Category: Home Base

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Critters Home Base Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Care for a cat scan?

This is becoming an increasingly common sight in my game room/office with the now-frequent Opening of the Window:
Cat Scan 😆
I’ve just about got all of that scanning and printing technology hooked back up, so Olivia may have to find a new spot to crash. Seriously – I need to find her a little ottoman or something. I used to have one in Green Bay, and kept it next to my computer desk, and Othello and Iago would spend all of their time there, watching me and staying within petting distance. Today I nearly stepped on Olivia’s paw (one of her recently-operated-on paws, no less) and she let out a loud alarm squeak before I put my weight on it. I moved my foot in a hurry and turned around to check on her, only to find Othello standing between me and her, hissing at me. Somebody’s protective of his little sis. I never thought I’d see the day.
Supremely frustrating evening at work tonight, just another instance where I’m more than ready to move on or just get out and start carving my own path. Maybe it’s just me getting a “bad attitude,” but the faults and weaknesses in our company are now sticking out like big, red, glowing sore thumbs to me, more and more, every day. And it pisses me off. It shouldn’t be like this. These are bring-everything-to-a-standstill problems and making-us-look-really-amateurish problems. When you’re endeavouring to be in the mass media, especially with a news operation, your credibility with the public is your only currency and it can take a lot to rebuild it if you make a habit out of screwing up. In this day and age of cowering away from anything that might potentially result in the vaguest whispered hint of a lawsuit, and then turning around and courting easy hot-button controversy for ratings, it’s no wonder that the media is losing that currency of respect with the folks who they’re too busy forcing ads onto.
Pac-Man potholderBack to the game room: when I moved stuff around, I had to take the HAL 9000 off the wall, leaving an icky nail sticking out. A while back, a friend of mine – in fact, it’s someone who reads this blawg! – sent me a few hand-made potholders (which, in this house, come in far more useful than you might realize, though I’ll admit that at least one has been hijacked by Olivia and pressed into service as her pillow). This one, however, is a display piece only, and perfectly suited for a retro gaming room. I just thought they’d like to see that these were definitely appreciated.
Back to L.E.O. for just a second – if anyone wants to grab it through my site instead of Not Lame, I’ve put it in the site’s store – click here-ish. All proceeds go toward…well…getting me a copy of the same. 😛… Read more

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Critters Home Base

Preparations B.

While working on moving stuff around and hooking it back up today, and realizing that the Doctor Who pinball backglass wasn’t going to be able to adorn the window anymore, I decided I’d like some real live sunlight in the room. This turned out to be a very popular move with my household helpers.
Earl's game room
Olivia seems especially happy with the prospect of being able to sit on top of the computers and watch the bird’s nest that’s been built in the brush that pretty much covers the window. (It’s an interesting privacy screen, but it’s really just a case of me needing to get out from behind the computer and get outside and suck up some allergens to cut it all down. On the flipside, I could always just tell people that my game room is on Kashyyyk.)
Earl's game room
God only knows what the bird were thinking. 😆 … Read more

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Critters Gadgetology Home Base

Preparations.

Today has been all about starting to rearrange the game room for the new gear that’ll be occupying it in about a week and a half or so.
Viewsonic Monitors
Trying to find a way to avoid buying yet another monitor, I pulled down a flatscreen we haven’t used in a while to see if I could get it to overcome a problem it has displayed in the past – namely, starting to display the bottom of a Windows display about halfway up the screen. Turns out that there’s a trick to fixing this (it’s a known bug), and now we’re working just fine. These two monitors will be the Avid edit monitors.
Avid-ready
This is the end result of today’s toil; my main computer (Zen)’s monitor is at the far right, Orac’s is the one in the middle/corner, and the one between them is a 17″ LCD that monitors either cable or the output of my existing (non-Avid) video gear. (Orac’s and Zen’s monitors can also do composite video signals – you may have seen these in action at OVGE.)
Avid-ready
And how do I handle the daunting power requirements of this stuff?
Avid-ready
Kitten power! (ZZZZzzzzzzzzz…)
Only Olivia could crash out while I’m moving stuff all over the place, creating clouds of dust and lots of noise in the process. 😆… Read more

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Critters Funny Stuff Home Base

What IS it with people?!?

Those people in the other cars, I mean. Why is it that, when I’m just trying to pass on the left on the highway without completely trashing the speed limit, so many of the people I’m trying to pass suddenly decide to make a race out of it, as if I’m somehow threatening their very existence? I guarantee you, if I’m trying to pass on the left, no one will think any less of you or relieve you of whatever social status you hold because you got passed. It just means I need to drive faster than 55 miles per hour, and I figure it’s a simple matter to just pass you rather than be late to work because the person driving in front of me is tottering along and talking on the phone. Clearly you’re capable of driving the speed limit, be it 65 or 70 – clearly, because the moment I pull out into the left lane and crank it up to 65, you’re suddenly doing freakin’ 80 (i.e. waythehelloverthespeedlimit), because God forbid anyone should be unwilling to take a back seat to the guy who’s yakking while he’s driving.
Sometimes I daydream about a 007-style Aston-Martin tricked out with all kinds of gears that’d get other folks outta my way. Except make it a Corsica. I’m on a budget.
In other news, my first experiment in scanning negatives with the previously mentioned scanner has yielded an unexpected surprise – now you can see what it was like when I finally moved out of my parents’ house and got a life. (Well, okay, okay, good point – but at the very least I moved out of my parents’ house.)… Read more

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Home Base

Our long national nightmare is over

Okay, so maybe not very national. But I got something in the mail today which indicates that, while it is entirely possible that you can take the sky from me, there exists a roof between my head and the sky which remains mine.
So ends a process which I hope that no one reading this ever has to experience for themselves.
I went ahead and sprang for the three original Star Wars flicks on DVD – including the original originals that my site’s been shilling for all week 😆 – and then today the three new ELO remasters that I preordered some time back arrived in the mail. Which trilogy to indulge in first? In my present state, Lynne Lucas. (And there is a certain amusing symmetry to the fact that I’ve bought the same things again from both of them, and became interested in both around roughly the same time – in fact, my first exposure to ELO was my older brother giving me an 8-track tape of A New World Record, which also happens to be one of the newly remastered albums, as bribe to leave him and his date alone; he informed me that the intro to “Tightrope” “sounds just like your Star Wars music”.)
I’m feeding horses every morning for the next 10 days, so I may not be blawging quite so actively during that time (for which you may wish to thank the deities of your choice, and 20+ hungry horses, at your convenience).… Read more

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Gadgetology Home Base

Color organ transplant II.

Just got back from feeding horses in the middle of a thunderstorm. I think I actually did start singing “I’m feedin’ in the rain…” a couple of times for the benefit of the babies. I was moving the farm’s stallion today on a halter and lead rope and he reared up on his back legs right in front of me. I just froze (for the record: not a smart thing to do). Two thoughts occurred immediately:

  1. My God, that looks spectacular to see a real horse doing that up close, even better than the movies.
  2. So this is it, I’m going to die.

Fortunately he wasn’t actually striking with his front hooves, or I doubt there’d be enough of me left to sit here typing this. He was just showing off. The stuff I put up with for the love of four-legged critters…
Disco infernoIn the words of Servalan from Blake’s 7, “That’s not Orac! That is a box of flashing lights! I will kill you for this!” (Orbit, season 4.) Right after OVGE, I was glowing with happiness about procuring a little disco light at the show, and finding a place for it (in the same display cabinet as my Coleco mini-arcades), but I hadn’t quite found a way to integrate it into my entertainment system so it had something to respond to on a consistent basis. Well, now it does. With a little bit of creative wiring, I’ve tied it into the sound mixer I have in my game room, so it responds to whatever’s running through that – and that includes the PC’s sound. So basically, any sound the PC throws out there, even event sounds, cause the colorful little thing to light up. (Man, there’s just no way to say that where it isn’t a double entendre.) Other things which send sound to the mixer include the CD changer and the sound output from my game consoles. The original idea of the mixer was that one could listen to music and play games at the same time, but now that the color organ is plugged into an otherwise-unused headphone jack, there’s a whole other light show going on in my room. (The mixer also drives my Atari Video Music, which probably has gotten more use since I’ve owned it than in the entirety of 1976 to 2005.) Yes, both of these arcane disco lighting devices will respond to the sound of someone playing Yars’ Revenge. (And since the consoles run through an analog stereo reverb to make the room sound like a football arena when it’s all pumped through the surround speakers, the light patterns get pretty funky.)
Click here to see a short flash video of some of my blinky game room lights in action. If you’re so inclined or even remotely interested. 😀… Read more

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Cooking With Code Home Base Serious Stuff

Pizza, upgrades, and other adventures in pure exasperation

Saturday is really my one day to rest. I work Mondays through Fridays, and I get to slave away on the farm all day on Sundays (and at some points in the year, I’m expected to work on Sundays even after I do the farm thing). Saturday is it for me. This hasn’t been the best Saturday in the world.
I’m trying to install an upgraded WordPress on my site and my FTP client isn’t just rebelling, it’s crashing with enough force to leave a hole in the floor. You can’t just hit the red X and kill it, you have to go to the task manager and kill it. And it crashes doing the damnedest things – it’ll upload a directory with a dozen subdirectories just fine. Ask it to refresh its view of the remote directory? Splat! I’ve been trying to do this for something like four hours now.
I’ve also been eating pizza during that four hours – pizza that was delivered around 7ish PMish. My wife and I each ate a couple of slices when it arrived, and both wound up in digestive distress not very long afterward. She went to bed after that, and I went back to doing whatever the heck it is that I do around here. I ate three slices later, and they didn’t cause me nearly that much trouble. You know what I think the difference was? The grease. The grease ran off into the wax paper in the bottom of the box. So I guess in the future, if I want pizza, I need to order it with about 12 hours’ notice. 😆
Diet Rite Strawberry KiwiOne bit of good news so this entry isn’t all grump: I can affirm that the drink seen here, Diet Rite strawberry kiwi, has completely rocked my world all weekend. There’s lots of stuff on the market that purports to be strawberry kiwi flavored, but so often it winds up being a slightly sour strawberry flavor. This drink gets it right on the nose. My wife found a case of this stuff at a local “damaged freight” store – i.e. where some of the local retailers consign stuff that’s been damaged not to the point where it’s unsafe for human consumption, but just to the point that it’s cosmetically imperfect. (We shop there a lot.) The price averaged out to a few cents a can. I hope they get some more of this in soon, or maybe Wal-Mart will start carrying the stuff – it’s mighty tasty.
OK, now back to my final rant of the night, as I kill WS_FTP in the task manager again. 🙄 For reasons that some of my closer friends know right now (and reasons that I don’t plan on going into in a public blog, at least not for a while), I don’t exactly love the institution of the bank right now. In fact, I’m getting close to hating banks, everywhere, period. I don’t have a problem with the people who are just doing their jobs there, but whoever the ones are in the head office who are coming up with ways to bilk us, those are the ones who need to die several nasty deaths over a painfully protracted period of time. My wife and I have three accounts at our bank – one is more or less her “vehicle fund,” for fueling, maintaining and insuring her personal vehicle, which she also uses heavily at work. One is the joint account which pays our bills. The third is mine, though it’s also referred to as the “site account” – any revenue from the website goes in there, and any expenses on the website’s behalf come out of there, but that account also fuels up the car I drive and occasionally feeds me. (Not that I’m making enough dough every quarter from Amazon to do that – a portion of each of my paychecks also goes in there. 😆 )
Anyway, here’s the deal. I need gas. The kind I can’t get from eating greasy pizza. I’m going to need it tomorrow. There’s about four bucks left in my account. That won’t cut it. So, after making sure my wife knew about it, I got online and moved about $35 over to my account from the joint account, and went and put the gas on my debit card. Well, okay, I put it in my gas tank but paid for it with my debit card. No sweat, eh? Just the way it’s supposed to be. Not so fast! I checked my balance online tonight, and saw that I’ve drawn an NSF for that gas – apparently the $35 won’t “officially” be moved until Monday. Which is “officially” bullcrap. That just negated the entire point of online banking. I would’ve been better off writing a check which couldn’t be deposited until Monday. But it sure as hell made the bank $25 for an NSF fee, didn’t it?
Oh, wait. Writing a check won’t always do it either. I used to have the “site account” at an entirely different account until they instituted a hairbrained policy whereby, when a check comes to them for payment, they don’t pay it against the balance in your account at that moment – they backdate it and use the balance that was in your account on the date that’s written on the check. So, for example, I write a check Thursday night for an amount that would cause an NSF, except that payday is on Friday, the check won’t hit the bank until Friday at the earliest, so I’m okay, right? Wrong! The bank backdates the $20 check to Thursday, sees that I only had $10 in the account on Thursday (never mind that there’s $70 there now), and uses that as an excuse to steal $25 from me. Oops, so sorry, charges me a $25 NSF fee.
I think you can see why I closed the account at that bank. And why I now want to close an account at this one and just start keeping it all in a frakkin’ jar under the bed.
Don’t get me wrong, folks, living beyond your means is bad – a highway to hell paved in bling that you couldn’t afford in the first place. I’ve always tried to play by that rule and not overextend myself, at least not for something completely frivolous. But every once in a great while, you have to play a game of “float the check” that should be resolved by the start of the next business day; I know that the days of doing that are numbered, with the rise of the debit card, smart cards, and even doing instant electronic funds withdrawal via check, so we might as well get used to it. But it looks like we also might as well get used to the high probability that someone at the corporate level of the banks with whom we do business is actively dreaming up ways to make up their own shortfalls – due to a dropoff in the loan business with rising interest rates – by getting it from the little guy any way they possibly can.
Maybe they wouldn’t be seeing a dropoff in business if they’d show even a modicum of respect for their customers.… Read more

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Home Base Toiling In The Pixel Mines

It blowed up real good

Not much to report today – stuff going on in the “real world,” mainly to do with finances, is battling it out with my work on the site to see which one can beat me into a submissive stupor first. Not to mention a lot of stuff going on at work. At this point, I think I’m way past the end of my rope, hanging in mid-air over a canyon like Wily E. Coyote, and the moment I look down, it’s all over. I thought I’d found the escape hatch and had a plan, and now it’s not even that simple anymore.
I should know inside the next five days whether or not I’ve accidentally looked down. Damned Road Runner.
As you can probably imagine, I’ve felt like blowing something up lately, just out of sheer frustration. Fortunately for everyone, I’ve found a way to do it digitally – I think I’ve created the station’s first-ever show open with explosions. Even as tired as I am, I think I came up with a fairly elegant solution for blowing stuff up in the Avid. You can check here for more details if you’re so inclined – it even includes a step-by-step quasi-tutorial-type thingie.
For the first time in a dog’s age – actually, I think it’s the first time since we moved into the house – I’ve had the turntable hooked up for some vinyl-to-CD transfers. I’m dubbing off some fairly old and well-worn LPs, but Nero Wave Editor is proving to be a great help in cleaning things up.
Overall, anything to distract myself from looking down.… Read more

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Home Base

Well, this is just swell.

It pains me greatly to type this. No, seriously – it does. For some reason, late last night at work my fingers and hands began to swell and become very itchy. I tried to retrace my steps and for the life of me, I can’t figure out what I would’ve run into at work that would’ve brought on an allergic reaction. When I got home, I found that the same thing is happening to my back, the left side of my neck, and my toes and feet – again, absolutely no explanation I can think of. I’ve already wolfed down an antihistamine and taken one hell of a hot bath – if nothing else, I was hoping it was hot enough to shock my nervous system into worrying about something else – so now I think it’s time to crash.
I just hope I can sleep. This feels very very not good.… Read more