drfreex.com

So the boss and I were discussing how weird it was, that the day after the Festival, we both felt fairly chipper, but the second day after, we both feel like we’ve been hit by the Sandman’s steamroller. She’s been throwing stuff at me whenever I yawn.

I mean really, blah and blurgh. I was doing some more physical stuff yesterday, admittedly, taking the second huge round of trash from the garage clean-out (Other people may talk about Spring Cleaning, but around here it’s Fall Cleaning. That’s the only time time we can count on it being cool enough to actually pull stuff like this off and survive) to the curb. Then dragging out the water hose – we had a fair amount of rain this summer, my lawn didn’t need it much, but the wife was whining that she couldn’t get her Halloween cut-outs to stake into the ground because it was too hard , waaaaaaah. (You may think Dave Sim is rubbing off on me, but no, that was almost verbatim. I married the youngest of the family. I love her more than life itself, but oy…)

Ah, well, it would have to be done, anyway. The lawn needed the water. I turned the garden to mud – well, mud-ish, the light was failing fast – and hammered in the damned decorations. Went back inside sweatier than ever and covered in mud, and continued to go back and forth in Tweets with Zack Handlen about how much the new Word sucks. Still covered in mud. Because I appreciate contrast in my life.

Yeah, speaking of contrasts, hearing how people are cold and snow is falling in London. And me, sweating in the garden. It was still a balmy 85 degrees at 7 in the evening, and while the humidity was not up to the killing Summer levels, it still wasn’t comfortable. I could use a little nip in the air, frankly. Please note I am wearing a sweater as I type this out. The server farm remains frigid.

Well, with any luck at all, and if UPS isn’t lying, I should have a new computer – well, a refurbished one, anyway – tomorrow evening. Then I get to cackle for a bit and then mutter as I realize how many software discs I don’t have and how many passwords I didn’t write down.

October 19, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Slept the sleep of an older man who’d been doing some physical labor last night. The International Festival wasn’t as tiring as last year’s version – for one thing, I graduated from grip to cameraman, so I was, at least sitting down once the damn thing started. However, as we were a man short – which seems to be a tradition – breaks were few and far between. In fact, there was exactly one. I locked down my camera on a wide shot, then ran outside to wolf down a turkey sandwich, use the john, and then rotated through the other camera positions so they could do the same.

Tear-down always goes quicker than set-up. What took us three hours to accomplish in the morning was put away in a little more than an hour. After unloading at the station, we were released, and I went home, amazed that I was not more tired. Until I fell asleep in my reading chair. Then I stopped being amazed.

I was in this morning at my regular time, and the only ill effect – didn’t need my cane today, though I am moving slower than usual – is that my pre-lunch crash started early, and it is lethal. Caffeine is doing nothing to alleviate this, and I am in serious danger of waking up at my desk with Keyboard Face.

Sorry, dozed off for a second there. What was I talking about?

October 18, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

At this point, I’m awake and active, though ranking somewhat lower than slime mold on the sentience scale. I’m relatively certain that I slept last night – there’s a six hour hole in my evening, and I didn’t wake up covered in blood. Though you can’t prove it to me by any method that requires measurement of restedness, ’cause I ain’t got none.

Sleep was thankfully inevitable, after a couple of nights nearly devoid of it due to my wife’s suffering. The dentist appointment in the morning was not very encouraging, in fact it was fairly alarming. She needed oral surgery, and she needed it right now. Under a crown, one of the roots of a root-canaled tooth had fractured, and there was severe infection, reaching out to surrounding roots. The expanse of the infection was why no pain medication was having any effect at all.

Quite, quite good, incidentally.

So I spent most of the late afternoon, into the evening, sitting in the waiting room. I read Osamu Tezuka’s Ode to Kirihito in its entirety – and it is not a thin book – and started on another. My emergency throwdown book was DC Showcase Presents The Brave and the Bold Vol. 3, which is early 1970’s Batman team-ups, but after the intense and complex Kirihito, the novelty of seeing Batman exclaim, “Right on!” failed to satisfy. Eventually, about a thousand dollars later, they released her to my care.

One of the first questions she asked me, while waiting for the elevator, was, “Could you hear me out in the waiting room?” “Um, no…” “Good.”

As much of the infection as possible was removed, of course, and a bone graft inserted. Apparently he had shot the area full of anesthetic before she left, with a caution that after it wore off, quote, “Katy bar the door,” unquote, a phrase which has never made any damn sense to me, but I’m not an M.D. Took her home, spent another 40 minutes at the pharmacy, went home to cook a late dinner for myself and The Boy. The patient was satisfied with only a Smoothie.

Oh, Katy bar the door, indeed. Vicodin still wasn’t doing much good for her mouth, but eventually she did get to sleep. She didn’t have much choice, by that point. I doubt she’d slept more than a few hours the entire weekend. She seemed better this morning, but still inclined to mass murder if she only felt better. I left her int he company of Vicodin, two different antibiotics, and a prescription mouthwash.

Me? I’m trying like hell to stay awake and get my story on the Fall Faculty Art Show edited. I’ll probably absent myself a bit early to go home and hopefully sleep before I go pick up The Boy from school. The story’s in pretty good shape, needing only my open and close and some B-roll over the interviews. And graphics. And a music bed. And…

Aw, crap, I’m never getting home.

"That's him, officer! That's the one!"

October 12, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

My wife’s toothache began, as do all horrible toothaches, late Friday night. By Sunday she was finally ready to call a dentist (I married the Queen of the Wusses, and being married to royalty does not have the perks one would imagine). I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep this weekend. I filled it with reading. In other words, those two novels I mentioned Friday? Both history.

Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan is what we call a ripping good yarn. It’s the first book in a new Young Adults trilogy, a steampunk adventure story set at the dawn of  a World War I being fought by genetically engineered animals on one side and steam-driven mechs on the other. We get a hero from each side: from the “Clankers”, the son of Archduke Ferdinand, on the run from other Clankers because he has a clear line of descent from the aging Emperor. He’s got a loyal crew of five retainers and a Cyclops Stormwalker equipped with a cannon and two Spandau machine guns. On the “Darwinist” Side, we have Deryn, a young girl who is pretending to be a boy to join the Royal Navy; she was trained by her now-dead father to be the match of any male airman. The airships in this reality being mutated whales serving as the basis for an ecosystem that produces mass amounts of hydrogen.

Leviathan is imaginative, full of thunder if not too much blood (young adults, remember), and is just, as the Idiot Prince would say, “A roaringly good story!” I handed the book over to my 12-year-old son with no reservations.

Last night’s sleeplessness was eased by Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim, which I will likely not be handing over to my son. Leviathan I consumed in two days, but Slim I gobbled down within a day, as I tweeted, “Like hot pizza after B-Fest”.  It’s a berserk mixture of Donald E. Westlake, Clive Barker, Andrew Vaachs and a heaping helping of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Stark, the central character, escapes from Hell, where he was sent, still living, eleven years before. A living person in Hell was a novel thing; he’s spent the time in gladiator pits, where cheating demons applied a hex here, a protection spell there, and taught him some battle magic of their own. In consequence, he’s very hard to kill, and has returned with the intent of slaying his old coven who betrayed him, and later killed his one true love in life while he was fighting nightmare creatures in the ninth circle.

What that paragraph doesn’t convey is how funny the book is, a black, mordant humor that keeps things from getting too horrifying or bleak. When the last line of a book is severed head saying, “Be quiet, the movie’s starting”, I know I’ve found a comfortable place to rest my imagination.

There are now three books I have compulsively read in one sitting: Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, and now Sandman Slim. Sorry, Mr. King, but there was no way I could have read The Stand in one go. I tried, believe me.

The only problem here is, I found these two books by reading reviews of their sequels, both of which are so new my library apparently doesn’t have them yet. So, you know, Argh.

Anyway, as I write this, my wife is at the dentist. Maybe I’ll get some sleep tonight instead of reading. That would be sweet.

October 11, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Well, Promised Monies have still not arrived, so it looks like another weekend without a computer of my own. Well, Pooey on yooey, feckless fate, I have plenty on my plate to tide me over.

For one, even though my last couple of attempts at it have left me cold, I have checked out two books without pitchers to read. Man does not live by Power Man & Iron Fist alone, it turns out.

Both of these received great reviews at Boing-Boing, which is one of my traditional morning stops. The first is Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan, which is classed as a “Young Adults” book but is an imposing tome nonetheless, at 440 pages – until you notice those pages are 1.5 spaced, not single-spaced like an adult book.

I am told this is an alternate history-type book in a steampunk pre-World War I world where the Brits are “Darwinists” whose weapons of war are “fabricated animals” while the Prussian forces are “Clankers” with steam-powered mechs. There is literally nothing there that doesn’t sound great to me.

The second is Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim, which sounds like a post-punk black magic film noir directed by Sam Peckinpah, and which was, needless to say, in the adult section.

I guess in the interest of honesty I should mention that the reviews I read were both for these books’ sequels, but hey. I like things to be in sequence.

Which means I’m sad about the library presenting me with Volume 15, the last volume of Path of the Assassin, skipping over 13 and 14. I suppose I’ll just wait patiently, hoping the missing books will magically appear, a strategy which has worked stunningly for that computer money, after all.

I made a snarky comment about the new Twitter in my feed this morning (because I was finally offered it), but with a recommendation from Chris Magyar @icrywolf and another Tweet who mournfully proclaimed it “just like the new Google Image Search” – I hit the preview button and immediately liked it. For the record, I also preferthe “new” Google Image Search.

However, the IMDb redesign sucks worse than a black hole in the center of the Festival of Suck.

Also on my weekend agenda is the usual show which will take up my Saturday from 5 till midnight. Saturday morning, however, I will be covering the Houston Comic Con, so I would appreciate it if all attending cosplayers would put on their ill-fitting and/or slutty outfits and be there between 10 and Noon. And if the Westboro Baptist Church is planning to protest this one, the same time frame goes for them, too.

Of course, ladies like these will be at the NEW YORK Comic Con. Dammit.

October 8, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Okay, so I’m going into one of my edits knowing that I’m going to get a headache.

1) It’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month (also Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Arts Appreciation Month, but that’s neither here nor there). Ergo, I’m putting together a story about a women’s shelter.

2) For reasons that become obvious, I can’t show any pictures of the shelter’s exterior, nor any of the women or children actually housed in there.

3) I don’t really need any reminders that mankind in general is a large festering cesspool of violent shitheads, control freaks, and people who are not worth the meat they are printed on.

The balance to that, or course, is that the women I interviewed who run the shelter and associated services are good, passionate, concerned people who are doing worthwhile things with their lives. Out of nearly fifteen minutes of prime interview material, I have to boil out four minutes of absolute gold. And then find pictures to cover the edits, and because today’s TV audience can’t look at the same picture for more than 15 seconds without clicking the remote.

I Googled “drudgery” and got this. Greaaaaaaaaat.

This sort of thing is the bread and butter of community-level TV. Well, that’s not true, that’s probably the interminable city council and budget meetings, but you get my drift: we’re covering a small community with very little int he way of actual news, and getting the word out on worthy services is a Good Thing.

Manufacturing images to comprise B-roll is not. Pulling some generic public domain images, making the move and spin and zoom in so I can plaster some CG text over them gets a bit labor intensive, especially on a part-time job.

Well, the stories can’t be all Hot Sauce Festivals and robot dinosaurs. At least this weekend, I’m covering a local comic convention. That might prove interesting.

October 5, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

So this is kinda bizarre. Sitting in my living room, tapping out this entry on my wife’s netbook, which is logged into my home’s wifi. It’s a cute little thing with a foreshortened keyboard – the last and only time I bought a laptop I got one with a full keyboard, making it so huge it could hardly be called a notebook or a laptop. I called it the Necronomicon, which amused me and puzzled everyone else.

So I should feel all cool and 21st century. The only thing needed to complete the picture would be doing this in Starbucks with a clove cigarette in one hand. And wearing a beret. It’s cool enough for a beret out there. Instead I feel like I’m typing this on a Fisher-Price toy.

To be sure, lacking my usual desktop brain, I’ve been sneaking a few moments at work to update the blog (sssh!), but my work schedule is messed up this week, and that’s all my fault.

In the course of a semester, I have to do a certain number of stories centered on the college,  a responsibility shared among the reporters. This can get tough on a community college campus, especially one in a suburban setting, but I had my ace in the hole, a presentation that took place last Spring, but it was a former instructor on a second career, and fairly evergreen.

To digress (but not really), the man is Dr. Richard Taylor, who was diagnosed seven years ago with dementia, likely Alzheimer’s.  He works hard to keep his cognition up, and has become an Alzheimer’s advocate, writing a book called Alzheimer’s from the Inside Out and speaking on the disease’s effect and helping unaffected people understand how best to interact with sufferers.

It was a very good presentation, and he gave me an excellent interview afterward.  And I finally needed to use that footage this week.

When I go on location, I check out equipment from a pool. I’ve learned the hard way to make the “check out” part of that equation literal, but I had not apparently learned it when I recorded Dr. Taylor. Generally, under such circumstances, I use a shotgun mike with pretty good results. But apparently, whoever had the camera before me had switched the audio inputs to the camera’s internal mike, which are, to put it mildly, inferior.

To put it more diplomatically, less discriminating. The audio was marred by a horrific buzzing, most likely from the fluorescent lights, and picked up every door slam from students arriving late like a gunshot, every unzipping of a backpack, every shuffle in a seat. But mainly it was that buzz.

Now, mind you: this was on the same campus where I work, where I have my own workstation. It would have been the work of a minute to grab headphones from my computer to check the audio. Two minutes to check out a wireless mike setup so I could piggyback on the frequency of the mike being used by the Central campus TV guy.

But yeah, hubris. i knew what I was doing. And it would come back to haunt me.

Our station manager is an audio wizard, but was out with bronchitis, and only came back yesterday. It still took him an hour to get the buzz down to an acceptable level, using some software tools that were so complex I hadn’t dared try them,even with 25 levels of “undo” at my beck and call. After the lengthy Wednesday staff meeting, I still have voiceover, B-roll, graphics and a music bed to lay down.

I still have two remotes to shoot this week, and my extra time put in yesterday weighs against those, and the fact that I floor manage the news stand-ups this week. I can’t go beyond my allotted 19.5 hours, or they might have to start thinking about giving me benefits.

I shouldn’t be so churlish as to complain. I have work, a lot of people don’t. Bills are getting paid, if barely. There’s food in the refrigerator. Then again, I also contemplate I am here unable to replace a necessary tool, with some health problems that need to be looked at, and a wife driving a 20-year-old car. So fuck it. I’m gonna complain.

What else are blogs for?

September 30, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment