Patience - something we believe we all possess to some level, and as I have gotten older, I believe I am very patient in comfortable situations and extremely impatient in not-so-comfortable ones. Guess that pretty much goes for everyone as well, but sometimes you realize that you need to be just a little bit more patient - and tonight, I learned it from the Internet.
Yep, the Internet - that treasure trove of content and information, gossip and news - the things life is made of. I turn to the net for most everything - and sometimes it astonishes me how sometimes it takes the web for you to see what is right under your eyes.
About a week ago, I learned that a cruise ship which docks in the Port of Miami was detained for over four hours due to a child’s belt that looked like a grenade - stopping all operations, departures and arrivals. I actually read about it on the BBC from the UK about an hour after the incident was over. Nothing notable about that, aside from the fact my apartment overlooks the Port of Miami and directly at the cruise ship to which they were referring and I had no idea anything was awry. It took me discovering a story on European website, via the Internet, to see what was, and I’m not joking, right outside my window, 15% off the side of my monitor.
Now, you must understand that having Biscayne Bay in Miami, including the port of Miami, two causeways including the main causeway to and from Miami Beach, the American Airlines Arena, Carnival Center and the Miami Herald as a view - I see and hear a lot of things. Helicopters are a regular thing - as are the planes who fly overhead as they go into the Miami International Airport. The Coast Guard boats are fun to watch, as are the helicopters with the spotlight on when they are looking for who knows what sometimes at night. But that day was clear and beautiful and I was not only inside a floor-to-ceiling window, I was out on the balcony itself, even closer to the ships, at least ten times. But it took the Internet from a server half way around the world for me to see it.
Okay - so tonight - it happened again! Well, not the same thing, but something similar. I am helping a friend with a project to import some old television footage from the late 70s from a DVD someone captured them to, then overlay them with a new ‘enhanced’ audio track. I was attempting to get the content off the DVD to re-edit the tape into segments to create a real DVD of the footage, with the new soundtrack, as well as publish the individual titles onto YouTube.
Figured I could ‘capture’ from the disc. No go. So, okay, I’ll just navigate my way to the disc and open the files on there - they are MPG files deep inside anyway - and it complained it wasn’t a re-writeable drive. Okay, so I guess I will copy the VOB file over and see what happens then. So, after copying the 1GB file from the disc, about 10 minutes had passed and I was busy searching the net for a solution the whole time. Found about 10 programs you can buy if you want to import content off a DVD - but I’m more stubborn than that - this is the age of freedom and information sharing - and I was going to find a solution.
Found out how to import into nearly every application in the world - then realized I should narrow my search down to the application I am using - Pinnacle Studio 11. Viola! There it was in a discussion about the features of the newest version of the application - which specifically allows you to import VOB files directly. Great.
So, over to the other PC I go, click on “File,” “Import,” and was off and running at the races. So, just another reminder that often - the answer is right under our nose. We just have to keep our senses finely tuned and observe everything.
