One Trick Pony

… sat on the park bench like bookends. Well, we’re not that old yet but it was great to see Don Gettner today for the first time in 4 years. We’ve known each other since 1972 when we worked together at WPI. Everyone around us was questioning and reinventing everything about engineering education. Lots of excitement, lots of experimentation, and a whole lot of drinking.

We dined at Lotsa Pasta, where I wolfed down the timpano. This amazing dish was apparently reverse engineered by watching the movie Big Night.

It’s great to know someone who anchors a memorable part of your life, and to connect with them well enough that you can talk about the here and now and not just rehash the past. I’m lucky to have a half dozen friends like Don that go back 30 or 40 years. It helps keep a life in perspective.

Uh oh… just realized something. Though he’s a luminary in his field, Don has carefully kept himself fairly invisible on the web. Thanks to this blog, though, Google will soon know where he was on the night of June 7th. Old creditors, girlfriends, and subpeona servdar”are now one step closer to tracking you down now, Don. Sorry!

I’ve been waiting for someone to come out with something like this: the Virtix Pan and Scan Filter for iMovie. For $20 you can now create DV movies by scanning in still images and then telling this plug in to pan across the still in any path you want and optionally zoom in. It’s the same technique Ken Burns used to bring the Civil War to life using tons of still images. What a great way to transform an old photo album into something more interesting, or to go beyond the usual PowerPoint presentations by kids. I want it. I also want two weeks with nothing else to do. And a pony.