hmatt's blog

• I found the funniest way to update my twitter post. http://www.twoogie.com/ – Brilliant. #

Hello everyone.

I was trying to think of a fun name for next year’s resolutions.. and then I came up with Matthew Hirsch Projects (or hmatt projects). Projects like “hey let’s go do this” and/or Projects like “Hey can you hear me back there?”

So what are the 2009 projects you ask? Good question.

Well 2009 is the year I REALLY start auditioning for stuff. I had hoped 2006, 2007 or 2008 would have brought that.. but I didn’t make a big push. Deadlines yo.. That is how stuff gets done.

A lot of other goals lead up to this: take acting classes, memorize monologues, perform for friends, read plays…

Then there are things I’ve been wanting to do for AGES- Take photos every day, take a red bus tour, go camping, take a hip-hop class, go to a dance club, go to someplace as a character.

These goals have been taking a backseat, but I hearby declare that I’ll keep up with all these things. I will assign only ONE goal a month and totally commit to it. I may have certain deadlines within that month too (like mini-assignments). Oh man, it shall be so fun and a challenge!

Now to lay out my projects..

Hooray! Someone did a choose your own adventure on youtube!

I wanted to do this a few years ago, but it was too difficult to write the story. I spent a lot of time writing up index cards that connected to each other.

Why isn’t there a free, easy to use program that allows you write interactive stories? It would be wiki like and have the ability to connect back to different pages.

Alas though, I haven’t found any program that does this quite yet

I have finally found a clean, flexible, and easy to use database program for my iPhone. It cost $10, but it has everything I’ve been wanting in an app… complete customization, able import and export data.. so awesome.

I can now delete several apps on my phone because this will replace so many of them!

I have, I think, all the receipts I’ve ever received still sitting in boxes with me.

Why do I have them? Well, at first it was for tax reasons, but I also like to reflect on the past. They remind me of the adventures I’ve been on throughout the years. However, after visiting my parent’s house and seeing all the paper I have there too, I decided it was time to find ways of getting rid of it all.

I have a flatbed scanner, but I don’t like to use it because it takes so long. I have to place each piece of paper in and then do a prescan, and then highlight the part I want, and then do a real scan.. and it takes a long time.

Enter the NeatReceipts scanner. I bought it through Costco for $150 and they have the mac software available on their site. When I opened the box I saw how incredibly small this is! Plus it is USB powered!

I wish I would have bought it long ago. It truly is a small, fast little scanner that will allow me to trash my old receipts!! Plus it can do single full-size pieces of paper!

I told myself that I wouldn’t start scanning until after the next video with Gil was posted up, but I couldn’t help myself.

I scanned a paper bag full of reciepts already! It is really quick. You put the receipt in and press a button and it feed through. As soon as it passes you can put in the next one. The processing is done in the background. It takes the info, makes a PDF document of it and then does OCR to type what it thinks the reciept says. The OCR does a REALLY great job too!

They’ll have new mac software soon I hear, I can only see this getting better though! Ah, finally I’ll have a life with less paper taking up space!

Grr.

I was so tired this evening, as soon as I came home I fell asleep. Now my schedule is all off. Doh.

Dude.. what happened?

I had all these goals and I keep letting these months fly by. Pretty soon the cycle will start again and I will write more New Year Resolutions.. etc…

Well, no use dwelling on what could have been.. My goals are being revamped right now.

I went over to trusty 43things.com and took out a lot of my old goals.. either they were worded to never actually accomplish, or I changed my mind (like Weho living and getting a dog.. at least for now).

There are many passions that are merely embers in my being and I am about to light the world afire with those passions. I’m adding the kindling and the logs to keep this fire bright!

So it begins..

My crummy camera always takes blurry photos. Instead of worrying about I’ve decided to make it a design choice. = )

http://flickr.com/photos/hmatt/tags/blurred/

I should probably experiment with other types of post-photo editing, but I already procrastinate when posting pics. I don’t want to give myself another reason to wait to put my pictures online.

Well, that was quite the visit home.

Earlier this year my grandmother’s house caught fire. All their remaining stuff was sent away to get cleaned and boxed up. The day after I went up there was the second day they’d been in their new house. Wow. It was surreal. From the outside it looked the same, but all the rooms were completely different, and the only thing that looked remotely the same was the whitewashed basement. Wow. Crazy man.

Anyway, I spent a lot of the time helping them get everything back in order as soon as possible. I took all their ‘too sort’ stuff and put it below. Things like books, cook books, papers, photos and VHS tapes. That stuff I want to go through at some point because there are several home movies that I want to convert.

As for photos I had this plan. I wanted to show my grandpa how to scan each photo. Then I saw how many, many, many photos there were so I looked up a service to scan them for us.

Fortunately many exist, and I went with Scanmyphotos.com – I bought three boxes for $250 which will get me 3 dvds of scanned pics. That isn’t counting the ones that are still in albums that I need to take apart.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I’m probably the only one in our family willing to do all this work. However, there are no ‘backups’ of those memories and I want to make something that will allow all those pictures to be preserved.

I didn’t want to get these scanned pics (at 300 dpi) mixed with everything else, so I had signed my grandpa up for a flickr account. This way I’ll have a backup, with tags of us all. Hooray!

It will take me years to complete though. This first phase was all the loose photos, and next time I visit will be to take apart the albums.

The rest of my trip was trying to reduce the amount of junk that has accumulated at my parent’s place. I’m part of the problem there as I have 30 plastic bins with books, toys, memorabilia, tshirts and papers. Ugh. Such an overwhelming task.

Now that I’m back at my place I’ve been all inspired to clean up my place. I am starting to accumulate all sorts of paper trash that I hope a NeatReciepts scanner will fix.
—
My grandmother was in the hospital for surgery to get a metal rod in her leg so she could walk around (she has cancer in her leg). The last time I saw her was in bed waiting to go in.

I’m so grateful that my grandmother was able to be such a big part of my life when I was younger. I was lucky to have such a wonderful childhood.
—
Okay. Time to clean up some of this mess at my place now.