another reason to love macs

I spent an hour and a half yesterday morning trying to track down a hand-held audio recorders. I used to own one, but since I knew that my law school classes would be recorded by the a/v people everyday, I didn't bother bringing it with me to Utah. I was going to be interviewing someone yesterday at 4:30 for a paper I am writing. I knew that this interview was going to last for at least an hour (we ended up taking 2) and I wanted to be able to spend the interview just listening instead of worrying about getting good notes to refer back to later.

So I left class, and went to the a/v people to see if they had anything I could borrow. I was handed a briefcase-sized contraption with a cassette tape, and off I went back to my carrel to test this monstrosity. 10 minutes and 3 law students later, I was back to the a/v office trying to find instructions for this thing. The guy working there finally settled on trying to find me a different recording device. This time he came out with an older model which was much less smaller. Another 10 minutes later, I walked away empty handed since neither of us could figure out how to get this second device to record.

So off I went to the Lee library (I can count on one hand the number of times I have set foot inside this library... and that includes the times that I went there as a child with my dad). Supposedly the LRC (I'm not sure what this stands for) had some smaller hand-held devises they check out to students. Unfortunately the only ones they had available were broken. I asked them when the next working one was due back. They responded that they didn't know. I found this hard to believe, but they gave me another place in the library to go look. I gave them a blank stare and told them I didn't know where that was. So then they looked at me with a bewildered look and asked if I knew where some other place was in the library. I responded that I rarely set foot in this library and had no idea. One of the girls was kind enough to paint a visual diagram for me, and off I went. Although this next location had some recorders, they were all on reserve. Boo.

I then resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to spend money on something that I knew I would only be using once, but decided to check with Luis to see if his work happened to have one that I could borrow. That was when he told me that my lovely MacBook has recording capabilities. All it took was opening Garage Band and 2 clicks later I was saying, "testing-testing 1-2-3."