Month: March 2007

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Boy’s hand will squeeze the giant’s heart

Before I forget:

Is this the new kitty?

Our new kitten

I'd just as soon kiss a kitten

Happy birthday Olivia! The cuddly kitten is a year old today, and she’s got a brand new puffball to play with to prove it.

In other news, I just got back from hearing the baby’s heartbeat. Turns out we’re still six weeks away at least from knowing a gender (the suspense, and not knowing what to buy just yet, is killing us), but either way, the little one’s already got a new nickname: THUMPER.… Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

I get it, I get it – time for another movie.

Okay, okay, okay. I think everyone has e-mailed me about Sci-Fi’s Galactica Videomaker contest about three times apiece now. The thought has occurred that if Olivia can beat the Daleks, surely it’s time for Oberon to take on the toasters. But, while this may be disappointing, the thought has also occurred that I may be a little top-heavy with other projects-in-progress and might not make it in under the wire.

What really got me, though, in reading over the terms & conditions on Sci-Fi’s site, was this clause – let’s call it the “Star Wars Kid Clause”. … Read more

Categories
Critters Gaming Television & Movies

Reality keeps calling me away from my dreams

Sorry for the lack of updates this week. I’ve been a little bit busy.

Now that we’re running up on three months since Oberon came into our lives, one thing is becoming quite dense: our Obi is denser than a neutron star. I love the little fuzzy guy, but by having him neutered, we’ve automatically raised the collective IQ of future generations of cats in this area by default. He’s fiercely loyal and lovable, and loves everyone who lives under this roof with him, but somehow he’s just missing some vital feline survival instincts, and I really question whether or not he’d still be alive if we hadn’t taken him in. Poor little furry doofus.

To make sure he does stay around, though, we’ve made an appointment to have him declawed next week. He’s a great cat to just pick up and cuddle, and he never bites or scratches unless something catches him completely off-guard. My youngest niece has a cat named “Spaz” who she hauls around like a sack of potatoes and plays with, and gives her no problems at all. Obi has great potential to be my kid’s “Spaz” – he’s got that same lovable, luggable and harmless thing going for him, and we want to keep it that way. The other kitties have taken him on board completely (though Othello still gets a bit irritated with him if the young’un is being a bit too playful). … Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Gaming Television & Movies

Just a ton of stuff

This is going to be kinda choppy, kinda like my train of thought right now, which has zipped right off the tracks, straight through the guard rails, and off into the abyss.

Best MAME cabinet project ever? It’s bigger on the inside. I just hope he’s got Dalek Attack and Destiny Of The Doctors installed on that thing.

Best butt coverings ever? Take a look at these, folks with babies – we’re seriously considering them, not just for the hip biodegradable factor, but because it seems that most diapers are now coated in a common herbal skin-soothing agent that I happen to be highly allergic too (which has us concerned that the baby will be allergic to it as well). Septic tank safe, and very cost-effective next to disposable diapers, and therefore replete with awesomeness.

Best baby room ever? Nobody would believe this if I didn’t tell you about it: my wife has suggested that the walls of the baby’s room could be adorned with cute video game characters. Part of me is thinking “let’s see how long this lasts.” The rest of me will already be busy designing it in my head. 😆

O2-a-thon. Fired up the mighty Odyssey2 tonight to play my newly arrived copy of Puzzle Piece Panic, and did some catching up on other O2 homebrews that I’ve had for a while but have barely had a chance to play properly. I had four O2 homebrews or repro releases of prototypes sitting on the “to play” pile; Puzzle Piece Panic and Shark Hunter both rocked, while Impossible Mission was honestly a bit of a bore, and Calculator…well, it’s a neat idea, but more of a tech demo than anything. Still, as incongruous as it may seem now, I bet Magnavox would’ve put this puppy on the market back in the day.

It’s a funny old world. When I was a wee tot, I used to play this machine constantly, wonder where the ideas for the games came from and who made them, and even obsessed over the artwork style. Now I know who makes the games and to a certain extent where they get their ideas, and it seems like I do the artwork for about half of them. (In the case of Puzzle Piece Panic, I didn’t do artwork – I just suggested a name that met the vintage Magnavox style of “descriptive but slightly cheesy,” and it just kinda stuck.) Funny how these things work out.… Read more

Categories
Should We Talk About The Weather?

Tornadic dramatic

So I stayed up as long as I could to watch the weather; right around the time I was fading fast, storms were just firing up and flashing instantly into severe status along a dry line in eastern Oklahoma. I went to bed but tried to stay at least semi-awake, forcing myself to lay in a semi-sitting position, writing a DVD review on the ever-handy Mobilepro.

Half an hour later, when she awoke to the sound of the tornado siren just down the hill from us, this is where my wife found me dead asleep, lulled into unconsciousness by the magically relaxing stereophonic sound of two purring catboys, with the Mobilepro not only still open, but still on, waiting for input, and displaying an entire paragraph – a surprisingly coherent one – that I don’t remember writing. (I’m going to credit the cats as co-authors on this one, just in case.)

As we watched hail pile high on Xena’s doggy bed on the deck (fear not, Xena was let in before it even started raining), we reflected again on the effects of one piece of video editing equipment on our lives. If I was still working at the station, I probably still would’ve been at the station when this happened, leaving my pregnant wife at home to deal with God only knows what kind of weather (and apparently this was a reasonably close call), three skittish cats, and a nervous dog. Pregnant or not, she’s put up with enough years of that sort of thing.

That said, the old school tie is still there, because practically on reflex I turned on the TV and went straight to Drew’s weather. 😆 While I did that, nervous Olivia skittered across my Mobilepro keyboard and erased the entire DVD review. (Thankfully, there’s this thing called Undo…)

Back to bed for me, this time without a computer in hand.… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Home Base

Blog reruns

I hate to throw “blog reruns” at you, but I’ve just been thinking recently about how much the topic of this blog entry has changed my life. I’m not going to try to claim that my freelancing life is a stampede of success, but y’know what? I’m much, much happier than I was the past two or three years at the station, by far. Even some of the health problems that plagued me while I was at that job have cleared themselves up. Best of all, it provided the answer to a question we didn’t even know we’d have until later (i.e. “who’s staying home with the baby?”) – by the time that one came about, we knew what the answer was.

So naturally I have the whole thing completely powered down right now – bad weather’s on the way in (it’s mere minutes into March, and we’re already under a tornado watch), and even though it’s on a heavy duty surge protector, I just prefer to unplug this machine from the entire universe for the kind of bad weather that hits us here. Needless to say, the Avid will get a lot of rest during the spring and early summer months. 😛 I’ve grown so used to the deafening ROAR of the outboard equipment, every piece of which has its own fan, that the quiet is somewhat mesmerizing in and of itself.

I went back and looked at the original “won the Avid” blog entry and saw that there was a link to the original eBay auction – or at least that’s where the link led at one time. Since the original auction has of course vanished from eBay’s database, I’ve put this selection of screen captures I took at the time up for your amusement. At the time, these seemed like a bit of a vanity piece, but now…well…this machine has turned out to be terribly important.… Read more