(no subject)

I forgot that it was Marathon Day until I was already on the Green Line. But, it wasn't so bad, even though I had to press past a lot of folks to get off at Longwood (D Line). I had fun with that, tossing out a variety of exhortations for people to sidle out of the way, based on ol' Br. Hamilton's patter back at St. John Neumann High School: Excuse me, pardon me, hot soup, comin' through, hot soup ladies and gentlemen! Lady with a baby comin' through, folks. Pardon me! Hot soup. Thank you!

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This has been a good weekend. Posted a lot of Volity progress (including my first real foray into Java-land; kudos to dougo for his clean and very nicely commented code), and finally started editing the footage for the show's first video game review. (I don't expect to take so long to get around to it in the future. I think I was encouraged to procrastinate by the fact that this first show will take a long time to finish no matter how fast I work, due to the dependency of my finishing the SCAT production course. First class Tuesday of next week, and on through June, probably.) I also thought that I recorded the footage for the other video game review I want on the pilot, only to discover that S-Video cables don't transfer audio. Will have to hit the Radio Shack again and try once more.

Learned more about iMovie's powers and limitations, and wonder if Final Cut might work better for me. I was pleased and surprised to discover that one can operate the camera's VCR controls through iMovie (implying that there are standards for such things, which is nice to see... I know absolutely nothing about low-level A/V software and protocols), but disappointed that there's no apparent way to make a timer appear while the camera is playing, which seems pretty brain-dead to me (especially since the app does display the camera's current timecode when it's not playing).

SCAT offers classes in both iMovie and Final Cut; I'll probably take both, despite my temptation to consider myself too much of a smug smartypants for the former. If the teacher is any good, I can surely learn some nice tricks.

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I'm still kind of worried about SCAT, which continues to have some basic arse/elbow disambiguation issues. When I signed up for classes last week, I was told that the guy who asked me for a membership card on Saturday (before shooing me away) was in the wrong because SCAT hasn't used membership cards in years. A few days later, I got a new membership card in the mail, paperclipped to a "Welcome!" form letter signed by the person who had told me this. Okaaaay...

We're devils and blacksheep and really bad eggs

Via rserocki, this wonderful collection of high-quality audio samples from Disneyland attractions in MP3 format. I am listening to the Pirates of the Carribean track with great delight now... I don't know how many times I rode its clone at Disneyworld (on the other coast), and remember well the animatronic puppets that go with most of these. More voicework from Orson Welles and Thurl Ravenscroft that you can shake a stick at!

Urgh, I wish I had my iPod on me... I'd love to load of those tours-for-the-blind tracks for the ride home. I'll do it later this week.

I just got BOFH'd?!

For real... in an email cc:ed to all my sidelings and overlings, an HMS sysadmin just chewed me out for writing a database password in a file in my home directory just a few minutes ago. He had every right to complain and tell me about a sysadmin-preferred way of doing things (which would be to parse a locked-down credentials file elsewhere on the fs), but really now.

I group-replied with "LART'd!!!" and then wrote a poem about him and put that in my home directory too, called a_haiku_about_${BOFH_name}.txt

A lovely spring day
Hey, that file's world-readable
Release the hounds, yo