September 23, 1986
Spent much of today working on the logistical problem of how to get the footage from a VHS tape into the computer. I finally (tentatively) settled on photographing the frames one by one with a regular 35mm camera, getting prints made, then (after retouching as needed) digitizing the prints with a regular Sony video camera. It sounds like a pain but I think it’s the best way.
September 25, 1986
Another solid workday. Today I stayed till around 7 and got DRAY pretty much finished. I tested it out by digitizing a page out of Muybridge. It’ll do what I need it to do. It could use another day of work. Actually, I could keep working on it for a month, if I didn’t have so much else to do.
September 26, 1986
Ed Bernstein called his last P.D. meeting this afternoon. He’s leaving to head up Broderbund’s fledgling board games division. DOUG HIMSELF will be taking over as acting head of P.D. He’ll be taking my desk, the better to stay in touch with the people. So I’ll be moving into Ed’s office. Life is strange.
P.D. is throwing Ed a goodbye party. “Better the devil we know than the deep blue sea,” Steve said.
At lunch, Doug said: “You seem to have a very strong entrepreneurial bent.” I was surprised, and said something about how I’d probably inherited it from my father.
Coming out here was definitely the right thing to do. In Chappaqua, I was in a rut. Now, I’m in the thick of it. It’s great.
September 27, 1986
I have a car.
September 28, 1986
I have an apartment.
September 29, 1986
Today I moved into Ed’s office. Obviously, this is a temporary arrangement; eventually some new guy will be hired to run P.D. and I’ll get booted to some other part of the building. But while it lasts, it’s great.
Besides vast amounts of space, a couple of armchairs for visitors, my own phone, and a door that I can close, the office has the most important thing of all – equipment. A printer. An amber screen. An Apple IIc. It didn’t occur to me until I was actually confronted with two Apple II’s on my desk and I had to figure out what to do with the extra one – but it’s perfect. Now I can run programs without destroying the source code in memory. It’s…(gulp)… a development system.
