One Hour Photo
February 19th 2003 -
One Hour Photo
I really didn’t want to see it, but Anna dragged me along last night to the mooovies to watch One Hour Photo. And, surprisingly, it was good. I was expecting it to be a “Hand That Watches The Fatal Attraction to the Cable Guy at Cape Fear”, or such-like, which had been strongly implied by the ads. However, the film itself was done almost entirely from the Photo Guy’s point of view, showing him as creepy but a better-developed character than your common or garden psychotic. Apart from an unusual dropping of the ball at the end – no, not what you’re thinking – I enjoyed it muchly.
Spit
I worked a bit more on getting better copies of the Spit demo stuff on-line, but progress is slow and frustrating. Grr. The portable minidisc player only outputs through the headphone jack. I recorded the entire album as a wav file, then as I was cutting it into individual tracks, noticed that the background hiss levels were much higher than I’d have expected. Listened back to the minidisc. Fine. Really not sure what was going on – possibly a mis-match in impedence – so I grabbed the proper minidisc player, which has a line-out. The levels on it are just that *little bit too high*, it’s very frustrating. I had tot turn the OSX input levels down to the minimum, and it is still perilously close to topping out.
Problems are compounted by the fact that sound recorders for OSX are way dodgy, not that they’re any better for the PC. All I want to do is record and be able to hear what I’m recording, so that I know the levels aren’t too harsh. The biggest, most irritating thing of all is that minidisc recorders really ought to have digital outputs, but don’t because of stupid bloody copyright protection laws. I have perfectly legitimate uses for minidisc recorders, but I am artificially constrained to a stupid Analog -> Digital -> Analog -> Digital scheme.
Anyway, I gave up in disgust after an hour or so of trying to get things working. I’ll try again tonight.