Nina Lewis

Archive for December, 2008

My soul is giddy with technology glee.  Very giddy.  That’s because I discovered the application iTalk for my iPhone.  It is a free application — but it can be upgraded to the premium version for only $4.99.  There is a very small, unobtrusive ad at the bottom on the free version.

This application is about the most simple way to make an audio recording that I have ever used!!

You use iTalk to record with your iPhone and then you download the recording to your computer using iTalk Sync.  Once your file is in iTunes, convert it to an MP3 file and upload to your file server.  Then, it’s ready for all your adoring fans to listen to.

Fast.  Easy.  Cheap. If you have an iPhone . . .

And, the quality is really good!  Take a listen.

Podcasat about the iTalk application

This recording was done on the highest quality level. I think it sounds pretty dandy, if you ask me.

I’m off to play with this app some more to check out the quality of a recording done on the good level.

My sympathies go out to all of you non-iPhone users!

I just finished the very interesting book Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years.  It is about Sadie and Bessie Delany, two Negro women who came from a prominent Negro family in North Carolina.  They became career women and racial pioneers:  Sadie, the first African American woman to teach domestic science (home economics) in the State of New York; Bessie the second African American woman dentist licensed in the State of New York.

The chapters alternate between Sadie’s and Bessie’s point of view.  It’s fun to see the different versions of the same incidents.  You get a good perspective of their lives, their family, and what life was like for them doing things that women didn’t normally do in the 1900s let alone African American women!

Imagine:

• having a family creed that centered on self-improvement through education, civic-mindedness, faith in God, and ethical living.
• telling a drunk white man to leave you alone even though you knew you could be lynched for doing so.
• doing the dental work on prominent Black civil rights leaders.
• taking speaking lessons to get rid of your Southern accent so it wouldn’t keep you from getting a teaching position.
• being Black and moving into an all white suburb.
• doing yoga even though you are one hundred years old!
• living to be 104 years old (Bessie) and 110 years old (Sadie).

Imagine that!

I highly recommend this book.  It’s an enjoyable and an easy read.

What happens when an 82 year-old mother, a younger sister, and a husband is coerced . . . er . . . encouraged to make a video to wish far away family members a Merry Christmas?  This is what you get . . .

Travel back in time with me circa the mid 1960s.  My father, who normally had his pictures processed as 35 mm slides, came home with a new invention. (For my sarcastic children who may be reading this blog, yes, we had electricity and, yes, we had indoor plumbing at the time . . .)  This new invention was a Polaroid camera.

Sunday after church, Dad would shepherd us outside to stand in front of the pink climbing rose bush.  Dressed in our Sunday best and our hair curly from sleeping with pink sponge curlers wound in our hair, we shyly grinned (yes, I was, and still am shy, contrary to popular belief) while Dad snapped our picture.  We huddled around Dad eagerly watching our picture appear.  It was magic.

Fast forward to this year. I just found out that Polaroid is shutting down its film manufacturing lines and abandoning the technology that made the company famous. No more instant film.  Living in a world with digital cameras and phones that take pictures, am I surprised?  No.  Am I saddened?  A wee bit.

My grandson will probably never see a real Polaroid picture.  He might not even know Polaroid pictures existed.  This little bit of photography history might fade away (as did the Polaroid pictures over time) into oblivion or be relegated only to museum displays about the history of photography.

Please.  A moment of silence to honor the passing of such innovative technology.

Thank you.

However, to preserve the ‘look’ of Polaroid pictures, you can download a free software from Poladroid (did you catch that clever name??) that creates Poaroid like pictures.  Like these:

It’s a fun little application to use. And did I say it was free? It is available for Mac OS 10.4 (and later versions) with the Windows version currently in alpha testing.

Maybe if I create enough of these pictures and save them, then Spencer will understand about Polaroid pictures.

Maybe.

I recently came across this quote by William Zinser, author of On Writing Well.  Said he, “There’s not much to be said about the period, except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”

I mentally reviewed my writing.  Each word is a precious child that I cling to forever and ever.  Pull out my four-generation family group sheet and I can show how each word is related by blood and sweat and tears.

Then, I wondered if my writing was like the freeway last Saturday during the snowstorm– snow packed roads, cars out of control slipping and sliding and crashing and bashing.  Do my words slide out of control over the page?  Crash and bash each other?

Maybe I need to be like a vulture and pick strips of carrion* from my writing and leave naught but the desiccated white bones of nouns and verbs.  Maybe I need to arrive at periods sooner than I am wont to be.  Not pellmell lickety split dashing through a sentence but maybe with more poste haste than normal.  Maybe.

That book has been on my to-read list for the greater part of my life.  ‘Tis about time I read it . . .

*carrion - dead and putrefying flesh (pretty good noun to describe the fleshy parts of my sentences, eh?)