October 25, 2005

Last night I did something for the first time in my 37 years of existence on this planet. I sat down and watched an entire episode of “Star Trek: Enterprise.” I know the series has been cancelled and unfortunately I couldn’t watch it during it’s original run so I’m relegated to reruns on the New York NBC affiliate on Sunday nights, but I figured it was a good way to get acquainted with the series. One of the reasons that I wanted to see the show was to see what effects they used for the transporter sequences. I know that the transporter is rarely used during ST:E, apparently the crew is hesitant to use it since this series occurs early in Star Trek’s history and the technology is apparently new, but the week’s episode featured transporter use and I found the effect and accompanying sound effects to be way cool. Very retro with an updated look and sound, not overly glitzy.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but back when “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” was filming, I sent a hand-written letter with accompanying storyboards to Paramount describing how the transporter effect should appear in that movie. Remember, this was 1987 or so, before massive adoption of the internet and web browsing and all that, and I can’t draw anything to save my life, so drawing out these storyboards was quite an undertaking. Surprisingly, someone at Paramount did write me back (though I’ve long lost the letter) and said that they would consider my idea. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen it used. I guess I’ll have to recreate it in Apple Motion 2 with myself as the subject and post it to my Video Gallery someday.

This past weekend I downloaded some trial versions of Adobe software to mess around with, mainly GoLive CS2 (for web page design and development), Photoshop CS2 (I currently use Macromedia Fireworks) and Adobe After Effects. I have to tell you that aside from GoLive CS2, I didn’t like using these programs at all. The thing I noticed right off the bat is that installing the software slowed down my PowerBook a lot. Is that normal? Even if the programs weren’t open the computer ran slower. Booting up my PowerBook seemed to take forever. Once I completely uninstalled the try-out software, my PowerBook returned to its old self. I was a Microsoft fanatic for many years before crossing over to the Mac side and I must say that I do not miss the experience of “installing” software. I like the Mac stuff that you basically just drag and drop into your ‘Applications’ folder. It just seems tidier. If there’s a reboot involved after installing the software, there’s a good chance you’re going to have issues.