Saturday, August 27, 2005

The Atlantic Film Festival's 25th

This year is the 25th anniversary of the Atlantic Film Festival , which is held in Halifax, Nova Scotia every year in September. It’s a great, friendly festival that is big enough to have a great selection of films, but small enough that you’ll get to know lots of people during the festival. I’m lucky because we’ve been able to integrate attending the festival with teaching people to make films, so attending the festival, seeing films and networking is part of my job. It’s one of the best times of the year and I’m hoping that this year I’ll see as many films as possible and I should be able to see at least 43 films (including shorts) in the 10 days of the festival.

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Saturday, August 20, 2005

Carolyn's Mac mini

The Mac mini is a very neat machine. Carolyn's PowerBook was near the end of its life and it was becoming difficult for her to do much work with it, so we decided to buy a Mac mini as it was relatively cheap and would let her do everything that she needed to do. I found a refurbished Sharp flat panel monitor so we ordered it.
It arrived in about a week and everything seemed to be overpackaged. The computer is beautifully designed and is elegant as is the box that it comes in, but that box was packed in foam and two other boxes! So it was a huge box filled with packing material and other boxes.
The computer itself is almost impossibly small and quiet. Setting it up was very easy and simple and we used the setup assistant to move all of Carolyn's stuff over. Her account, applications, mail, preferences, and documents all moved over without a hitch.
The only odd problem was when we connected to our wireless network and everything got strange. For some reason the new computer disrupted our whole network. The network would be there, disappear and then reappear. A similar thing happened when I reinstalled OS X on a machine, so I figured that there was an update that I needed for the Mac mini to bring it up to speed. But how to connect to the network, since I didn't want to unplug the mini and all of the other stuff to move it to the router. What I did was shut off Airport on the mini and share the internet connection through FireWire on my PowerBook. It worked and after the update everything is working very well. Aside from the networking trouble at the end (which I think is a problem with our router) it was a painless experience.
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