It’s time for eight feet of adventure! Not meaning eight feet tall, mind you – just two little sets of four little fuzzy feet each getting into way more trouble than you’d really think them capable of. (Olivia just watched.) And just what kind of trouble did we find ourselves in? Tune in next time, true believers – same cat time, same cat station. … Read more
No fancy intro? Ah well, time for meat and potatoes then.
It’s time at last to get working on the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD set. … Read more
Did quite a bit of cooking today, including a chocolate cake I’m a little bit too fond of. Also swapped out amps in the living room so the Mrs. would have her beloved KLH amp back in place. The big difference between that one and what was in there? A remote control. I also found that I had to rewire the entire speaker system because a number of small, four-legged rewiring experts who shall remain nameless had undone a lot of what was already in place; amp swap or no, two speakers out of a five-speaker surround setup were still plugged in. Argh. I redid it so that there aren’t any dangling speaker cables for the, erm, experts to play with.
Here’s a little sneak peak at a DVD intro that isn’t going to happen, which utterly breaks my heart. (Yes, I know that there are a couple of models that turned out to be completely screwed in there, as well as one or two that completely vanished come rendering time. ???) The models were downloaded, but some of the authors basically said “no way” to their models’ inclusion in an intro for a for-profit DVD project, enough of them to make me reconsider the whole thing. (The intro, that is, not the DVD project. You don’t get that lucky.) In the meantime, enjoy the show. I think the intro would’ve been beautiful. And probably three times as long in its finished, more polished form. 😆 I Squeezed this into a larger Flash movie than usual for you, just because the detail is worth it. Some of the models are just deliciously photorealistic, and it’s no accident that the “camera” starts out at the eye level of a small child before it really takes flight.
In any event, my heartbreak is cushioned by the fact that someone else is doing something like this that would’ve put anything I could’ve come up with to shame – and when the day arrives that an actual PDF documentary project is ready to go (rather than this one which, while much-requested, still feels like a bit of a placeholder to me), he’ll probably be unlucky enough to be on my speed dial. 😆 (Besides, his home arcade would make a damn fine shooting location, except for the great likelihood that I wouldn’t be able to get any work done there. Ever.)
I’d love his arcade…but I think I’d hate his electric bill. Maybe he should see about making the new arcade outbuilding he’s working on (see his blog) solar-powered. 😀… Read more
Sam ‘n’ Ella better keep away from my peanut butter cookies. I’m a mongrel for crunchy peanut butter, so this news is rather alarming. In other news, to make a completely bizarre segue into another topic, someone’s finally cracked the Tagalong Code: if you’re craving that most delicious variety of Girl Scout Cookies during those times of the year when Girl Scout Cookies aren’t available, try out Keebler’s new peanut-butter-filled fudge cookies. I forget what they’re actually called, but OMG they’re delicious. They’re still not quite perfect – Tagalongs are thinner and I like the chocolate coating better on them – but they’re as close as anyone’s gotten. (And they’re about a buck cheaper.) That said, I’m still craving genuine Tagalongs, but it looks like I missed the bus for this year’s order. 🙁
Robin Hood: Cats On Printers. The funny picture yesterday of Obi standing proudly atop my PC is not an isolated incident, so my game room has become Off Limits To Kitties While Daddy’s Away. Sad, really, because the window in there, which is all overgrown with brush, is teeming with birds year-round – it’s like Cat TV. You can find one or both of the kittens sitting in there on top of the scanner, watching the window all glossy-eyed. But when Obi jumps on top of the printer, decides that it’s a good idea to jump up and try to tag either an arcade marquee (which is damn close to the ceiling) or the Doctor Who pinball backglass (perched in the upper pane of the window in a way that isn’t precarious until someone starts screwing with it), and then all that jumping threatens to dislodge both printer and Vectrex from their slots on the shelf…well…I suppose this is just a sneak preview of things to come. 😆 My game room is going to need quite a bit of work to make it kid-friendly. Fortunately, I already have some ideas on that front, ideas which I’ll share shortly. Gaming folks with limited space and/or concerns about keeping their consoles clean of dust and other things may want to pay close attention… … Read more
Okay. Let’s put some cards on the table. It’s become painfully apparent in the past few days that I’ve got an E ticket on the hormonal roller coaster that’ll be making daily (if not hourly) stops through my home. I’m doing some final animation work as I get ready to start working on the PDF DVD – believe it or not, the wife is bugging me about it (mainly, I think, because she’d like to see it sell and sell well) – though whether or not she’ll show that same enthusiasm about the prospect of me making it to any of the shows this year to peddle my wares personally is a big question mark. I am still planning on having it done by July at the latest. Those who have seen it at OVGE in years past will still be surprised: it’ll be nearly twice as long, necessitating it being either a 2-DVD set or (less likely) a dual-layer DVD. As much as I’d love to do it dual layer, blank single-layer discs are, quite simply, cheaper. (Go price a spindle of DL-DVD+Rs, even at Wal-Mart. Seriously.) I’m still working on adding more stuff to it, including a real gem of a long-lost commercial that’s literally just been…um…unearthed. (Negotiations are ongoing.)
In the meantime, I’m working on a couple of Nefarious Video Projects. … Read more
Some disjointed, unrelated thoughts that I really didn’t think merited their own individual entries (not that this has ever stopped me)… … Read more
Did my first weigh-in tonight, a week after starting the diet. I figured, what with discovering that I was going to be daddy just a few days into the diet, I probably would’ve gained weight from nervous nibbling. Nope – I actually lost two pounds. Which ain’t too shabby.
The Mrs. and I were actually embarking on this weight-loss adventure together, but I guess she’s going to have to postpone for a little bit, isn’t she? (Actually, somehow she lost six pounds, which is kinda scary, considering.)
I’m up late reconfiguring my LAN to be, well, more of a real LAN. Orac II has been wiped clean and has had Win98 installed on it (it was a Win2000 machine in a former life, but I actually need it running 98 – what a motley assortment, a Win98 box, an NT box, and an XP box – plus a couple of handheld PCs running old, old builds of Win CE). The reconfigured LAN will allow me to get stuff from the Avid to Zen much, much faster, without wasting a lot of time uploading and downloading to my web server (which merely steals from the monthly bandwidth allowance that, by all rights, belongs to you, the reader). It’s time to get some real live workflow ability going here if I’m going to be sitting here all the time with video to edit and a baby to feed. Or is that the other way around?
Speaking of video to edit, I was playing around tonight with a very, very simple effect – making something semi-transparent in a shot. (Easy: shoot the same thing with and without the object in question.) I then messed around with some lighting and other effects, and…
…voila, Cybermen staring down a “holo-Dalek”. Kinda cool, eh? I’d show you video, but I’m not sure there’s a need – that still frame pretty much spells it out for ya, and there really isn’t much movement to the video anyway. (The Dalek lights up different colors, but that’s about it.) (And between the diffracted light and the soft focus, it looks so ’80s.) But hey, I moved it via the LAN, so it was as good a test subject as any.
There’s supposed to be a gaming get-together at Brian’s (icbrkr) new place this weekend; there’s also supposed to be half a foot of snow, slush and ice. This is something like the third or fourth time his gaming gathering has been scuttled by the weather. I’m watching the schedules for CGE and OVGE this year very closely, with one eye on wanting to go, and one eye on possibly needing to stay. :/
By the way, if you’ve never had to do it, puzzling out what kind of devices are on a new machine so you can find the bloody drivers for them is a huge pain in the ass. Thank God for pcidatabase.com.… Read more
First blawg from the new job here. One of my first big tasks is to figure out how to migrate a heap of e-mail from Mozilla back to Outlook. Actually, let me back up a bit there. The guy who was here before me, as the back office IT guy, left on fairly short notice, was the only one who really knew how this stuff worked, and was pretty much thought of as indispensible – as I think I’ve said, there’s plenty of irony to be had in the comedic twist of me leaving the station and then finding myself picking up the pieces for such a person. Anyway, this guy was Mr. Open Source. He either uninstalled or rendered completely unusable Microsoft Office, Outlook, Explorer, what have you, and switched everything over to the Mozilla family or to OpenOffice.org. Now, that’s all fine and dandy, except that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was ever actually specifically asked to do this switcheroo. And what’s more, while the near-beer open source Office knockoff can read Word and Excel files just fine, exporting to those formats is a different bird entirely; it exports humongous files, far bigger than the same exact things would be as Word or Excel files, and loses formatting. It’s either clumsily programmed, or it’s as if they’re penalizing you for trying to go back to Microsoft.
I’m not a Microsoft cheerleader, okay? But for office software, it’s damn near a universal standard. If a file I generate that’s supposedly Word-compatible isn’t, that’s going to create a logjam when I have to e-mail something outside of the building. (Or inside, for that matter – no other machine here has this same odd train wreck of open source stuff installed on it.) Love it or hate it, if you’re in business, there’s either “the behemoth” or there’s “sticking it to the man in such a way that your clients will have a hard time looking at anything you send them.” Which, hey, that’s great that you’re sticking it to the man, but you’re probably losing money, if not clientele, while you’re doing it. Congratulations.
Migrating e-mail from Thunderbird back to Outlook is looking like it could be a whole other full-time job. I’ve found one program that, by all reports, does the trick, but it’s kinda pricey for something that would, essentially, be used once and then put back on the shelf. What I don’t get is this: if open source is the wave of the future, and the end to software monopolies, yadda yadda yadda, why is it easier to export mail from Outlook to another mail client than it is to get that same mail out of Thunderbird and back into Outlook? Again, I get the gut feeling that I’m either looking at shoddy programming or some vague attempt to punish anyone who would dare re-align their allegiances with Microsoft.
Remember the South Park episode about hybrid cars, where a cloud of “smug” smothers whole cities to the sound of George Clooney’s self-important Oscar acceptance speech? I’m really starting to feel the same way about open source software. Are we trying to break a monopoly here…or are we just jealous that we’re not that monopoly?… Read more
I have’t gone in to work yet, but today we get back to the big countdown: 4 days until the end of my penance in the TV industry. Can’t wait.
Oberon and Olivia are chilling out after all the Christmas cheer. Actually, they got to spend a lot of the day in the house with no people around – as usual, we head to my sister-in-law’s place for Christmas. I missed seeing Sampson and the other kitties around; there’s only one cat left up there. It’s easy to figure out why when you see real live bald eagles zipping around the mountain.
My wife liked the bundle of Olivia goodies I got her. As crazy as she is about her kitten, I hoped they’d go down well. I filled the mug with these chocolates that she likes a lot, so all was well. I suppose sometime this year I need to update that design with one that includes Oberon and says “My Cats Are The Real Bosses.” 😆 Anyone who’s interested in picking up the Olivia-wear can still find it here.
I got a nice big spindle of dual-layer DVD+R blanks, new boots (seems that the incident a week ago today was pretty much the end for my already-slowly-disintegrating farm boots) and socks to go with them, and the 4-disc Chronicles Of Narnia DVD set. And today, I got…technical problems. Zen has suddenly decided that it will no longer run Paint Shop Pro 8, nor will it let me reinstall it; I’ve had to load up PSP5 to get any graphics work done. As a possible solution to this problem, I managed to get IE7 uninstalled at last, at the cost of Microsoft trying to tell me every 15 minutes that my computer requires Critical Updates.
Time for me to get cleaned up a bit and head to work. 4 more days…… Read more
Alas, poor Orac. He’s dead. That PC wouldn’t voom if you put 1.21 gigawatts of electricity through it. It’s pushing up the daisies and it’s joined the choir invisible. It can’t even get to the CMOS settings. It’s dead, with a capital dead. Naturally, right now is when I happen to need to scan a lot of stuff. 🙄 Fortunately a replacement is on the way, probably in even better shape than Orac was when I first got it. Really, it’s kinda silly if you think about it – when did I start needing three different computers in close proximity? Yikes. Just go ahead and assimilate me.
Speaking of computer-related misfortunes: I. Hate. IE7. And the whole thing about how it’s supposedly easy to step back to 6 seems to have been misreported: it’s sure as hell not easy for me, and I want that digital hellspawn gone from my machine. Argh. If I wanted a browser to act like Firefox, y’know, I’d just download bloody Firefox. This one was not ready for prime time, and at least on my machine, it’s very unstable – what good is tabbed browsing if the thing crashes and takes all my tabs with it?
Ah well. It’s Friday (actually, technically speaking, it’s Saturday now). It’s the end of my work week. It’s almost Christmas. I should go look at my own kitten pics and cheer the heck up. Actually, scratch that – I’m gonna go home and look at the kitten in the pics.… Read more
