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...And Little E Makes 3 Television & Movies

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

Categories
Gadgetology Home Base

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

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code Gadgetology

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

Categories
Critters

Gonna take a sentimental journey

I needed to do this, so you’ll have to put up with indulging me for a moment:

The story of Othello & Iago…in pictures – from the day I brought them home to the end of their journeys.

It’s cuter than you think, and I lost track of how many times I laughed (and cried) when thinking back to some of these pictures. These guys were definitely worthy of a tribute.… Read more

Categories
ToyBox

If anyone out there is going to San Diego Comic Con in July…

Time Crash action figure set…you think you could do me a solid? Character Options is doing a SDCC exclusive Doctor Who “Time Crash” action figure set, featuring what they claim will be the only version of the fifth Doctor sporting celery on his collar. There will only be 3,000 of these two-packs at the event, and proceeds will go to the Children In Need charity, which is kind of appropriate since that’s what “Time Crash” was done for in the first place. If anyone reading this (who I know and trust, that is – people who I don’t know and trust probably couldn’t find anything interesting to read about here anyway) is going, I can paypal you in advance for the figures and of course for shipping ’em to me once you get home. Assuming you don’t get terribly attached to them in between. Which, actually, I could see happening, because how awesome is plastic Davison + his plastic celery?

Now, a bit of funny commentary about this set: the irony of doing a “Time Crash” set in the U.S. is off the scale, because, of course, you haven’t seen “Time Crash” in the U.S. unless you downloaded it. If you want to see some pissed-off Brits, hit up any Who forum and look for the thread about these figures. The British collectors are – quite rightly, in my estimation – furious over this, because while they’re likely to have been the people who donated money during the telethon-style broadcast of which “Time Crash” was one small part, we’re the ones getting the figures. The UK collectors were already up in arms about the wide-release fifth Doctor sporting no celery, so they view this as a slap in the face. Now, the money all going to charity = a good thing, but it seems like someone’s marketing logic is a little askew here. So, my thanks to Character Options for announcing something which has cheered me up a little bit after a craptabulous week, and…I guess…thanks for rewarding us Yanks for…technically speaking…illegally downloading…that little Doctor Who special?

If CO can get permission to legally show TC at the con, that might make marginally more sense. But still, the basic assumption in place is that the target audience has got hold of the thing somehow, by hook or by crook, and knows why the tenth and fifth Doctors would be packaged together. *shrug*

So yeah, if anyone I know is headed for SDCC, hit me up here.

(Sorry if this seems like an awfully trivial thing after all the Othello angst – you can almost hear the mental gears being stripped. If you were to accuse me of trying as hard as I possibly can to find anything to distract myself and snap out of it…well, you’re dangerously close to being right on the money.)… Read more