Month: April 2007

Categories
Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Insomniophilia

GreenhouseFX.tvWell, here goes nothing – GreenhouseFX.tv is out of the “testing” stage and into the fire. There’s a rate schedule in writing, there’s a print brochure available for download (one with which I was mighty pleased, by the way), and there’s also a “cutoff point” at which my wife and I have agreed that, if I can prove that I can meet it regularly and keep the work coming, I can ditch the part-timing stuff I’ve been doing in the meantime. (And that would make me a very happy panda.) I’d really like to prove to her, somehow, that there’s a point to me having dragged her to Illinois last fall to get an extra roomful of equipment that edits video and sounds like a plane taxiing down the runway when it’s just sitting there idling, and that I can justify my leap into unemployment by getting this thing off the ground and helping to support our new family while staying home with the baby when he gets here.

Thanks to those who gave me valuable advice and feedback on the look and interface of the site.

Not much else to say – I’ve had GreenhouseFX on the brain so much that I literally don’t think I have another thought in my head at the moment. (Though I suppose there are some who’d say that’s par for the course. 😉 )… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Home Base

Light brainshowers

I’m about to keel over here from exhaustion, so here’s a cute picture of Oberon and Xena:

Oberon and Xena

Actually, no, I’m not just going to leave it at that. My wife and I spent the afternoon at my dad’s house, because we haven’t been to see him in ages, and because we wanted to show him the ultrasound video and personally deliver the still pictures. My stepmother was there too… ’nuff said. Still, it was pleasant enough visit, and I’m hoping we can have an even more pleasant one in the near future. (‘Nuff said.)

A less pleasant part of the day was finding out that my wife’s vehicle, which was in for one more minor repair, now requires one more major repair. The repairs don’t seem to come in flavors of under $600 or so, so I’ll admit that the word “lemon” has been rolling off my tongue quite a bit lately. It was a good deal when we got it, but I’m starting to think this was a set of wheels with one good year of service left in them, and we’ve passed that year. Long since passed. The constant surprise problems we’re getting have completely eliminated any kind of “backup for a rainy day” that we had built up, and when we need to be buying baby stuff and working on redoing parts of the house, that’s just absolutely killing us.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on GreenhouseFX.tv over the past few days, including working up what’s basically a print version of the website to distribute as a printable PDF.

I’m having one of those weeks where I wish I could declare my own by-week and just catch up with the rest of the world later. Too damn tired to even think about thinking about thinking.

Now that I’m done cooking up the food we’ll be nibbling on tomorrow during the day, I’m going to go get…well…maybe all of a couple of hours of sleep.… Read more

Categories
Home Base Serious Stuff

Mow, mow, mow your goat

I don’t get into too much serious stuff of a political bent on my blog because, well, frankly, it’s not that I don’t have my opinions, but there are other people who are so much more eloquent than I am, and they can back it up with all this “research” stuff that I’m sometimes not that good at. But I thought I’d chime in with a little environmental note.

I recently killed our lawn mower. This is not something I’m proud of. I was a doofus and forgot to check the oil after it sat out for the winter. My bad. Yes, you’re right. Not just bad but just plain stupid. (Remind me to tell you what happened to my Corsica sometime. Me and combustion engines just don’t dine at the same table.)

So my wife called me today as she was window-shopping for lawn mowers, and she only half-seriously mentioned that she was looking at a solution that consumed no fuel and produced no pollution. My equally half-serious response was “We’re getting a goat?” No, that wasn’t it – we could get a manual, non-electric, non-gas-powered push mower. To her surprise and mine, I said a very emphatic “YES.” She warned me “You’re going to be getting your exercise trying to move this one around,” to which I almost replied “Uh, honey? Have you actually seen me lately? More exercise isn’t a terribly bad thing…” But I look at it this way: the one we have earmarked as the one to Buy Real Soon (as opposed to Buy It Now) has a grass collection bag. With no motor, those cuttings won’t be coated in oil, and can be fed to horses. With no motor, there won’t be any more ear-splitting engine sounds that leave me with huge headaches. And last but certainly not least, with no motor, that’s one less vital device to require gasoline, which has gone up 80 cents a gallon over the past six months. (Uh, hello? Congress? You lovely folks who I helped to vote in last November? With all due respect…this is one of those things I was hoping you’d find some ways to fix…not that I’m saying Gonzalez doesn’t need to be fixed…before he has puppies or something.)

So: an unpowered push-mower it is. (And yes, you can bet I’ll get some pictures of this puppy in action, just for the sheer curiosity value.) My little contribution to making this tiny corner of the world that I supposedly (on paper) own a better, cleaner, quieter place. Just you wait, someday when he’s old enough to mow the lawn, my son is so gonna thank us for this decision. (In the same way that every son thanks his father when the mower is thrust into his hands for the first time – with unprintable words muttered under his breath as dad walks away. 😆 )… Read more

Categories
Critters Serious Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines ToyBox

Friday the 13th Part 2

Some random, unrelated notes from today:

In what must be the 6 and 9/10th sign of the Apocalypse, I walked into a national chain store in Fort Smith, Arkansas today and bought a Doctor Who action figure right off the peg. Not a special order or anything like that – it was already there. I hadn’t picked any of these up since I got a couple of loose Cybermen last fall from someone on eBay who had already imported them, so I was just utterly stunned. I’m under no illusion that this means that Fort Smith is stepping up in the world; I’m sure they wound up here because they never left the pegs in the Hastings in Little Rock or Tulsa. 😆 One final note: as difficult as it is not to win yourself some snickers or at least weird looks when you’re 30-something and bellying up to the checkout counter with an action figure, a new layer of difficulty is added when the figure in question is a baroque, frilly-costumed Clockwork Man from The Girl In The Fireplace. Trust me, funny looks are guaranteed…and despite that, I hope they get the Ood, Cassandra and/or Captain Jack figures that I’m missing. My trip to northwest Arkansas has been delayed until next week, so maybe I can check any Hastings stores that might be lurking up there. Inasmuch as a store can possibly lurk.

After I went there and went to get dinner to bring home, I stopped to get gas at one of the ubiquitous Murphy Oil stations perched next to Wal-Mart Supercenters. There was a youngish guy ahead of me, I’m going to say 20 or so, who was tweaking. He was extremely agitated, cursing up a storm for no readily apparent reason, and got pissed at the girl working the checkout booth when it turns out he didn’t have enough money for a pack of cigarettes. He then turned to me and asked if I’d buy them for him and I just shook my head. I had half a thought about offering to buy him some nicotine patches instead, but it’s just as well that I didn’t say a word, because he then proceeded to go off on me. Of course, I can already hear the argument that he needs his next pack of cigarettes as much as I need a Clockwork Man, but y’know, if I hadn’t been able to afford that…I wouldn’t have gotten it. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have asked anyone else to pick up the tab for me for something that isn’t exactly – okay, not exactly and not remotely – essential to my continued survival. (I’m sure the jury is still out with my wife about whether or not I needed a Clockwork Man, but hey, at least he’s not gonna damage my health. 😆 )

I’ve finally started getting GreenhouseFX.tv put together. A lot of what I’ve put on there so far is copied over and modified from the original 2002 version of the site. The list of services is still in “flux” – there are a couple of things under “what we do” that I won’t, in fact, be doing. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but hopefully in about a week it will be.

I tried to watch the premiere of Painkiller Jane on Sci-Fi tonight. I’m not familiar with the comic that it’s based on, so I can’t vouch for how faithful it is/isn’t to the source material, but overall I found it just left the taste of apathy in my mouth. Kinda like…I dunno. Dark Angel Minus The Barely-Engaging Backstory.

Tomorrow I’m going to get some dog food, as well as some new cat food that we’re going to see if the kitties like. We’re going to start out mixing it into their Iams dry food, but hopefully we can wean them off the Iams completely, very very soon. The food we’re getting is from an outfit that grows its own ingredients rather than buying them in bulk from, oh, say, Menu Foods, especially since it seems as though damn near everything Menu is putting on the market is either already on recall, or is about to be recalled. The fearsome threesome have checked out just fine so far, and I’d like to keep them that way.… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Gadgetology Serious Stuff

And so it goes…away.

Poor old Vonnegut – I hate to admit to being so ill-informed, but even when that book of essays came out a year or three ago, I assumed it was posthumous.

I know a great many folks compared Douglas Adams to Vonnegut over the years, often enough that Adams railed against it if reminded. Which is one area where I have to disagree with my favorite author – if I had written any fiction that was compared to the works of Vonnegut, I would’ve hung it up right then and there just in case my next project didn’t live up to that praise.

Vonnegut’s work was informed by an edge of bitterness that, at least until “Mostly Harmless”, Adams just didn’t have (and even in “MH,” Adams didn’t deserve to claim that bitterness). Bitterness and yet just a smidgeon of world-weary hope that maybe humankind might gets its act together and learn the folly of its ways – it was such a weird mixture, and I’ve never run into anything quite like Vonnegut’s writing. I doubt I will again. I’ve been really bothered by my inability to write an obit for the news section that came close to even being in the same solar system as an adequate send-off. I’m going to write it off as me being tired and just not quite able to process the news.

I figured out how to beam new wallpapers and MIDI ringtones into my wife’s phone via infrared from my phone. Talk about a convoluted way of doing things – her phone isn’t bluetooth capable. Oddly enough she didn’t want any Katamari Damacy music or “Xanadu” as ringtones!

In news that will stun absolutely no one, the “video game characters” theme seems to be out the window where the baby room is concerned. I knew that idea was going to last about 10 minutes tops (and I wasn’t even the one who suggested it). Ah well. Guess I’ll just keep that little idea about painting the baby room to look like the interior of the TARDIS to myself…

I’m a little scatterbrained and burned out mentally right now, so you’ll have to forgive me for not having more to say at the moment. During the course of the day, it really hit me how damn tired I’ve gotten after the almost completely sleep-free Week Of Worrying, and I’m looking forward to crashing this weekend, with my head on a pillow and a bed full of warm kitties.… Read more