Not much to report today on the moving-stuff-around-and-hooking-it-up front today; my lunch has been disagreeing with me vehemently for most of the day, and frankly, it’s winning the argument. I think the tipping point for my body to rebel against me, aside from just plain not having enough sleep, was moving the Kick machine. Even though it’s not currently in a playable state, I love that machine and strongly resist even the slightest urge to ever get rid of it. But much as I love it, I find that I live in a whole different continuum from some of my friends who collect arcade cabinets. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not down on that as a hobby - I just can’t figure out the whole space thing. Rob’s got an entire outbuilding devoted to them, but even then at some point one has got to run out of space.

For those who aren’t into even thinking about the hobby of collecting arcade cabinets, let me explain to you, in practical terms, what it entails for your spouse: “Honey, I just brought home another full-size upright refrigerator! Where can I put it?”

I can only imagine that if I pulled that stunt just once or twice, I’d be told where I could put it.

At the same time, I think it’s an Important Hobby, and I’m glad people do it. These are machines that otherwise would’ve been done away with, or converted into something else. Recently on Digital Press, there was a thread written by a fellow who got a non-working Gravitar machine, and was planning to gut it and turn it into a MAME machine. Which, you know, isn’t a total waste - at least the machine would find a new life, and hey, it’s his machine. But a Gravitar cabinet also happens to be a gorgeously illustrated and put-together few slabs of plywood and glass. Surely there’s another machine that could be maimed and then MAME’d.

But bless those folks who do have the space for a bunch of them. (And especially folks like Peter Hirschberg who have the means to really do it up - good grief!) These are the people who are preserving the history of an entertainment medium.

And putting their backs out every time they have to move.

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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.

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.)

God only knows what the bird were thinking. Continue Reading »

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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.

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.

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.)

And how do I handle the daunting power requirements of this stuff?

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.

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The U.S. Olympic synchronized cat bathing team - Olivia and Othello!

It all started when I tried to get a picture of the dynamic duo snoozing together:

…and then Olivia woke up and decided that if her picture was being taken, she wanted to clean up. Continue Reading »

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Because everyone’s interested, here’s how my VCR will be wearing the same six-hour tape thin week after week this fall (assuming we don’t have the traditional every-other-day power failure that kills my VCR programming):

Wednesdays

• 7:00pm - Jericho (CBS)
• 8:00pm - Lost (ABC)
• 9:00pm - The Nine (ABC)

Fridays

• 5:00pm - Night Stalker (Sci-Fi, through Oct. 13)
• 7:00pm - Doctor Who (Sci-Fi)
• 11:00pm - Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi - late showing is less likely to have credits screwed with)

Saturdays

• 9:00pm - Star Trek remastered episodes (Oct. 20-TFN)

Some thoughts immediately occur. Filling a watching a six hour tape every week is not a drought of SF on TV by any stretch of the imagination - hell, it’s more like an embarrassment of riches. But upon further examination, one of those six slots is occupied by a show that’s already over and done with (either a year ago or 37 years ago), and a further two slots are filled by shows that are continuations or re-imaginings of past shows. (Not that I’m complaining for even a fraction of a second about having Doctor Who back on the air, especially not when it’s as smashingly good as it is on a consistent basis, at least for my money, and not that I’m complaining a bit about Galactica - just pointing out, shall we say, a creative technicality.)

To balance that out, it’s a rare fall schedule that has two brand new shows that intrigue me enough to start taping them from the word go. And yes, I’ve already seen all of this season’s Who episodes, and I’ll happily watch them again. I actually like to see where Sci-Fi “invents” commercial breaks - they seem to to judge points of dramatic tension quite well that lend themselves to ad breaks. (At the very least, they seem to judge that better than CBC did in season 1.)

It’s been quite a while since I’ve had that kind of a regular viewing slate. I’d get started watching Heroes, except I don’t have any 8-hour tapes handy.

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I was double-checking my e-mail this morning, just to make sure that the stuff I was about to discard as spam was really spam, and saw one message that Mailwasher wasn’t sure about. I could tell it was in German, so I cut and pasted it into Babel Fish to see what it said. And I then proceeded to howl with laughter.

Richly by search machines (www.thelogbook.com) Let me one equal get straight. I am lazy and arrogant. Everything is no matter to me, because I am simply much to realm. I am much to realm, in order to sit?berhaupt here and write this text. Therefore I will seize myself briefly. I earn each year more?ber million euro with search machines, without doing much daf?r. Whether it gef?llt you or not, here goes it not around it to you to please, but therefore who you gladly exactly the same realm w?rst like I, otherwise w?rdest you that not to read here! You found this web page, because you know m?chtest as one by search machines rich becomes. There are many sides, which are concerned with in the InterNet how one makes money in the InterNet. Perhaps you already pursued or other idea. And? How were the concepts like that? Do you have to learn a course on a DVD bought around as one become rich? Were you impressed? I not! Not even a little! What do these sides promise? A few thousand euro in the month? Do you want to earn a few thousand euro in the month? That is l?cherlich!

Were you impressed? I not!

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Now there’s a logo that hasn’t been around for a while, eh? Scary thing is, it might be coming back. Two weeks from today I should have an Avid sitting in my house, and I’m trying not to be utterly terrified at the prospect of going into business with the thing. I’m trying to focus more energy on finding another day job - a real day job this time, not a graveyard shift that calls itself a day job, and certainly not the just-this-side-of-indentured-servitude gig that I’ve got now. I haven’t given that gig a drop-dead date yet…but damned if it isn’t tempting to do so.

The new job and/or new business angle kinda puts the whole going-back-to-school angle in the air right now. The lesson of the recent financial crisis we’re still trying to limp away from before it explodes cinematically behind us, slightly out of focus, like any good downed helicopter in the movies does, is simple: I’m going to need to be bringing in some income for a while yet before I can cut loose and be a full-time student for a while. The best bet there is a new job; while Greenhouse Effects might still re-open quietly on the side, there’s no guarantee that it’d make the kind of money I still need to bring in for a year or three.

For those who have no idea what GHFX was, it was a little business I ran out of my home - VHS tape duplication, VHS & DVD region conversion, a bit of web design here and there, CD, DVD and VHS custom packaging, and some marginal editing. I also did some custom music composition during that time, for horse videos and radio theater projects. It had a nice little run of about two years, but once the indentured servitude thing kicked in at my real job to the point where a 12 hour day was a light day for me, I had to close it down. With the new gear, and other stuff I’ve picked up since the end of 2003, I’d be able to add other capabilities, such as actual editing and post-production, voice work, PC video file-to-DVD/VHS transfer, and maybe even camera work. I could conceivably produce a commercial from the ground-up with this stuff. And to get into that line of work, basically, it means I’ll have to undercut and snatch business away from folks I’ve probably worked with before. (Or maybe even some that I work with now, for that matter. But I’m not under contract, and therefore don’t have a non-compete clause to worry about, so if/when that time ever comes, they’re welcome to take their best shot. I was editing on Avid back in Green Bay, so it’s not like I’d be walking out of there with trade secrets.)

Still, there’s no guarantee that I’d be able to line up enough paying clients to pull it off. So I’m spending a lot of quality time with Monster.com. One thing’s for damned sure: no more broadcast gigs. No more stations. After a while, it’s a thankless, soulless thing, and I’ll be happy to be free of it someday. It’s an environent that’s increasingly friendly only to the young, and ya know, I’m not 22 years old anymore. I can’t strip the gears and suddenly pull a day shift after an all-nighter just because someone doesn’t know how to do something.

Anyway, back on track. One decision I have already made about the new machine is that I have no plans for it to ever touch the internet. There’s no reason for it to. If I do bother to pop a network card into it, all that connection will be used for will be updating anti-virus software and Windows, and networking will be disabled the rest of the time. If this machine is supposed to be something I can earn a living with, and its function does not depend on being online, then there’s no reason for me to let it go and play in the traffic on the information superhighway. (In fact, it’s my experience that in the past few years, Avid has been telling clients at new installs and training sessions to keep their edit suites off the ‘net unless the company needs to automatically update the software.) Zen and Orac can pull anything off the ‘net that I need, and now that we don’t have to worry about building our own Avid-capable machine from scratch, Kent and I can now focus on building Orac II - still a Win98 machine, but not quite so cranky (good lord, but it lives up to its namesake in that respect).

Which brings me to my next point: the new machine’s going to need a name! Something other than “Avid” or “the Avid.” I have a running Blake’s 7 theme with Zen and Orac, but somehow “Slave” doesn’t seem like a good fit. I’ve been running down the list of fictional computers and artificial intelligences at Wikipedia for inspiration; I quite like VALIS, Colossus and a few others. If anyone can come up with a name that has a little more bearing on a machine that handles audiovisual tasks, though, I’m all ears. (And no, the Guardian of Forever isn’t a computer or an AI.) I may even offer some kind of prize. (What that might be, I have no idea. A hot date with Burchuss?)

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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.)

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