Day: October 11, 2006

…and it’s the motherboard! The replacement is already lined up. Apparently it’s a fairly unique mobo, so we’re having to order its replacement all the way from Canada. Hopefully I’m no more than two weeks away from having the Avid up and running.
Speaking of which, there’s another piece of equipment I haven’t devoted any blawg time to as yet: a 4-track studio cassette recorder that came with all of the gear. I don’t know what this was being used for in the original configuration of the equipment, but it’s a nice piece of kit.

It has serial ports on the back for automation control and, I’m presuming, punch-in pedals. The inputs come in both standard mic jack and XLR jack flavors. It’s quite a step up from the 4-track cassette recorder that a lot of the older stuff in my music section was recorded on. Put simply, this haul is making me want to re-energize a lot of my creative juices.
And my cats just want to wrestle next to all these Avid parts that are waiting for a nice safe motherboard to be plugged back into:

My wife saw a calico kitten sitting on someone’s woodpile today while she was delivering their mail, meowing to get her attention (that is to say, the kitten was meowing to get my wife’s attention, not vice versa, though I’m not saying that it couldn’t happen), and wondered if it was homeless. Could there be another little furry mouth to feed in our future…? Would Othello stand a chance against two playful calico girl kitties? Would anyone in this house ever sleep again? Tune in next time!… Read more

In the absence of an Avid to play with at the moment (Kent has had some work stuff going on, so he probably won’t get to take his first look at it until tonight), I’ve been testing out the Super VHS VTR that I got in the same package, as well as messing around with some 3-D software (of which more later).

This is it – being on top of that tower of plastic shelves (my temporary solution to the lack of a rack) probably makes it look a bit smaller than it really is. It’s a bulky, heavy monster, and just getting it up there scared the hell outta me. (The thought of having to lift it off of there someday scares me too.) It delivers a very nice picture, and has both BNC and S-video output ports; I ran one of the S-video outputs to the S-video jack on Orac’s LCD screen, which will serve nicely as a playback monitor. It gives an awesome picture, even on stuff that I shot years and years ago with my plain old VHS camcorder.

This is the documentation for the Avid, by the way. Note that it’s bigger than the freakin’ speaker!

This is an Olivia I woke up while I was trying to get this picture, looking like she’s just been squished by all those pillows.

This is a flavored water drink we picked up at the store the other day – yummy apple flavor, though it turned out not to be sugar-free, so I don’t know if I’ll be getting any more. But at the very least I was completely fascinated by that container – it’s like a plastic drink bottle sliced in half with a pop-top can lid on the top. Maybe this is something that’s been floating around the rest of the country for ages, but I’ve never seen anything like it – pretty cool, actually.
I have to go back to work tonight, and I’m in no hurry to do so. That may be big talk for someone with a broken Avid, but it’s getting harder and harder to not just walk out of the place. (For those thinking “Well, that’s okay, but common sense would seem to dictate not blogging about it getting harder and harder to not just walk out of the place,” that thought’s occurred…but so has another thought: I don’t care. At the moment they need me more than I care to stick around with them. I don’t have to be part of that organization to make my soul and my life complete, y’know? Plus I’ve made no secret of my desire to leave, or the reasons why. The income helps, but even that can be replaced once I’m up and running. (And in any case, the money I’d save by not having to drive half an hour into town every day would almost cancel out the loss of income.)
Just gotta be patient…… Read more