I want to like iMovie '08. The cataloging feature looks useful, and the "skimming" feature is clever. But every time I play with it, it drives me nuts. I tried using it for a real project last weekend and within a couple of minutes went back to iMovie HD.

Most of my iMovie projects involve editing together excerpts from a long video that I've imported from DV or VHS. Last weekend I had about an hour and a half of video from a judo tournament that some of my friends competed in. As I usually do for these tournaments, I wanted to create (1) a "highlights reel" and (2) individual videos of complete matches. I found iMovie '08 somewhere between cumbersome and useless for these purposes. It seems like it should have been fine, even fun; but I hated it.

Here's just one complaint: as far as I know, I can't name clips in iMovie '08. In iMovie HD I can type a short name under each clip, which is helpful for seeing at a glance which of my friends is fighting in which clip: "Nina 1," "Germain 1," "Nina 2," "Paul 1," and so on. What I do is, I import the whole thing from my camcorder, then work my way through the video finding where each of my friends' matches begins and ends, and I fill in names accordingly.

In iMovie '08 I have to look at the thumbnail for each clip to see who's in it, which is a pain because most clips look similar (two people in judo uniforms), and I have to squint (or skim over the clip) to recognize faces. This drives me nuts, even with the thumbnails at maximum size.

I'll be shooting video at another tournament tomorrow. I'm going to watch some iMovie '08 tutorials and see if they persuade me to try it again. I doubt they will.

Last Wednesday, my friend Ellen Litman was at the Happy Ending Lounge to read from her new book, The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories.

The event was part of a twice-monthly reading series hosted by Amanda Stern, whose crackling, sometimes raunchy humor made the whole thing a lot more fun than any reading I've ever been to. Besides Ellen, there were two other readers and a singer-cellist (who was a lot more entertaining than you might guess).

One of of the rules of the series is that every performer must take one risk in front of the audience, aside from whatever they're there to perform. The risk Ellen took was to tell a joke — something I'd never, ever seen her do. She's usually the one giggling at jokes, not the one regaling the audience. I confess I was a little relieved that she built the story up beautifully and the audience apparently found the punchline as surprising and funny as I did. In fact, although I'm more of a clown than Ellen is (and will be repeating her joke to a couple of Russian friends), her joke-telling that night was better than mine has ever been.

I've known Ellen since the mid-90's, when we were both working in Baltimore. In those days, she was a software engineer. None of us — and this may include Ellen herself — none of us knew what talent she had as a fiction writer. None of us could have predicted how radically her life would change when that talent was discovered.

Before there was a book, there was a short story, "The Last Chicken in America." When I first read it, I was affected by the beauty of the story itself — the humor, the poignancy, and the clean, vivid language. Beyond that, I found myself with a little extra softness in my heart for my own parents, despite that fact that they are very different from the parents in the story, and I am very different from the teenage girl who is its protagonist.

I've been working my way through the book, and I'm continuing to find that Ellen's compassion for her characters is infectious. I hope you will check the book out and find the same is true for you.

On the 20th I saw Kim Richey perform at a small club called The Living Room, in the East Village. She was promoting her new album, Chinese Boxes.

I've loved Kim's music since her self-titled debut album, which came out in 1995. I don't remember the moment when I discovered her, but I must have been browsing the Country music section, because that's where she was classified, though in my opinion that's sort of stretching the definition of the genre.

I've always been a sucker for a pretty face, so maybe that drew me to the album cover, or maybe the album was being specially promoted by whatever store I was in. Whatever the initial attraction, I wouldn't have bought it without listening first. I'm sure I took the CD to a headphone station, gave it a listen, and felt something special right away.

That first album spoke to me. Not one song on it was a dud. I liked how the stories her songs told were neither too literal nor too abstract. The language was plain and familiar; the poetry was never laid on too thick. The music was catchy without ever sounding manufactured. I won't try to do her justice here, or try to explain just what got under my skin; you can listen for yourself at the iTunes Music Store, which has all her albums, or at the Amazon MP3 store, which only has Chinese Boxes, at least for the moment.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. Kim hadn't put out an album in years, and I had stopped checking on her. But one day, on a whim, I went to her web site and discovered that not only did she have a new album, but she was going to be playing in New York. So of course I had to go.

The Living Room is an easy walk from where I work. It's an intimate venue, and all seats were taken when I got there, just minutes before Kim and her band came on stage. I was lucky to find a folding chair I could set up in a back corner of the room.

She started right in with the first song from her first album, "Those Words We Said." It's a great song and she sounded great. It was neat to hear her phrase the lines a little differently than on the CD track I'd listened to so many times.

The rest of the set was just as good. She kept things moving along and was cool and efficient dealing with one fan, a young woman who got overenthusiastic about something — I couldn't quite make out what. For her closer, Kim did a beautiful à cappella rendition of "What a Wonderful World" that alone was worth the price of admission.

Afterwards I bought a CD and hung around long enough to see Kim by the bar, surrounded by a circle of fans. I could have gotten the CD autographed, but I felt awkward about it, so I just watched her for a minute before heading home.

Lately there have been so many crappy ideas for online media distribution. This morning I was surprised and delighted to find that Amazon, with their new MP3 Downloads store, is the first big player in this field that seems to "get it."

John Gruber provides lots of interesting details and observations. He sums up my reactions perfectly:

The new Amazon MP3 Store looks like no previous iTunes Store rival. The music is completely DRM-free, encoded at a very respectable 256 kbps, includes a ton of songs from major record labels, and offers terrific software support for Mac OS X.

[…]

There’s very high “it just works” factor here. Music is easy to find, easy to buy, and easy to download once you have the Amazon MP3 Downloader installed.

The one significant thing I can think of that Amazon lacks, aside from the smoother and nicer-looking navigation in iTunes, is previews. I find the 30-second previews on the iTunes Store very useful for discovering new stuff and for making purchasing decisions with almost no regrets.

I've often used Amazon to research products before buying them elsewhere. Now I'll be using iTunes to research music before buying it at Amazon.

Update: I stand corrected (and embarrassed). Gruber pointed out that the Amazon Store does have previews. Not that it's an excuse for over-hasty blog posting, but I have FlashBlock turned on and didn't notice the preview controls.

I see you can choose to preview all the songs currently displayed, one after the other, like a kind of sampler album. I'm pretty sure you can only preview one song at a time in iTunes, but I won't be surprised if I'm wrong about that too.

I just did an Amazon MP3 search on "candy" and I'm now playing previews of all the songs that got returned. It's a game I sometimes play in iTunes too, except with Amazon I can just click once and go back to whatever else I was doing, while the random snippets play in the background.

I used to have a frequent problem where I'd lose track of where the mouse cursor is, and it would take me a second or two to find it again. The problem was exacerbated at work, where I have a 20" iMac with an external 17" monitor, plus my MacBook. (I can seamlessly drag my mouse to the MacBook via the extremely useful teleport.) With all that screen real estate, if I made a big sweeping motion of the mouse to get it from the rightmost screen to the leftmost screen, it could take me a second or two to find where the cursor landed.

As you can see from my previous post, I have multiple screens at home as well. Ten days ago, when I added that 24" iMac in the middle, things went from slightly inconvenient to ridiculous.

In the past I've tried third-party apps like OmniDazzle and Mouseposé that create a highlight area around the cursor. I liked a couple of them, but for some reason I never stuck with one. I might revisit them, partly to help me find the mouse and partly because I might make videos of application demos someday, and the highlight is handy for that.

For now what I've done is increase the cursor size in System Preferences. I highly recommend this for anyone else whose eyes aren't as eagle-sharp as they used to be. Go to System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Mouse & Trackpad. Near the bottom is a slider for adjusting the size of the mouse cursor:

I did this for all my screens, even on my MacBook where I hadn't thought I had a problem tracking the mouse. I slid the slider to the first notch, which made the cursor the size of a healthy fly instead of a starving mosquito — much easier to track. I can locate it at a glance, with just a quick wiggle of the mouse, and it's big enough that I can track it with my peripheral vision when I sweep the mouse from one large screen to another three feet away.