Category: Critters

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Critters Home Base Should We Talk About The Weather?

Wind and/or wuthering

It’s been an insanely windy 24 hours here. We’re talking sustained 30-40mph winds (and the gusts are worse). Needless to say, my already-battered mailbox has all but been left laying in the ditch by this. The resulting temperature drop – down to around freezing – has accelerated that time of year when Xena becomes a full-time resident inside the house. Which seems to suit Olivia just fine – it means that wagging tail is always just a pounce away, in the comfort of her own home!
Shall we do promos for global thermonuclear war?
At exactly the same time tonight, everyone working for a Hearst Argyle TV station got an automated call on their home or cell phones, testing an automated “emergency response” system to be activated in the event of major emergencies or disasters; I guess it’s there to tell us if the station’s been taken out by a surgical strike (though I can’t imagine who’d want to do that now that Dancing With Or Without The Stars is over), or, more likely, to tell everyone to Report To Work Now Now Now in the event of a 9/11-scale emergency. This system was put in place after Katrina all but wiped out our sister station (and one of the oldest continuously broadcasting stations in the U.S.) WDSU last year. It sounds like the mutant love child resulting from a menage a trois between WOPR, Speak & Spell, and some Commodore 64 text-to-speech program whose name I’ve long since forgotten. It’s like getting a surprise phone call from Stephen Hawking, and he’s calling me “Early Green.” I’ll try to record it off the answering machine later in the day before I delete it, for your amusement.
Twilight Zone Standard Time
I have a small cluster of VCRs which I used for converting international videotapes to domestic formats and vice versa. (If anyone actually still requires this service in the age of DVD, give me a shout – I give good PAL conversion.) One of these VCRs has been routinely slipping into another timestream. For example: the always-accurate clock on my DVD recorder says “4:08A” (I kid you not, the thing is tuned into the atomic clock or something, because I’ve never had to set it once in 3+ years). The JVC VCR, at this moment, says “10:12A.” I’ve come home from work at two in the morning to find the VCR claiming it’s in PM time somewhere. And 12 hours or so later, with no readily apparent explanation, wham, it snaps back into real time. This would be great if I could get it to record stuff from the future, you know? I’d suddenly become an avid (and quite probably much wealthier than I am now) sports fan. Sort of like a slightly more modern version of Early Edition. Minus the yellow cat. Which is probably for the best, Olivia would chase his tail too.… Read more

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Critters Serious Stuff

Gallop polls

Willie Nelson says we have a lot to learn from horses, and I find it very difficult to disagree with the man. I get to spend a lot of time with a number of horses who have been spared the slaughter yard, and I can’t name one of them who qualified as “problem children.” The reader responses below the main article are alternately touching and (IMHO) mind-bogglingly unenlightened. The one person who said that old, crippled or unruly horses need to be sold to slaughter is so far from seeing the point of the legislation that I’m not sure they can find it with a map. This legislation prevents kills for food, or sale for foreign kills for food. It does not rule out humane euthanasia with the assistance of a veterinarian in the event that the animal can look forward to no quality of life. (And yes, you do bury them, out in the pasture.) The legistlation does not cast aspersions on other cultures that consume horse meat; it just ensures that the United States won’t be contributing to that particular market, which is as much as we can do.
I never thought I’d be getting behind Willie Nelson on the political spectrum, but this is one case where I feel the man speaks truth. Your mileage may, of course, vary, but in that case, you need to come with me sometime and feed some big fuzzy faces.… Read more

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Critters Gadgetology

More video

Here’s a super-duper-time-compressed version of the morning feeding frenzy at the farm, shot back when the weather was actually warm. There are quite a few strange jump-cut edits that I normally wouldn’t sit still for, but it’s kinda hard to maintain consistency when you’re cutting so much stuff out of the middle. And hey, who needs consistency with all those cute babies? (Bet you can’t figure out which one is my favorite.) Also, for your amusement and edification: the Electric Burchuss Bluescreen Test. (Trust me, there’s a reason.)… Read more

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Critters

A guest for the night.

Meet Obsidian.
Obsidian
The heartbreaking thing is, as was agreed when my wife took her, the person who had taken her in will be happy to take her in again if she doesn’t work out. And sadly, that’s how it’ll have to be. Obsidian quickly elbowed Olivia out of the way, and was positively hateful toward Othello (who could just about be her great-great-great-grandfather). She has a home to go back to if she can’t adjust here, but really, I think just a few hours has pretty much shown that she needs to be an only child.
Obsidian
She’s a neat little kitty. Very friendly, silky smooth jet-black coat (very hard to get a picture of – she’s like a cat-shaped hole in the fabric of space and time), lets you pick her up and pet her, and purrs at the drop of a hat. But just very aggressive to the other two cats who clearly have the right-of-way around here.
Sorry, Obsidian. You’re a little heartbreaker, and I think you’ll find a good home sooner rather than later. (Though hopefully just a little bit later – even the local humane society won’t adopt out black cats around Halloween.)… Read more

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Critters

Holy cats, Batman.

So…my wife just called me and told me that there’s a new kitten in our house. A new little black girl kitten. She got her from someone who sold her a new laptop; apparently the kitten had been dumped on their property. Apparently Othello went into hiding, and Olivia’s hissing, because Olivia’s mommy has put this interloper on Olivia’s mommy’s bed with Olivia.
Um…we’ll see how this works out. You know me, I’m a slightly younger male version of the Crazy Cat Ladies who take in thirteen zillion kitties. But I’m a little bugged by this happening without my consultation. On the otherhand…and let’s be fair and put the cards on the table honestly…it’s almost Halloween, and we’re in superstitious backwater redneck country. If we didn’t take her in, chances are disturbingly good that something bad would’ve happened to this little kitty in about two weeks.
So…how’s Obsidian sound?… Read more

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Critters Gadgetology

The verdict is in…

…and it’s the motherboard! The replacement is already lined up. Apparently it’s a fairly unique mobo, so we’re having to order its replacement all the way from Canada. Hopefully I’m no more than two weeks away from having the Avid up and running.
Speaking of which, there’s another piece of equipment I haven’t devoted any blawg time to as yet: a 4-track studio cassette recorder that came with all of the gear. I don’t know what this was being used for in the original configuration of the equipment, but it’s a nice piece of kit.
Tascam 4-track recorder
It has serial ports on the back for automation control and, I’m presuming, punch-in pedals. The inputs come in both standard mic jack and XLR jack flavors. It’s quite a step up from the 4-track cassette recorder that a lot of the older stuff in my music section was recorded on. Put simply, this haul is making me want to re-energize a lot of my creative juices.
And my cats just want to wrestle next to all these Avid parts that are waiting for a nice safe motherboard to be plugged back into:
Othello and Olivia extreme kitten wrestling
My wife saw a calico kitten sitting on someone’s woodpile today while she was delivering their mail, meowing to get her attention (that is to say, the kitten was meowing to get my wife’s attention, not vice versa, though I’m not saying that it couldn’t happen), and wondered if it was homeless. Could there be another little furry mouth to feed in our future…? Would Othello stand a chance against two playful calico girl kitties? Would anyone in this house ever sleep again? Tune in next time!… Read more

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Critters Gadgetology

Preparations E.

In the absence of an Avid to play with at the moment (Kent has had some work stuff going on, so he probably won’t get to take his first look at it until tonight), I’ve been testing out the Super VHS VTR that I got in the same package, as well as messing around with some 3-D software (of which more later).
Super VHS VTR
This is it – being on top of that tower of plastic shelves (my temporary solution to the lack of a rack) probably makes it look a bit smaller than it really is. It’s a bulky, heavy monster, and just getting it up there scared the hell outta me. (The thought of having to lift it off of there someday scares me too.) It delivers a very nice picture, and has both BNC and S-video output ports; I ran one of the S-video outputs to the S-video jack on Orac’s LCD screen, which will serve nicely as a playback monitor. It gives an awesome picture, even on stuff that I shot years and years ago with my plain old VHS camcorder.
Avid Manual
This is the documentation for the Avid, by the way. Note that it’s bigger than the freakin’ speaker!
Olivia snoozing
This is an Olivia I woke up while I was trying to get this picture, looking like she’s just been squished by all those pillows.
FlavH20
This is a flavored water drink we picked up at the store the other day – yummy apple flavor, though it turned out not to be sugar-free, so I don’t know if I’ll be getting any more. But at the very least I was completely fascinated by that container – it’s like a plastic drink bottle sliced in half with a pop-top can lid on the top. Maybe this is something that’s been floating around the rest of the country for ages, but I’ve never seen anything like it – pretty cool, actually.
I have to go back to work tonight, and I’m in no hurry to do so. That may be big talk for someone with a broken Avid, but it’s getting harder and harder to not just walk out of the place. (For those thinking “Well, that’s okay, but common sense would seem to dictate not blogging about it getting harder and harder to not just walk out of the place,” that thought’s occurred…but so has another thought: I don’t care. At the moment they need me more than I care to stick around with them. I don’t have to be part of that organization to make my soul and my life complete, y’know? Plus I’ve made no secret of my desire to leave, or the reasons why. The income helps, but even that can be replaced once I’m up and running. (And in any case, the money I’d save by not having to drive half an hour into town every day would almost cancel out the loss of income.)
Just gotta be patient…… Read more