No Test Track for Daddy Clay

It’s pretty quiet here at the DadLabs WHQ. Just me and Aaron the intern holding down the fort. At the moment Daddy Troy and Daddy Brad are doing doughnuts in the center of Ford’s Test Track in Dearborn. As part of a press junket, the car maker has invited mom and dad bloggers to the test facility to demonstrate their latest safety equipment. They guys will be taking spins in Volvo S80s and Lincoln MKZs.

The freaking test oval? I’m the car geek in the bunch, yet here I sit, driving my iMac across the information superhighway.

How did this injustice come about? I burned up my travel chits last week by heading to the iHollywood conference in San Francisco. Plus the car maker could only accommodate two representatives of this esteemed media organization (budgets a bit tight? weird). So what do you think? Did I get the good deal going to SF instead of Detroit? Bear in mind that I was mostly sitting inside the Moscone Center..

I can’t wait to see the footage. There’s a pretty high statistical probability that Troy will get in an accident and Brad will get a ticket. Those episodes should be hitting the site in a couple of weeks.

Sorry, Honey, But No More Pictures

I tried to update my system last week and was informed by my computer that my hard drive was full. 150G just isn’t enough any more. I had no idea what could possibly be the culprit here. My whole iTunes library is a measly 12G. My iPhoto trove of over 5K photos is just 26G. How have I managed to fill up a drive?

My old friend and nemesis: video. More specifically, unedited video. Not really all that much: a few school performances, a couple vacations, and birthday parties that had been loaded from the camera but never edited. Of all the people that should understand how this stuff consumes memory, it should be me. I work in constant danger of being crushed under the weight of a hard drive avalanche here at DadLabs.

So I went through, hacked a bunch of things together, exported quicktime movies and dumped all the original footage. I got about 15G back for all my efforts. And a rather nostalgic trip back through time. That part was fun.

But I also realized that I am shooting less and less video of my kids. A few clips now and then on my Canon Elph, but mostly I like stills and slide shows more than videos. Dispensing with the irony that my work is making digital video, I wonder why this is? Somehow, to me, childhood is more poignant, perhaps more palatable to a nostalgic parent when captured in a still photo. My digital video camera is gathering dust.

Getting their voices preserved is worth getting at least some video. And I really treasure the few little narrative “movies” that I have made with the kids, but overall I have to say that I much prefer stills. What do you think? And why do you think that is?