Of Miles Rausch

Super Gr8mm!

Well, Mac­Book is back. For those of you who don’t know, here’s the story. Last week, on Tues­day, I woke up as usual. I went to my Mac­Book, and I turned the screen bright­ness back up. Or, at least, I tried. It was unre­spon­sive. So, I tried var­i­ous trou­bleshoot­ings: close lid, hit space­bar, hit enter, hit eject disc, hit key­board in frus­tra­tion. None of those worked. I finally decided to hold in the power but­ton to hard restart it.

The sys­tem went black. I waited a cou­ple sec­onds, then I pushed the but­ton again. The first sign of trou­ble was that the hard­drive was click­ing. That is never, never, never, never a good sign, and it’s usu­ally a sign that you should have backed up your data about three min­utes ago. After a long boot period I finally get some­thing to show up: a blink­ing folder with a “?” on it. I’ve never come across that with my Mac, but I’ve used com­put­ers enough to know what it meant. It meant a trip to the MacDoctors.

Well, when they finally got it back to me, they gave me a new hard­drive (unable to get data off the old one), fixed a crack in the top panel, and replaced a gouged delete key. All of which was cov­ered under my war­ranty. Fur­ther­more, I had backed up a lit­tle less than a month before, so things were pretty much all good (which some strange quirks and some miss­ing data, but, oh, well). It was nice to start over.

My other super news is that I bought a Super8 cam­era on eBay. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s the most pop­u­lar film cam­era ever invented. Basi­cally, it’s a home video cam­era that was afford­able, light­weight, and good enough for most fam­i­lies in the 60s, 70s and 80s. If it was all that then (and if infla­tion works the way I think it does) it should be mega-cheap now! Well, that’s not quite the case, but I don’t think this whole process won’t be too cost prohibitive.

For those who do know what that is, you’re won­der­ing “Why?” Well, I’ve been read­ing The Filmmaker’s Hand­book, and the book does a good job of con­ver­ing video and film cam­eras in the begin­ning. The book made me think of all the advances made in tech­nol­ogy, and that I feel a lit­tle less like a film­maker and more like a video­maker. So, I wanted to get dirty, and now I am.

To my fur­ther ben­e­fit, after win­ning the auc­tion, Holli dis­cov­ered that her Dad had his Super8 cam­era and splicer (used for edit­ing film or putting a cou­ple small reels into one big one) and pro­jec­tor. The pro­jec­tor has a prob­lem with the back reel, so when Holli and I checked out an old home video of the Gregg fam­ily, I had to man­u­ally rotate the back reel the whole time. All in all, I’m excited to find new and excit­ing uses for this old and bor­ing equipment.

Easter was decent. Holli had to hous­esit over the week­end, so I was fly­ing solo to Big Stone where I’d spend pretty much all of the week­end with Tony, who’s fam­ily also left him. Sue had an Easter brunch at her place, which was excel­lent. Tony helped me film, which included him say­ing, “I’m direc­tor, right?” every three min­utes. Then he got tri­pod envy. I man­aged to con Sue into help­ing out, too, and she let us film in the school. Easter means a lot of Gui­tar Hero, a lot of church, and a lot of dis­cov­er­ing more strange things about Hogan.

Check out the Super Gr8mm Pho­to­set.