November 19, 1998
Dear Everyone:
We finished watching all four
Records
Management software presentations last Thursday.
That’s eight hours’ worth of demonstrations, all of which tend to
look alike after a little while.
So I had video
tapes made of all of them, plus the discussions that took place in
the afternoons. In all, I
had six tapes at the end.
I’m having copies professionally made so that we
can send them to certain people who couldn’t attend the meetings, thus
convincing them that their input counts for anything (just kidding,
again). But, since getting
four sets made would probably take all of this week, I wanted to have a
“convenience set” made for myself, so I could get started on really
dissecting each product as soon as possible.
Therefore, I bought six new tapes last weekend.
I took the old
VCR in
the east bedroom and brought it into the west bedroom, where I connected
it, via a handy set of cables, to the combination TV-VCR.
Now I could play a tape on one VCR and record it on the second
VCR, thus making my very own copy.
(This is perfectly legal since we told the vendors we would be
making copies and they said OK and could they get a copy, too?)
The tricky thing about this tape-to-taping is that
you can’t use the remote controls.
If you tell the VCR on the left to play, using the remote, the
VCR on the right gets the same message and starts playing when it should
be recording. Instead, you
start the tape on the left, and only use the remote to get the tracking
correctly set up. Then you
manually rewind the tape on the left.
When it’s ready, you press PLAY on the left while simultaneously
pressing RECORD on the right.
Keep it straight, or you’ll lose what was originally recorded to
the “snow” on the as-yet-unused tape.
Now, since it takes two hours to record a two-hour
presentation, I would go downstairs and use the living room VCR to catch
up on deferred viewing from the week before.
Part of the way through zipping through a commercial break, I
suddenly thought, “Gee, I sure hope the VCR upstairs isn’t zipping
through two minutes worth of the presentation right now.”
Apparently, upstairs and around the corner is far enough away to
block the signal from the remote.
Although, there are times when I would have the
same show playing in both bedrooms (and downstairs) while I puttered
around cleaning house. I
noticed that turning “Mute” on in one bedroom would sometimes do the
same in the other. Tricky
little devils.
So now, I have ten hours of tapes that I can view
whenever I have time to work on this project.
And I’ll have lots of time next week, since I’m taking some
vacation along with the
Thanksgiving holiday.
(No Letter next week.)
Movies...
Finally got to a movie with “Jeannie” last weekend.
Meet Joe Black
is a remake (again) of
Death
Takes a Holiday. The
idea is that Death has come to our world in order to find out what all
the fuss is about. He
selects William Parrish, played by
Anthony Hopkins,
as his guide. Parrish is
something of a cross between
Ted Turner and
Mother Teresa,
a media mogul with a heart of gold.
Hopkins does a superb job; but then, he’d do a superb job of
reading the phone directory, too.
Death, introduced by Parrish as “Joe Black”, is
played by Brad Pitt.
“Jeannie” says any awards should go to whoever dyed Pitt’s hair
“surfer gold”. It hangs over
his eyes like a puppy dog’s.
Pitt does his best to look wide-eyed and innocent, but generally comes
across as just not quite there.
He starts out with a kind of arrogance that comes from knowing
nothing can touch him coupled with the fact that he really doesn’t know
the system.
But he catches on fast.
Soon he is romancing Parrish’s
daughter and discovering the joys
of peanut butter.
When Joe finally realizes what love is, and that sometimes it
means making sacrifices, the arrogance slides off a little.
Or maybe he just cut back on his medication.
Whatever.
Pitt is still cuter than a bug’s ear, the movie has a surprising
number of laughs in it, and Hopkins gets what every actor dreams of:
A three-hour death scene.
Try it, you’ll like it.
Love, as always,
Pete
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