Year: 2006

Categories
Home Base

Brrrrrrrr III…in Brrrrrrrr3-D

Here’s the verdict after an HVAC service call.

  1. The heat and air units are as old as the house is. At least as old. The units are so old that they may have arisen from the primordial ooze and the house may have simply been built around them.
  2. There are three “heat strips” in the unit. Two are burned out. One is good, and it’s never been used anyway, because the electrical wiring for the furnace was never completed to support the voltage for all three. That good one has been swapped out for one of the others, so we’re at about 50% heating capacity.
  3. After about 2 1/2 hours of being on again, the house is now as warm as it normally is in the winter. Which likely means that one of the burned-out heat strips was burned out when we first got here. Which might explain the electric bills we get in the winter.
  4. We still don’t know the answers to “how soon” and how much”, but in the meantime…we’re back to status quo.
  5. We should really look at replacing the whole thing, but at least no one’s trying to sell us on a $10K dongle for the upgrade.

So, yet another piece of bizarre wiring/plumbing, the latest in a long line of such, rears its head in our home. The former owner, God bless him, gave us a steal on the place, largely because he didn’t want his ex-wife to get any more out of the deal than necessary. But he wasn’t a DYI guy – not a handyman. I’m not either. The difference is that I’m willing to admit that I need to have someone else come and do it, because I just don’t know how to do some of this stuff. The guy who used to own the place…well…he left us many puzzling bits of wiring and plumbing to unravel over the past three years. I’m sure with the best of intentions, but some of these wiring jobs were pretty ghetto, almost dangerously so.
This is kinda like that.
PS. It got down to 22 degrees last night.… Read more

Categories
Home Base

Brrrrrrrr II: Electric Brrrrrrrrgaloo

Kickman - now also a handy heat sourceWhen the heat in your home goes out in the dead of winter, and after business hours and on a Sunday no less, it’s amazing what one resorts to in order to try to restore some semblance of comfort to the place. For the record, the game room is probably the warmest room in the house; it gets toasty enough in here with all this gear running (especially now that the Avid is here) that I usually have the fan on, running at a low speed, all winter. Well, not tonight. The fan’s off. The heat’s also off. It’s time to turn on anything that might generate a bit of warmth. … Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff Gaming ToyBox

Like a rolling…well, it’s not a stone…

Homsar and the artist formerly known as...
I’m trying to think of a suitably Homsar phrase here, but I got nothin’. 😆 Submit your entries below!
No mid-south gaming get-together today due to the roads; it’ll be rescheduled for sometime in January, I believe, which will be good since I won’t be recovering from a sweeps month. I was looking forward to the “Wii-kend at Bernie’s,” but to be honest, I was wiped. I’ve wandered aimlessly around my house all day in a zombie-like state, burning dinner and dessert and DVDs.… Read more

Categories
Cooking With Code

Compliance appliance

Mark Holtz sent me this link after submitting thelogbook.com to this site for a checkup; basically, it puts your URL of choice into a queue to grab screenshots of your site in several browsers to check for web standards compliance. The fact that the site’s main page now shows almost no variance from browser to browser, despite the fact that it’s one of the most tricked-out new portions of the site (what with its drop-down side menus, the new top menu, random header images, lined-up-by-almost-careful-planning-and-the-grace-of-God graphical menus and whatnot), makes me a very happy puppy.
You know, for it being two days after the end of sweeps, I’m still waiting for it to feel like sweeps is over.… Read more

Categories
Should We Talk About The Weather? Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Out in the elements

Last night at work:
Snow
Why I was outside in the middle of that:
Marianly and Everett and snow
One of our reporters wanted me to get a picture of her doing her live shot outside the building in the middle of the snowstorm, so she could show her family. (They apparently know nothing of this “snow” that they only hear about but never see in Miami.) I also got to hold that light stand as steady as I could – the wind is blasting so hard outside that it was like trying to keep a handle on a kite during a tornado.
The drive home was pretty treacherous. I might get my day off after all. (Besides which, I clocked out with over 37 hours – if I can’t make it in tomorrow, I almost have a full week of work in. In four days.)… Read more

Categories
Cooking With Code Gaming Home Base Spamatozoa Toiling In The Pixel Mines

I’ve been saying UGH a lot. Does that make me an “ugh-naught”?

Just popping my head in to apologize for not feeling particularly bloggy lately. Some stuff has some up – and admittedly 90% of it is work – that’s left me in a not-even-remotely blogful mood. (I’ve also been trying not to vent about things a whole lot at work either – I’m sure everyone’s as tired of hearing about it as I am of dealing with it. That, and I have to start taking the moral high ground at some point rather than feeding the gossip mill.)
I’ve started conceptualizing another fun little piece, very much along the lines of Olivia vs. Dalek, that I hope to start some shooting on fairly soon. I won’t spill any dirt there, except to say that it, too, involves Daleks. Possibly lots and lots of them by the time I’m done working a bit of Avid magic…
You may have noticed the scads of ads for Amazon.com/.ca/.co.uk/.egbdf gift certificates all over the site. That’s the great thing about the sections that have already been converted into WordPress – I just drop in a smidgeon of code, and wham, it’s on everything. (I’m sure some folks are going “oh, gee, that’s great,” but just remember it helps to keep us “on the air.”) So if you need an Amazon gift certificate, by golly, click one of those handy little buttons. The site can always use the dough.
We have wintry-type weather moving in tonight. I’m actually hoping that it’ll sock us in enough that I can’t make it down the mountain to go to work. (That actually happened last year – when you live out in the boonies, you’re in the absolute last place that anyone’s going to send a snowplow. Instant vacation!) I’d love to stay home with my favorite cats and dog in the world and just relax and not worry one bit about the station. At the same time, I’m hoping this weather doesn’t kill this weekend’s gaming get-together in Bentonville. Maybe it could thaw out on Saturday morning…
Also, congratulations to the spammer whose random name generator came up with the absolute best spammer sender name ever to appear in my inbox: Yomoshiro Guadalupe. I mean, that’s got the staying power of Napoleon Dynamite and then some. 😆
November sweeps ends in one hour. Thank God. The handful of spots I’m not embarrassed about from this latest month of mayhem can be found in my work section, for those interested.… Read more

Categories
Critters Gadgetology Home Base ToyBox

Then again, maybe not

Okay, so Raquina’s not expecting. She’s just getting fat. Which doesn’t help her next year when we breed her and she is expecting. Looks like it’s time for me and the li’l nibbler (okay, she’s not that little anymore – at the beginning of the second half of this video, she’s the horse who almost runs over me) to do some walking. (Seriously, she follows me around. And tries to nibble anything relatively loose that I’m wearing – jackets, hats, you name it. Hence the nickname.)
Speaking of video, I bet that even if you have a Transmat Dalek, it doesn’t do this. Neat little practical lighting effect – no video trickery whatsoever!
OK, now that my weekend “Christmas by way of eBay” is over, it’s time to reveal the spoils of my mad consumer lust. 😆 … Read more

Categories
Critters Gadgetology

It’s starting to look like we’re expecting…

…a baby horse next year. Here, what’d you think I was gonna say? 😛 Raquina’s huge. With a capital H and a capital UGE. She’s either going to have a baby, or she’s eaten one and we just haven’t noticed which one is missing yet. When the ultrasound was done, her breeding seemed not to have “taken,” and we just kinda threw our arms up in the air and said “oh well, there’s always next year.”
I’m really down because my Slightly Extended Weekend is almost over. It’s nigh-on-impossible for me to wind up with a three-day weekend without being deathly ill throughout the whole thing, so I’ve enjoyed it tremendously. I’ve slept a lot, because by golly, I’ve needed to catch up on sleep. I’m unashamed to say that, Friday and Saturday, I got 10+ hours of sleep each day. Because I’ve been freakin’ exhausted.
Some awesome eBay finds tonight, including one which is a real doozie, and one which is something I’ve literally wanted for almost 20 years. Some stuff is Avid-related. I’ll do the customary show-and-tell when it all gets here.
I’ve been doing some Avid stuff when I haven’t been asleep or at the farm. Mainly video for the site, catching up on PDF demo videos and starting to crank out the first few Pixel Fiction demo videos. (I think there’s been one already, for Katamari, so maybe that’s a misnomer.) Now, I’ve been asked a couple of times, “Surely, with all of that power in your hands, you’ve not just going to crank out game demo videos for the site, or make Olivia blow Daleks up, or do spaceship animations.” … Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Television & Movies

An animated Thanksgiving treat

Enterprise animationGot a nice shiny new animation for you that I left rendering over part of the holiday. I wish the Flash – as nice as it is – looked like it looks on a real TV screen. I forgot how much I enjoy doing 3-D animation.
Work on the PDF DVD should begin soon – the expanded version of the presentation shown at OVGE the past few years. I did some messing around today with creating animated looping DVD menus with the Avid, and I was well pleased with the results. Every new discovery I make with this thing is a rush, and it’s all I can do not to load you guys down with 2-3 new Flash movies every day. 😆 … Read more