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This chunk of metal has been my constant companion for the last year and a half, but alas, it shall be no more. My phone has died. Getting out of a taxi this evening, mid-text-message, I dropped it in the street, and it was finally one drop too many.

Our first week in Korea, Adam and I took a trip to Yongsan, Seoul’s huge electronics market and paid 100,000 won (about $100) for this used, battered, brick of a phone. It treated me well.

I can’t say the same for myself… I dropped it almost daily. Not long ago, I was running down the sidewalk, it bounced out of my pocket, and I stepped on it, skating a meter or so across the pavement. The phone kept right on working.

It has worn many ornaments that tell stories of my life here. My first cell phone charm still adorns it: a small piece of a stick engraved “Seoul Fringe 2006″ that I picked up in our first Fall, visiting the art festival of that name with our English Village friend Neville. We now live in the neighborhood where that annual art festival is held. Then there’s my “T Money” fob & finger leash that has paid my way onto hundreds of buses and subway trains all across the city. The “Mini” charm is random, but one of my students gave it to me to match his own cell phone charm, and it makes me think of my brother who drives a Mini back in California. The blue “Bourjois” charm was the newest addition, only a week old, that Adam just added as a joke, and I left it. A favorite charm that was retired months ago was my “Little Prince” charm to match Annie’s, as she and I became good friends like the Prince and the fox.

I’m not looking forward to the day or two without a phone until I can replace it, but I am excited about the prospect of getting a nice, new phone with a Korean/English dictionary and a subway map program. Woo hoo!

Oh, and if you’re trying to reach me this week, it would be best to email.

-Jessica

Cheryl came over for a tutorial on her new Mac.  Her Macbook has a fun program called PhotoBooth with the built-in camera…

Anime characters: Hiroshi Horsenose and Blinky Yakamura

whatchu lookin’ at?

somethin’ smells funny

Jessica G. Lofbomm.  G for giraffe.

sour grapes Biff.

I got my hand caught in a blender.

The cover of our neo-psychedelic album.

-Jessi

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q[/youtube]

I recently came across this incredible video on one of my favorite blogs, “Shlog” written by Nashville musician Shaun Groves, and I got involved in a mini debate in his comments section.

I have experienced this shift firsthand: Online, I found Adam, we found and later sold our cars, we found our house, our travel companions, many of our friends, and my job here in Korea. We keep in touch with family and friends all over the world though email, this blog, and internet phone. Adam is completing his degree online. We get all of our news online. We conduct business online (selling my CDs and Adam’s voice and photography work). We book travel online, we buy our music online, we buy almost everything but groceries online. Technology is such a gift.

However, Adam and I have been feeling the weight of technology lately. With the conveniences available to gain more information and complete tasks quickly and with a greater scope, the information, expectations, and “noise” are becoming exponentially greater. We feel guilty for not being able to keep up with emails and phone calls (no, you’re not the only person we’re ignoring).

Our generation has the gift of meeting and maintaining more friends because of the conveniences of CouchSurfing, MySpace, high school and university alumni pages, Skype, Gmail chat, email, blogs, the ease of international travel, etc. It’s just getting overwhelming, and this video reminds us that it’s not going to slow down.

Adam and I actually talked this morning about the ramifications of a year without any long-distance correspondence other than hand-written letters. We’re not going to do that, but imagine…

-Jessica

I haven’t really talked about my emerging career in voiceover here on the blog, but I’ve been doing it off and on for a while. I really enjoy doing it and it’s beginning to pick up.

I just signed up to be a voice actor in Voice123.com’s pool of talent. What they’re doing is really pretty cool. Essentially, they serve as an online middle man between voice actors and clients. Clients post their demos, voice profile and resume. Then, clients can search for actors that fit their desired criteria for a job they have. Sort of like online dating for voiceover.

To audition and bid on jobs, you just record an mp3 to their specs and email it. If a client selects you to do the job, you can either go to a studio to record it or (as I plan to do) record it right in your bedroom. You can audition for and do jobs for people all over the planet from anywhere on the planet.

With all of the content-rich media being produced these days and the fact that North American males are by far the most sought after sound, I’m in a pretty great position.

I love the way that more and more industries are being revolutionized by the networking power of the Internet. The ‘Net brought me a wife, a life in Korea, and now a fun career that I can do from anywhere in the world.

Anyway, you can check out my demo here.

You can also check out their main site here:

Voice123.com - The Voice Over Marketplace

What do the Lofbomm nerds do while on vacation? We go to our favorite coffee shop and sit silently at our matching iBook computers for hours, that’s what. Mmmm. We’re back in Nashville, enjoying the chai lattes and East Nashville atmosphere of Bongo Java. Mmm. Love it.

enjoy your day…

-Jessica

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=1xXNoB3t8vM[/youtube]

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=YgW7or1TuFk[/youtube]

-A.

Two days ago we had a hard drive catastrophe. I fired up iTunes and pressed play on the Party Shuffle. iTunes started hiccuping out the track and then up came the dreaded spinning beach ball, telling me wait since it was thinking really hard about something. This was not normal.

I waited for a bit and still nothing, just the spinning ball. Soon, the whole system froze up and crashed completely. Yuck.

I rebooted, which took ages. When OSX finally came to life, my external backup drive was missing from the desktop. ‘That’s no good,’ I thought. I ran some disk utilities (OSX Disk Utility & Disk Warrior), and came up empty handed. It seems there was a mechanical failure, as far as I can tell. Almost 220GB of trapped inside that dead drive.
Fortunately, it was my backup, so nothing critical was on it, but a couple of months ago I needed to free up some space so I moved my entire music library (over 60GB worth) over to the external drive. It was a highly rated FantomDrive and only a year old, so I felt pretty safe. The irony is, next week when we go home there is a 320GB Western Digital backup drive I ordered to backup the backup that just died. It could have waited a week and a half to die, couldn’t it??

I still have some hope. Once I have the new drive in hand, I’m going to try out a data recovery program for the Mac, DataRescue II, that I heard about. It’s a last ditch effort, but it’s worth a shot.

Anyway, this little scenario has woken me up to just how valuable (and fragile) data is, and how important a sound backup strategy really is. Right now, I’ve got four years of priceless digital photos sitting on my hard drive, vulnerable until I can back them up again. I’ve got the drive at home, but what if my iBook’s drive crashes too between now and then? That’s scary.

In comes JungleDisk. JungleDisk uses Amazon’s new online storage service, S3, to create a virtual drive that mounts on your system like a regular network drive. Instead of your data being stored in one vulnerable location, though, data on your JungleDisk is stored at multiple datacenters. Distributed, redundant backups- very good thing. On top of that, all data is encrypted, you can schedule automatic backups and space is unlimited. Here’s an excerpt from their site:

What is Jungle Disk?

Jungle Disk is an application that lets you store files and backup data securely to Amazon.com’s S3 â„¢ Storage Service.

• Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15¢ per gigabyte
• No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
• Your data is fully encrypted at all times
• Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
• Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux

So, I’m really tickled pink to find this. Paired with automatic backup to our external drives, JungleDisk will help us create a really simple, very safe solution to protecting our data.

This little story also reinforces the ideas I discussed in my Society and Technology discussion post the other day- high bandwidth internet has changed the game, and moving data and applications off the desktop and on to the servers can be really beneficial to the end users like you and I. Case in point.

-A.

p.s. Geek Notes: Is it fast? Speeds will be determined by the bandwidth of your connection, of course, and will vary, but I uploaded 225MB in a minute and twenty seconds today. That’s pretty darn fast. Also, to clarify- you only pay when you play…15 cents per month, per GB, and 20 cents per GB of bandwidth used. Phenomenally cheap. There’s no file sharing option or web access interface yet (like Xdrive), but there is talk that these features are forthcoming on their FAQ.

I just realized that Adam and I recently passed the three year anniversary of our first blog.  How romantic.  We weren’t even married yet, just newly engaged.  It’s fun to read back and see what we’ve gone through and how much we’ve grown.  What a good life.

-Jessica

Here’s a pic from back then…

Here’s a recent posting I made to a discussion in the Society and Technology class I’m taking right now at DePaul. Nothing highly novel here, just my thoughts on the future importance (and unimportance) of processing speeds.

Partly I’m posting this since I’ve been so dry lately on the blog front and figured it was time to say something. More coming soon, I promise.

Personally, I tend to agree with software developer and author Paul Graham that for personal computing and even a good deal of the business market, we will see an increasing move toward web-based applications. Paul goes so far as to say that in 5 or 10 years, most computers will be running not much more than a web browser on the local machine. He cites a number of advantages, among them that for the end user this model would be: “easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software.” On the back end there would be greater security, distributed backups, faster software development and easier update deployment. You can find his great essay (and others) by clicking here.

Using the Web 2.0 type applications currently available, one can email, calendar, archive and manipulate photos, manage projects, create and collaborate on documents and spreadsheets, read aggregated RSS feeds,and much, much more. Here’s a good idea of what is out there along these lines today.

OK, so what does all that have to do with this discussion? Well, I think that for the average computer user (with the exception of gamers that demand more and more power to run their virtual worlds), processor speeds will mean less and less in the next few years. Web applications do not depend on processor speed on the user side as much as they do bandwidth. Far more important to the end user will be processor miniaturization, but that is another discussion entirely.

However irrelevant speed will become to the average user, processor speed is still immensely important for professionals working with digital media production, and will continue to be so for a very long time. The only limit to the need for more powerful processors in those areas is the limit of human imagination and creativity, as far as I can tell. Artists will continue to push the envelope in terms of the definition and complexity they want to use in their films, music and art.

Also, as we rely more and more on information technology to make our world work on the large scale, processor speed will continue to be crucial for creating the infrastructure of the internet, banking systems, transport networks, medical facilities, telecommunications backbones and so on. A more connected world means more data. More data necessitates more power, plain and simple.

Overall, I don’t see the push for increased processor power to wane any time in the foreseeable future, though we should expect processor speed to decline as a key selling point for manufacturers in the next couple of years.

-A.

I don’t understand spam.  It used to at least make sense.  Spammers used to be very direct in trying to sell you something or get you to click on some naughty link.  But now I’ve been getting spam comments on my music website– almost a new spam comment a day– and they’re not advertising anything.  Unless it’s something subliminal, or maybe it’s tracking something.  Or something.  I don’t understand.

Around Christmas, there was a spam comment talking about how December 25 isn’t the actual day that Jesus was born and that in many countries December 26 is boxing day.  Yeah, okay.  That’s fine.  But what does that have to do with my music?  Nothing.  Then, I have had a string of new comments saying that I have a very interesting site, my site is “impeccable”, they learned much new information from my site, etc.  My site is a template, folks.  It’s nice, but it’s nothing special.  If you comment on my music site, can you say something like, “great music, Jessica” or “can’t wait to see you in February”?  I don’t understand.  I’m sure these are random spams, but why?  What is their malicious intent?  It’s so annoying, and I can’t tell what they can gain from it.  Can anyone shed some light on this?
-Jessica