Preparations C.
Not much to report today on the moving-stuff-around-and-hooking-it-up front today; my lunch has been disagreeing with me vehemently for most of the day, and frankly, it’s winning the argument. I think the tipping point for my body to rebel against me, aside from just plain not having enough sleep, was moving the Kick machine. Even though it’s not currently in a playable state, I love that machine and strongly resist even the slightest urge to ever get rid of it. But much as I love it, I find that I live in a whole different continuum from some of my friends who collect arcade cabinets. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not down on that as a hobby – I just can’t figure out the whole space thing. Rob’s got an entire outbuilding devoted to them, but even then at some point one has got to run out of space.
For those who aren’t into even thinking about the hobby of collecting arcade cabinets, let me explain to you, in practical terms, what it entails for your spouse: “Honey, I just brought home another full-size upright refrigerator! Where can I put it?”
I can only imagine that if I pulled that stunt just once or twice, I’d be told where I could put it.
At the same time, I think it’s an Important Hobby, and I’m glad people do it. These are machines that otherwise would’ve been done away with, or converted into something else. Recently on Digital Press, there was a thread written by a fellow who got a non-working Gravitar machine, and was planning to gut it and turn it into a MAME machine. Which, you know, isn’t a total waste – at least the machine would find a new life, and hey, it’s his machine. But a Gravitar cabinet also happens to be a gorgeously illustrated and put-together few slabs of plywood and glass. Surely there’s another machine that could be maimed and then MAME’d.
But bless those folks who do have the space for a bunch of them. (And especially folks like Peter Hirschberg who have the means to really do it up – good grief!) These are the people who are preserving the history of an entertainment medium.
And putting their backs out every time they have to move.… Read more
Now there’s a logo that hasn’t been around for a while, eh? Scary thing is, it might be coming back. Two weeks from today I should have an Avid sitting in my house, and I’m trying not to be utterly terrified at the prospect of going into business with the thing. I’m trying to focus more energy on finding another day job – a real day job this time, not a graveyard shift that calls itself a day job, and certainly not the just-this-side-of-indentured-servitude gig that I’ve got now. I haven’t given that gig a drop-dead date yet…but damned if it isn’t tempting to do so.
Anyway, back on track. One decision I have already made about the new machine is that I have no plans for it to ever touch the internet. There’s no reason for it to. If I do bother to pop a network card into it, all that connection will be used for will be updating anti-virus software and Windows, and networking will be disabled the rest of the time. If this machine is supposed to be something I can earn a living with, and its function does not depend on being online, then there’s no reason for me to let it go and play in the traffic on the information superhighway. (In fact, it’s my experience that in the past few years, Avid has been telling clients at new installs and training sessions to keep their edit suites off the ‘net unless the company needs to automatically update the software.) Zen and Orac can pull anything off the ‘net that I need, and now that we don’t have to worry about building our own Avid-capable machine from scratch, Kent and I can now focus on building Orac II – still a Win98 machine, but not quite so cranky (good lord, but it lives up to its namesake in that respect).
It seems like I get new toys in sporadic bursts; tonight I’m messing with the latest one, a slide/35mm film scanner. This may seem like an odd thing to have for someone who doesn’t even own a film camera (he said as his photographer grandfather spins in his grave), but I’ve wanted one of these for ages for an entirely different reason. I have quite a slide collection. Many moons ago, I was very much into slides of photos from various and sundry NASA missions, and amassed quite a collection. In later years, I routinely salvaged promotional photo slides that were due to be thrown away at the places where I worked. These would usually be the very familiar publicity photos, logos, etc. (you see, everyone else got the same slides sent to them too), in 35mm color slide form. Some years back my slide projector broke, so I’ve had a ton of slides and nothing that I could really do with them.