The Wonders of Blu-Ray

My first choice for comparing DVD to Blu-Ray on my new toy was the James Bond film From Russia With Love. The reason I had chosen this particular film was because the DVD copy I have of this one looks like a digital scan of an old film print without any cleanup work at all. It even has film imperfections preserved in glorious digital detail. 

I selected a scene that I thought would show off the potential of the high definition versus the "how bad can it be?" of the DVD copy. So I watched the helicopter scene near the end of the film where Bond avoids a helicopter trying to take him out. Naturally, he wins in the end, and the helicopter comes down in a glorious crash and explosion. 

After I watched the DVD, I put on the Blu-Ray version that I'd gotten from Blockbuster. Holy cow! The difference was absolutely unbelievable. I had wondered if they'd done any cleanup or found a cleaner copy for the HD transfer, but the clarity is beyond description. The colors were brighter all around, and they managed to increase the definition to where everything was clear right down to being able to make out the texture of the seat belt in the helicopter.

We subsequently watched Twister and had the chance to compare it to an SD version from shots within the documentaries on the disc, and it was so much sharper than we'd seen before. 

So there is a difference so far. I still want to make a comparison between a modern DVD and the Blu-Ray version that would have been released on the same day, instead of there being years between the releases. Hence, my next target for a direct comparison is Casino Royale, though I do want to compare The Polar Express as well. The up-convert of the standard to HD of that movie was actually really incredible.

I guess I'll see how they go when I get ahold of them.

How Christmas Went

Christmas went very well on my end. I got all kinds of nice goodies that I don't mind sharing the wonders of, not to mention a little extra bonus to boot. On the evening of the 24th, we met with my family as we always do, and they got me the new Guitar Hero: World Tour game. I'd played this a few months ago, and I'd wisely decided that since I was going to have it at some point, I would not delete the saved game I'd built up when I'd rented it so I'd still have all the songs I'd unlocked. It was still there, so I can freely play pretty much anything on the game. It's still awesome. I've played some co-op with both the Engineer and Rock Girl since, and found it has its own tiers for co-op. That's interesting.

On Christmas morning, I found Santa had gone Star Wars on me, and brought me the Mace Windu lightsaber (which is the only lights and sound lightsaber I did not have... [notices the odd looks at the mention of the complete set of lights and sounds lightsabers] ...what?), but as luck would have it, this one was defective in that the spring action sprung once and never sprung again. Bummer. Also for me were three more action figures to add to my growing collection of them (not a complete one, but I did grab all of the Episode I and Episode III figures when they came out -- lately there are so many that it's unwieldly) as well as the Wii game Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Battles. The controls on this one are a bit different from The Force Unleashed but the play control is similar, and the one round I've played on it so far was fun. 

Oh, and this geek totally scored on the Queen's gifts. She squealed at every one of them as she'd gotten this year's holiday Barbie, the Tales of the Beadle and the Bard (a sort of spin-off book from the Harry Potter franchise), and from thinkgeek.com (I'm so proud), an executive Crayola crayon pen. My Queen can be a bit of a geek too.

For lunch, we went to the Queen's parents house for the family Christmas of her end. A few years ago, we'd started all gathering at one location so everyone could enjoy everyone else's company for Christmas as opposed to running all over town to see everyone for a few minutes and then running off to someone else's house. The princesses get worn out after such a day. So this year, it was her parents' turn to host and next year, they're talking about it being our turn again. We had a buffet style lunch, and everyone got their fill of the food before the attention turned to the gifts.

I got a blu-ray player from her parents which is something I'd been eyeing for awhile now, given my rather extreme movie interest. From her grandparents, I have two more Wii games: Force Unleashed and Lego Batman, both of which were at the top of my want list. With the cash from her other grandparent, we started our blu-ray disc collection with Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, which is the start of that series that we'd been wanting to get anyway. I decided that I'd rent movies I already have to compare them with the DVD versions.

The princesses, of course, took home motherloads of toys that they were all overjoyed with and have been playing the heck out of. From Polly Pockets and Littlest Pet Shop toys to a pair of Nintendo DS's and a Leapster, they've barely put any of them down long enough to pick up the next one. And it's not one toy over another either. They go through pretty much all of them and The Socialite and Sassy Pants freely fight over each other's toys as well. Oh, but not playing with each other's toys, but rather getting the other to play with her.

Our last little bonus was from The Engineer. At his church, they'd come across a dishwasher that someone brought in presumably after a remodle or replacement or something, and they were informed that it still worked. As it was a free deal, on Friday, the Engineer and I ventured over there to pick it up, bring it home, and then install it. It took more time than anticipated, but there aren't any horror stories to go along with it. Our new free dishwasher works like a charmand actually cleans dishes.

So it was a good Christmas all told. Everyone went home happy, and ready to face the new year with some new stuff that makes them all very happy.

Merry Christmas 08

Merry Christmas everyone!

I'm writing this on the 24th for a head start since I know I won't have a chance to write anything tomorrow, but as I've neglected this blog for long enough, I want to keep it going. We got done with our Christmas shopping quite some time ago, so we were more than ready for today to come.

I know the princesses are quite excited, and we live vicariously through their excitement. Very little in this life makes me happier than to see them happy, and we always do everything in our power to make them stay that way. The whole economic downturn affected us only a little in so far as I lost the mega overtime I was getting, but our Christmas is going to be great.

Remember, of course, that today is the celebration of the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and whether you believe he was born on December 25th, or that this is really a carryover holiday from the Babylonian celebration of the winter solstace that was covered up by the early Catholic church to become a Christian holiday even though Jesus was probably born in September, I hope your Christmas is a joyful holiday all the same. To me, it's the meaning that matters, and I am grateful that we were given an eternal hope through the gift of his life.

Have a great day everyone, and a Merry Christmas.

Another Rough Cut And Print

Well, I've reached another milestone on my movie. I finally worked through all the footage I'd shot on the 13th and cut together some transitions. I put the transitions into my rough cut and I have a full rough cut of the movie. I popped it onto a DVD and sat down to watch it. The sound is very rough and uneven throughout, not to mention it's clear where I cut it together, and of course, there's no music yet.

I even noticed that I'd screwed up one scene that I probably won't be able to fix. In moviemaking there is a sort of invisible line or plane that the camera is not allowed to cross so that the audience's perspective of two conversing characters remains consistent. This way one character looks left and the other looks right. If you cross the line, you end up with a cut where the characters are both looking the same direction. Well, you can kind of tell where the characters are in this scene, but when I cut back and forth between them, they are both looking to the right. I considered flipping the picture for one of them horizontally to make one of them look the right direction, but it would make the background look strange and facing the wrong direction, so I think I'm stuck with the mistake.

Of course, the Engineer was wanting the avi file of the movie, but at the moment, I can't get a 15Gb file on my portable hard drive, so he'll have to be content with the wav of the soundtrack and a DVD of the movie to match up. The only other thing missing at the moment is a series of voiceovers at the end that tell a little about the main character's resolution, but I figured that for the Engineer to do anyway since it deals with sounds that would need cleaning.

The movie with the mock credits only runs for 73 minutes, which is really short for a feature. My answer to this will be including the four minute short I shot in April 07, so the disc has enough content to justify itself. It'll just make this DVD release my "first movies" disc. That'll have to do, since I can't make it any longer.

I've also found that I'm way too familiar with it at this point. I watch it, and mostly, I hate it. But it's not a sort of despising hate, but the kind of hate where you've just seen something so many times and dissected it so much that you know it too well. While the sounds are being worked, though, I need to leave it alone, so I will. Otherwise, it won't line back up right.

I'm handing off the DVD with the movie on one side and the soundtrack on the other for the Engineer to work, and I'll just mail the other DVD off to Beggs for Farmer to work on the music. We're getting there, though. Once The Engineer is through the soundtrack, we'll get the cast together to do some ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording) and once the ADR is done, I would hope that Farmer is done with the music (it really needs music). From there, I've got an outlet to get the DVD onto Amazon in fairly short order, and I suppose at that point, you'll know who I am if you look it up.

But that is another day. It's just nice to get through something.

The Girl of Taco Gringo

Optimus Prime is really one for stories, and he ran down another one for me recently that I thought was both amusing and fascinating in how our interactions in other peoples' lives serves to change them. This one boils down to an essential if-then statement when it comes to Prime's life choices, since in the case of this particular girl, his failure to keep track of time and desire for some Mexican fast food changed someone's life, and perhaps not for the better.

His story began with Everquest, a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), which has since been supplanted, I believe, by Everquest 2. These are affectionately referred to by players as EQ1 and EQ2. Well, people who play these types of games tend to revolve their lives around them, and as such, he tended to miss dinner time at the college cafeteria. Some colleges have some very specific times that the cafeteria is "open" for meals, and in the case of his college, this open time was 5 to 6 pm. After that, you're on your own. 

Well, his choice of fare when he missed the college meal time was a place called Taco Gringo, and he said after the first twenty or thirty times he went in there, they got to know him, and he tended to get more to eat after that. One person who got to know him was this girl who was a waitress in there, and him being a geek and all, he talked to her about computers. She wasn't even a user at the time they met, but knew "about" them, probably like your average 80 year old knows "about" them.  She had been thinking about getting one, and so she talked to him about how to use it, etc.

He, in turn, not only gave her the whole skinny on computers, but told her all about EQ1 and his affinity for it. I have little doubt that he went into lots and lots of detail about who he was and what he did and the little clubs or whatever he was in within the game world. This lead her to go out and buy a computer, and subsequently, get into Everquest as well. While I've never played an MMORPG (never wanted to make the time to do so), I understand that losing yourself in that virtual world is very easy to do if you're not careful, and this is what she ended up doing. She went from waitress to EQ junkie in short order.

So one day, when Prime had missed the meal times at the cafeteria again, he's gone into Taco Gringo only to find that the girl had failed to show up for work again, and had been fired as a result. This, however, was not the end of the story because he'd apparently learned more of what happened to her after she'd left Taco Gringo and how her life in the EQ world went from there. This is all given "as the story goes," and may or may not be 100% of what happened, but it's an interesting story all the same.

She had met a wizard in EQ, and he didn't live too far from her -- just over the state line. She began to take time to go see him, and like the game junkie she had become, she took her computer with her when she went. It started out with weekends, but after one weekend when she'd taken her computer over the state line to see her wizard, she didn't come back. Turns out they had gotten married, but then reality set in.

Apparently (and this may come as a surprise), being a level 80 wizard in the Everquest virtual world is just that: a level 80 wizard online. This equates to being absolutely nothing in the real world. Like his new wife, his EQ obsession took its toll on him, and he was expelled from college for his overkill obsession. This guy was beyond your typical gamer. As the story goes, he had an actual Legend of Zelda Master Sword in his dorm room at one time. By actual, I mean it was an actual, functional sword made to look just like the one in the video game.

I asked him what ever became of them, and his first response was pregnant with 12 kids, but then he laughed it off. Turns out the relationship was not meant to be. He left her when she discovered World of Warcraft.

Weight Loss

So for several months, I've been working on becoming healthier, primarily by running on a treadmill we'd gotten back in April with that "economic stimulus package" that the government passed around. After several false starts, I finally settled into a groove and was running upwards of 3 to 4 miles per day at 5 or 6 mph (lately anyway) five days a week. I'd also done some reading on how to control your diet, and I'd found that what you eat is only a piece of the overall puzzle, and the whole concept of dieting was rather flawed. It's more about eating what you want to eat in moderation or more to the point only eating what you need. There was a show some time ago called Dinotopia that summed it up rather well: "Eat to live; don't live to eat." 

What it boiled down to was to keep your metabolism working, you should ensure that you not only eat breakfast but an afternoon snack no less than two and a half hours after lunch will also keep the metabolism going. Apparently, the body is an amazing little machine that will not allow itself to starve, and so if you don't eat, it won't metabolize anything since there's no new energy to replace it. Hence, as long as you continue to feed the body, the body will continue to process and the metabolism will continue working. So I've made sure for the first time ever that I actually eat something when I get up in the morning, eat lunch every day (that's EVERY day), and I have something mid-afternoon as well (usually that's when I indulge my soda habit and have a Mountain Dew).

A third thing that I'd done in these past months (yeah, there's more; it's a lot of work, isn't it?) is ensuring that I drink a lot of water. The water thing is similar to the food thing in that the body will do whatever it can to ensure your body has enough water to function. If you don't regularly ingest water, the body will selfishly hold on to the water that it has (or "retain water") in little reserves that will vary based on how much it thinks it needs. This can amount to some significant poundage in some people. Once you start taking in enough water (which some experts say is half your weight in oz -- i.e. a 200 pound person should have 100oz of water), the body releases its stores and functions that much better. Now, I admit that I don't always have half my weight in ounces of water, but I do drink quite a bit of it.

The thought that prevailed in my mind when I began had to do with my father who has had cancer a couple of times, has type B diabetes, and is overall, not very healthy. One thing that could have benefited him (and what we're trying to get him to do more of) is exercise. By maintaining a relatively healthy lifestyle, you get yourself into a healthier body, and you live a happier and more illness-free life. I figure that I want to see the princesses grow up and have their own children all all that, and to see all that for as long as possible, I need to ensure that I am healthy as opposed to falling apart. This way, I am not just around for their lives, but I can keep up with them as well, and you know, look good while doing it. I don't want to be one of those dads who huffs and puffs because he just can't keep with the kids anymore. I want to be the one who is out ahead of them telling them to keep up with me.

Anyway, all this has amounted to my losing some fifteen pounds over the course of three or four months. 

Then I got a Wii Fit. This is an amazing little workout "machine" in that it contains aerobic activities as well as yoga exercises for stretching and balance/posture, strength exercises for toning those muscles you never use, and some balance games that are relatively fun. But with that new toy, I started falling out of the routine of running five days a week, and started playing on the Wii Fit for half of that time. I still run, but I needed to find a balance because I was getting frustrated.

You see, this Wii Fit has a "body test" function that measures your weight and calculates it against your height to determine your BMI (body mass index) as well as providing a couple of balance tests to figure out just how agile you are and give you a "Wii Fit Age," much like the Wii Sports Age does, if you're familiar with the game that has come with most Wiis. The downside of testing your weight every day is that you watch it go up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down until you wonder if it will ever go in the direction you finally want it to go. Now, given that we're in the big eating season of the year, in all fairness, the fact that my weight has stayed down is a big plus, but after three weeks on the Wii Fit, I'm not seeing it decrease further with any consistency.

Now, there is something that is likely causing this weight stagnation, and it's actually a good thing. I mentioned the strength exercises. A short term goal that I want for myself (and this is something for a geek who really doesn't like the workout overkill I'm subjecting myself to -- really, I would rather be doing something other than running and exercising -- I have game to play, but I am digressing), anyway... the goal I want is to look good next summer at the pool, when we inevitably head back to Roaring River. I saw myself recently on a video of two years ago, and I think I was working towards looking like Santa Claus. 

Anyway (again), to work toward the pool goal, I've been doing the strength exercises very consistently to the point where I wear myself out doing them. I feel good afterwards, but I take myself to where I struggle to finish, so I figure I'm doing myself some good. Well, muscle weighs more than fat does, and the Queen noted last night that I am getting some definition here and there. Can you see where this is going? By virtue of overkilling myself at the muscle toning exercises and foregoing the straight calorie-burning I'd been doing, I've probably managed to build some muscle while working out the fat issue, hence my weight has temporarily stagnated since I continue to feel better physically, which is unlikely if I'm just randomly gaining weight again. It's also unlikely that I would just be backsliding when I continue to kill myself working out almost every day, even though I'm working different parts of my body.

So last night, I decided to not to do anything. There was a water line break down the street, and the city had shut off the water to the block, so I used it as an excuse to not work out (even though I don't usually drink water while working out -- I do it afterwards since I only go for an hour at the most). Well, to torture myself, I went ahead and did the Wii Fit weight thing at the end of the night. I'd been helping the Queen here and there, and I'd played drums on Rock Band for a while too, so I hadn't been completely idle.

Well, it was a surprise to me that I my weight decided to go down that night. It went down by nearly 3 pounds from the previous day, which was an especial surprise. What I had been trying to pull to trick out the scale was working out first, doing my weight, and then drinking water. It can give a false reading, really, since sweating sheds some water weight, and makes you lighter. Hey, it made me feel good. 

So, thinking about everything, I need to work the Wii Fit in conjunction with the treadmill so I get the relentless calorie burning in along with the body toning. But the bottom line is for me to keep doing what I'm doing because somehow it is actually working...

Not Enough Memory

You know, another problem with keeping a blog is remembering that cool story worth writing down long enough to actually write it down in here. As I stared at this blank page, I pondered the tale I thought I was going to tell on Saturday, but figured I would just remember it for Monday, and take it down then. Yeah, that's the part I remember. I remember the idea to remember the story, but I don't remember the story itself. How warped is that?

But that's about my lot when it comes to remembering stuff. People remember stuff different ways, but my method of memory seems to be a little more unique than the majority. Sometimes, I remember specific details of a situation if that specific situation is recalled, but most of the time, I remember that something happened, or I remember the general overview of it, or what I felt like I was supposed to get out of it. It's this memory "condition" that makes the Queen and everyone else crazy since you'll note "details" is not something listed up there.

Now when it comes to something I am working to specifically recall, I can often recall details to make someone's head swim. Look at some of the older stories I've told on here. Some of them go into a lot of detail about what exactly went on, so I have the ability to remember things, but most of the time, the stuff that happens day to day isn't worth remembering. I'm to the point at my job that once I finish talking to a particular person, I disremember them almost immediately. And I didn't use the word "forget" on purpose, but I don't actually forget the conversation. If someone asks me about it, and I pull up the ticket or account, I'll remember it almost verbatim, but what I'm doing by "disremembering" is choosing to immediately put the affair out of my mind since it will rarely concern me again. I usually can't remember who I spoke with five minutes ago.

This has, unfortunately, carried itself over into my home life. Now, when a member of the Queen's family calls, I often forget to tell her. When I converse with my family, the Queen will ask about the conversation, and I have a lot of trouble remembering what was said beyond the gist of the conversation. My mother will talk to me for twenty minutes, and I'm, at best, only able to summarize the conversation in under a minute. Ok, so my mother does tend to repeat herself during the conversation, and occasionally go off onto other tangents, but who doesn't?

And speaking of memory, I got a ticket reopened today from someone that I spoke with back on December 9th about an issue related to their program that accesses Medicare's system timing out. It processes along just fine until it just stops. Now, this is a product where they provide the connectivity, and we have a little program that pages through the screens and pulls back the info automatically to post to their claims. The reason it timed out is because the Medicare system is a little overloaded on Mondays and it loses its connection causing our program to lose its connection as well. They, naturally, blame us. Well, on the 9th, I convinced the person I spoke with that it was a connection issue with the Medicare system, and they just have to resume the program and it will eventually finish its work barring how the connection with Medicare holds out. She understood, and was ok with this.

Well, today a completely different person saw the problem and reopened the ticket wanting us to "look into it." Well, it's still something that we can't control, so there's still nothing we can do about it. And yet, this is somehow our fault. I guess they have memory problems too.

Never As Planned

Life's funny sometimes. It's been said over and over, and it continually proves to be true. I've got two things that have come around that prove this point yet again, leaving no doubt in the mind to how life makes your plans for you, no matter how hard you try to do it yourself. And from a second ironic perspective, they both have to do with my movie.

I was going to work to submit a rough cut of my film to the Barebones Festival on the 16th, which was Tuesday, but a couple of things prevented me from doing so. The first was that I wasn't comfortable with putting it out to be judged yet since although I have the shots I need, I hadn't cut them in yet, and the sound was still a mess. The second, and more amusing, reason I couldn't do it was because I couldn't afford to. While that's not necessarily funny, it plays into the amusing part. 

This film is what's referred to as a "no budget" film in that it literally had no budget to shoot it. Some might think that means I only spent a couple hundred bucks on it, but no kidding, I spent almost nothing on it. I bought tapes for $20, built a steadi-cam rig for about $10, and developed a picture for $2. This means the up front cost of this movie was $32. The other equipment used I got from other people or The Engineer got himself (and to be fair, he did get a nice little sound thing for his laptop to record the sound on). The entry fee for the festival was $55, meaning that the entry fee was actually more than the cost of my movie. Isn't that funny?

The second thing that happened recently concerned my working through the shots I had gotten that I needed to fully complete it. I was off the last couple of days for the birthdays of both The Socialite and Sassy Pants. I like to take everyone's birthdays off, and while the first of the year didn't work out too well, I finally got to take off the birthdays in the last part of the year. Well, one of those days was spent with everyone as school was still out due to ice, but Thursday was a regular school day. This means that I was going to be all by myself for the middle part of the day since The Queen substitutes at the preschool that Sassy Pants goes to. 

She asked me what I was going to do with all that time I had to myself, and I declared that I was going to finish my movie. Well, the whole time wasn't to be mine, to be sure. I got to take The Socialite to lunch for her birthday (a real treat, since I usually work), I saw the Queen at the preschool, attended the Socialite's Christmas (sorry, holiday) party, and I had to get something for the Queen for Christmas without her being with me. In the end, I had no time to work on my movie at all. I spent a few minutes on it trying to remove the extra crap from the footage that I couldn't use, but I didn't get much of anywhere on it.

This is not to say that my days off didn't go well. I enjoyed my time with the family, and we did our best to make their birthdays fun with what we could do. They each picked where they wanted to eat dinner. They were each the VIP for the day, which made Rock Girl withdraw quite a bit since the focus was not on her at all, and she'd been out of school for five days by the end of it. On Thursday, she apparently relished the peer to peer conversation and was quite a bit happier at the end of the day.

And of course, they thoroughly enjoyed all the movies watched on Wednesday. We watched A Bug's Life during the day, but that night, I got to surprise them with Wall-E, which I've checked out from the library. They really enjoy that movie.

Did I ever get to work on my movie? Oh yeah. About ten last night, I sat down to work on it. I went to bed at two...but it's a lot closer to being done.

Life Goes On

...much as it has this past age. It's kind of a pedantic update, but something to go on. Sassy Pants had her Christmas program with her preschool last night. She did a good job with her part and was incurably cute in it. I videoed it, of course, and not only did I snap a few shots of it, but I gave the still camera to Rock Girl (since the Solcialite insisted on sitting on my lap...and kicking the tripod a couple times) so she took some pics as well. The lighting in that room was not so good, though, and I fear for the quality of the pictures. Originally, I thought it was something Rock Girl was doing (i.e. not holding still long enough), but I found mine looked about the same way.

For my job, it has settled into what amounts to a mundane routine. Occasionally, something interesting comes up, and I always make a contribution to the betterment of the organization, so through the economic troubles the country is experiencing, I'm remaining gainfully employed. Of course, they cut our overtime, but we just adjusted the budget and moved forward. We're still doing financially better than we have been, and last month, I finally did what I should have done a long time ago, and made a long range budget plan that shows both what we have, what carries over from check to check, and what we need to have even a year from now. It's been incredibly useful at tracking our expenses and keeping us in line.

I do have a rought cut of movie still, but I wasn't able to go shooting for my transitional shots last weekend. I'm hoping that with my sister home, I can get the laptop shot I need, and then drive about getting the outside shots that I need to provide some additional scenery and fill some awkward gaps.

The most amusing discovery with the movie deal, though, is that while I had intended to submit the film to the Barebones Film Festival, due to my strapped cash situation, I can't afford the entry fee. More amusing than that is that the entry fee is more than I spent on my entire film. If I spend the entry fee, it'll more than double my expenditure on it. Thought that was funny.

But that's the gist of the past few weeks. I did put all my toys back out on my desk at work. I'd put them all away before Halloween to ensure the kids who were walking through the office didn't think I was giving toys away...I'd lose them all. But they're back out and displayed again, and everyone is back commenting on them again. I'm still not out of Halloween candy yet either.

There's me for now. Maybe I'll throw something out soon again.

A Rough Cut

Well, I completed a rough cut right on schedule when it comes to getting the raw footage to an acceptable level. It still needs some sound balanced and I've got some gaps when it comes to transitions, especially when it comes to time transitions between certain scenes. My plan was to get some road shots and some scenery of Broken Arrow to fill some gaps to indicate some time has passed. 

I also need another shot that I won't discuss at the moment since it would totally qualify as guerilla filmmaking since I'll need to get a shot of a certain situation that people would not be entirely comfortable with if they knew they were being shot for a feature film. In the final product, even if they saw themselves, they wouldn't have a clue. It's also a shot in the dark as to whether I'd even be able to get such a situation, but I'm hoping I get lucky...and if you knew what I was talking about, you would find "lucky" to be quite the morbid thought.

Once I get those shots down, I'll have a complete cut ready to go for both the sound balancing and the music writing. I still have a commitment from Farmer, who is my composer, so that's still a go, and The Engineer is practically chomping at the bit when it comes to engineering the sound.

I did have to move from Moviemaker to Pinnacle since Moviemaker couldn't handle some of the more complex sound things that I was doing. Pinnacle worked like a dream since it works frame by frame as opposed to fractions of seconds like Moviemaker does. Some elements were more difficult to use, especially in the sound category. Pinnacle can't just mute a sound clip, like Moviemaker does. You have to actually adjust the volume before and after the clip in question. But on a brighter spot, clips and their sounds all move together when you do anything, so if I had syncked the sound in Pinnacle, I could have cut anything anywhere and everything would have moved together. I don't know if that made sense, but it was very cool. It made the cuts in the complete movie file a lot easier.

The picture part is almost done, but unless I get those shots by the weekend of the 13th, I won't have a full rought cut ready by the 16th deadline for that festival I was going to try and get into. I really need to read some more info about that to see if I can even afford it. But we'll see how things go.

The Curse of Other People

I would say that the hardest part of keeping any blog is what to put in it. That's the problem everybody seems to have, right? "A blog sounds like fun, but I never know what to say." Or even better, "My life is too boring. Who would read about it?" 

Well, I don't know who would read about my life, but I know people do. But the hard part about blogging anything isn't that one would lead a boring life. Come on. No one is that uninteresting. You might feel that way, but the biggest problem in blogging your interesting and uninteresting items is that you usually have other people around to tell about it, and once you've told your interesting story to one person, you don't tend to want to tell it again unless it's really, really good.

So while you might tell everyone about the overturned car on the expressway, you might only mention that fascinating discussion on building a virtual machine that you heard only with the guy sitting next to you. The promotion is spread all over town while the fact that you managed to clear 24Gb of space last night or lost 16 pounds gets lost in the day once it comes out once.

Such is that curse of other people. I know the Queen spends literally hours on the phone talking to people and telling them absolutely everything that goes on. I chat with her and Optimus Prime and The Engineer, and it remains the same curse of not having anything left to blog once I've told it. It becomes a matter of remembering all those events and placing them here and telling others about them. 

Can I promise to do that? No, but I can promise to try. I really don't have any vices that I need accountability for, or that I need to put out there. My life continues on like a little train, dutifully chugging along, but not making any major waves. I do have a lot of interesting things that I'll probably start putting out there since I do want my share of boasting. Also, with Christmas coming up, there are a ton of interesting and quite geeky things out there as well.

Oh well. So I've discussed the mystery of blogging again and why people (mainly me) have trouble with it. I say again that I'll give this a go, and stop whining about not doing it. There've been a few things I'll probably backdate to begin with....

Some Sound Success With Some Oddities

Well, there's been some ups and downs here and there with the sound and video. I had taken some of the video off the tapes from Day Two to get some of the pick up scenes we did, and had a listen to the sound. It sounded like it was blasting out the speakers! I turned it down, and tried to turn the sound down in Soundbooth, but it didn't help. I let the Engineer know so he could look into it.

Then, out of curiosity, I tried to load the sounds into Movie Maker, but the program said it didn't have the codec to play it. Wait a minute. It's a wav file. Wav is a Windows media type. It would be only logical for a Windows program to have the codec built into it. After all, the original wavs loaded in. However... Those files were originally aif files, which Movie Maker was unable to load, and for day two, the Engineer saved the files as wavs instead of going through the aif step. It's possible that they're actually aif files since both Movie Maker and Soundbooth perform the way with them. I can save these as wavs from Soundbooth, but Movie Maker still won't load them. 

Well, over the past few weeks, I'd been messing with Pinnacle, and so I tried to load the sound into it. That worked which brings me forward to where I am now. I figured out how to get an uncompressed audio file out of a completed avi file. I found I could load the avi into Soundbooth and then save the audio as a wav file. It can be worked as an audio file and then reloaded uncompressed into Movie Maker and align with the original video file perfectly. This means I am free and clear to start editing which I did.

I've only done a few scenes so far, but I've found an odd issue with Movie Maker that I've worked around so far. It seems when you cut a bit of the video and move it to the audio track, and then mute the audio from the original video during that time frame, it mutes the audio for the rest of the file. Weird. I managed to work around it for that file, but I'm not only unsure what causes it, but I don't know what I'll do if it happens again, and I can't get around it. Pinnacle, I've found, is interesting enough, but as I'm unpractised with it, I don't know if I want to really experiment with a new program in the middle of a film. I know I'm going to use it for some advanced features, but I was hoping for my comfort zone for the first pass.

I'll see how it goes. For now, Movie Maker is doing okay. I guess I'll see how it goes.

Work Annoyance

I'm sure this has come up before, but this week has been particularly hideous for me in this regard. It's one of those things that no one does consciously, and I'm sure there have been times I've done this to people either out of lack of confidence, lack of desire to talk to someone new, or just my general introversion. I can even explain why someone would do this; you don't want to waste your precious time on dealing with someone who may or may not be able to answer you. The downside to this attitude is that you might be turning down someone who knows better than the person you're looking for.

What I'm referring to here is using people as informational resources. I work in an area with Optimus Prime. We both do essentially the same thing -- or rather, we share a common responsibility with differing outlying responsibilities. Within this similar responsibility, however, he is always considered the preferencial person to ask questions of when someone has them. This is understandable. What hurts sometimes, though, is when he is not only preferred, but I am excluded completely and deliberately.

Here's what happened: a few days ago we were looking at a problem with one of our clients that had stumped us for a few weeks. We had seen an error message, assumed what it meant, and didn't know what to do about it. Well, on the day in question, I finally cracked open the log file to see if this message was telling us the truth or not, and I found to my surprise (shouldn't have been a surprise), the message was not giving us the whole story. It seemed to indicate a login error, but in fact, it was a connection issue and the login error came from the connection resetting, returning to the login screen, and the enter key being pressed as a sort of "leftover" action from the previous screen definition. This generated a login error that our scripts were not equipped to deal with.

Our response to this error was to just resume the task and it typically processed just fine, so what I did was add the error message to the code and upload it. It worked like a charm. Well, while I was keeping an eye on that client, someone else came over, glanced between us, and (as this person ALWAYS does) shifted into Prime's cube to ask him about this very same client and the very same issue I'd just fixed but was monitoring. Prime told him that I was just working on them. This person glanced over to me, but was unwilling to speak to me on it. He said the a contact from that client was on the line, so Prime said to transfer the caller to him.

Huh? That equates to taking credit for someone else's work. Not that I care in most cases if someone else talks to a client over something I did, but in context of everything else that transpired, it just seemed really, really weird.

Ok, so maybe I'm just whining, and if you feel that way, that's fine. But you have to also understand that part of the satisfaction of doing a job is feeling valued in that job. When you see all the time that your opinion (though asked for) is not valued, it's hurtful, and that situation just came off as completely de-valuing what I do. 

The next day, something similar happened. I had asked Prime about a particular piece of the system and rather than just answer the question, he launched into an explanation of how it worked. I didn't need that, and wondered why he thought I did. He's also going to be on vacation next and has repeatedly asked if I could handle it. Why not? I've handled it before. He's also given repeated advice on some best practices. Again, I can handle it.

This whole thing has caused me to read a lot into a lot of other stuff, and I need to let it go. It is my sincere hope that just typing it all out here will help me to get past it. I played Guitar Hero last night for an hour and a half trying to get over it. It was over an hour before I could play much of anything straight on it. I felt better when it was over, but I still needed a little vent on here...

9 Reason You Should Date A Geek

I found this on AOL one evening, and since I can relate to it, I figured I had to post a link. I also posted the entire article just in case they ever take it down. It's found at this place on AOL.

Ladies: 9 Reasons You Should Date a Nerd
Filed under: Attraction & Chemistry, Love & Romance, Dating, For Women
Posted Sep 11th 2008 3:37PM
by eHarmony Advice

Ladies, is the reason you aren't getting very far in the dating world because you haven't let go of the girl you were in high school? We know it's a stereotype, but sometimes women pine after the rebellious cool guy, the one that mothers hate and girlfriends envy. While we're driving ourselves crazy to impress Mr. Cool, the undiscovered nerd is standing in the shadows waiting to be noticed.

You know who we're talking about, right? We're referring to that bespeckled guy that you overlooked so many years ago because he wasn't cool. Well, brace yourself for revenge of the nerds, because this soft-spoken loner is smart, sincere and will genuinely be nice to you. If you haven't given a second look to the guy that looks like your former Chemistry tutor, perhaps you should delve deeper into this untapped resource.

Maybe the comic book expert with the closetful of costumes for next month's convention is a little much. But those guys who walk the line between nerd and die-hard geek could use just a little luring out of their shell. Underneath all of those odd hobbies and quirky friends, these men can not only hold a conversation, but they also champion a woman with an education, a large vocabulary and a mind of her own.

If you have never dated a nerd, consider the following 9 reasons why you might just need a geek in your life.

1. He's Heartfelt Although sometimes awkward, geeks are usually well-meaning and sincere. He wants to get to know you and feel comfortable with a real lady. Surely, it is quite a difference from the lonely nights with Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, but a welcome change nonetheless.

2. He's a Smarty Pants Nerds usually are intelligent, can hold a good job and are overall self-sufficient. He's probably responsibly planned for and invested in his future well before any of us have started. Smart guys can also open your horizons and can offer a perspective or education about world news, politics or obscure movie trivia.

3. You'll get the Star Treatment Often overlooked, these guys can appreciate a woman when they get one. Likely to be a priority in his life, they show you off to their friends, call when they say they will and will most likely impress Mom and Dad. Okay, so maybe you will be number 2 or 3 after the computer games and geek trivia, but you won't be on a long list of ladies vying for some time with him.

4. He's Open to Suggestions You can offer tips on fashions, hairstyles or even music of present day. They realize that they could use the help when replacing the acid washed jeans or "spiked" hair from the days of yore and welcome their newfound hipness.

5. He's a Gentleman A far cry from the smarmy creep at the bar, nerds are more likely to debate your favorite Superman villain than only go after that "one thing." With little less relationship experience, his naïve fumbling with romantic advances come off as endearing and honest.

6. He's a Go-Go Gadget Guy Nerds tend to be more tech-savvy than the average layman, so whenever a frustrating situation happens with cache memory, deleting cookies or synchronizing the network, he can get those gadgets to behave.

7. He'll Make You Laugh With quirky interests and a matching sense of humor; nerds can share some interesting trivia or strange hobbies and while laughing at themselves, too. It's a welcome deviation from the "I'm too cool to laugh at myself" act.

8. He Keeps the Right Company Nerdy guys often have awkward geek friends. So instead of bad influences or disrespectful attitudes, your nerd man is hanging out with these guys playing Guitar Hero. A welcome reprieve from the raunchy "Guys Night Out," when who knows what could happen, these guys are spending time with the fellas discussing politics or network gaming. Plus, the buddies treat you nice when you come around, while your new man will be the hit in the group with such a hot gal on his arm.

9. You Can Be Yourself You don't have to put on a show for these guys by wearing 4 inch heels and making yourself up to look like a goddess. We bet they wouldn't mind your hair in a ponytail, the makeup-free glow, or your favorite jersey. You can be yourself around him and he won't be the jerk that works so hard to make you feel ugly. Like finding a diamond in the rough, your nerdy guy can be your own little treasure that no one has discovered yet. You will have to discover them, by the way. Nerdy ones are not the type to seek you out or make the first move, so you will have to be the brave one. But upon further examination, choosing a nerd may improve your chances of making a real connection.

Due to their neglected past, there are a bevy of nerdy gentlemen out there that never garnered a second look that are ready and willing to have a real relationship with someone that will give him a chance. So what if they are interested in geeky things? They make great companions because they stimulate the most vital organ: the brain.

Shocking

This wasn't funny when it happened. These things never are. And when version 1.1 is iterated to you in hysterics, laughing is out of the question. It wasn't funny. I was really concerned. But when it's retold, it's hard not to laugh at what happened as a result of it. This is a story from The Queen and her day.

She was helping out at school as part of the PTA in getting ready for their fall book fair by making copies of some flyers to be sent home with the students come next Monday. With her in the copy room was Sassy Pants, and Sassy Pants was going to be bored since this would take awhile. As such, The Queen had her bring some things she would want to play with to keep her occupied while The Queen made her copies. 

At this moment, nothing in Sassy Pants' backpack held any interest for her, and she was being generally difficult, and rather than do anything The Queen said while she was stapling notes to flyers, Sassy Pants decided she'd lay out on the floor under the table. Not to be frustrated, The Queen said fine, and went on with her stapling. 

Something came up, and The Queen left the room for a second to talk to the secretary (she was in the school office making the copies; you know, home of all the high power school folks who don't hang out in classrooms). Suddenly, an electrical pop sounded, the alarms went off, and the power went out. When The Queen went to check on Sassy Pants she held out her thumb because it hurt.

You see, apparently Sassy Pants got bored on the floor, and without mommy, she decided to explore. She found some staples on the floor and subsequently found herself a power outlet which I suppose functioned as the lock to the princess' castle and she held the keys in the form of those staples. The key went in the lock, and as you can imagine, no door opened. However, she did blow the circuit breaker for that part of the school, leaving the office personnel momentarily without computers or phones, and the alarms went off. I sure hope they saved their work.

Once the breaker was back on, computers and phone systems rebooted, Sassy Pants was left with a burned thumb, but no worse for wear any other way. Yes, I asked several times if she was ok. She did spend a fair amount of time in her room once the Queen got home, so she would not strangle the child in sheer frustration. 

The Queen had a meeting back at the school at 11, and she wasn't sure they'd let Sassy Pants back in the school, but that meeting went off just fine, and Sassy Pants stayed quietly strapped into the stroller. She was not allowed out.

Re-Affirmation Again

Wow, you know, everytime I get a good start on the blog, it gets away from me again. I had tons of ideas last months when I started again, but sure as I began, I forgot about it. Something shiny drew my attention probably. 

I know I've been busy in other areas. It's hard to say everything without totally divulging too much information. I have quite a few interests outside of my workplace, and my time tends to be almost completely monopolized by them.

For instance, I've played quite a few video games since I last noted anything. Star Wars: Force Unleashed for the Wii is quite fun. It actually wore me out working my way through it due to how physical you can be with it in how you react with the game through the Wiimote.

Also played the new Guitar Hero: World Tour. Found out that while the Rock Band microphone works with it (which I predicted since it's just a basic USB mike), the Rock Band drums do not (which I also predicted). But that games a lot of fun, and not only does it have a lot of songs in its gig lists, which are more surfable than Guitar Hero III, but it's got some huge hits in there. I got a kick out of playing and singing through Hotel California. And I managed to get through enough of it to play the Dream Theater 'hit' Pull Me Under. I don't recall whether I've gone over my top music artists, but Dream Theater is one of my favorites.

The job continues much as it has for the last year. They cut our overtime through the economic crisis, but hey, I'm still employed. That's what really matters.

But in the end, all is well, and I'll thinkof something to write at least during the week.

Principal Photography Done

Ah, we got it. At 1:30am on the morning hours of the 2nd (which thanks to daylight savings time, means we get home by 1am), we completed principal photography on my movie. Now is where the real fun begins (and the real magic happens). Of course, I'm a little shy on hard drive space, so before I can load up the 2 hours I got on Saturday, I have to cut together the footage I got on the 18th.

Not that this shoot was without its shortcomings, but my experience from day one helped me get through day two with fewer problems, so my 2 hours probably has more usable footage than the 3 1/2 I got on day one. Of course, it seems that some people have difficulty learning lines still which created additional frustration among the cast, and I think he was feeling even more this time around. While I expected issues, the tension rose as the shoot wore on. However, I'm hoping that the multiple takes of his lines will yield enough to make him look like a solid upstanding amateur.

Some things that went well, though, had to do with my desire to rehearse the scenes first and walk through it without the camera in hand. It allowed them to solify their lines and actions, and allowed me to see where they wanted to be without forcing them into a hole within the lens. We did that for Scene 33's reshoot, and I managed to get a single take that I think I'll use uncut, since I enjoy one shot takes.

We will likely have sound issue with the outside shots, however, since we got all kinds of miscellaneous sounds out there that can't be cleaned up such as wind, dogs, church bells, and traffic. Yeah, the pickup on the Engineer's mike is so good that he was getting traffic on the expressway at least a half mile to a mile away. We'll have to get everyone together in the room that we did our initial read-through in to re-record a lot of the outdoor sound. I really hope that goes well, as one person did not like acting along with a recording of another part that needs to fit together seamlessly in a single uncut take. I can only imagine how she'll do trying to re-act with herself.

Now the issue is getting an NLE that I can use easily enough and has enough features to warrant bothering with it. I'm still syncking up the sound in Windows Movie Maker and I plan on doing the rough edit in it, but need something more robust to make it look consistent in color and sound, as well as doing some minor effects on the video here and there to either clean up some pixels or lower the light to make it look darker. That sort of thing.

It's kind of a long road, but there is a festival deadline on December 16 that I want to make if I can. So we've got to get this sorted out as well as finding a way to either extract the sound from the final video or it'll need to be worked before hand, which is kind of silly since why work 6 hours of sound when you're only going to use 90 minutes of it. Haven't got it all worked out yet, but we're going to have to soon cause I want to get editing here.

Reviewing Day One

So I have been watching the footage I got from October 18 on my movie. I got the sound files from The Engineer, and it turns out that Windows Movie Maker, which I'm using for the initial cut until I can track down a usable Non-Linear Editor for some color correction and better sound editing feature, doesn't allow the use of the files that he created. Adobe Soundbooth will open them, but not save them as wav files for Moviemaker to use.

I've found I can save them as MP3's, but that creates yet another problem. Turns out those compressed sound files also compress the time at a rate of less than a quarter second per minute. Not significant for a music file you play on your iPod, but when you're trying to align the sound to your uncompressed video, it makes a huge difference. The Engineer turned around and was able to resave the files as wav files, so I was able to retain the uncompressed sound for aligning it to the 3 1/2 hours of footage I got from my 15 hours of shooting on the 18th.

I'm praying I can cut most of this together to be some kind of coherent movie, but it's a little daunting at this point, especially all the pauses and "line" requests during the cuts. I was a little "Ed Wood-ish" in my shooting style in that most takes only have one take to them, so if something doesn't work, I have to cut away to another take to cover the mistake. I'm hoping I don't have to do it too often.

I did get ahold of one amusing story from the shoot, though. The Engineer had set up the sound for an outdoor shot, and placed his laptop (that was recording the sound) on the hood of his truck. Well, he moved a little too far away from it or something, and that's how you get a Mac to crash. It hit the ground and popped several catches on the case, besides shutting it clean off (yeah, that sound file didn't come through, though I did get the crash on the camera's sound). He snapped it back together, turned it back on, and proved just how sturdy that Mac was. It worked fine the rest of the day and still does.

Of course, from that same scene, I discovered my amateurish blocking of the scene. Scene 33. It was such a mess that the footage I got is completely unusable. I cut together a hasty version of it to see if it would even remotely work since not only was the blocking a mess, but the lighting was awful as well in several takes. Yeah, it'll be something we'll have to redo this coming Saturday.

The only other question mark we have to work out before I can start editing is how to extract the soundtrack once the film is done. So far we haven't figured out how to get an uncompressed audio track out of the movie file. So at this point, nothing is edited. Have to figure that out before I can cut on it.

Making A Movie

This last weekend was the beginning of the culmination of years of work for me. Since 2001, I've been practicing the art of screenwriting, following my work on musicals and plays. Well, screenwriting has stuck with me the longest and to date, I've written some 60 screenplays, teleplays, and shorts. I'd taken one of my features and decided to shoot it myself. It is a no-budget script with five people and one location: a house. It's a straight drama with no effects and lots and lots of dialogue. For having no money, it's perfect.

The plan was to shoot the entire 80 page script in a single day starting at 8am and going right through till 11:30pm. I had every shot planned and every scene timed out to the minute. I had plenty of tapes; the Engineer was running the sound; we had bright lights to make sure we got a good picture. It was perfect.

Well, almost. There were a few things I failed to take into account. First and foremost was my own inexperience. After all, I was undertaking the mammoth task of shooting this thing. I'm the director, producer, and cameraman. There were no assistants of any kind. This inexperience lead to some blocking issues, some weird shots, and extra time take trying to figure out the real life versions of what I saw in my head.

The other issues concerned the actors themselves. I failed to allow for something I can only refer to as "diva time." This would be the time that actors use to primp themselves into what they feel is presentable for the shoot. Understandable completely, but one didn't start doing this until I said, "Let's go." They almost completely failed to be on time for most of the shots, and then there was the matter of knowing their lines. Most of them knew their lines just fine most of the time. There was a couple that nailed almost every one. Some needed prompting the first time through a scene. One barely survived two lines without needing help...every time. This latter one caused some frustration (which I contained exceptionally well) not only from me but from the rest of the cast as well. And I'm not saying anything here that I don't suspect he knew already...

So, with all this, we got through most of it. There are quite a few scenes we didn't get to, but fortunately, the people who allowed me to use their house are allowing me a second day on November 1st to finish up. According to my schedule, it's only the evening, so it won't even be all day that we shoot. I'll send out a schedule revision later, but it's mostly night scenes anyway. I'll also go through what I did get shot to see if anything need to be redone.

Anyway, it is exciting, and I can't wait to get editing on what I have to see how it turns out.

Pulses

If you're only up on current movies, you may have seen a movie from 2006 carrying itself around as a horror flick called Pulse. That movie was actually the third film named Pulse, and was a remake of the second Pulse movie, which was a Japanese film. But let's take a few steps back and have a look at the point that all these films have in common: technology = bad.

In 1988, a film came out called Pulse. It was an American horror film that played out like a haunted house story, but had this theme of becoming the victim of our technological dependencies. The villain was simply the electricity feeding into the house, and it could increase itself to the point of taking control of the household devices and becoming destructive. The film opens with the guy across the street going "crazy" without explanation, and as luck would have it, some similar things begin occurring to the family that in central to our story. Each member of the family narrowly escapes death by electrical mishap, and their only hope of being safe? "Unplug everything," says the guy whose house is lit by kerosene lamps. But not just unplug it; get rid of everything that so much as receives a signal from the outside world.

Fast forward to 2001 when a Japanese filmmaker concocts a story to where people can communicate with the dead via a website. The site seems to have webcams showing people who don't look so well, but as people become obsessed with this site, something weird seems to happen to them. They become profoundly depressed and before long, they lose hope entirely and become black splotches on the wall. There's an odd theme about red rooms here and there, though little explanation is given of this, and people soom begin to actively kill themselves because of their depression. The solution? Well, it's hard to say. The red room seems to be a bad thing, and whatever's in there gets out and does something to you to make you lose hope. The heroes eventually leave Japan entirely to escape it.

After many failed attempts, 2006 brought us the American version of the 2001 Japanese film. This time, we get a rock solid explanation as to what's going on. The dead are trying to communicate or come back entirely through electronic devices. Anything the uses an electronic pulse to power it is an outlet for them. This extends to everything we have from radios to computers to cell phones. If you are even in range of a cell phone tower, you can be had. They attack and suck the hope right out of you. You sink into that depression while being slowly covered by dark lines before turning into ashes (the American idea of the black splotch). The solution? Unplug everything. Get out of the range of cell phones and everything to be safe.

Finally, though this is actually cheating my way into just complaining about it, we have Pulse 2 from 2008. This one uses the concept of the American Pulse and does little more than try to tell a story in that world. It doesn't further the original characters' story; it doesn't progress the battle against the dead; it doesn't even give us a worthwhile and endearing tale of bravery and hope. No, this one follows one of "them" searching for her child who ends up with her still-living husband. After a host of pointless scenes, we get a pointless ending where he and his daughter run to a bus to a refugee camp, and for some reason, they stop when dead mom appears. I'm sure it was supposed to be heroic and touching, but since they didn't have to stop, it came off as dumb. He didn't even try to escape.

Anyway, it makes you kind of consider in all instances just how much we have become dependant on technology for everything, and if one of these scenarios did occur, just how screwed we would all be. I know as a geek, I love my tech, but I also know I'm dependant on it. If I had to live in an environment or situation like it was 200 years ago, I would be in a world of hurt, because of how dependant on technology I really am. There are many things I can in all reality do without any problem...if I were ready for it. But there are other things that are difficult to do without.

I always think of the ice of 07 to consider doing without all of our modern conveniences. You see, while there are times that it's very easy to do without these things, the middle of the winter is not one of those times. Without electricity, we had no heat at all, and we were not very good at keeping a fire going in the fireplace. We still have a corded phone, so we were fine on the phone front, though I did take our cell phones to work to charge them. I used the computer at work to get my internet fix, but though I was at work all day in a heated building, being at home in the cold all night, I was constantly cold at work as well and maintained my layered clothing. But on the flip side, we did just put our refrigerated items outside since it was freezing out there and kept them just fine.

So quality of film aside, it did make me think about everything I have that would be vulnerable to the stories presented. Kind of an odd thought for a Monday, but it gives me something to ponder.

Code Error

You know, in the world of programming, there are things that are nothing short of frustrating. I know that people who don't dig into computer code find it to be something daunting, but once you know one language, they all kind of fall into place, and work almost exactly the same way. It's all about simple logic. When you find situation A, do action B. The trick comes in finding the perfect logic that works every single time, and making sure you know the code you're writing in so that the program reading it understands what the heck you're trying to say.

In this particular instance, I had run up against a very strange error in which a date was being run through a subroutine that changed a blank field into the date 01002000, or January 0, 2000. Well, when a file containing this date went through an import process into another program, it caused the whole process to break down because that's clearly an invalid date, and the importing program knew it.

I know I just gave the whole problem, but finding the date was a needle in a haystack to begin with because that particular record was hidden deep within a file containing many, many other records, most with perfectly valid dates. Once the date was discovered, it was yet more research to figure out where it came from, and I eventually figured out that the system we were pulling the information from had a blank field where a date SHOULD have been.

So now, it came to finding out why something like this would happen. We knew it happened fairly often because this particular client had these import failures on a weekly (and sometimes more often) basis, and after they observed some of claims associated with these dates, they discovered that a date WOULD appear eventually, so we had to basically tell the system to make these records run again if this date came up.

After I found that I couldn't just pass a blank in that field, I decided to just use the date and set the record for pending, but then I had another problem. Once I coded in to set the claim for pending, I had some kind of code error. Now, this system uses a sort of "bastardized" BASIC language, which is the language I grew up on, but this thing was fussing about something invalid about the statement I'd put in there.

I read it and re-read it. I compared it to the rest of the file making sure everything in it was used somewhere else. I checked every character to make sure there was nothing funny about what I'd put in there, but it was all in vain. The stupid thing wouldn't run at all. What made it that much worse was I was controlling someone else's desktop, so they can watch me as I sit idle on this file. I had Optimus take a look. Still nothing.

Then I saw it. Foolishness washed over me. It was so simple that I should have seen it, but it was so easy to overlook. Here's what I wrote:

IF ($PaidDate == "01002000") THEN
SETSTATUS(Claims, PENDED, , , S12345)
//Back out and get the next claim
IF ( 0 == @ReturntoMainMenu() ) THEN
RETURN(0)
ENDIF
RETURN(1)
END IF

Can you see it? The comparison is right there. I'd even cut and pasted the "back out and get the next claim" part from elsewhere in the same file. The solution here is something that anyone with some simple observancy skills should be able to pick up on, and when I reveal the magic answer, if you haven't figured it out yet, you'll kick yourself. It's like a riddle where no knowledge of the subject matter is required for the solution.

Here's the correct version:

IF ($PaidDate == "01002000") THEN
SETSTATUS(Claims, PENDED, , , S12345)
//Back out and get the next claim
IF ( 0 == @ReturntoMainMenu() ) THEN
RETURN(0)
ENDIF
RETURN(1)
ENDIF

See it yet? All right, look at the ENDIF at the end of both of them. The first one has a space between the END and IF, which is correct for regular old BASIC, but remember that someone bastardized this verion, and the BASIC "END IF" is now ENDIF, as in one word, no space.

See? Now wasn't that a fun game? Stare at it for another fifteen minutes before it hits you, and then it's not fun anymore. Still kicking myself.

Who's The Boss?

Family dynamics are interesting and remarkably consistent across families, no matter how different they are. I know mine the best, of course, but I've also observed this consistency in other families with a similar makeup. This has to do with birth order.

The first born is the leader and protector of the others. Rock Girl is the one the younger ones always look to, no matter what to find out what they need to do. She is the example and they listen to her (when they want to). In all honesty, they listen to her more than they do us, but she's really good and listens to us, so she does set a good example. When it comes to the protection factor, we've seen her on more than one occasion chastising some poor kid at McDonald's who made her sisters cry. She comes to their rescue unapologetically, for that, we're exceptionally proud of her.

The second child is the quiet one. The Socialite goes with the flow of whatever the others are doing, but she does it with her own style. She very imaginative and creative, but also outgoing. Because she is forced to interact with someone both older and younger than her, she socializes very well. She has already gotten into trouble at school for talking to her friends in class, but this is something we pretty well expected because she takes after the Queen in many, many ways, and this is just one of them. Her downside is that while she can outsmart her sisters, she also allows herself to be pushed around by both of them, which leads us to number three.

The third born is the baby and the boss. Because she's at the bottom of the pecking order, Sassy Pants is the loudest of the three, demands to be heard, and will not rest till her peace is heard, and her way is obtained. While we were driving one day, we heard her demanding to see what The Socialite had because she needed to see it. Now, it wasn't a case of "I want it," but she just needed to look at it. Last night, we asked the Princesses what they wanted for dinner, and the older two declared pizza (well, as you might guess, Rock Girl declared pizza and The Socialite went along with the "awesome" idea), but Sassy Pants went her own way and demanded Mac and Cheese (of all things). Well, having been outvoted, the night was ruined. She whined, complained, and carried on the rest of the evening about wanting nothing other than Mac and Cheese (despite our repeated commentary about home not being a restaurant). As you might also be able to guess, she refused to eat anything.

As luck would have it, they were going to have a pizza day at preschool today. She wanted peanut butter and jelly. Yeah, she got the sandwich in her lunch box.

Pillow Sheets

Kids are cute, you know? Through their curiosity and imagination, we see the innocence that makes them so endearing and even appealing, and along these same lines, their creativity to describe their world has always been a source of fascination, at least to me.

Part of this is their mispronunciations. When Rock Girl was learning to speak, we got a kick out of her words such as chlocate, pliggit (as in the Pooh character, Piglet), aminal, and celluwar. The Socialite still requires some interpretation when she asks for a "cheese girl." Any guesses? That would be a grilled cheese sandwich, which she orders only when she can't get a quesadilla (a word she can pronounce perfectly). Sometimes, we wonder about their regional dialect as they all started out talking like people from the east coast (a concept difficult to convey in writing).

What I had to share, though, was the most fascinating so far that was spouted out last night, and that I am not inclined to correct, really, because I find it to be a unique term and something not undescriptive of the object they were going for. You see, the Socialite needed a pillow case. Now, the princesses go through pillow cases like nobody's business because they use them as sleeping bags (yes, sleeping bags), bags to carry toys in, and store stuff in them.

Well, last night, The Socialite declared that she needed a pillow sheet. It only took a moment to figure out what she was referring to, and I got her what she needed. I'd never, ever heard them referred to by that term before, but in a way, it does fit, especially from a child's mind, who doesn't know the actual term. You put a sheet over your bed, and the same material is used to put over your pillow; hence, pillow sheet.

As a short follow up, Sassy Pants has a "pillow sheet" that features the Disney princesses -- one side with only Cinderella, and the other with Cinderella, Belle, and Aurora. Well, when she goes to bed, the side with the three princesses MUST be facing up and it MUST be right side up. No other way is acceptable.

Happy Meal Toys

I've discovered a wonderous thing in recent months. You ever go to McDonald's, order one of the value meals, and find yourself choking down the last of the fries because there were just too many of them? Maybe you just threw them out. Maybe you tried to take them home and eat them later. Or maybe you just chow right through them, which is also okay.

Me? I find that most of those meals contain entirely too much food, fully explaining the reason we're all getting rounder (and that's not even super-sizing). I'll admit that there are times I'm hungry enough to get a huge meal, but on a normal day, I'd rather not.

Then, they started having Transformers toys in the Happy Meals to promote the new Animated Series, so I figured I'd get those double cheeseburger Mighty Kids Meals, so I could get the toys. Sometimes, I got just the meal, and sometimes I'd pay the extra $1 and get a second double cheeseburger, but I started then, and I've been getting them ever since.

Well, the reason I've continued is because they went from Transformers toys to Star Wars toys, and being the fan I am, I had to see about getting all those bobble heads. In the end, I only ended up with nine of them. The Princesses actually have two that I don't, but I'm not going to sntach them up. I got some and Optimus brought some in, too.

Well, then they went from Star Wars to having Lego Batman toys to promote the Lego Batman game (which I've rave about, I'm sure). Well, I got the first toy, and discovered to my delight, that each toy contained a code for the game to unlock something. Then, I further found out that even the same toys contained different codes. Well, I was hooked. I now have a full set, and Optimus Prime, who is just a Batman fan in general (don't get him started on Dark Knight; he loves it), has been helping in getting the whole set and getting codes.

So at this point, having discovered a decent amount of food in a double cheeseburger and small fries, I've decided to stick with it once they go to Barbie and Hot Wheels, which is next. A double Quarter Pounder is good, but add in the fries, and you've got a huge meal. Yes, I can eat it, but I also want to live long enough to see some great grandchildren, so I'm cutting back.

Besides, how can you go wrong with a collection like this (note the full set of Batman toys...):

Some Very Lazy People Out There

To begin with, I'd like to open with a joke that came out of no where on a recent day. I've overtold this one in the Queen's presence to the point that she's tired of it, but each new audience likes it. It so happened one day that Optimus and I were talking about nothing in particular and at the end of this pointless ramble, I said, "Sure, I understand. But what would I do with a monkey and a phone jack?" Optimus replied, without batting an eye, "Start a call center."

If you've ever worked in a call center, you'll laugh about twice as hard as not. Anyway...

I've talked about the Medicare Direct Data Entry system before and my involvement with it, and today I had someone that just exemplifies the level of effort that some people want to put into their work. Everything I did for this person was well within their realm of access, so it wouldn't been too complicated.

You see, they'd been getting an error at random on their claims coming back from this DDE system stating that one of their hospital identifier numbers was not valid. I had explained that this error typically means that the login being used is not authorized to use the number they're trying to send or access. It's pretty simple. So they called up Medicare to see what the deal was, and there are no problems with their numbers. Well, I never said their numbers had a problem. I said their LOGIN had a problem.

So they did it all over again, and again, big surprise, their numbers are fine. Yeah, they are. Never said they weren't. This time, however, I got some examples to look at and compare. Well, since it's a login problem, my first (really, my only) inclination was to find the job that sent (or attempted to send) the claim, and see what login it used. They can see this from their side of ePremis, and they don't need my super-wide access to do it. It's a simple matter of comparison.

Find number on claim; find job from that date and time with that number on it. See login.

Fifteen minutes later, my suspicion was confirmed. One login was giving them fits. I told her which one, and she told me that they don't have a login for that out there. I assured her they do and offered to fix it, but she wanted to run this by her boss and get back to me. Um, ok.

The point of all this was that using some basic comparison skills, I was able to solve a problem with information she had at her disposal. A mountain was made out of a molehill because they didn't listen to a word I said and went under their own assumptions over what they thought I said. I fully anticipate their calling back because they "did what I said and it didn't work."

If you did what I said, it would work. Clearly, it means you weren't listening, but hey, there's a precedent for that.

Time At The Bank

This part of the story last left off in May 2000 with my being sacked from my fireplace tech job, and moving into another summer of renewal. The first job I ended up with was via another friend of the Queen's who hasn't come into the story too much, which is odd because they're really good friends (have been since college). Her husband (who normally doesn't command our respect) was working at an apartment complex, and he let us know they were in need of a person to perform "make ready" duties. A Make-Ready person goes through empty apartments and ensures that they have all their light bulbs, hinges, window locks, etc. before someone moves in.

He was on maintenance there and taught me a variety of things regarding maintenance, which actually impressed me, since we didn't know he was capable of doing anything up to that point. Unfortunately, the work bored me to tears, and as the job also entailed picking up people's trash, the occasional cleaning, and a bunch of other miscellanous duties that geeks just aren't cut out for, I quit at about the same time they were going to fire me...but not before I managed to pick up pink eye from someone else who worked there. Super fun.

The plus during this period, though, was actually a boon for the Queen. She was offered a teaching position and was to start as a first grade teacher come August. She was super excited about it, and I was very happy for her. She had to leave town post-haste to get to a teacher retreat or something at Shangri-La, which is a resort in Oklahoma. I was left with Rock Girl in her absence. We were still more than a year before The Socialite would come onto the scene.

After the Make Ready job, I found my way into a temp agency where I got on at a bank working with a guy who had injured in hand. How did he do this wonder? Well, in the basement of this bank, there is this room where a bunch of equipment lives, and among them are (I believe) some air conditioning units. Now these units suck in a lot of air, and when the door is open, they pull in a lot of air from the hallway, and in the process, try to pull the door closed...hard. He had left that room one day, and the door slammed onto his fingers, bending them backwards (possibly breaking them, I don't remember). They could have either tried to train someone else in his position, or get a helper to do the heavy lifting.

Enter me for the heavy lifting. The job was a total cakewalk. Drive around a couple times a day. Climb some ladders. Carry some boxes. But mostly sit around in his office and do nothing until the next time we had to do something.

While there, I made a mistake, though. You see, they recognized my propensity to work on computers and make them talk. It was easy for me. So when my term as a temp employee was up because they guy with the broken hand was all healed and could handle it on his own again, they offered me a job baby-sitting their servers from 2pm to 10pm. It would have been a great position for me, but at the time, I was narrow enough to only want to work during the day: a 9 to 5 job. I said no. Stupid...stupid...stupid. It would only be a matter of time before I'd be landing a night job, and this would have paid so much better and been so much more fun.

This isn't the only time I did this either. Maybe I mentioned this one before, but I don't remember the time frame in which it happened. You see, when the Queen was a teacher, they also recognized my propensity to make computers do what I wanted, and suggested I apply at Tulsa Public Schools as a computer tech. I was between jobs at the time, and actually applied for the Queen's old library assistant position when the principal suggested that the computer tech would be better.

Well, when I interviewed, and they told me about hardware and networking (which would have been awesome to learn), I said I was better with software and walked away. I really must stop doing stupid things...

A New Addition

I'm sure people wonder how I forget these things, but to follow up with the story about Padme's labor, she continued the drip last Friday to see if she would go ahead and go into labor, have contractions, etc. Well, as in Thursday, nothing happened, and finally, the doctor decided they needed to go ahead and get the baby out of there via C-Section. The Queen called me at work, and at first, they were going to take her in at 3, but then, I got a frantic call back saying she was going in "right now," and that she was coming to get me ASAP.

This whole rigamarole caused some tension between us since she wanted to be there for the birth, and didn't want to miss anything, especially the baby coming out into the nursery, so it was a very, very tense ride. This was a situation I knew it was best to leave alone, so the ride was also very silent as we cruised toward the hospital.

We got there just in time. The baby wasn't out yet, but they were in surgery at that point taking care of it, and to our surprise, Darth (who had always said he would refuse to go back) followed his husband instincts and accompanied Padme into the delivery room for the cutting. We waited.

Not too long passed before Darth showed up with a small bundle and walked into the nursery accompanied by a nurse. He relinquished his child, who is a boy that we'll obviously have to call Luke, to the nurses for the battery of testing that babies undergo when born nowadays. Everything was fine, but we learned why the baby wasn't engaging, and why she wasn't going into labor.

Turns out the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby's neck...twice. This means that the child could not engage without being strangled. If they hadn't pulled him out, there's no telling what could have happened. The optimist says that he might have woked himself free and come out without any problems in time. The realist would say that without the C-Section, the child would not have survived.

Bottom line is that it doesn't matter. He's with us now, and he's healthy and perfect.

The tension between the Queen and I, however, over us conducting a normal day due to the indecision over what would happen lead to my leaving her alone the majority of the time we were there, and my never being given the opportunity to hold the baby. Naturally, the Queen was allowed to, but I was allowed to stay in the waiting room after a time and leave her and her family alone. That really wasn't a good day either. Oh well.

We did go back on Saturday, and at that time, I was allowed a time to hold him. That was nice. I'm not totally cold hearted. Babies are nice to hold.

Could It Be The Pills?

So I think I've mentioned before that I'm more than just a little AD/HD, and it's been a bit of a task keeping the tendency to chase shiny things under control. Recently, I read a thing online about there being a more natural remedy to keeping it under control by ensuring that you have enough magnesium and omega-3 in your diet. Well, my response to trying this was grabbing a multi-vitamin and some fish oil. How's that working? Well...

Initially, I didn't notice much. I seemed to be a little calmer, but now after a week, I think it is doing something, but it took a bit to figure out that it might be the supplements causing this. Since a few days ago, I've felt immeasurably depressed. Perhaps you got that from the bad week post. Now, I'm not the type of person to feel depressed about anything, but I've just felt really, really down lately. Wait, you might be thinking, how can someone who is hyperactive be "down"?

Aha... There's what I hit on too. I've been taking these vitamins and fish oil regularly over the past week, and all of a sudden, I feel depressed. Maybe I'm not actually, but the "downing" effect is working. Maybe I'm not depressed. Maybe I'm somewhere close to normal. Perhaps I've calmed down to the point that it's noticeable.

Now the hard part is focusing because I am not sure that I'm all there at this point because being down all of a sudden from being up all the time is a bit of a culture shock to me, especially since I deduced this possibility just this morning. I've gone over recent events in my life and despite the fact that they are a little over the top, I've gone through much worse, and it's been no big deal. I need to turn my mind from all the ugly annoying things that have been bringing my mood down and focus on everything that keeps me going all the time. Keep on everything that excites me.

I'm not sure where all this will take me, but I currently have mixed feelings over these supplements. Maybe my body is just adjusting to getting these extra nutrients and there's an acclimation period I just need to endure. I'll go with that for awhile, but if my mood fails to improve through my own cognitive abilities, then I may be chemically depressed, and have to toss these pills by the wayside.

Can't have the geek's brain put through the ringer cause of pills. Just not right.

Walking In And Waiting

Optimus Prime was telling me a story today about a day when he was younger and they had a short day at school. Apparently this shortened day was unplanned, and rather than calling his mom to get a ride home, he and a friend opted to just ride the bus home so his mom didn't have to get out to get him. Well, he mentioned at the beginning of this story how he tended to step softly, unintentionally surprising people when he walks in. Well, on this occasion, he got home and walked in on his mom...

...eating the Nestle Toll House cookie dough. He says she wasn't a very good cook, but she tried as evidenced by the six trays of progressively lighter cookies, showing she was steadily figuring out how long to not cook them. I thought that was funny. What did you think was going to happen? She always told him not to eat raw cookie dough and ... busted!

Anyway, my sister-in-law, Padme (you know, Darth Vader's wife?... haha), is very pregnant with my first nephew at this point, and due to potentially complicating issues such as gestational diabetes, they induced her yesterday. Well, nothing happened. The pitossin (sp?) gave her a couple negligible contractions, but that's about it. So they took her off of it yesterday, and re-started it today, and still very little was going on. Last I heard at this point, they are looking to do a C-section later today if nothing further progresses.

Apparently, these complications could get somewhat serious, but as women who have C-sections don't ever have regular, natural birth later, it makes me wonder if they're still going to be able to have the 3-4 kids they were looking forward to having if she's going to be going under the knife every time.

I guess time will tell.

Not A Very Fun Week

So it's been awhile since I've written anything. It's not out of anything more than finding myself in a mundane path and feeling like there is nothing left to write about. This is, of course, rather silly since life always provides enough drama in anyone's life to make something interesting to write about. Such is the last week in the life of the Geek and the Queen. There is some measure of comfort in the anonymity of this blog since the Queen is taking one of these issues very personally where it isn't her fault at all, but just one of those things. It doesn't make enduring it any easier, though.

The first thing that happened was last Thursday when it was raining cats and dogs. We were getting the leftovers of Hurricane Ike here in Oklahoma which lasted a couple of days into Saturday. On Thursday, the Queen was getting the shopping done, so on Friday, when I had taken a personal day off to spend time with Queen and the Princesses while they were out of school, we could go and play all day without worrying about the shopping. But it so happened that in the parking lot of Wal~Mart, the Queen dropped her cell phone.

This was not an act of clumsiness, by any means. It was raining, she was juggling the umbrella and Sassy Pants, so when she turned a certain way, apparently the phone twisted right out of her pocket, and when it hit the ground, that sound was indistinguishable from the already pounding rain. Would it have been so bad if she'd noticed it right away and picked it back up? Probably not, but she didn't notice the phone missing until they had gone into Wal~Mart, done the shopping, and got back to the car. By then, the phone had been kicked under the car by someone who likely never saw it.

Well, she retrieved the poor drowned piece of personal electronics, and took it home to dry it out, praying it would work. I had tried texting her a couple of times during the day until later on when she called me, and I found out what happened. She was hoping it would just work, and she wouldn't have to tell me. Now, I'm not that mean, but she wasn't happy about dropping it. The phone doesn't work, so $50 was going towards the insurance to replace it (which she should be getting in the mail today). I was able to hack the phone to get the phone book and ringtones and such, but the games and such are not retrievable. That's how they make some of their money; you have to repurchase them. It wouldn't matter if I could have gotten at them anyway; they're usually sold to the specific ESN, and won't work on another phone -- kind of like buying something on iTunes, and then trying to play it on another computer...um, no I've never tried that...

The real tragedy that turned our world upside down happened on Friday. I was off already, and we had planned to hit the air and space museum in town because Rock Girl is all about space, and more recently, meteorology, so she loves going. The Socialite is more about art than science, but she has fun; and Sassy Pants just goes along. Anyway, while we were getting everything together, the Queen made a rather horrifying discovery: lice. The horror of elementary school was alive and well on The Socialite's head and our plans were toast.

The Queen called Moneypenny, who has dealt with this before, to find out how to deal with it. Wash everything, quarantine stuffed animals, vacuum everything, and pick through every hair on everyone's head. Our vacuum cleaner went belly up week before last, and we haven't had a chance to replace it yet, so Moneypenny gratiously leant us hers. Wash everything entailed the bedding off of every bed in the house (I had no idea just how many blankets those girls sleep with) along with the clothes that they seem to forget to take into the laundry room. Four or five large garbage bags of stuffed animals are currently camped out in our garage awaiting their 2-4 weeks. Vacuum everything means get everything cleaned now so it doesn't get sucked into the shop vac, and yours truly got the privilege of running the machine. And pick through everyone's hair takes hours.

This is what we did, though. Rock Girl didn't have any. Sassy Pants was minimal. I had none. I picked through the Queen's hair and I can't confirm she for sure had anything. The Socialite was the one who apparently found the nest because the poor thing was inundated. Insert the speech over not sharing hats, brushes, masks, wigs, etc. Every night, though, everyone gets checked again; every strand of hair is examined. It takes forever and wears everyone out. Their bath every few days (because little ones don't need to bathe daily) has turned into a daily routine since Friday. Their bedding is washed every day (we've stopped giving them their piles of blankets until this is over. Last night, I went over Sassy Pants' hair until she was so worn out that she was begging to go to bed.

So the Queen and I have been emotionally drained. But then, life threw one more curve ball at us. With all that's gone on, we forgot something. Last month, we had to pay something rather substantial which got the utilities behind a month. Well, we had gotten a nasty-gram over the water bill, and I'd planned to pay it on Friday. You remember Friday, right? The day the sky fell? Yeah, it didn't get paid.

So today, the Queen calls me (on my phone, of course, as she won't have hers until later today) and asks if I paid the water bill because it's shut off. Well, I know there's a fee to turn it on, and I thought it used to be $35 or something, so I call them to make the payment. Well, they want $50 to turn it on and another $50 to "bring our deposit up to date." That's $100 over and above the amount I needed to pay. You've got to be kidding! So on top of trying to catch up on two months of utilities, I've been hit with $50 for a phone, another $50+ for this lice thing, and now another $100 for forgetting the stupid water bill. Yeah, I feel sick.

And to top it all off, I forgot my lunch today...but I feel better for venting.