More random thoughts on things of little import

Some disjointed, unrelated thoughts that I really didn’t think merited their own individual entries (not that this has ever stopped me)…
Orac Mark II is up and running just fine and dandy – a much faster and bigger machine than the old one could’ve been, quite frankly. It’s doing everything the old Orac was doing, and then some (I’ve discovered that feed aggregator software is a lovely thing, and yes, I’m aware that I’m a few years behind the curve on that, as usual). (As a side note, in the process of that realization, it’s hit me that the WordPress-ified sections of theLogBook are capable of doing that fancy RSS thang. That’s just too cool. I’ve even got it monitoring the Scribblings comment feed here, so I don’t wind up checking in at my own blog a zillion times a day and feeling like, arguably, a bigger loser than I already am.) Orac II will also be running Cubase for me. Cubase is really, really, really cool. Even if you don’t know what it is, trust me on this. Orac II also has a nifty Matrix screensaver on it which drives the kittens nuts – they’ve already knocked the monitor over twice trying to grab the falling doodads. I’m also installing Dune 2000 and, for the Mrs., Master Of Orion II and Star Control 2, so if it’s not busy crunching numbers for something else, it can play a game while the other two machines are doing some heavy lifting.
Also completed is my LAN, which even has a nifty network name in line with the theme of each machine being named after a science fiction computer/AI. (But I’m not going to tell you what it is.) This has made doing web video or anything else an almost infinitely faster process. I cranked out over a dozen game videos for PDF this weekend, including the one for the brand new 5200 Berzerk review, in record time – basically, a couple of minutes’ setup of each sequence in the Avid, then the time it took to export each file without rendering (15-20 minutes, which ain’t bad – exporting without rendering saves storage space on the media drives), and maybe a grand total of a minute to transfer. Zen then Sorenson Squeezes it for all of two minutes, and another minute to upload each finished Flash movie to the server. (For those thinking “Woooo! More web video of Earl playing video games!”, this is a huge improvement in workflow that I’ll need once I’m working at home and taking care of the baby.)
Speaking of baby, over the weekend I found two or three “baby journals” that my mom had filled out, basically “baby’s first year/two years/indeterminate period of time” books that had been given to her. One in particular is funny and heartbreaking at the same time, as it’s all in my mom’s handwriting, but she’s writing in the first person from my point of view, i.e. “I took my first step today and pitched forward right onto my face.” I’ve actually given some thought to scanning that stuff in and adding it to the blog as back entries. 😆 I don’t know if anyone would “get it” though. But as baby-focused as this blog is gonna get in the next few months (and for those who aren’t digging that element of it right now…well…I’m sorry about that), it might be amusing. On the other hand, that stuff wasn’t meant for public consumption. It’s just a rare glimpse of her creative side, and that element is what has me wanted to go ahead and post the stuff. March 19th will be 20 years to the day since she died, and it bugs me a bit that all there is to show for her life are these baby books, the memories of at most a few dozen people, two wildly different kids who are now grown up, and a slab of granite. Of course, I’m not sure that adding scanned pages from a baby journal to a blog that’s read by, at most, a few dozen people would really change that. There’s an instinct the preserve the material, and an instinct to say “See, wasn’t my mom cool?”
And she was cool. If you’ll forgive another tangent here, my mother had a knack for trying to spark/encourage/intensify interests for me. I think she was disappointed that nearly every attempt to formalize any musical education for me tanked (I’m keenly interested in creating it, not just listening to it, but taking structured lessons on anything from sight reading to singing to playing an instruments just never “stuck” with me – as with so many other areas of study), but damned if she didn’t try. When I exhibited an intense interest and an intense fear of weather warnings, she made some calls out of the blue and got me a tour of the local weather service office, so I could see what they did there, meet the guy whose voice consistently scared the crap out of me, and demystify (and hopefully de-terrify) that topic for me. Map making, radio commercials, you name it, she figured out a way to expose me to the reality of it to see if something ignited. And all of this while working, and without having a huge network of connections to call in for stuff like that. I want to be able to do the same thing for my kid. I know I’ve got a few years of diaper-changing, spoon-feeding, basic-cognitive-skills-teaching stuff to get through before I get to that point, but I want to do that.
By the way, there’s no truth to the rumors that the names Humberto, Burchuss, Kal-El, Davros, Jadzia or Mario are under consideration. It was just a joke, people, that’s what it is! 😛
In other news: hiccups suck. Intense, prolonged, painful hiccups suck in an intense, prolonged and painful way. That’s why I’m awake and bothering you with this stuff. Never mind the baby, somebody apparently needs to burp me.