drfreex.com

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

I work in a server farm. The temperature in here is usually kept at around 65 degrees Fahrenheit, year round, and sometimes in the middle of Summer I find myself putting on a sweater. Once I was moved into an office adjacent to the farm, instead of actually in it, I thought that would stop, but no, my workstation is now under an air conditioning vent.

I’m not complaining. As one acquaintance put it, I like it “Elvis cold”. One would then, perforce, ask what the hell I’m doing living in Houston, with its hideous swamp summers that are only getting worse. Offhand, the answer involves equal amounts of stupidity and poverty, but another big factor is the woman I love living and working here.

All of which is beside the point I was intending to make. According to my phone, it is 57 degrees outside, with impossibly light humidity, at nearly 11 o’clock in the morning. We get, at a liberal estimate, ten days like this a year, and I find myself treacherously yearning to experience it. Instead of sitting at my windowless workstation, thinking of putting on my sweater.

Not helping is the fact it’s my week to do a college-centric story, and nothing of note is going on here; I’m pulling my ace in the hole, based largely on a presentation in the Spring, and I’m finding out just how hard the acoustics in the place bagged me. I’ll get four usable minutes out of it, but it’s gonna be hard.

Best of all, I do not sub today. If the fates are kind, I will never be subbing again. I got enough frustration and repressed anger in the four days I did to last me for some time. There certain occupations I am simply not cut out for, and teaching at any level below college is one of them. Scratch that, don’t even consider me for college.

Anyway. My goal to stay positive took a real beating in the last week. Hell, the ghost of Bruce Lee came over and trounced it soundly. Time to get back on the horse, but I have a ton of negativity to purge first. Meditation would be good, but there’s no time; I have a private show tonight.

Maybe some shopping. I’m pulling the hard drive from the fried computer (well, not tonight – likely tomorrow) and putting it in an enclosure so I can hopefully get the files I need off it – I still have some website responsibilities that are weighing heavily on me. So perhaps strolling around the man-mall will help me recharge a bit.

September 28, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Life continues without my digital IV drip; I knew it would, you knew it would, the question was only what form it would take.

Today marks my last day of subbing at my wife’s school. Friday night should have been marked by heavy drinking, yet it was not. I kept working my way through the extras on the Starcrash DVD, and dozing off in my easy chair. Caroline Munro has a very soothing voice.

Saturday, was, well, a typical Saturday for me. Which means getting all the rest I could and doing a show Saturday night. One difference was dropping by the library to pick up the next six volumes of Koike & Gojima’s Path of the Assassin, which they were holding for me. I had finished the first of these volumes by the show’s end.

Even after tearing down the sound system and packing away the curtains, adrenalin still pumps after a show, and I’m rarely in bed before 2am on show nights, frequently later. Having finally exhausted Starcrash, I was going to return to Galaxy of Terror to see if my memories of it seeming largely improvised still rang true. But then I discovered that I could watch that first episode of Hawaii Five-O I had missed and everyone was being so positive about… on my phone. I do a lot on the Droid, almost to the exclusion of using it as an actual telephone. But I had never done that. YouTube videos and such, yes, but never an actual extended entertainment video.

So I had to do it at least once, right?

I’ll likely do it again, too, though watching a movie – something that meant to be projected big – does not appeal to me. I was also hooked into my house’s wi-fi and had the phone plugged in, so I don’t know how that would have impacted my battery (significantly, I’m thinking), so I’m not looking at doing it in the wild much, either.

Oh, what about the show, you might ask? I enjoyed it well enough to check out another episode. A couple of terrific stunts, to be sure. Rather slight on the story side. But enjoyable.

As mentioned, this is hopefully my last day of subbing at my wife’s school. I am going to get religion long enough to praise whatever gods are responsible for an end to this suffering. And for my pay earned, which puts me a little closer to a new computer.

September 27, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments