Sept. 13, 2001
Welcome to the 5th year of the David Files. Kind of nuts that I've been doing this for 5 years now... Anyway, sorry for that massive break in writing. It think it's been close to 6 months. The delay was largely caused because I didn't have my address list when I was at school in Norway or in Japan this summer. When I got here, it took a couple of weeks to get my computer up and running, and then I had to sort through over 500 email addresses to get my address book put back together. The letter has a new look... Yes, I know... it's still black and white with a bunch of text, but I've kicked out the "table of contents" part. To me it started looking kind of dumb... hmm, and commenting about it seems even dumber... oh well. Unfortunately it's not exactly on a happy note that I get to kick off this next "season" or whatever you want to call it, of newsletters. I began writing this last night, when I was suddenly interupted by my brother Brent saying, "Come quick!" I was just thinking "What has he done now?..." It didn't take long to realize that it was not something Brent had done to his computer, or some cool new thing he had figured out for his thesis. You should all know by now about the terrorist attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. It's hard to imagine that 5 or so people could take over planes with at least 40 passengers on board. You'd think the 40 would be able to overpower 5 men armed only with knives... But I guess nobody knows for sure what really happened onboard those planes. Please pray for all those involved. The families that lost loved ones, those who are trapped under the wreckage, and those who have been injured. I just hope God can pull something good out of all this. I feel kind of stupid to go off onto a "lighter" note, but I'll do it anyway. I know I've tried to do this several times before, but I think I might actually be able to pull it off this time. I'll be putting up a new website. The URL is www.geocities.com/davidmuir_2000/ I'll tell you all when it's up an running in full. As of now my old uncompleted site is still there. It has photos from Habitat Trips to the Philippines, and from Nojiri. Unfortunatly most of the links don't work, and I haven't quite figured out why... The new site will include a new photo gallery. I've got a digital camera, and I've taken 100's of pictures. Don't worry. I'm not putting all of them up. I have a feeling that most of you don't want to see my 50 picture collection of pictures of trees and grass.;-) A copy of this newsletter will also be going up on the site. I have also started doing some video editing. I've currently finished a 3 minute ski/snowboard video teaser. It will also be going up on the website, as soon as I find a compression method that works nicely. So far everything that I've used except for DivX interlaces the picture. Unfortunately it doesn't compress enough for web use. Anybody know what other codec I can use that has a higher compression rate that doesn't interlace? So far I've tried a dozen codecs, but nothing seems to look good. Uhh... never mind. I just figured it out... The video is a first of a bunch of movies I'm making. All brought to you from Mountain Valley Productions, and brought to you by The Four Stooges. If you've never heard of these companies, then it's probably because they don't really exist... hehe. You can download the teaser from the website now. All of you who know me, know that I have difficulty with staying in one place in the world for a long period of time. Well, right now, I will most probably be living in the same place for an "extended" period of time. Whatever "extended" means, I don't know. What I do know is that it means longer than usual... hehe... So where am I right now? Beaconsfield. Good luck finding that in a world Atlas... Basically, Melbourne, Australia. Yes, so that means I am no longer in Norway, but I would like to go back there sometime soon. Throught the next few weeks I'll try to give you all an idea of what I've been up to for the past 6 months.
Tootles, David Muir