Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods

I think the realization that something was terribly wrong kicked in about the third time I went to log into my own blog and had a virus thrown at me. Yet another Wordpress theme had been compromised (a good indication that it’s the theme: if you change themes and the same URL is suddenly harmless, it’s the theme).

This happened earlier in the year with another part of my site, and as with that incident, I tried to find a new theme quickly, customize it quickly, and tried very hard – and, might I add, quickly – to get it up and running so the two or three people who do visit the blog (as opposed to reading the entries that are shuttled to Facebook or Livejournal via RSS) wouldn’t be infected (and infected quickly).

This is the result – the whole thing suddenly looks impossibly slick, and there’s a very cool persistent nav bar that stays at the bottom of the screen at all times. I had to do some work on it to get certain things to format the way they did in the previous theme, but overall, I’m beyond pleased.

It’s worth noting that there’s a difference between minor customization and wholesale rewriting of code. The previous Wordpress theme I was using as called “Nine”, and I loved the look of it – but it arrived in a hobbled state (with no indication that there was a working version that one needed to pay for), so I had to do some considerable recoding on it. Whether that left it in a vulnerable state, or whether “Nine” was defenseless to begin with, I don’t know. In the meantime, it’s back to business as normal. Cruise by and give it a look-see; I’ve also put the new theme on my TV work archive blog, which also used “Nine” (but showed no signs of having been hacked).

The new theme’s got some really cool crap in it – check out the little pencil icon in the lower left corner. You can change the background image (and, accordingly, the entire color scheme) to suit your tastes. That feature doesn’t really add anything mission-critical, but damned if it isn’t cool.

Sorry for the interruption, you two or three folks out there. I also hereby extend a defiant middle finger – no, make that two – at the script kiddies out there who really need a life. Enjoy!

Okay, so they’re both based on turtles. But somehow I think it’s gonna be a while before Evan’s toy collection and mine are anywhere near a point where integration of our collections is possible.

Unless someone can figure out a way to retcon Wonder Pets into Doctor Who mythology, that is.

Wednesday, I retrieved Evan from day care in the middle of what seemed like a monsoon. Before I went to get him, I looked for the umbrella that I thought I kept in the car…I guess it’s been relocated. Anyway, we both got thoroughly soaked. We went to the store and stopped to grab food on the way home. We both looked like we’d showered in our clothes. (By the way, Evan thought that sitting in a shopping basket as his daddy raced it toward the car in the middle of the downpour was just the best thing ever. )

Hold off on taking that picture, dad. I’m eating.

Okay. Here’s the prettiest face you’re going to get out of me if you insist on taking our picture while I eat. Nom nom nom.

Dad…um…we’re done here, right? Can I eat this in peace now?

In related news, it appears that the same storm may have fried my wireless router. That’s a bit of a biggie since I have a lot of stuff networked between machines. Hadn’t really budgeted for a replacement, so…..grrrrr. Incidentally, this is the first time I’ve lost any gear to lightning since the Apple II days.

I’ve begun prep work for a media center PC that I hope to install in the living room, God and/or the IRS willing (is there really a difference between the two in terms of sheer power?), come tax refund time. A while back I asked if anyone had any ideas on a maniacal supercomputer name to go with the new box. I have a LAN set up in the house called WOPR. My main desktop PC, Zen, is the WOPR hub; other machines already on WOPR are Orac (secondary desktop & file server) and Colossus (Avid). Zen and Orac are supercomputer names from the adorably outdated (and not just a little bit campy) BBC space opera Blake’s 7, while Colossus is the Forbin Project (and a nod to the sheer physical size of the box that runs the Avid).

The new machine will reside on the WOPR network as well, and it’ll be called Gambit. Gambit was yet another supercomputer that made a one-off appearance in the 1981 Blake’s 7 episode Games; appropriately enough, it spent all of its time entertaining an eccentric hermit and occasionally dishing out digital death via its automatic defense systems too. Gambit wound up getting cozy with Orac, and despite all of the advantages inherent in keeping Gambit around for future stories, naturally it was never heard from again. Of course, my wife will see Gambit as an X-Men reference, so it’s a win-win situation. Sort of like the time she named her new kitten Olivia, swearing that she was breaking the cycle of Shakespearean-named cats in our household (see also: Othello, Iago, Oberon). (I had to point her toward Twelfth Night – which features an Olivia – at a later date and then get out of book-throwing distance, because that all-inclusive Shakespeare book of mine weighs a ton.)

So that’s the important issue of naming the machine settled. Will the real Gambit get cozy with the real Orac? Only time will tell. Current plans call for Gambit to be equipped with a wireless keyboard/mouse combo (we’re looking at this one, again as funds permit). Ideally, it should be able to record as well as play back. It’ll also be browsing the web and doing e-mail, so I’ll install the usual security/antivirus/antispyware/antispam stuff on it, and I’ll be keeping a fanatical, Friddle*-esque eye on the thing’s health too.

It’d be nice to have another terrorbyte** drive to stick in there, but you know, I have a feeling that’s something that we’ll be needing to ask Santa about.

Can I actually put another system together and successfully convince it to not suck? Stay tuned, true believers. More »

While I was working on PDF Level 2, there were a couple of places where I seriously thought about dredging up some of my much earlier musical creations – back from the pre-loop-driven days – to drop at least an excerpt in as needed, with the idea of seeing if anyone noticed that this obviously wasn’t something done with Music Generator. The problem, when I went to listen to the specific old piece of music I had in mind, was that any half-deaf dog-food-eating possum could tell the difference from tape hiss alone. I ditched the idea for the sake of getting the DVD out on time, but I still found myself wondering if it was possible to clean up my old recordings, a few of which are getting dangerously close to 20 years old (!!). After Evan went to bed tonight, I set about doing precisely that – or at least trying to.

The results still aren’t perfect; in a few places the “fix” actually ate the frequency response for dinner. In others, it worked freakin’ wonders. The amount of tape hiss to eliminate on any given piece was frightening. In most cases, even the noise reduction introduced its own problems, so I dropped a bit of reverb (and occasionally another effect or two) in to cover those problems. I played around with “Perseids” so much that it became a whole different animal. The results aren’t perfect, but they’re at least interesting enough that I thought I’d share ‘em.

Anyway, without further doodoo, here are some free tracks for your amusement. They’re all instrumentals, though I’m not exactly an expert musician by any stretch – especially not on the guitar (before we were married, my wife once heard the guitar-oriented tracks and asked “Are you tone deaf!?” Maybe there’s something to that… ). For me, it’s always about getting the song out of my head and preserved in some other medium, just in case something horrible and/or biologically improbable happens to my head.

Enjoy! (The original unrestored tracks can be heard here for comparison purposes.)

No particular focus for tonight’s entry, so you’ll just have to keep up.

I guess we can do a Red Dwarf-style JCC reunion now. For months on Facebook, I’ve been looking for my friend Mark, with whom I hung out a great deal around the end of high school and a few years afterward; I remember he singlehandedly helped me move all of the heavy furniture into my Garrison Avenue apartment in late ‘94 or so. He was also part of the surreal, please-tell-me-you-guys-were-high-when-you-did-this video experiment called Jump Cut City, a.k.a. JCC (a new and improved mini-site for which is horrendously overdue; until then, this’ll have to make do). About the time that I made the horrendous mistake of letting myself get bumped up to a salaried position at Fox 46 (translation: every moment of your life was now owned by the station), I dropped out of contact with a lot of people. Mark’s one of the ones I regret losing touch with the most, and tonight I was lamenting the fact that I couldn’t find him online anywhere.

My wife asked, “Have you tried the phone book?” And maybe this is a testament to the pathetically enormous amount of time I spent on the internets, but I had to admit that no, I hadn’t thought of that. Turns out she also knew him at around the same time – she was working at a comic book store that he frequented. She was eager to call him right then and there because, she reasoned, surely his head would explode at the very thought that two of the strangest people he’d ever known, two people he’d never really associated with each other, had gotten married and produced offspring who would carry our very strange genes forward.

So out of the blue we called him, and made his Saturday night more surreal. It’s been at least 15 years since I talked to him, and he sounded exactly the same. There’s much lost time to make up for, and I’m sure there are a lot of laugh-until-whatever-you’re-drinking-is-ejected-nasally moments ahead too, because there’s definitely a get-together in the works. But man, do I feel stupid – look in the phone book? Surely we have the technology to move beyond the phone book.

Slipped (mini)disc. For years, I’ve stubbornly stuck by my minidisc player instead of joining Generation iPod. Partly because it appeals to my curmudgeonly retro-tech side (Atari is to iPod as Odyssey2 is to minidisc), and partly because…well…it still works, why replace it? My wife and I have, between us, two Hi-MD players (which hold a gob of stuff on a single disc – for example, about two dozen full-length Doctor Who audios) and one NetMD player (which holds approx. 5 hours of stuff on a single disc). The great thing about these is that you can build up as many discs full of stuff as you like and swap them out on a whim: no “uh-oh, stop the world, I’ve gotta go back to the PC to put stuff on here.” Of course, there’s a lot of “upload stuff to the machine” time up-front, but before a lengthy two-way solo road trip to, say, a neighboring state’s capitol, that whole swapping-discs ability is awfully handy.

The weak link in the minidisc chain, however, is the software required to load stuff from your PC onto your MD: a horrific C++ monstrosity called SonicStage which crashes at the drop of a hat. Worse yet, when it gets into a “crashing spree,” there’s a better than even chance that it’ll corrupt the table of contents file on the disc and force you to start from scratch. I tend to leave some stuff on my music MD for months; as you delete and add things, the oldest items slide to the top of the TOC (hint: the top entries on my music MD’s TOC have involved members of the Finn family for many months). Having to rebuild the whole damned disc gets a wee bit old. I’m not a huge iTunes fan, but so help me, SonicStage may yet be the defining factor that gets me to become a Pod Person. I should be sitting up at one in the morning, thinking “Yay, it’s finally working!” and blogging while transferring months worth of tracks over to a freshly-formatted disc. Ugh.

And speaking of long drives through Oklahoma… …I’d say we now have an official “stay tuned” on the subject of OVGE (the major Tulsa-based video gaming convention) for later this year. I have no idea when or where or how big or how small, but all I have to say is…count me in. I’m already being asked if I want to exhibit at shows like CCAG and Video Game Summit this summer, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there’s no way I can make it in person. I’ll try to line up some way for the CGE DVDs and the old and new PDF DVDs to be there if there’s already an exhibitor I know and trust there, but the problem there is that I’m actually running a little tight on inventory – I have to make sure, in sending stuff out for non-local shows, that I’m not hindering my ability to fill online orders, and PDF Level 2 and the Brown Box have suddenly been moving fairly well thanks to mentions on a number of sites I hadn’t even sent the press release to! Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised – and maybe I shouldn’t admit to being surprised – but I had no idea that the project registered on that many people’s radars. I’m still quietly wondering if there’s not another application just waiting to happen with the same basic format as the PDF DVDs; what it could possibly be, I don’t know. I’m open to suggestions. In the meantime, I’m also open to the next OVGE show – no way am I missing it a second year in a row. OEGE energized me to get back into the swing of things for the first time in a year, and now I’m ready for a show where I don’t have nearly 20 years on the average attendee.

Good night, but not goodbye. I’d be remiss if I didn’t include at least a passing mention of the passing of Bea Arthur (see what I did there? I didn’t actually mean to do that there, but…eh, let’s move on). Long before the Golden Girls, she was Maude. I probably first saw her on the Mary Tyler Moore Show as a wee lad, but I don’t remember it; the first thing I saw her in that left a mark – more of a painful welt, really – was in the utterly bizarre cantina “sketch” of the much-maligned, aired-only-once Star Wars Holiday Special. I generally don’t crap all over that legendary show the way most folks do – in fact, I have a soft spot for it just for its sheer surreal-ness – but man, the portion of that special that featured Ms. Arthur was off-the-scale awkward. Imagine, if you will, a musical number set in the Star Wars cantina, lamenting how sad it is that the bar is closing, in a family-viewing-hour special based on a movie that’s incredibly popular with kids. Add to that the “life under the Gestapo” underpinning of the whole scene (the bar is closing because of an Empire-imposed curfew), and poor Bea had the dubious honor of singing and dancing her way through an “oh my God, did they really just do that?” segment of a show that was already strange enough. But she was a trouper about it – and for that, my hat’s off to her. A true talent who, for her trouble, really should’ve been made into an action figure, because whatever she was paid for appearing in that special, it wasn’t enough. Hey, that reminds me…

Torchwoody. Maybe an unfortunate pun there, but for the Doctor Who-and-related toy collectors out there, scificollector.co.uk popped a surprise announcement that they’re making a limited advanced run – 1,000 of each! – of the wave 2 Ianto and Captain John figures available now. They’re in different packaging than the “wide release” wave 2 figures will be, but the figures are actually the same. When released in June or July – painfully close to the San Diego Comic Con Doctor Who exclusives – the second wave of Torchwood figures will include Ianto, Captain John, Toshiko and the goofy business-suited Blowfish character (the one who stopped his sports car long enough to let an old lady cross the street in the first episode of season two; why this character was deemed more worthy of a figure than Owen, I can’t even begin to speculate).

OK, I warned you this blog post would be disjointed; I’m gonna bip it in the nuds now before it gets downright surreal.

My dad dropped by for a visit on Friday morning; I kept Evan out of day care for the morning so they could get a little bit of time in. Unfortunately, as hard as this is to believe, Evan was just about on his worst behavior ever before my dad got into town – he was a total terror. I think a lot of that was down to his daily routine of going to day care right after breakfast being disrupted. We went to pick up my dad at the Alma Cracker Barrel while my stepmother ran errands elsewhere, and came back to the house. After a little bit, I had to let my dad down – Evan really needed to go to day care, run off some of this energy, and be with kids his own age. I know my dad was upset by this, but the kid’s got a routine…and at this age it’s all about the routine and familiarity. That and I was just tired enough that I was ready to hand him off for a bit. But my dad was bored to tears after we dropped Evan off – and then I found out why.

Apparently, one of Dad’s neighbors, or the clubhouse, or somewhere, someone has a Wii. And he’s played it. And he loves it. And he thought that if anyone on this planet was going to have a Wii, it’d be me. I kinda disappointed him on that count too. (Hey, I’d love to have one – maybe soon. I hope.) I just thought it was funny that someone came to my place expecting to play video games and found the experience a total letdown.

Ahhh dammit. I’ve wanted one of these for years – a question mark umbrella. I doubt that many people who know me will really have to “question” why. Pity it’s so expensive.

C’mon, tax refund…