30 years!

We’ve been together 30 years this week. I lack the ability to adequately express what this occasion means to me beyond the hope for many more healthy years together.

Serendipitous conversations

A couple of weeks ago or more I had a short talk with Mathieu Arsenault about goal setting and how he structures the multitude of activities he is involved in. It wasn’t so much what he said, the brain is amazing in how it forgets everything you have learned in the past, but more the timing of the conversation, which has lead me to attempt to re-prioritize the activities I spend time on. Without a boss or employees I tend to spend time on work which though “very important,” doesn’t really help us buy groceries. I really love how serendipitous conversations can lead to all kinds of new insights.

I haven’t really found a way to fit my blogging and twitter activities into the mix but I’m trying to find a way to justify it (it feels similar to how I have been trying to justify buying a new running watch just because it’s on sale).


Apples broken audio

I wasn’t intending to update my Mac or my iPhone to the latest versions of the operating systems that were recently released. My greatest concern was with Xcode, as I have a renewed focus on development this month I didn’t want any hiccups from Apple’s recent software QA problems. Most I talked to stated they experienced no problems and since I saw the updates as an excuse to clean out old Microsoft apps and do some general file management chores, I went ahead and installed the updates last week.

Generally I’ve experienced no problems and nothing really interesting in the updates as a whole. Until I can have a natural conversation with my computing device, I doubt there will be much in the way of ‘wow moments’ from any of these incremental updates (though I do appreciate some of the small advancements with SIRI).

What I didn’t give any thought to was Apple’s consumer software, like Garageband, which I use to produce our podcast Sleep Tight Stories. Sleep Tight Stories, and the others we plan to launch, are only viable if I can produce them in a very short period of time. “If only I had more time,” is a determining factor in many projects. To this end I have created a master Garageband file that I use for each episode, which is tuned for our usage and the equipment we have on hand. The latest version of Garageband breaks this in a couple of ways:

– As the screenshot illustrates the timeline is completely out of sync, ignoring the first 10 seconds where there is a sound file.
– Anytime I place an audio file in the timeline it changes the speed of the file, making all the sound files I’ve licensed or created unusable.

So lesson learned. Rolling back to a previous version of the software does not work. But converting files to wave format does for some. Perhaps I will take this opportunity to try Adobe’s more capable software, which will also slowly remove my reliance on Apple for all my professional or semi-professional computing needs.