January, 2009:

Parris Island Graduation

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Yesterday I had the great honor to join my colleague in attending the graduation of the son of a friend. My colleague had himself graduated from Parris Island boot camp 22 years ago. It was a wonderful event and amazing to see these young men transformed. (One young Marine told me he had lost 40 lbs! He looked solid and healthy now, so I am guessing those were 40 lbs that won’t be missed.) I will put more photos on flickr when I get better bandwidth, but in the meantime here are two.

UPDATE: The photos are now up on flickr: Targuman.

Parade Rest

This Drill Sergeant was unbelievable, a caricature. His voice was like a rusty nail.

The Drill Sergeant was amazing, a caricature. His voice was like a rusty nail.

Photo: Hilton Head Island, SC

Jan 29th, 2009

by Christian Brady.

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This evening we are in Hilton Head Island and had a wonderful dinner at Hudson’s On the Docks. As we arrived the sun was setting and was gorgeous. Unfortunately I only had my BlackBerry for the photos, but that will give you a sense of how beautiful it was that its little camera could take such pictures.

IMG00109 by you.

IMG00118 by you.

Saving space – converting MP3s

Jan 29th, 2009

by Christian Brady.

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(This likley will not apply to most folks, but I have been ripping, converting, and moving song files back and forth for several years now. The amount of “legacy errors” that I have carried forward required some clean up.)

I just realized this morning, while playing with Smart Playlists in iTunes, that I had imported a number of CDs using “Apple Lossless” encoding. This meant that a song that in 192kbs MP3 encoding (which sounds just fine to my ear) would be 5MB was 35MB. Fortunately iTunes has a nice “convert file to MP3″ setting. Simply right-click (control click) on the song(s) and select from the drop down menu. NB- The “convert’ command is into whatever encoding that you have chosen in the iTunes preferences, so set it there first if need be.

After converting and deleting the Apple Lossless songs I saved 3GB! And that means a LOT more songs on my iPods.

In South Carolina

Jan 29th, 2009

by Christian Brady.

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Our plane finally arrived from Philly to remove us from the snowy valley of State College. We then had another 4+ hour delay in Philly before arriving in Charleston at 12:34 AM.

After a very long day of travel yesterday (landed well after midnight) I am in South Carolina for the next couple of days. I should have some time in the hotel to write which means I will likely procrastinate by blogging.