I Am An Editing Whore with Crappy Computers

Devin recently realized that he can't keep the blog up on his own, so he enlisted the help of his trusty friends. I am one of those friends. There are three of us in total, and with three people posting, you can look forward to more regular blogging, more interesting stories and opinions, and a more schizophrenic narrative on the web.

What I'd like to write about today is a source of much frustration to me, and to many people in my situation. I am a poor college student who wasn't given a computer of her choice before she was sent off to a venerable institution of knowledge, so for the last four years I've been stuck using the junky school computers and substandard hand-me-downs. For example, I was just given the computer I'm writing this on by my parents. It was originally bought in 2003 to serve as a teacher's computer in the local school district, but that teacher was forcefully retired after throwing an orange at a student who pointed out that he really never would use algebra after that class. So my dad, the school's computer teacher, refurbished it (code for deleted all the teacher's files) and gave it to me. That is the story of how I got the newest computer I've ever owned.

This is actually an upgrade from the computer I was using. That was a laptop from 1999 that ran office but didn't connect to the internet, and which had no working keyboard. I really used that one as part of a computing team, which included a desktop which would connect to the internet, a first-generation mac book which I use to edit movies on, and a TI-89 calculator, which probably had more memory than all three computers put together. I also used a suite of thumb drives to save everything on. There were two 2 GB ones that served as hard drive and back up, and one 264 MB one that served as working thumb drive that I could carry around with me. In addition, I had a keyboard to connect to the laptop that ran word, and speakers which I plugged into whatever computer I was using at the time, or into my music brick, a second generation iPod with 10 GB of storage, and a body large enough to flatten mice with. All of these components together created a force which would make my computing power equal to that of a single, up-to-date computer circa 2001.

With this new laptop though, I've been thrown three years forward, and am now more powerful than I've ever been. Mwahahaha. Or at least so I thought until I realized this computer doesn't have word, or any Microsoft office application. That's the main reason I'm working on this blog, rather than on the research paper I intended to start tonight. However, I still have a better computer than the two boys who work on this blog, which brings me to my second point; I am an editing whore.

You see, Nolan, Devin, and I are all very fond of making movies. Some of them (all of them) may not make sense, but we still like making them. Devin bought himself a sweet camera, so we can shoot them without lugging around my clunker camera which records directly to VHS (yeah, it's that old), but none of us can afford a computer, thus the need for me to keep my old Mac around. It would be pretty nice to have, except for the fact that it has almost no memory (remember the calculator remark? I wasn't kidding about that). There's less than 2 GB of empty space on the whole computer, which means I can only edit five or so minutes of video at a time. That kind of sucks, but luckily none of us are thatambitious, so it's been fairly easy for us to keep our video projects to five minutes and under.

The reason I'm an editing whore is that since I'm the only one with a computer that has a reasonably good editing program on it, and because I'm fairlyOCD , I am the only one allowed to touch the computer, and therefore the only one that can edit our movies once they've been put on tape. Even ones that Nolan and Devin come up with themselves. I bet it's really annoying for them to have to have my opinions, views, and ideas forced onto their creative projects while I scream at them to not touch anything in my apartment because their hands are grimy, but until they pony up for their own computer, they'll have to learn to deal, because with a computer team this size, I don't have the sanity to pay attention to much else.

Until next week,
The Girl