards, but occasionally I hit one that iTunes doesn't recognize. Then I have to listen to each track to find out what it is, and then search that artist's catalog to try and figure out the album title. That's kind of a pain. But so far I've only encountered one I couldn't identify at all. It was by Al Bowlly and the Ray Noble Orchestra. I really liked it, and I hope I can find out what it is.
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