Category Archives: Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Coffee expertly roasted by dragons

Okay, so here’s the thing. I used to do post-production for a living, albeit for a local TV station or four in one state or another. So I know, intimately, what kind of phone call *somebody* almost certainly got at 11 o’clock Pacific time last night to start the process of editing a Starbucks cup out of existence in a scene from Game Of Thrones. I know that call too well. It goes a little something like this:

“Hey Earl, you’ve got some free time between now and ten, right?” Read More

No Comments Television & Movies, Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Of styro-stuffing, set-building, and starting to feel like home

When we toured the house in Utah that we’ve wound up renting, the first glimpse of the basement – an area as big as the living room upstairs, but in a decidedly unfinished state without even so much as drywall in most places – there was talk of contractors coming and going for the first several weeks that we were there until the room was done.

Having come from a house that had, for several years, had bare concrete floors, I took one look and said we’d take it as-is. I saw exposed beams and rafters from which lights could be hung, places where a camera or two could be mounted, unfinished walls where I could put acoustic foam to make the space a better recording studio, and the floor was nothing new to me. I saw the studio that this space could be. Read More

No Comments Toiling In The Pixel Mines , , , , ,

Attack of the Blipverts

Ah, the imprecise voodoo of advertising on the web. Too much, and you lose people. Too little, and your site is running at a loss financially and then people lose you because you can’t afford to keep the domain name locked down or exceed your site’s monthly bandwidth or… you get the idea.

And then there’s the current trend, which is to have something which detects ad blockers and throws up a smoke screen to keep you from making use of a site, either partially or fully. I’m not installing anything like that here, ever. I hate that shit.

Still, I have been forming partnerships here and there to bring some new advertisers and affiliate programs to the site. This keeps all the eggs out of one basket (which proved disastrous when Amazon kicked all of its Arkansas affiliates to the curb about 10 years ago), diversifies what’s on offer (while still keeping it very much in theLogBook’s wheelhouse), and hopefully, will eventually add up to the site being financially self-sustaining again in the near future. Read More

No Comments Cooking With Code, Toiling In The Pixel Mines, Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

The future of job searching…

…is basically like creating a profile on a dating site.

I applied for a graphic design job which required – REQUIRED! – me to post a “passion video”. Fortunately they described what they meant – sorry, I charge extra for doing O faces on camera – and then I realized…oh wait. I’m doing this during a break at my present job. Um…how to do this without attracting attention? Read More

No Comments Funny Stuff, Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Cyan Saturday

read!I’m declaring it Cyan Saturday. Not sure why, but it flows off the tongue way better than Black Friday, doesn’t it?

First off, I want to introduce a new tradition, wherein I point you toward books written by several of my closest friends. Somewhere between common interests and all of us being writers at heart, an awful lot of us have written and published books in the past few years. A fair few of the books fall into the same wheelhouse, subject-matter-wise…but not all of them! Anyway, peruse this fascinating list of Books My Friends Wrote and add their works to your bookshelf or the bookshelf of someone who needs a gift this holiday season. You really can’t go wrong – I vouch for all of them as writers and as people.

And my own books? They’re now available through a nice new digital delivery gateway right here at theLogBook.com, a long-needed improvement that finally happened thanks to a little bit of digital drudgery undertaken by my oldest. The new system is really neat, and unlike the old one…it just works. And to celebrate the “grand re-opening” of that component of theLogBook.com Store, I’ve added a couple of crazy bundle deals (they’re the ones with green buttons) that’ll save you…well…a bundle.

Books. They’re what’s for dinner. Go getcha some.

No Comments Cooking With Code, Gaming, Toiling In The Pixel Mines, Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Camera…action

So, for the first time in over 10 years, I’ve gotten myself a video camera.

Camera

Technically speaking, there’s been one built into my phone all along, but here’s the thing: I have to take great pains to make still photos from that same phone come out not looking like crap, and…it’s my phone. Yes, I use it to play music, surf the web, and catch the odd Pokemon or two. But…it’s a phone.

The camera above set me back $18, and weighs nearly nothing. I’m still having a hard time, on a gut level, accepting that the above is qualified to be called a camcorder. It records to SD cards that, depending on where you get them, may cost you more than the camera. Read More

No Comments Gadgetology, Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Troubles hooting

At work, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, the factory in China gets to mangle our manuals, requiring me to fix them. Word files of the manuals come to us with either no spaces whatsoever between words, or spaces in the wrong places. Every so often, there’s a paragraph that has spaces in some of the right places, just to lull you into a false sense of security. And thus was entire work day for me turned into combing through several manuals and occasionally finding gems of Engrish hilarity.

Troubles hooting Read More

No Comments Funny Stuff, Toiling In The Pixel Mines
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