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Gaming Serious Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Always remember: Avid = diva spelled backwards

…but I kid the electronic behemoth that is my livelihood. But seriously, what’s up with this new corporate logo?

new Avid logoI mean, I get it – volume up and down, pause, play (a few more arrows and it’s the Konami code!) – but it just lacks the elegance of the company’s previous logos. Maybe they should’ve stylized it a bit more instead of sticking doggedly to perfect isosceles triangles. It’s really kinda clever, but…I dunno. What they’re putting out there as the final logo seems more like something you’d get at an intermediate step of the design process. Ah well, they’re the multi-zillion-dollar A/V company, and I’m just a guy who sits around using an older version of their products, so what do I know? (And heck, even though I bought it fair and square, according to Avid, I don’t own the machine!)

I’ve been meaning to fire up the Avid, by the way, to edit together the video I shot almost two weeks ago at OEGE; I positioned one of my cameras right behind the Magnavox Odyssey. People may have thought the camera was there to keep watch over the machine, but no…it was watching them! It was watching them puzzle over how to play the thing and watching them reel with the realization that this machine that doesn’t even have a central processor and plays the weirdest game of video ping-pong you can imagine paved the way for their PS3s and Xbox 360s. Some of the comments were hysterical. I’ll try to get on that sometime early next week, unless there’s bad weather that forces me to shut down my diva. Sorry, did I say diva? I meant Avid.

Still working on ironing out the credit card theft mess; the card has already been cancelled and a new one is being issued, and I got a little bit proactive and started contacting the places where the card had been used to see if they could reverse charges or cancel transactions on their end. One of the places that the idiots ordered something from was Abercrombie & Fitch. I’ve never even looked at one of their catalogs or visited one of their stores – that’s one of those places where I just assume that they have nothing that fits me, because I’m not a guy with six-pack abs who walks around shirtless. (Sorry for destroying any illusions you may have had to the contrary.) Turns out that they alone were ahead of the curve: they cancelled the transaction because it seemed odd for someone with an IP address in Ireland to be using a card whose billing address is in Arkansas. Smart cookies! So kudos to Abercrombie & Fitch, even if they, in all likelihood, don’t make a single thing that would fit me. This crisis, such as it is, is winding down very much to my satisfaction – yay.

Other than that, not much going on. Like the man once said, come back later and there’ll be more to tell. And bring a real corporate logo with you when you do, yeah?… Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Seeing spots

Just for fun, a couple of the interstitial spots that I worked into the looping DVD display shown lasy weekend at OEGE.

theLogBook.com 20th Anniversary Spot
Phosphor Dot Fossils Brown Box Spot

They drag on a little bit longer than you’d expect a normal TV spot to, but they’re kinda there to grab the eye without vanishing the next time that eye blinks. Given that not many DVDs wound up selling, maybe they didn’t do what I wanted them to.

Enjoy!… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Gaming Music Should We Talk About The Weather? Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Egging them on

Evan's Easter Eggs!

Evan’s day care had an Easter Egg hunt on Friday, though it was held indoors since we had nasty storms blow through on Thursday night (of which more in a bit). What a haul! And what the heck is some of this stuff? Eggs with little cars in them? Eggs with Play-Doh in them? Man. It’s almost becoming a cliche at this point, but they didn’t have stuff like that when I was his age – at least not in Easter Egg form! … Read more

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Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines ToyBox

Just about ready

PDF & CGE DVDs 4 OEGE

Here’s a great big diaper box full of DVDs headed to Oklahoma City with me this weekend – hopefully no one will think that the contents are full of crap! 😛 I’m a few more copies of the Brown Box twin-pack away from being finished with both duplication and packaging. I’m amazed I haven’t killed an inkjet cartridge yet, with the dark “woodgrain” cover on the Brown Box.

Those not making it to OEGE this weekend who have pre-ordered will probably get their copies early next week – I may mail some out as early as Thursday. Now, ready to see something else cool? … Read more

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Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

PDF Level 2…finished at last

I need a pan-galactic gargle blaster.  No, make that two.  Neat.It’s done. Thank God it’s done. It’s Miller time! Well, that’d mean something if I were a drinking man. As it is, I’m a man who still needs to drop chapter stops and author the DVD, and once that’s done, and I’ve verified with my own eyes that the whole thing doesn’t look, sound or read like crap, then it’s time to duplicate like there’s no tomorrow, because there’s only a tomorrow until April 10th.

Since I’ve crossed the Rubicon, so to speak, by completing the content, I’m confident enough to open the door for pre-orders; the discs will ship at around the same time as the DVD’s premiere at OEGE (April 11th). … Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Fame: I’m going to make a very serious attempt to live forever, though no warranties are implied or given.

So tonight I dubbed Fame from VHS to DVD-R, and to be honest, this one’s gonna be a walk in the park. The master tape is in SP, so believe it or not, it’s considerably sharper despite still being VHS. Also, fortunately, the action seems to be confined to a single camera – I haven’t seen any switching-back-and-forth – which caused the huge number of problems with Up The Down Staircase – at all. This means you get a few more random camera movements – trying to follow people, the camera being bumped, and so on. But I think that’s the sort of thing you expect on something like this. There’s one tape edit toward the end that’s a bit messy, but it seems to be right in the middle of a fade-down on the stage and house lights, so that’s easy enough to skip. Sound quality’s pretty good for a camera that’s 1/3 of the length of the auditorium back from the stage.

This is another case where a bunch of synapses that haven’t fired in 20 years kicked in, and I remembered a heap of stuff. … Read more

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Gadgetology Toiling In The Pixel Mines

The play(s) (are) the thing – Northside drama DVDs revisited

I burned the completed 13-minute “1981” segment of PDF Level 2 to DVD tonight (via the dip-a-toe-into-the-analog-pool method I described earlier in this blog entry), and had ample space left on the disc. Since I hate to waste disc space on that silly a scale, I thought I’d have a go at a transfer of the troublesome VHS tape of the Northside High drama department’s production of “Up The Down Staircase.” As it turns out, there’s even a helpful slate at the beginning of the tape nailing this down to the January 14, 1989 performance.

That’s just about the only thing helpful on the tape, though. … Read more