hmatt's blog

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.
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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.
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Okay. Time to clean up some of this mess at my place now.

New Show Idea – 45mb, 5m22s
Vlog #57.

or

Yesterday was terrible. I fell asleep and slept most of the day away. Yikes! I don’t know how people can love naps so much. They are so tempting and erase one’s time so frequently. *ugh*

I’ve been working on a new video, but my camera battery died, so I’ll have to finish editing it later. Things I noticed:

-My apartment is completely silent, until I am about ready to record video- then my neighbors play their music super-loud.
-My camera needs to be replaced. Sometimes when I press record the camera begins to clean the tapeheads- which ruins whatever video I was trying to record. Someday I’ll upgrade to a new HDV camera so I won’t have to deal with tape issues- but I vowed not to let not having the right equipment stand in my way.
-I still need to work on memorizing my lines. I wrote the script and I still forgot what I was supposed to say.

I took the metro to work today. I’ve been waiting to buy a pass and had a slew of misadventures while trying to do so.

I wish I’d done this ages ago. The metro line isn’t that far away and the trains are probably always on time.

Coming home the train was packed. No one looked happy. My original plan was to write on the bus, but I didn’t have much elbow room. Listening to my ipod was a second idea, but I’d likely go deaf trying to drown out the ambient noise. I’ll have to invest in some noise reduction headphones.

I’ll have to brew some other commute activity. It is sure nice to save gas money and not have to worry about a parking space..

I just have to remember to move my car all the time to avoid getting a ticket via a time limit or sweeper visit.

http://www.physorg.com/news145514544.html

I think futuristic stuff is truly fascinating.

I’ve known about the Production Manager on IMDB for a while, and I assumed he lives in Los Angeles. However, there is a THIRD Matthew Hirsch in L.A. according to Facebook! He’s in college apparently.

Hmm, I wonder if he was the one that the DMV thought looked like me when I first moved down here and tried to get a license.
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At work I go by Matthew so as not to be confused with the other Matt at the store.
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Professionally I guess I’ll have to remember to go by my full name. At least Ray is quick to write and easy to say. I don’t like the way “Matthew R. Hirsch” sounds. It interrupts the flow of the name and also sounds like I’m speaking poor english.
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You’d think having the domain name with my name would bring me up higher on google ranking, but I get beat by the lawyer in PA and the Physics guy in MA.

A while ago I went through all my files and created this sub-system to keep things organized. I had the internal hard drive on my Macbook 74gb, an Iomega drive 465gb, and an old seagate 279gb for backup.

However, all my files were in the same place. I’ve often wanted an offsite backup for files in case my place was robbed or something.

I finally bought another hard drive. I moved absolutely everything on that 465 g-drive and I run my os off of it too. Hooray! All my eggs are in one basket & have time machine turned on for safety in case of hard drive failure.

I’m also going to backup my super important files onto that old seagate and mail it to my parents place.

It takes a LONG time to move all these files around. Plus I took several minutes figuring out how much space I have and if everything would fit to the places where I need it to go. After several pieces of scratch paper and textedit documents I figured out a plan. Now comes the job of organizing all those files so it all makes sense. An all day job.
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I also bought a puppet. I won’t get him until the 18th, but that gives me sometime to write some puppet sketches. Oh, the goofy ideas I have. = )
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Later tonight I’m going to a BBQ and I’m performing improv. Fun times.
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I’m compiling all of my todo items too. I’ve been so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the projects I’ve started and I’ve not done much to get the ball rolling. I tried setting deadlines yesterday, but I got sidetracked. Today I hope to set deadlines.

Ha ha- I’ve just set a deadline for my deadline.

I just saw the Nov 5th show and it wasn’t that funny. It almost felt like the last episode of a tv series.

How will they be able to make fun of a administration who isn’t as incompetent as we’ve seen for the last 8 years? Where will the jokes come from?

I was pleased they too noticed Oprah leaning against some random guy at Obama’s speech. Oh, and how completely ridiculous the media was– a hologram?

What bugs me most of all is that it wasn’t even a real hologram! The guy was just staring at a blank space and the video was put in via like they already do with green screens. Now if it had been a real laser hologram.. that would have been something. = )

Oh media.. how I despise your misinformation and inappropriate stories.