Category: Home Base

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Cooking With Code Home Base

Pinned and pained

Ouch. Between working on the farm and discovering that the only sunscreen Jan had at the pool yesterday contained something that’s basically poisonous to me, I didn’t just get sunburned this weekend. I fried in my own fat. I was thinking last night before I went to bed that I was just an embarrassing shade of red, but now it really kinda hurts. Add that to all the aches and pains that I picked up over the weekend, between farm work and spending one night sleeping on the floor (don’t ask), and I’m not exactly feeling great today. I’ll probably still be lobster boy by the time CGE rolls around. Ah well.

Interesting article here about Spam Blogs, and it really points up one of the reasons I’m so fond of WordPress…though by the same token, I wish there was a little more due dilligence when it comes to “sponsored” WordPress themes. (I think I’ve griped about that before – ah, here it is.)

I almost forgot to mention, in last week’s travelogue of the 1984 Arcade, that I got my first real bit of Wii time in before Brian and I left his (really really nice) new house. I love that thing. I must have one some day. Brian warned me away from playing the baseball game in Wii Sports, but let me tell you, that was the moment where it really hit me, because I like playing baseball a heck of a lot more than watching it. In fact, I barely can watch baseball – it’s like a televised death march. And this is as close as I’m likely to get to being up at bat since, oh, about fourth grade or so (long story). Bowling was okay – I do about as well with virtual bowling as I do with the real thing (i.e. I royally suck), tennis was a bit better, but baseball was where it really clicked for me. I never got even close to letting fly with the Wiimote, either. 😆 Santa, please take note: I really, really want a Wii this year. I haven’t been so enthusiastic about a modern gaming platform since discovering retro compilations on the original Playstation.

I’ve been skimming the list of available, playable games at Las Vegas’ Pinball Hall Of Fame Museum, a destination to/from which there’ll be free shuttles after hours at CGE this month. Anyone who knows me knows that my very tenuous grasp of physics (for example: walking in a straight line, catching objects which have been gently thrown precisely in my direction, breathing in and out) extends to pinball tables. I never had the interest in pinball as a kid that I did in video games, and certainly not the body mass – as a kid – that one needed to really “work” the table. But so many pinballs in one place? How can I resist? This is truly the kind of once-in-a-lifetime thing one runs into at Classic Gaming Expo that I continually tell people is worth much, much more than buying a CGE-exclusive homebrew and then going home to play it. Anyway, what’s emerged from my research is a few lists of games I need to play/film:

Stuff I Remember From My Childhood: Orbitor 1 (Stern, 1982), Haunted House (Gottlieb, 1980), Black Hole (Gottlieb, 1981), Black Knight (Williams, 1980)

Stuff I’ve Always Wanted To Play, But Never Saw A Machine In My Life: Superman (Atari, 1979), Q*bert’s Quest (Gottlieb, 1983), and the biggie: Doctor Who (Bally, 1992).

Stuff I’ve Never Seen Or Heard Of Before That Intrigues Me Greatly: Space Shuttle (Williams, 1984), Star Trek: The Next Generation (Williams, 1993), Star Wars Episode I (Williams, 1999), Stargate (Gottlieb, 1995), Super Mario Brothers Mushroom World (Gottlieb, 1992), Super Mario Brothers (Gottlieb, 1992)

You can see the details on each machine linked from the Museum’s list. But…no Xenon machine or the original Star Trek pinball? Are you guys serious!? Anyway, I’m not saying that there’s going to wind up being a pinball section on my site anywhere. In fact, I don’t know what the heck I’ll do with any video or photos that I shoot of these machines. But I do know that it’s an exceedingly rare opportunity – the flipside, if you will, of the 1984 Arcade in Springfield. To hit both places in one month? Awesome.… Read more

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

Things are going just swimmingly

Swimmy time
A look at our super secret swimming hole. And us in it. (I’m the bald, non-pretty one who isn’t using any kind of flotation device and is therefore barely keeping his head above water in the deep end.)

Little Girl
This is the lifeguard, Little Girl. Sooooo much better than David Hasselhoff. For example: I could never see giving David Hasselhoff scritchies behind the ears. Hell, I couldn’t even see doing that to Pamela Anderson, for that matter. And I don’t think we’ll ever see video of Little Girl sloppily wolfing down cheeseburgers in a drunken stupor either.

Dipstick
This is Dipstick. He’s a much older cat and loves nothing more than to find shady spots…and stay there. He is wise beyond his considerable years.

Oberon and Olivia
Naturally, our own kitties are more than happy for us to come home from the pool.

I spent almost three hours today shooting some video for a Toybox article you’ll see in about a week; it was quite a bit of fun and took quite a bit of setup, but I think you’ll like it when you see it. It got me thinking quite a bit about my evolution from playing with toys as a kid to collecting them as an adult, and I realized that I was much closer to playing with them today than I’d been in a long time – I was just inspired in a kind of “I know that’s not what it looks like on the screen, but what the heck?” kind of way, and had a made-up rationale for why things would be the way I was setting them up instead, and before you know it, scenarios form in my head and I have to remind myself that I’m taking some pictures, not playing with my action figures. I had a long train of thought about the nature of imaginative play, about how much modern toys (especially those attached to TV and movie licenses) are geared more toward re-enactment of specific scenarios than they are to open-ended play, and the thought also occurred that I would need to be accessing my imagination in that same wide-open, no-boundaries space once again, probably sooner than I think, when interact with my son (and play with him) as he grows up. Anyway, not wanting to dump all of the cargo from that train of thought at your station, I arrived at the following summation:

  1. In some ways, I have indeed never grown up.
  2. I think I’m actually happier that way, and may function better that way.

So much of the business I’ve been in all of my adult life has revolved around finding ways to do things, finding ways to make things look a certain way. There are several schools of thought here:

  1. It can’t be done by us with this equipment.
  2. It can be done, but we don’t have the time to do it.
  3. It can be done, we just have to rethink the angle of attack and use what we know about the equipment we’re using to make it happen in a reasonable amount of time and/or money.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am so Mr. #3. And that comes from that spirit of imaginative play. Anyone who’s so locked into one way of thinking that they reflexively fall back on #1 or #2 as an answer without even trying #3 needs to get out of the pool and let someone more playful dive in and make some waves.

My toys are mostly digital now, but damned if I don’t still love my plastic ones too. And if I get to play with both at the same time, even better.

I’ve already gotten one call from the Entertainment Fort Smith print ad for GreenhouseFX.tv, but they wanted me to shoot a wedding…on the last Saturday in July. Eek. Stay tuned for the explanation of why exactly I had to turn them down…because it seems I’m booked.… Read more

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Critters Gaming Home Base Television & Movies

Big Fun!

Found even more treasures during the Great Clean-Up Of The Baby’s Future Room Wednesday, including my long-lost tape of the original Fox promos for the 1996 Doctor Who movie. I’ve put those up on the site here, just click each of the “preview” buttons to see the various promos Fox ran in 1996. Damned if they didn’t make it look exciting, eh? (And hey, if you like Doctor Who trailers, you can’t miss this one – if ever you don’t dig a trailer from the new series, just come back to this one again. 😆 ) I also found a heap of PAL VHS tapes of such things as “I Was A Doctor Who Monster”, “K-9 Unleashed” and “Who On Earth Is Tom Baker”, all of which I promptly dubbed to a DVD for safe keeping. I’m fond of that now-nearly-extinct breed of fan film/documentary hybrids that Myth Makers excelled at.

The trip to Springfield’s 1984 Arcade is still on, and just a week away. I can’t wait for that. I may have some other Big News in the next few days as well, stay tuned!

Got some swim time in on Wednesday night, then we came home and I proceeded to whip up both dinner and the next day’s lunch for both of us all at the same time. Well, all three of us. That Evan is a hungry little bugger. As usual, I didn’t get near any fireworks – I fired up the fireworks graphic demo on the Christopher Tumber Vix / Tsunami Vectrex homebrew and let it run all day. When other people did start blowing stuff up, Xena was ready to come inside. (Smelling me cooking may also have had something to do with that.) I was getting pretty irritated with some kids who were shooting off fireworks insanely close to our overgrown pasture, when all of a sudden it stopped, and yet I kept seeing flashes of light outside – lo and behold, it was the nightly thunderstorm to the rescue. With all the rain we’ve had, it’s probably too damp for there to really be any legitimate concerns about someone burning down my land, but it’s just the principle of the thing.

I’m just elated with the news that Catherine Tate will be back as Donna for all of the fourth season of Doctor Who. That just about makes up for the hash that was made of Martha’s character development (to say nothing of that finale…oy vey! Sleep, Data, sleep! Am I the only person who thought that Eccleston’s Doctor would’ve wiped the floor with John Simm without a second thought?). But Catherine Tate? I can get behind that, and not just because she’s delicious. She’s not 20 years old, she’s not impossibly stick-figure thin, and she doesn’t have an unrequited love thing going on with the Doctor… yay, she might come across as a real person. I loved that character in The Runaway Bride, although I fully understand that I’m probably in the minority there. (That episode, and the first one with Martha, air this Friday night on Sci-Fi, so hey, you tell me.) I know that I’m just an American who hasn’t suffered overexposure to Catherine Tate via her comedy show, but I just thought she was really cute, and the character was a nice departure from anything we’ve seen in the show before, old or new. And as for Kylie…well…ask me again after Christmas.… Read more

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Critters Home Base

Unearthing the past

Amazing what turns up when cleaning my old room.

Jump Cut City raw tapes

These are the Jump Cut City raw tapes, straight out of the camcorder, the original footage that we’d pile layers of sound effects, etc. onto later. When there was a big Burchuss scene, we’d dub Burchuss speech audio directly onto these tapes as well. What a find! If one had professional editing gear and time, one could probably do a Lucas number on these…oh…wait.

Jump Cut City raw tapes

I’m going to have to look at some of this stuff and see what’s on it, because several of these JCC adventures never ever got finished.

Boxed Kitten

We’ve been boxing stuff up to store it away and get it out of the baby room, though obviously we wind up with the wrong thing in the wrong container from time to time…

Boxed Kitten

(Don’t worry, that lid was closed for all of three seconds, and wasn’t locked down. On the flipside, Olivia’s not jumping into every box we’re unpacking or repacking now…)… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code Home Base

Remodeling in more ways than one

Tuesday we get a look at the baby once again via ultrasound…supposedly this’ll be the fancy deal where you can basically see what he’s going to look like when he pops out into the world in a couple of months. Of course you know I’m going to post some pictures from that.

In the meantime, baby room work continues, with one of the heaviest pieces of my furniture – a bookshelf that has traveled with me through every move I’ve ever made – now in the game room.

Bookshelf
Thing is…I’m not sure it’s going to go right there. It’s a case where, now that I’ve got it there and have it loaded down with a couple hundred pounds of bound printed material once more, I’m just not sure it’s going to work there. It creates a little “hallway” coming into the game room, which may just be too narrow (especially with the arcade cabinet creating an extra corner to navigate). And the back of it isn’t exactly photogenic. So…it’s still a work in progress. I’ve just got a lot of progress to make in the next few weeks. Really, the important step is getting it out of the bedroom that’s going to become the nursery.

During cleanup, I have found a few treasures that I had declared missing, from the jewel case with my Tron 2.0 discs in it to a VHS copy of MST3K: The Movie signed by Trace Beaulieu:
MST3K The Movie

By the way, the third and final volume of Amazing Stories soundtracks arrived today, and let me tell you, as pricey as these were, it’s so worth it to have the whole set.

Amazing Stories CDs

I’ve been on the lookout for a new WordPress theme for Scribblings, because the current one (“Fishy”) has started doing weird stuff that I’m not too fond of (try paging down and watching the left margin on the various blog entries). The problem here is that, now that WordPress and themes for it are a big deal, some honest-to-God mediocrity is seeping into the whole thing. Themes that just flat-out don’t work as advertised no matter what browser you use to look at them, themes that rely wholesale on brute-force non-compliant HTML code, and the new bane of my existence, “sponsored links themes”. These usually include a set of links toward the bottom of the page – though I’ve started to notice that some theme authors are working up the stones to drop these links near the top – which link to some really spammy stuff: the usual suspects, drugs, highly suspect search engines, and other forms of link-farm bullcrap. The authors of these just about always include something in their terms of use about how you can’t use their themes if you remove those links. Now, part of me wants to just remove the links and see if the authors ever actually even find out and do anything about it, but I’d rather just find a suitable non-“spamsered” theme and try to keep the internet’s barely-functional honor system intact. But it infuriates me to see how much this is happening. I hope that this isn’t just the tip of an iceberg that might see WordPress targeted in much the same way as phpBB is. I reserve a special hatred for spammers in whatever form they take, and theme authors who integrate that stuff into the fabric of their work are spammers, whether they want to think so or not in their little worlds. (Thank God for Weblog Tools Collection, which carefully notes which themes are spamsered; that’s a criterion that themes.wordpress.net desperately needs to add to its search tool.)

Off to bed. I’ve got a date with a baby in the morning.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base Music

Dispatches from the Bizarro World

Jan recently got a call from the hospital to let us know that our evening childbirth classes, which were were signed up to take through July, have been cancelled due to lack of interest. Did people suddenly bring the baby-makin’ to a halt? Can I help? You know where to find me if you need me to repopulate the species in my own image. Seriously, I’m having a hard time buying that – lack of interest!? On the flipside of that, we were directed toward internet videos to replace the classes. This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite off-topic threads at Digital Press, the two best posts of which were as follows:

  1. anyone know a website that explains how to wield a katana? videos/pics whatever, like a Katana Wielding for Dummies type thing.

    thanks..

  2. I like your traditional ideals, learning the subtle beauty of the weapon the same way the samurai masters did a thousand years ago… through pictures… on the internet.

That thread sprang to mind immediately. I know humans have been pumping out babies since day one, without classes, but it’d be nice to have. Until then, I’ll just have to learn myself… through pictures… on the internet. (But when I’m not doing that, my offer of help still stands. Trust me, extinction’s uglier than I am. 😆 )

The summer of swimming continues, and I’ll admit that it’s probably slowing down my work on the baby room. But I’d forgotten how good it feels to just float around (and how much better it feels to put in some actual laps). When you’ve got skin problems like mine, there’s nothing like just being in water up to your ears for a couple of hours. On so many levels, it feels so much better.

Also, last but not least, I just gave Frost*’s cover of ELO’s “Here Is The News” a listen or three, and I’ve officially declared it brilliant. This is how you cover ELO – maintain the strengths of the original, and feel free to rock it the heck out where appropriate.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base Serious Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines ToyBox

TGIF x 10,000

Thank God for Fridays. And thank God that this is one of ’em. ‘Nuff said.

I’ve been meaning to post a small version of the print ad for GreenhouseFX.tv that I prepared to run in the July bridal issue of Entertainment Fort Smith. I just keep letting it slip my mind. I thought the way it was worded kind of cleverly gets around whether or not I’d be shooting video or just editing it. With Evan at T minus 86 days and counting from liftoff, I’m hoping the message comes across that I’m doing post production primarily, without that seeming like something that would count points off.

It’s rainy today, and rainy = no swimmy. And no swimmy = no happy. Maybe that’s stretching it a little bit, but I’ve really gotten to enjoy what has become the daily swim. Even if the skeeters made a buffet line out of me yesterday while my head was poking out of the water. I don’t “dunk” well in swimming pools – I can’t stand chlorine getting into my eyes – but I dunked several times yesterday.

I’ve had the misfortune this week of watching a guy I used to work with take a very public fall from grace. I didn’t work with him very long before I left the TV station, but he always struck me as a pefectly nice guy. Oddly enough, he is the second former co-worker of mine about whom something like this has come to light (the other was someone I worked with at Fox over 10 years ago), and it’s still incredibly creepy. There was absolutely no indication of anything like this from working with the guy day in and day out. It’s bad news on multiple levels – I have no wish to see the place I used to work for take this kind of a black eye, and this was the first hire for Drew after he took over as chief meteorologist. (I’m pretty sure Drew had no idea about any of this either. At least not during the hiring/auditioning process.) In short, it doesn’t make anybody look good. Dude…get some help. Please. Before you wind up like my other former co-worker who wound up with actual molestation charges and not just being a peeping tom.

The foot that I’m staying off of is still pretty slow going. Missing a day of swimming (I know, bad topic to mention after the previous paragraph…) isn’t going to help it any. There’s just a zen state that I’m able to find in the water that I think has been missing from my life for a decade or so, and I don’t seem to find it anywhere else. My wife has a hard time getting me to vacate the pool. I’ve found myself wondering lately if this site would even exist in anything resembling its current form if I’d had a swimming hole to devote this kind of time to all these years. I wonder what kind of shape I would be in. Relative weightlessness = bliss. Especially for a fat guy like me. But even then I’m trying to address that a bit – I try to do some actual laps back and forth, instead of just floating around.

And now, a Public Plea for Help: sometime back in ubikuberalles’ Livejournal, he mentioned finding the titanium collection Classic Galactica vehicles. Now assuming that all of this had happened before and all of it would happen again, I went looking for them locally, to no avail. If anyone spots these, please, please, please let me know about it, prices included. I’m not sure which ships they’ve making from the original series in that scale, but I’m after the Viper, the Cylon raider, and good ol’ clunky Galactica herself. If you can get these where you are, let me know – I can paypal you or something, or come up with some kinda trade. If anyone can finagle that, that’s very likely my last toy purchase before the baby gets here.

Speaking of the boy, I’ve been feeling him kick on a pretty regular basis here of late. I’ll put my head up to my wife’s belly and talk to him, and then PTHOOK!, right in my ear. He’s already kickin’ the old man in the head. This bodes well. 😆… Read more

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Home Base

Sunday! Sunday! Someday…

Ick. Stormy day. 😛

Yesterday Jan and I went swimming; she’s got an open invite from a co-worker to use his swimming pool, and yesterday was the first chance I’ve had to go with her. I don’t think I’ve been swimming in ten years, and I forgot how much I love swimming. Okay, maybe what I really love right now, with my ouchy mutant toe and the various spots of skin problems I have, is floating in the deep end with the water up to right under my nose. I did get a bit of exercise in and do some actual swimming, but yeah, mostly floating around and just soaking it up. Literally. My foot felt so much better after spending about 45 minutes in the pool. I’m hoping this’ll blow over – despite the thunderstorm watch until 9 tonight – and we can get some more swim (or float) time in.

I’ve also been reconfiguring Orac – again – after Kent spent a week or so doing some life-saving file recovery. It now has an XP partition and a tiny 98 partition – which will hopefully not go kaflooey – just to run stuff like the scanner. I’m aiming to get the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD project back on track now that Orac’s back in service, though I’ll go ahead and admit in public now that I’m having doubts about it being ready for CGE. I’m still aiming for that, but let’s just say I’m concerned about the crunch.

We got a nifty new microwave Saturday:
Microwave
…which replaces the replacement microwave (i.e. the one Jan used in college) that replaced our other one that died a few weeks ago. This one’s got a pretty cool feature, namely the ability to scan barcodes and somehow automagically pick out the precise cooking time from that. It can also be “taught” cooking time and power levels for new barcodes. We’ve both been wondering how much memory it has. It does, however, have this great indiglo-style light behind its display which provides enough light in the kitchen for midnight snack time. Not that such a time ever arrives in this house.

I’m also frantically preparing for the relaunch of yet another major section of theLogBook.com, this time the ToyBox archive. Work on that section has been ongoing for quite a while, and longtime fans of our nifty little sci-fi-and-space-and-video-game archive will be happy to hear that I’ve replaced a lot of the old low-resolution photos. I’m also adding more video segments to previously existing articles, including various and sundry vintage toy commercials and things along the lines of our patented extremely silly demo videos of things like R/C Daleks. ToyBox will relaunch in a week.

Just go ahead and stop, storms. I wanna go swimming again.… Read more