Another tool for the bag
2nd July 2009

Childhood memories
This weekend, as I walked around my former elementary school, McEbright Elementary, I was aware of a number of feelings. Feelings of nostalgia. Feelings of joy. Feelings of sadness for innocence lost. I wanted to keep these feelings alive because I thought that they would make a great project. Certainly, I didn’t want to slow down the process by writing. It’s too cumbersome.
I had been thinking of purchasing a digital recorder. So, I went to the only place that I was pretty sure would be open on Sunday morning, Walmart, and purchased a Sony 1 GB digital recorder for about $60 USD. It’s compact, very easy to use, and has a number of features to make organizing one’s thoughts fairly easy. You can organize your thoughts into folders: A, B, C, D, E.
After I made the purchase, I came back to the school, got back into the mood, walked around the playground, the building, and recorded my thoughts and memories. All through the rest of the morning, I simply pressed the record button to record any thoughts that I had. It’s a great way to take notes, etc. of those great, yet fleeting, ideas that you have along the way. I think that this will be my constant companion from now on.
When I returned, I sat down and, as I worked on my book and listened to the snippets that I had recorded. It was fantastic way to recapture those on-the-spot feelings that often soften and even disappear after a very short time.
The downside to this particular recorder, as well as other Sony recorders, is that it is a proprietary format and has only Windoze software available for it. There is no Mac equivalent that I have found. I did see a post on a forum of a work-around. Plug the output of the recorder into the Mac and record it directly to the machine. Yeah, it’s digital to analog to digital, but at least it will be captured on your computer. Also, I found in that same post that Olympus recorders are Mac friendly.
I can say that I would have bought an Olympus, if Walmart would have had them AND I would have known about the Sony Windoze-only issue. However, it’s not a show stopper. I’m glad that I bought it. However, I could have saved about $20 by getting a 512 MB model.
Another non-photography tool for the bag. I think that I’m now officially multimedia! ![]()
Posted in Photography, Spirituality | 8 Comments » : 54 views



