Month: January 2007

Categories
Music

The music gods must really like me

I must’ve been a really good boy or something, because I went to see if the new ELO remasters were finally available for pre-order (and they are!), and found a second sample clip from “Latitude 88 North” that makes me wish more than ever that Jeff Lynne would record something new – hell, I’d even settle for him continuing to “discover and finish” unrecorded ELO gems like this one.
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/l88n.mp3]
Add to this the upcoming Alan Parsons remasters-with-new-tracks, and the reunion of Crowded House, and that’s my trifecta right there. For reasons both musical and otherwise, I’m a happy boy.
If you want to pre-order the remasters directly from the fan club, get ’em at the link above, or heck, if you want to throw fiddy cents my way (uah!), I won’t kick you outta bed* for ordering ’em here. … Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3

I guess I got over the machine noises

From my “baby book” filled out by my mother the first year or two of my life:

Birth To First Year

  • Likes: Bright colors – electric, neon or any kind of lights – Shawn’s weird noises
  • Dislikes: Machine noises! – loud, sudden noises

So that’s the story on the game room, folks. I was predestined to do it. Now, from an adjoining page about favorite toys and pets, a word about Lady, a big black lab my folks had when I was wee:

Feb. ’73 – met Lady and grabbed her nose, ears. Lady was very understanding.

Here’s hoping that Xena, Othello, Olivia and Oberon are in the same gracious mood in a year’s time – because given the size of this house, this baby won’t have a 9 month wait before meeting his or her first pet. 😆 Probably won’t have to wait as long as I did to see that first horse, either…
Obviously, Obi’s gotta lose the front claws now. We were trying to leave those alone unless they became a problem; now they’re gonna have to go.… Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff

Speeling skills not required

Anyone need a job as a “Grahic Artist“? 😆 Probably oughtta be something in that description about spelling too. Wam-Lart, people – Wam-Lart! (But I kid my former employer.) BTW…what’s up with the morning show producer opening? Did Patrick bail?
Remember, Avid experience is a big plus. 😉 (Okay, I’m just being mean now. Trust me, I’m laughing.)… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Gaming Home Base Television & Movies

Great, kid – now don’t get cocky

Did my first weigh-in tonight, a week after starting the diet. I figured, what with discovering that I was going to be daddy just a few days into the diet, I probably would’ve gained weight from nervous nibbling. Nope – I actually lost two pounds. Which ain’t too shabby.
The Mrs. and I were actually embarking on this weight-loss adventure together, but I guess she’s going to have to postpone for a little bit, isn’t she? (Actually, somehow she lost six pounds, which is kinda scary, considering.)
I’m up late reconfiguring my LAN to be, well, more of a real LAN. Orac II has been wiped clean and has had Win98 installed on it (it was a Win2000 machine in a former life, but I actually need it running 98 – what a motley assortment, a Win98 box, an NT box, and an XP box – plus a couple of handheld PCs running old, old builds of Win CE). The reconfigured LAN will allow me to get stuff from the Avid to Zen much, much faster, without wasting a lot of time uploading and downloading to my web server (which merely steals from the monthly bandwidth allowance that, by all rights, belongs to you, the reader). It’s time to get some real live workflow ability going here if I’m going to be sitting here all the time with video to edit and a baby to feed. Or is that the other way around?
Speaking of video to edit, I was playing around tonight with a very, very simple effect – making something semi-transparent in a shot. (Easy: shoot the same thing with and without the object in question.) I then messed around with some lighting and other effects, and…
Cybermen vs. Holo-Dalek
…voila, Cybermen staring down a “holo-Dalek”. Kinda cool, eh? I’d show you video, but I’m not sure there’s a need – that still frame pretty much spells it out for ya, and there really isn’t much movement to the video anyway. (The Dalek lights up different colors, but that’s about it.) (And between the diffracted light and the soft focus, it looks so ’80s.) But hey, I moved it via the LAN, so it was as good a test subject as any.
There’s supposed to be a gaming get-together at Brian’s (icbrkr) new place this weekend; there’s also supposed to be half a foot of snow, slush and ice. This is something like the third or fourth time his gaming gathering has been scuttled by the weather. I’m watching the schedules for CGE and OVGE this year very closely, with one eye on wanting to go, and one eye on possibly needing to stay. :/
By the way, if you’ve never had to do it, puzzling out what kind of devices are on a new machine so you can find the bloody drivers for them is a huge pain in the ass. Thank God for pcidatabase.com.… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Music

I suppose that, upon further reflection, I would want to be like you after all

(Cryptic title is a play on the Alan Parsons Project song “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You”.) Check out this list of remastered goodies from the upcoming Parsons Project remastered albums. Some of it’s really interesting, and some of it…well, you can tell they’re probably reaching. There are some parallels with the bonus tracks on the ELO remasters, such as the stripped-down mixes and the backing-track-minus-vocals mixes, the latter of which have thrilled the heck outta me on the ELO CDs.
Before either they or I die, I really want someone to stick Jeff Lynne and Alan Parsons together in a studio full of instruments and gadgetry and not let them out until there’s a full reel of tape left on the machine (or they run out of air, whichever happens first). Actually, what would be really interesting would be for them to pre-record vocals and basic rhythm tracks for about four or five songs each, and then each one takes a shot at producing his own 4-5 tracks and the other’s 4-5 tracks in their own style. So you get the same ten songs, reinterpreted in radically different ways – Lynne has regressed into a kind of retro-rockabilly style with light strings, while Parsons has gotten an education in the ways of electronica. That would be interesting. (Not as interesting as having Neil Finn or Peter Gabriel do one song’s worth of guest lead vocals each into the mix, but I doubt that’ll happen anywhere except in my dreams.)
I lurk on the ELO mailing list and on a Parsons forum or two, and I’m amazed that there are folks who like one, but not the other – at their mutual heyday (the late 1970s), both groups shared some distinctive similarities in style, and I was in love with both of ’em.
All of this is just me trying to distract myself from other things. We informed the whole family over the course of the last 36 hours or so; I think the happiest reaction we got was from my father. I really get the impression that nobody ever expected us to unleash any mischevious spawn upon the surface of this planet. Honestly, we’re as surprised as anyone else…but you know what? I’ll take it. I haven’t been this happy in a long, long time, and the thought occurs to me that maybe this is what I’ve been missing in my life for years. And yet I’m not sure it could’ve come at a better time, what with me having just left the crazy slavery of teevee and more or less perfectly positioned to be a stay-at-home dad.
I can’t wait to read to my child. This is gonna be so freakin’ cool. I know there are diapers to be changed too, but you know what? That’s a pretty small tradeoff. (It’s not like mucking horse stalls for eight hours straight.) (And it ain’t like dustin’ crops, boy.)
And here you thought it was the expecting mother who was supposed to be glowing.… Read more