Month: February 2010

Categories
Toiling In The Pixel Mines

A certain show in 35 minutes

Sometime back I threw together a fun little video mash-up celebrating the entire history of a certain long-lived, apparently-indestructible sci-fi series in the space of 35 minutes. I briefly posted it to the web and a few folks seemed to really enjoy it. Now I just happen to be working on a new version, completely from scratch. … Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Funny Stuff

Lesson time with Evan

Tonight Evan asked me to refill his cup of water. While I was getting the pitcher of filtered water out of the fridge, he asked “Dad, where does water come from?”

It’s easy to get a blank stare from a toddler who finds that he’s suddenly getting a simplified explanation of the hydrological cycle.

Later, he spotted my wife’s watch and said “Mom’s clock!” I told him that if someone is wearing a clock, it’s a watch, unless the person happens to be Flavor Flav, in which case it’s still a clock.

I can tell that this first real inquisitive phase is going to be a lot of fun for us all!… Read more

Categories
Critters Gadgetology

Puck, the amazing Avid-repairing cat

For the past six months, I’ve had a problem plaguing my Avid video editing system: direct output from my other PC was a no-go. Running that same PC out to a DVD recorder, and then playing the resulting DVD-R back into the Avid, was okay. But direct recording, which is much more desirable? Nope. For some reason, the video signal was arriving weak and out-of-phase – the color was nearly 180 degrees out of phase, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to resolve the issue, even after re-seating/swapping cables, swapping out distribution amps at the source, and basically rewiring everything. This is a big item for me to do without, because I record a lot of video for the site this way (including Phosphor Dot Fossils video pieces).

Lo and behold, the first time Puck gets behind the Avid and starts playing with the wiring, the problem is fixed. Seriously. The video quality is just beautiful. He wouldn’t even have gotten back there except that I had removed some obstacles so that I could get behind the machine. Maybe if I let him get back there again, I’ll wind up with HD.

Puck

The sad thing about this whole story is that the only reward I have for the little guy is taking him to the vet in a few hours so they can snip his boy bits and, after much delibration, his front claws. He’s literally torn apart some of our furniture, just doing routine scratching. This was a tough decision, because that aside, he’s actually very judicious in his claw use: as much as Evan has been getting a bit rough with his feline friends of late, he’s accumulated all of two or three scratches. Puck normally just looks at me as the boy is trying to drag him away by one leg, as if to say “Help! I’d rather not shred your kid here.” For an ex-stray, Puck is a very gentle cat, with both Evan and the other cats. I think he knows he’s got a better gig here than in the big field behind the TV station. Unlike Obi, our other adopted stray, Puck shows zero interest in returning to the outdoors; obviously he’s not feeling any nostalgia for checking transmitter tower lights. If he keeps embarking on successful rewiring projects around here, though, I may start bringing Puck to work with me. Not to drop him off where I found him, but to lend his expertise to the engineering department.

The standard instructions for a cat who has surgery in the morning is to cut him off from food and water at 10pm the previous night. The key words here again being “ex-stray,” this has proven amazingly difficult. That little cat can get into just about anything. He’ll also eat just about anything. Dirty dishwater? Check. Fig newtons left out on the counter? Check. Who knows, by 7 o’ clock this morning, we may have to postpone the snipping of his outboard gear on account of not being able to enforce the food/water embargo.… Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff

The dark secret of Sunday morning services

Once upon a time, at my second radio job, I knew a guy named Tom. Tom worked in sales, and he was a pretty good guy. He was always trying to talk me into going to his church. (It’s worth pointing out that, at the time, A. I had hair, and B. I had hair down to the small of my back. This being the zip-fly of the Bible belt, I guess that was some kind of visual cue for some people to think I really need to be going to church. And probably cutting my hair and getting a job. You damn hippie. Anyway.)

It never seemed to dawn on Tom that one of the big obstacles to me doing that was that I was working at the station and making sure the commercials he sold were produced and aired every Sunday morning.

He came in one Sunday afternoon to make prodigious unofficial use of the station’s photocopiers, and once again started in on what I called his holy sales pitch, again neglecting to note that I was at the station every Sunday morning.

I’m going to completely destroy the surprise of the punchline of this story at this point by assuring you that Tom is a good guy, and I’m sure he meant “jumping pews.”

He wrapped up his lecture about me needing to go to church with the following statement, topped with an eyebrow-raising Spoonerism:

“Don’t worry, we’re not some kind of crazy church. We’re not rolling in the aisles and speaking tongues and pumping Jews –”

I raised my eyebrows at him and bit my tongue almost in half to keep from busting out laughing.

Tom looked back at me, his mouth half-open, realizing that perhaps, on this occasion, his sales pitch had just taken – as appropriate a use of this phrase as I can think of – one hell of a bad turn. Then he clammed up and walked away. I almost felt bad for him.

He never brought the subject up again. 😆… Read more