lesser-evil

If you’re interested in the world of movie-making (from a practical viewpoint, rather than Hollywood), I recommend Greg Pak’s FilmHelp site. It has lots of useful info about equipment, procedures, promotion and so on for making shorts, documentaries and semi-pro movies. I found it a while ago, but I’ve started reading it again after a fun weekend or two playing with video editing software, err, and reading about how porno movies are made. The book is
Once More with Feeling, about how two people decide to make a better class of porn movie. It’s funny, and offers an interesting insight into a world you don’t normally see. It’ll be interesting to compare it to the other book I ordered in a similar vein, when that arrives. The other book is much more of a hands-on affair, as far as I can tell.

It’s not that I’ve got any sort of urge to be the next Ben Dover, but it does combine my (theoretical) interests in film-making and pornography, and I’ve often wondered what is actually involved. Like the authors of ‘Once More, With Feeling’, I’ve thought that I could possibly do better (behind the camera - I’m not interested in anything that grotesque!). I’ve seen a fair bit of lower end stuff where they have the talent on screen, but the camera work and sound are dismal, or the guy is obviously the director’s brother.

One of my activities for this week is watching the first two seasons of Family Guy on DVD… it’s one of those shows that I’ve caught the odd one or two, liked, but never got serious about seeing. Very sharp writing.

So at the moment I get a couple of classic Stewie moments a day… Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!… and this morning’s one: Ah yes, you have to punch in the number… I know this… 8 6 7 5 3 0 9… wait a minute… DAMN YOU TOMMY TUTONE!

It’s a shame it was cancelled, but at least I still have a season and a half to go through.

Here’s an odd thing. Thanks to skoo for the link.

Last moan for a while, promise…

Barclays am teh sukc. Direct Debit forms always include a box for the address of the bank. As far as I can tell, Barclays really don’t want me to know the address of my bank. It’s not printed on my statements, and there is no (obvious) branch locator on their web site. Luckily, I know there is an ATM outside the branch, and for reasons which I have yet to fully comprehend, I can get the full postal address (with postcode) of the ATM machine from their ATM locator thingy.

Bleh. FirstNet (formerly Liberty Broadband (formerly Tele2)) are sucking this week. All-day outage on Sunday, and very intermittent service yesterday and today. When it works, the wireless service is pretty good, and I don’t have much alternative for broadband since I live ‘in the sticks’ (*), but I’m trying to have a lazy week at home, and what good is that without surfing and celebdaq?

(*) ‘In the sticks’ in the sense that I’m half a mile from the A4, and half a mile from the M4, two of the busiest roads in the area, but what do I know?

And another one: “This function does not generally print the data in a form that a manager application would typically need.”

But which function does? Statements of the bleeding obvious really aren’t helpful.

Odd note in the MSDN documentation library: “This structure is not used by the WinSNMP API functions. “

I expect it isn’t used in DirectX either… To be fair, it’s a sort-of SNMP related structure (you can tell I’m living in the fast lane), but it seems an odd thing to mention.

Adaptation also gets a mention for Best Comedy Use Of Foley, for it’s excellent headlamp warning noise. Very reminiscent of Jacques Tati (Playtime and Mon Oncle in particular).

I just got back from seeing Adaptation (imdb). Wow. Aside from the really quirky writing style, and the taken-to-extremes self-referential jokes, I identified a scary amount with the main character. I’ve yet to see anything that Spike Jonze is involved with that I didn’t like (although Jackass has gotten close at times).

Oh, and I got one of those annual pass things for the cinema, so I will no longer have an excuse not to see new movies - I’ve already paid for them!

I’ve been playing this evening with NetCaptor which is one of those IE-wrapped-in-new-skin things that were popular a couple of years ago, but with actual features, like tabbed-browser windows, and other usuability tweaks (multi-column favourites menu, for instance). It’s quite nice. It costs money, but it’s still quite nice.

Yay! I lost 10lbs in the last 3-4 weeks.

A couple of toys arrived today - a Linksys 4-port KVM switch, and a new IDE controller.

The new IDE controller means I can run my DVD-R on a seperate IDE channel, since it’s not very sociable with other IDE devices (seems to require PIO mode). I also should be able to play DVDs properly, since the DVDROM no longer fights with the recorder. We’ll see.

More interesting is the KVM switch. For those that haven’t seen one, it’s a device that allows you to run multiple PCs from one Keyboard, (Video) monitor and Mouse - very handy on crowded techie desks, or in server racks. Mine is for a crowded desk - I have a big noisy PC with all sorts of bits in it, and a tiny silent ITX box that I’d like to be able to leave on all the time, but I don’t want all that keyboardage.

The usual problem with these things is that they don’t always deal with high resolutions very well. This one handles my Windows desktop of 1600×1200@75Hz with no visible problems at all. However, it doesn’t seem to like my beloved IBM Model M keyboard, and possibly my MS Explorer optical mouse, although I haven’t established exactly what combination is the problem. With those two, the switch will lock up as soon as I press a key. So I’m reduced to an inferior keyboard and mouse, which really kind of sucks.

There’s also an odd quirk that I haven’t gotten to the bottom of yet - when I switch away from Windows to the X terminal, some things seem to not continue… for example, when I switch back to see how far along a CD is burning, it is where I left it, but suddenly ‘catches up’. I’ve not actually measured to see if it really is slower yet, but I am a bit suspicious.

I got a nice ebay bargain in the post today - a 6-disc Denon CD player to replace my very annoying NAD player. And for 40 quid! Too bad about the NAD - it really does sound lovely when it (rarely) works. The Denon is a tiny bit beaten up, but looks fine, and plays great. It even plays my CD-Rs.

Good night out on Saturday night - although I had the hangover to show it yesterday, and that sort of post-drunkeness-low that I always seem to get. I’ll manage to be regretting something I either did or didn’t do. I really ought to learn from that sometime.

While having a quick look at car stereos (it’s car shopping time for me), I ran across this interesting gizmo. It’s a hard-disk based MP3 player that can emulate Sony Unilink or Alpine CD changers. It’s not all roses, their FAQ suggests that the head unit wouldn’t really be enough to control the box (they have their own satellite display), but still, 1000 CDs in your “changer” for 400 quid is pretty cool. If you’re a fan of Japlish, then you should follow the link just for the kind of interesting english in places - the player seems to be made in Hungary - “…as the alterity of the connectors… will definitely require expertness. “

Anyway, if you know a 16V Golf GTi with aircon going anywhere…

Yay! I finally managed to capture a significant quantity of glitchless video using my DV bridge. The size of file that you end up with is pretty scary (5Gb for 25 mins of raw DV), and it’s not clear how best to compress it yet. Default ‘DVD export’ gets it down to 1Gb, but the quality is really nice. I’m hoping I can get it to nearer 500Mb, so I can get a season of a show onto one or two DVD-Rs.

Recently Read: Black Money, by Ross MacDonald. This is a detective story in the same vein as Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, starring MacDonald’s own long-running character, Lew Archer. It’s set in that mysterious LA of the past, when things seemed nicer, although obviously only on the surface. Good fun, although Archer isn’t the quick-witted wise-cracking type like say, Spenser in Robert Parker’s crime series.

We did a fire safety course today at work, which was actually kind of fun. The second half of the course involved us all out in the car park with trays of burning petrol and scrap paper, learning how to use the different sorts of extinguisher. It was a nice sunny afternoon too, for extra points.

I saw Daredevil last night with Ben, which was pretty cool. I never read any of the comics, so it was all new to me. He has quite an interesting super power, and the movie has that nice dark feel that the dark knight batman stuff has. I’d also forgotten that Elektra links to Daredevil too - Elektra:Assasin was one of my favourite comics back when I used to buy them regularly. Maybe there is still hope for an Elektra movie - that was a pretty violent and nasty comic though.

The Daredevil viewing was a spur of the moment thing. We actually went along to see Adaptation which, although UCI listed it on their website, wasn’t actually showing on Wednesday nights. D’oh!

And here’s that new look. Mainly it’s just cleaner. All the raggedy bits on the left are a lot neater now. It also uses a lot less physical markup for formatting. Here’s the old one for a side-by-side comparison.

While working some more on the new design tonight, I came across a nifty little set of articles about designing for accessibility. It’s something I try to think about where it’s easy, but there are some interesting ideas in here - the new design will hopefully be a lot more friendly to screenreaders and the like, as well as for Lynx/Links users.

Well, I’ve spent a jolly evening remodelling lesser-evil, with CSS goodness. I think it’ll just about be free of silly hacks, although I’m sure Mart will let me know if I miss one

“New” design up in a day or so (it’s not that different).