Posted under Critters
I mowed the yard today (real smart, I hear you saying already, after a nasty bout of heat exhaustion less than a week ago), so needless to say, I’m a wee bit sore. (And refreshed my sunburn to go with it.) Bath time, I think…assuming this isn’t about to turn into another Valuable Lesson for Olivia. 
Posted under Cooking With Code
Confucius say: manual manipulation of SQL database is most tricky with kitten on keyboard.
I’ve been playing with a couple of Wordpress plugins today and finally got both of them working - color me happy. The one I’m most impressed with is a Flash-based audio player which lets you specify an MP3 file on the server and then the plug-in gets on with it - if it’s been encoded properly (and most people probably aren’t going to pick some weird sampling rate), it plays it beautifully. Give it a shot on the music page. (I’ve also installed this on my work page for the very few radio spots that are archived there.) If you’ve got a Wordpress blog and some audio content and want to try it out, I highly, highly recommend Martin Laine’s Audio Player plugin. The degree to which it can be customized is impressive, and it solves a pet peeve I have about my content leaving my site. Damn it, I want you people to come here and stay here. I really wish I had more time to do the podcasting thing, because this plugin is absolutely freakin’ perfect for it.
I’m still working with the Top 10 Posts plugin, but I think I finally have it functioning properly. This is also activated in my work blog, though its results seem to skew themselves a bit - anything that’s on the front page of the blog automatically gets “hits” out of the deal. I’m planning on implementing this in the Wordpress versions of the site’s review pages and episode guides, but I’m also keeping an eye out for anything that doesn’t mess with its own results like that; I may also try putting a static page at the front of each of those sections, which may also accomplish that.
Posted under Critters
Isn’t she getting big…fast? No more curling up on the mouse pad for this one. Continue Reading »
Posted under Critters
The recent photo organization project inspired me to finally get around to doing something I’ve been threatening to do for year - create a family portrait out of pictures where no two animals were in the same place at the same time. Here are the results:
Wallpaper (without names): 1200 x 900 | 1024 x 768 | 800 x 600 | 640 x 480
Wallpaper (with names): 1200 x 900 | 1024 x 768 | 800 x 600 | 640 x 480
Wallpaper (without names): 1200 x 900 | 1024 x 768 | 800 x 600 | 640 x 480
Wallpaper (with names): 1200 x 900 | 1024 x 768 | 800 x 600 | 640 x 480
I don’t know who in the heck would want wallpaper of my pets, but I sure do, so I’m leaving it here, more or less for myself. Continue Reading »
Posted under Home Base
I’ve spent the past several days trying to ramp up my “photo dump” project and get enough stuff put together to fill a whole CD - and to my amazement, I haven’t come up with 750 megs worth of pictures yet. I’ve even gone back and organized all of the pictures I have on floppies from my older digital camera, and I’m still not there - and we’re talking about basically every digital photo that I’ve taken (and saved) since 1999. Something else I’ve discovered is that, anyone or anything you think you’ve taken a zillion photos of, you probably have, in reality, two or three dozen. When it came right down to it, I was amazed at how few photos I had of Chloe, or of Iago, and especially of Chelsea. (Conversely, you find that you’ve got a zillion photos of the most insignificant things imaginable.) What I do have so far is 4,057 pictures in 125 folders (which divide everything up by subject or sub-subject). Just about every critter here and at the farm has his or her own folder, though there are exceptions (cows and ostriches have “species folders”). There are folders for everyplace my wife and I have lived, and even my apartment in Green Bay. I have plenty of photos taken at work here (and in Green Bay), every gaming expo I’ve been to, and guest critters like Sampson and Gabby Cat. I still have a few stashes of floppies to locate and go through, but this is the vast majority of the pictures that I’ve taken in the past 7 years. I’ve made a concerted effort not to throw anything away; there were only a very few things I didn’t keep, and they tended to be old action figure shots I had taken for the Toybox section of the site, and other stuff along those lines. You don’t get that kind of self-editing when you have a roll of film developed, and I was going for the same idea here - even oddly-framed, off-centered pictures of horses are on there. Not to fill out space, but because one simply never knows. There’s a story behind every shot.
It amazes me how much some of the pictures bring back to me. There’s one floppy with some shots of our mostly-empty apartment, circa October ‘99, with a strange hue of orange from the setting sun shining through the windows, and I remember that day - couldn’t tell you what day of the week it was exactly, and I’d have to right-click on the photo and look for the date - distinctly, walking around my new place in a daze, wondering what the hell kind of crazy thing I’d just done, moving back to Arkansas without a job. Amazing how that stuff comes flying back, isn’t it? And it’s mainly the orange light, and the somewhat disjointed series of shots (my temporary computer setup, a slightly out-of-focus Iago cleaning himself next to a laundry basket of dirty clothes, Othello snoozing on the couch). I’ve actually thought about posting some of these photos in the blog and retro-dating them to when they were originally taken, with only a line or two of text explaining the when and where; I might still do that, and probably create a new “old photos” category so you can find ‘em if you want (or avoid ‘em if you want).
Before I go there, though, I think I need to go to bed.
Posted under Television & Movies
Far back in the mists of ancient time, or in the summer of 2004 to be precise, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski was approached by Paramount with an eye toward taking over Star Trek: Enterprise’s writing room. He declined the offer, needless to say, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing - for the most part, I think most fans felt that the fourth season finally saw the show come into its own under the guidance of Manny Coto. But Straczynski did reveal - rather cruelly, I thought! - to Trek and SFTV fans everywhere that he and Dark Skies co-creator Bryce Zabel had collaborated on a pitch for a new Trek series. And Straczynski hinted on several occasions that the idea leaned toward a complete re-imagining of the Trek universe, using many of the same conventions (no pun intended) but removing some of the boundaries that had been erected by Roddenberry, et al. - boundaries which, and this is my opinion, not JMS’, were put in place to rewrite history and make the original series sound more socially important than it was. Let’s be fair, the original series’ ideal world of the future may have been culturally diverse, but the turbolift still smacked into the Glass Ceiling on more than one occasion. Somewhere along the way, one of those barriers that Roddenberry added to the basic tenets of the Trek universe was that our characters don’t argue amonst themselves, at least not in a petty way. But some writers of the spinoff series of the 1980s and 90s interpreted this to mean that everyone got along swimmingly - Deep Space Nine was a refreshing exception - and along with other factors, the life was gradually bled out of the franchise.
But what would Straczynski and Zabel have done differently? Continue Reading »
Posted under Critters & Should We Talk About The Weather?
…is Olivia! What happens when bad weather approaches? Olivia gets after it! Here’s a cute little bit of video I happened to catch this morning before the kitties and I crashed out for the day. Storms don’t stand a chance with Olivia on the prowl.
I shall spew forth more platitudes later. Enjoy!
Posted under Television & Movies
Click hereabouts for a nice NY Times article on the various and sundry Star Trek fan video projects. Part of me yearns to get back into this stuff; another part of me realizes I’d only be cast as the fat, belching Klingon ambassador from Star Trek V, and yet another part of me would rather just tell an original story instead of hanging on to the coattails of any single franchise with all the copyright complications involved. (That last part of me, however, also reminds me that I’m not that great at writing fiction, be it in prose or script form, and that maybe I should just keep aiming my video camera at my kitten.)
Doctor Who Spinoff DVD Covers
