Benjamin Clark

Hrm, let's ignore the fact that I neglected this blog for the entire month of March. Time for one of my marathon bi-monthly updates in which I try to bring everyone up to speed with my goings-on.

In mid-March, I visited North Garden, Virginia, and spent the weekend with my grandfather. It was a very enjoyable trip, and since we don't get to see each other as often as we'd like, it was really nice to have an opportunity to catch up. I also spent some time with my uncle and his family, and visited with my grandmother. I'd also like to mention that I can't stop thinking of how good the home-cooked food was at a small restaurant named Lumpkin's.

The following weekend in March, I visited home (Venice, FL), and spent some time with my mom. I was tired from the traveling from the weekend before, but I wanted to head down there and be with her: March 24th was exactly one year since my father passed away.

My PowerBook's hard drive decided to die a few weeks ago. Fortunately, I had recently made backups to my external drive, and so it was a matter of installing OS X on my external drive and restoring from the backups. I lost some data -- mostly just iTunes play counts and I had to re-import some CDs I had bought -- but all in all, I was lucky that it happened when it did. I bought a replacement internal drive and found a guide to replacing a hard drive in a 12-inch PowerBook G4. It was a time-consuming process, but not terribly difficult despite what I had heard, and now I'm back up to speed.

I considered purchasing a new MacBook (or maybe something used from eBay) when the drive failed, but I figured it made more sense to hold on to this PowerBook for a little while longer. A new laptop -- or even a used one -- would be spending money that could be put to better use down the road.

Work is going well. I recently put some videos on our site from our past guest lecturers. WFSU comes in and records the lectures, and I've been converting them to Flash video (*.flv) and playing them on the web just like YouTube. (I'm using a custom shell script, dvdbackup, mencoder, and flvtool2 to make it all possible -- running under Ubuntu because I wanted to see what the fuss was [I'm a Gentoo guy].)

Technical details aside, we now have unique content available on our site, and this is a good thing. Here are some of the talks that have video:

• Murray Seeger, "Czars to Commissars and Back"
• Robert Merry, "American Exceptionalism: Pride and Pitfall"
• Lord Timothy Clement-Jones, "Fueling the Future: How We Can Secure Our Energy Supply"
• William Bicknell, "Public Health, Public Policy, HIV/AIDS and Africa: Who Should Die?"

And that's all folks! I don't know what else to write tonight.