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Month: June 2008
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Who…goes there
So…this episode of Doctor Who that aired tonight in the UK. I totally didn’t see the cliffhanger coming. Which may be an all-time high water mark for keeping a plot development secret in this age of the internet and folks taking location filming photos on their cell phones. Then again, there was all the curiosity about this episode’s returning villain to provide a handy smokescreen…
What does it say about me that the thing I’m most looking forward to on the weekend of Independence Day is watching a British sci-fi show?… Read more
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Big Giant Head
Evan sat very still for his CT scan, clutching his blankie horse the whole time. (Blankie horse = the bestest most cuddliest thing in the world.) And the results? … Read more
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I just thought you’d like to know that
One of my antibiotics that I’m on turns my pee orange. And my sweat too. We’re talking bright orange. Melt down Q*Bert, pour him in the toilet, that’s what it looks like. Complete with @#%&*!.
Now there’s a point to this story. I went Sunday after my first doctor’s visit to procure the aforementioned orange-pee antibiotic from Walgreen’s. There were two pharmacists on duty, an older guy and a younger lady. He briefed me on side-effects, and as he was doing this she was walking toward the counter. His litany of affected bodily fluids got to “If you wear contacts, this’ll stain your contacts orange. If you sweat, it’ll stain your underwear orange.” To which I replied, “Well, I don’t wear contacts. But I do wear underwear.” [pause] “Most of the time.”
At the sound of that statement, the lady pharmacist very quickly turned on her heel and went back the other way. 😆 I went to the same store today to pick up more crap that had been prescribed to me, and lo and behold, she stayed right away from me for some reason…
I’m listening to the new “Peter Gabriel & Friends” album, and so help me, first thing on the album is one of these tracks that I’ve been wondering about for years, featuring Tim Finn. Actually, featuring Tim and Andy White, which might date their contributions back to their brief collaboration as ALT (Andy, Liam O’Maonlai, Tim) in the mid-90s. Given that not all of the songs on the album even feature Gabriel himself, my first impression was that some of these tracks were very literally dusted off so they could find a home somewhere. I’m not saying that the “guest artist” tracks are necessarily bad, but it’s perhaps not what you’re expecting when you’re enough of a fan that the words “new Peter Gabriel album” trigger that Pavlovian buying response. I also notice that there’s a lot of Karl Wallinger (World Party) on here – and rather fewer of Gabriel’s usual session players. And “Burn Me Up, Burn Me Down” finally gets a proper release…even though it was finished at the time of Up and damn well would’ve been a better lead single. Sorry, I know I’ve said that before. I’m just bitter.
And orange. Yes. Bitter and very, very orange.… Read more
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Random rumblage
The good news on the spider bite tonight is that it doesn’t seem to be spreading – well, okay, just a little, but not upward. The foot is reddish and tender, and I can see veins pretty clearly, which is really unusual for feet. Or at least my feet. I’m due back at the doctor’s office on Tuesday to see where this is going – though if my follow-up is 48 hours after my initial visit, I’m guessing that there’s Cause For Concern. Either that or they just like taking my money. Probably a little bit of both.
I found and fixed a couple of bugs in “Doctor Who in 35 minutes“, as well as chopping it up into segments about 3 to 3 1/2 minutes long to cut back on the insane load times. This also had a beneficial side-effect of sharply increasing resolution – now you can tell which clips I sourced from crap-o-licious 20+ year old VHS tapes recorded off of AETN and OETA when I was in high school! Yay! 😆
Speaking of video projects, I think I may have mentioned redoing the PDF DVD ordering page as an old fashioned hand-coded HTML page – basically in theLogBook’s old, pre-Wordpress look – so that orders wouldn’t be tripped up by Globat’s endless database server errors. Lo and behold, I’ve had more orders in the past 24 hours than I have just about the entire rest of the month. Can’t ditch Globat soon enough. Incidentally, we’re now coming down the home stretch of the second edition – and that means there are about a hundred of these puppies floating around out there. Guess it’s not over yet after all. The proceeds from this round of DVD sales will go toward getting us moved to a hosting company that can actually keep a site up. If you think I’m overreacting, check this out. Or this. Or this. Or this hosting review page which has apparently accumulated so many complaints that they’ve closed the comments down. 😯 I have a hard time believing that these jokers haven’t gotten some class action lovin’.
I’ll bitch some more later. But you knew that, right?… Read more
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Rest well, George
George Carlin has left the building. Can’t say I agreed with him across-the-board in all of his thinking, but I always, always, always came away from his comedy with a few thoughts rolling around in my head, and a few belly laughs too.… Read more
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It’s the bite of the spider, it’s the thrill of the fight!
So I’ve had this wickedly itchy thing on the back of my right ankle for about a week now. I’ve soaked it in hot water, wrapped it in cold washcloths that spent a little bit of time in the freezer, I’ve done my level damned best to leave it alone and not scratch it. This morning when I got up, took Evan to his grandparents and got ready to feed horses, it was pure agony trying to put my muck boots on. Then I noticed it was about the size of a half-dollar (for those of you old enough to remember the 50-cent coin, a.k.a. the JFK half-dollar, a currency that I sorely miss) , and varied in color from purple to brown, and did I mention it hurting like hell? It hurt like hell. So after horse feeding time, I went to the doctor, who said he was pretty sure it was some sort of insect bite, and really nasty too. He hesitated to guess as to what kind of insect, but when I went to pick up my prescription and the stuff I’d need to wrap the ankle to keep a pad over the hugely ugly and painful open blister that’s there, the pharmacist basically confirmed that what I had on paper was a pretty stiff cocktail designed for someone who’s waited too long to treat a brown recluse bite that was pretty nasty to begin with. Joy. So I’m pretty much an inside-dweller until cleared: no yard work, definitely no horse feeding, keep it as antiseptic clean as possible until further notice. I’m hoping I’m not staring down the barrel of any lasting damage, but the whole foot is bright red and you can see veins sticking out. Between that and the drugs I’ve been prescribed, I’m just feeling woozy about the whole thing. First various farm injuries, then mutant monkey toes with more joints than a toe should have unless it happens to be a finger, and now this…what gives? Has someone got it in for my right foot?
Oh, and speaking of the doctor, or actually, speaking of the Doctor, here are 45 years of house calls in 35 minutes. If you don’t know your Doctor Who mythology, I’d suggest that sometime in the next week or three might be an outstanding time to catch up. Or so I’ve heard. 😉
For those whose efforts to get a PDF DVD have been frustrated by the constant downtime courtesy of Globat, I have replaced the PDF ordering page with a hand-coded HTML page that doesn’t have to have their SQL database server up and running. Orders for the DVD have taken a nose dive since the beginning of this month…right about the same time these constant server issues cropped up. But now that won’t be an issue any longer, at least for that portion of PDF. Never mind “baby needs a new pair of shoes” – at this rate I’m gonna need a new pair of feet!… Read more
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Complete and blatant randomness
In about 8 hours, it’ll be boys’ night here at Casa Green! My wife’s going to a postal workers’ convention, or she’s going postal at a workers’ convention, or she’s working on going conventionally postal or something. At any rate, she won’t be here all weekend, but Evan and I will, and, of course, Obi and Olivia will be hanging out too. As much as I sometimes get frustrated being “stuck” with the baby when there’s someone else inthe house who could be taking him off my hands for a bit, I don’t find myself feeling that way when it’s just the two of us and I know it’ll continue to be just the two of us. There’s a different psychological expectation there, I suppose – you know you’re running a marathon with no chance for relief, so there’s no light mocking you whilst standing perfectly still at the other end of the tunnel.
I just spent the better part of the last two hours listening to this SyFy Radio podcast, which is actually a bit of a hard news piece about the ignominious and not-just-a-little-bit-suspicious collapse of a recent convention in Dallas (the show was cancelled mid-morning on the day that it started!). It’s fascinating listening, though one’s advised to also visit Syfyportal.com and read the accompanying text articles for some additional context. But it’s a lot of drama, and it’s a legitimate news topics because a lot of people lost a lot of money – and may or may not have realized that the wizard behind the curtain of this show was the same fella who solicited donations to save Star Trek: Enterprise back in 2005. Between this and Flack’s podcast (which has just done its fifth installment), I’m reminded – cruelly – of how much I’d like to take on the podcasting beast and try to tame it, and then I hear my son roll over noisily in his crib and remember why I don’t even think about podcasting most days. At this rate I don’t think I could even guest on anyone else’s podcast. I mean, unless you people really want me to start podcasting baby feeding sessions…I mean, what’m I gonna use my old Radio Voice for now? Public service announcements about not misplacing your binky?
Evan’s entering that Extremely Clingy Stage of separation anxiety that little ones go through anywhere from the 8-month mark on; supposedly this passes at around the 1-year mark. Can’t wait for that. It’s not that I mind keeping him company all the time, but there are some times – i.e. showering, cleaning litterboxes, engaging in the taking of a dump, loading the dishwasher – that it’s just impractical, if not impossible, to haul him around and get this other stuff done that needs to happen. (Especially the dumps. Those are way important.) Basically, he’s at the stage where, if you set him down and then step out of sight to do something, he starts shrieking because he’s been left alone. Sometimes you just have to let him cry it out, because this stuff has to get done, but it makes me feel like the Worst Dad Ever. I don’t ever see this happen with Evan’s mom, so I guess it’s official: he looks at me and sees, more or less, his primary support system. The feeder of baby food, changer of diapers, mixer of bottles, and the bringer of darkness (i.e. the guy who keeps putting him down for a nap every 3-4 hours). If someone had told me, this time two years ago, that any child on this planet would ever look at me that way, I would have happily told them that they needed their head examined pronto.
One thing I’m thinking about doing, though, is putting a curtain over the “long” end of his crib – i.e. the side that faces the bed across the room where I sleep. In the mornings, if he wakes up early, he’ll sometimes be content to just sit up and play with the stuffed animals in his crib. But if he sees me move, even if I’m turning over in my sleep, GAME OVER, time to wake up! Get up, dad! I saw you move! I know you’re awake! FEED ME! 😆 He’s suddenly been getting up at about a quarter to five, ready to eat, which isn’t my favorite time of day to wake up. Where he gets this early bird trait genetically, I don’t know – it ain’t on my side of the family. 😛
One last baby note: he held and crank his own cup of water on Friday after lunch. Not a sippy cup with some kinda quasi-nipple thing on top, but a real live kid-sized cup. I’m sticking to my earlier theory: he’s got a big head because he’s scary smart. Case closed.… Read more
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Give us this day our daily power outage
At around 5:30 this morning I awoke to an ominous thunderous sound. It wasn’t actually thunder, but Xena thunderously knocking on the front door wanting to be let in before the actual thunder got here. I let her in and then shut down the Avid, which I had left on all night to render some stuff, and then we got yet another monsoon, and more flooding (hey, maybe we’ll get more Gamera!) and what’s becoming an almost daily tradition: the storm-induced power outage. I’m sure with storms rolling through just about every other day that there isn’t a chance to do a really comprehensive repair job on substations and whatnot, but it’s getting kind of silly.
Please Squeeze. I’d have something insanely cool to show you video-wise right now, except that all of a sudden, I can’t get Sorenson Squeeze to run on a single machine in my house. I’ll admit that I haven’t tried my wife’s laptop yet (though it has other issues that make me hesitant to even try, such as rolling over, powering down and playing dead with no warning), but it’s incredibly frustrating – this also means no new site video for stuff like Phosphor Dot Fossils (this has also held up a promo video that I’ve put together for the PDF DVD, which I’m sure is probably helping sales to drop off significantly, which they have). So maybe “incredibly frustrating” is being a bit on the charitable side. I’ve submitted a trouble ticket, though I have the feeling the fix will be “Upgrade to our new version for $XX!” I really don’t seem to be having much luck on the computer end these days, which is a surprise, because normally it’s purely mechanical problems that give me massive headaches. Which makes this next bit all the more surprising…
Holy #$%&, I fixed the air conditioner! Okay, maybe fix is too strong a work, because it wasn’t really broken, just frozen over, and this “fix” involved pointing a hair dryer on full heat at the ice until it melted away, and then taking a bucket full of warm soapy water and cleaning the intake vent, and then changing the filter that I should’ve changed probably a month or two back, which, if I’d done it then, this probably would never have happened. So on the balance of it, purely mechanical things still caused a massive headache. But I actually fixed it – if you want to call it that – without calling anyone out to do it, which I couldn’t afford anyway, which surprises me as much as it does anyone else. Still, I doubt the high-priced HVAC techs of the world have anything to fear from me. There are still plenty of people who are willing to pay them big bucks to aim a hair dryer on full heat at their iced-over intake.
More fun with Globat. Welcome back to Globat.com, fine web hosting and the home of Internal Server Errors galore! Today’s issue: “Server shutdown in progress.” Repeatedly. Sometimes you can actually get what you want from theLogBook’s databases…and just as often you can’t. The really fun part of this is on Scribblings, where each server shutdown forces me to go in and reconfigure my anti-spam plugin from scratch. If Globat sucked any more, they’d be off the Suck Scale on my suckometer. I can’t get the site moved away from these bozos fast enough.
Here’s hoping I can get some good Sorenson Squeeze lovin’ soon, because I’m eager to show off this…thing…that I want to show off. He said vaguely.… Read more
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Thanks for the memories
The memory card snafu has been solved! Pantech pointed me in the direction of an incredibly useful piece of software called Easy Photo Recovery which recovered – get this – all but two of the photos that had vanished from the offending memory stick. (The two casualties were from this week’s ToyBox piece, and since that’s already posted the originals aren’t needed anymore.) This program is just amazing, and I had no idea anything like it existed – and I’ll probably be calling on its services in the future, since this isn’t the first oddball disappearance of memory stick photos I’ve ever experienced, and because I take a lot of pictures. (I don’t know anyone with kids who doesn’t, actually.) … Read more
