Month: December 2007

Categories
ToyBox

The tree

For years and years, if my wife and I put up a Christmas tree at all, it was a tiny little tabletop tree, and the cats would promptly savage it. Most years…honestly…we didnt put one up at all. Family didn’t come to our place for Christmas, we went to theirs. But this year is a little bit different. This year we have a child of our own. He’s already fascinated by the big tree by the front window, with all of its white lights – we’re still on an incredibly meager budget, so this is one of the $30 pre-lit, all-but-pre-assembled specials one finds at Wal-Mart. For the first time, we finally had something to do with the considerable collection of Christmas ornaments we’ve been given as gifts over the years. And for the first time since I’d been collecting them in the early 90s, I finally had a launching pad for my fleet of Star Trek ornaments. … Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3

Tales of the toofers

Evan’s been a little bit cranky lately, has wanted the binky a bit more (which is odd, because he hasn’t been a baby who absolutely demands full-time binkyness), and has had trouble sleeping, occasionally going from being sound asleep to awake and screeching.

Turns out the little guy has his first toofers coming in! A few more of those (and a few more screaming fits) and semi-solid food, here we come. Poor little guy. I feel for him – it occurred to me that it’s almost exactly ten years since I had my own replacement toofers installed, and that was no walk in the park. Daddy has spent lots of time standing by the crib or carrying the little guy around, holding his hand while he’s having to endure this pain that he has no idea what to do with.

To observe the occasion of his first toofers, and the fact that it’s really really cold outside, here he is in his new little penguin outfit. Kid tested, Mr. Flibble approved.

Tough and ruthless...or rough and toothless?

If someone had told me, a decade ago while I was having teeth replaced, that ten years from that day I’d have a baby son going through teething pains, oh how I would have laughed.… Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

I kinda had a feeling this might be the case

What's it to be, Tennant? Love and/or Monsters?Possible big Doctor Who spoilers from a BBC chat show. Call it a gut feeling, but I had a strong hunch this would be the case. Maybe it’s just me being tired, or more narrowly focused on other things (can’t imagine what those might be), but what really bugs me is that I’m not sure how I feel about this news. If, in fact, it’s really news.… Read more

Categories
Music

Fun with music

Despite being exhausted, I haven’t been able to sleep yet tonight because my brain is pounding on the inside of its container begging me to use it to do something. So on the spur of the moment, I started and completed work on this year’s Scribblings Music Mix. You may remember this feature from last year – I assembled “best of 2006 soundtracks” and a “best of 2006 not-soundtracks” mixes that you could stream from the blog, and man, was that popular. I got as many e-mails as comments on it. This year, I decided to really screw with everyone’s head and put both the soundtrack and non-soundtrack pieces all in one mix, and did my best to make them all sound like they went together, joining stuff that ended in a particular key to other stuff than began in the same key – where possible. I tried to keep “full stops” and clumsy edits to an absolute minimum. Only stuff with a 2007 street date was allowable, though some of the absolute best stuff to street in 2007 (IMHO) was bonus material on catalogue reissues, or music from the vaults that just hadn’t been released until now. It’s all about 15 minutes long, and in listening back to it, I’m hearing thematic links that I didn’t know were there – sort of like my subconscious was in on the song selection. In some places it’s a little bizarre, so I don’t know if everyone who really dug last year’s mixes will like this one as much with the whiplash-inducing (and yet disturbingly tuneful) gear shifts. As with last year’s, the mix will only be up for a limited time, probably with the nifty Christmas Eve update, which also includes a dandy Toybox article from Flack which will finally answer the question “Who in the world were those space-type guys?”

Heck, I might put last year’s mixes up too, just for laughs. For those waiting for me to put up or shut up about what kind of radio show or music podcast I would inflict on the world, you will soon have the answer. 😆… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Gadgetology

Media, mutts, mercy!

The living room media PC project continues; installing Nero has solved a lot of problems; stuff that was playing with no audio is now playing with full audio. Yay! There are still some kinks to work out in getting theWindows audio/speaker settings, Nero’s audio output settings, and the living room’s occasionally baffling Dolby Pro Logic receiver to cooperate with each other, but that’s a job best left to the A/V engineer in the family…oh, wait. I guess that’d be me. I did conquer the mystery of why MP3s weren’t streaming from Zen (turns out the m3u playlist files use relative file locators instead of absolute ones – i.e., if the playlist is for an album contained in my “ELO” directory, the playlist entries are actualy “../elo/*.mp3” rather than the full network address leading to the right machine, the right drive, and the right branch of my directory bonsai tree. Obviously that’s not gonna get you jack from another computer – it has to be called up song-by-song. This is just a wee bit of a pain in the butt…but, as usual, I have – as they say – a cunning plan.

In the meantime, while my friends in Oklahoma and Missouri have been digging themselves out of a fresh glacier that’s been dumped on their heads since this time a week ago, we’ve just been getting rained on. A lot. This has resulted in, somewhat predictably, a very soggy dog. I let her in tonight and wrapped a towel around her so she could dry off somewhere other than all over the living room carpet. Lo and behold, she actually kept it on while she ate her specially prepared dinner consisting of dog food and, from last night’s dinner (ours, not hers), green beans and ostrich steak juice. Yum.

Xena chows down

Xena later wolfed down another bonus helping of “human food”, some leftover scrambled eggs. Actually, saying she wolfed it down is underselling it a bit. I thought she was just going to eat the damn plate the way she was going after it. We have a kitty who loves biscuits, a dog who likes eggs, and I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a cat here who doesn’t like a bit of bacon. Smart money says the dog would make quick work of any available sausage too. Breakfast is therefore served here at one’s own risk. (We also have a cat here who likes dog food. I’ll let you guess who.)

And what’s Evan doing during all of his dog-drying and media meddling? He’s workin’ that binky, of course.

Bink bink bink bink bink

Evan has started making this great gurgling/burbling/rolling-R sound (and he’s not even Scottish!). If I can just teach him to say “Mercy!” before doing his rolling-R thing, then look out, Roy Orbison.… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology

Randomly blithering platitudes unto the heavens

After all the hubbub a few days ago about “OMG, I’m gonna buy/build a media center PC!”, I finally realized that if I tweaked the settings on my wife’s slightly decrepit laptop, it would happily be the hub of that operation. There are a few kinks yet to be worked out with this system, but thus far it’s working…kinda okay. As Flack pointed out, streaming is not gonna happen over a wireless network, especially not one with as much activity as mine sees at any given moment, so video files have to be copied to the laptop’s hard drive…which takes about as much time. It’s not quite the instant access thing I was envisioning – this is more like having to prepare food that’ll take an hour to cook. Probably still going to put Nero on there though – it’s just my favorite video app for a variety of reasons. And I think we’ll still be wanting, at the very least, an IR add-on mouse. As it is right now, if you even so much as need to pause the thing, you virtually have to hug the entertainment center to reach the laptop to do that. The running joke around the house is that I’m the most reliable remote control that my wife has, but for now, that’ll do – I remember some saying about beggars and choosers, or maybe it was a saying about po’ folks, that seems to apply here.

If only all of my “I’m gonna do this someday” goals fell together this quickly.… Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff

(JC)C-64

Look who made it onto CNN…

A boy and his C64

Nope, not me, silly. I had a Franklin ACE 1000. Rather, this is a fellow friend of fiddygibbers everywhere. 😀

I also know one of the people in the little photo feature about people who are still using Commodore 64s. Small world, eh?… Read more

Categories
Cooking With Code

Help wanted: must like intergalactic travel. And swimming.

Just a quick Logbook administrivia note: I’m actively seeking a volunteer to take over the Stargate Atlantis episode guide starting with the second half of season four (beginning January 4th). A combination of factors – including lack of time and an increasing lack of interest in the show – is taking its toll, and I’ve watched this season so far more out of a sense of obligation to keep the guide current than out of being a fan of the show. Anyone who would like to keep tabs on Stargate Atlantis, and can turn around episode summaries similar to what has bene done so far the weekend after each new episode airs, should feel free to get in touch with me via e-mail; please use “Stargate Atlantis Logbook” (or something similar) as the subject line.… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology

Media monster…or…mobster…or…lobster. Or somethin’.

Tuning in, turning on, and logging outAfter hearing about Flack’s PIVO experiment, and having seen a similar setup of Kent’s working for the past year and a half or so, I’ve decided that we really need something similar here. With all the UK shows that I download, and having sucked all of the music in the house onto my hard drive, this whole business of hauling shiny round things from room to room is a bit of a dinosaur’s game. So I’ve started laying out in my head what I need for the living room media PC: … Read more