Monster Blog

• Luke, Come To The Darkside

  Ok, now I've done it.

  December 11, 2004 macintosh

• Cuesheets: The Way It Should Be

  Today I had to print out 4 reels of FX and BG cuesheets from Nuendo and it really couldn't have been easier. The editor had one session per reel with everything in it. Predubs A through D were backgrounds---E, F and G were hard effects. Initially I tried printing the whole session in one pass in Nuendo 2.2 in Mac OS X, but it kept crashing on the the last page. I switched to printing a couple predubs at a time and from that point on everything went very smooth.

  December 7, 2004 audio

• Huma, Verminaard And Caramon Walk Into A Bar...

  Today was an interesting day for me.

  December 5, 2004 neverwinter-nights

• The True Secret Of Surak's Teachings

  December 3, 2004 star-trek

• It's That Time Of Year

  It must be getting close to Christmas.

  December 2, 2004 musings

• Don't Know What You've Lost 'Til It's Gone

  I find it's amazing how quickly the internet has become a integral part of my life. Today at work our internet connection was down most of the day and it was remarkable the number of times I was frustrated because I couldn't go online. I have two editors working out of their homes and the picture department is on the other side of town. So it is certainly easier to exchange certain files over the net than it is to drive there in a car. Recently we've had some ADR sessions in Toronto and Montreal. With an ISDN hookup to a local stage we were able to get immediate recordings of those lines but with the internet I was able to download the original files within an hour or so of finishing the session. Even faster than FedEx overnight.

  November 19, 2004 musings

• Figure Out When Things Are Good Enough

  Sometimes it's best just to leave well enough alone. Things might not be perfect but they're good enough. Sure, you're sitting there. Taking stock of things and you say to yourself, "Hey! I know I can make this better."

  November 17, 2004 musings

• "Troll Bridge" Update

  After much sleeping on everyone's part, I got the final word from Daniel about the screening of "Troll Bridge" for Terry Pratchett, well, I should let Daniel say it in his own words:

  November 14, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Who's That Tramping Over My Bridge?

  Terry Pratchett is one of those truly gifted authors---someone who just "gets it". With a few words he can make the most cutting and incisive comment on modern life. And all of his Discworld stories are set in a fantasy realm. I don't think he's as widely known in America as he is in England and Australia. The typical response I give to the inevitable query "Who's that?" is that he Douglas Adams of fantasy novels.

  November 7, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Eat Your Heart Out, Jonathan Swift

  This is one of the funniest damn things I've read in a while. Funny because it's so true.

  November 5, 2004 musings

• I Woke Up Early The Day I Died

  You know that part in horror movies where the hero is chased by some crazy murderer and attacked with a knife or an axe or some other implement of death and just before the killing blow lands, the hero wakes up screaming? And just as relief starts flooding through the hero's body the crazy murderer comes crashing through the door or the window or the wall and you realize that the nightmare isn't over? It's just beginning.

  November 4, 2004 musings

• Dealing With -37 Errors In Pro Tools

  Pro Tools 6.4.1 is the pinnacle of achievement on the Mix|24 hardware and you've just finished cutting the most amazing piece of sound effects work in your life. Now it's time to layback your session to another drive for dubbing. So you select "Save Session Copy In" from the File menu, choose the other hard drive, check the box to copy audio files and your cranking away. The only problem is that part way through, the copy craps out with a -37 error. WTF?

  November 1, 2004 audio

• A Reflection On The Little Things In Life While Picking A Lock

  Pants? Check.

  November 1, 2004 musings

• The End Is Nigh

  From the AP:

  October 29, 2004 musings

• Office Halloween Party

  October 29, 2004 photos

• A Genius Named Jon

  Not me.

  October 28, 2004 musings

• Henchman Inventory and Battle AI v1.04

  The Macintosh installer for the newest version of Tony K's smarter henchmen, tougher monsters, and better inventory add-on to Neverwinter Nights is now online. You can download the Mac version from here, the Windows version from here, and a Linux installer script from here.

  October 27, 2004 neverwinter-nights

• Goodbye To Peel

  This just in from Reuters:

  October 26, 2004 musings

• A Weekend Of Pictures

  October 25, 2004 photos

• A Busy Weekend

  My cousin is in town from Norway and we are going to see some sites today and then tonight I'm off to a minor league hockey game for a friend's birthday. Tomorrow will probably be some more touristy things with my cousin. I'll try to post pictures when I can.

  October 23, 2004 musings

• We're On A Road To Nowhere

  This is one the scariest things I've read recently. I never liked our president but I didn't realize we had such a blind zealot in the office who pushes his own personal beliefs upon this country whether they have a basis in reality or not.

  October 22, 2004 musings

• Possible Pro Tools OMF Bug?

  Today I received several OMF 2.0 files from the picture department with embedded audio. Under certain circumstances, the timecode of the Pro Tools session generated from the OMF was incorrect so all the material was out of sync.

  October 19, 2004 audio

• Fall Is Here

  This weekend was the first time it really felt like Autumn in Los Angeles. We had our first big rain starting late on Saturday and continuing off and on throughout Sunday. In fact we are supposed to have rain through Wednesday. I'm glad it's raining. We certainly can use it. It continually amazes me though how quickly an arid landscape like LA can flood with just a few tenths of an inch of rain. Today I drove over the Los Angeles River and it was a raging torrent. Of course not nearly as bad as when we had an El Niño several years ago, but still with what many areas of the country would consider a light rain, Los Angeles floods like crazy.

  October 18, 2004 musings

• Print To Postscript File And Convert To PDF

  Here's a neat little trick that you might find useful for your Classic only applications, like Tape, and printing. If you have the LaserWriter driver selected as your printer in Chooser, when you tell a document to print, you can select "File" as the destination to save a Postscript file to your hard drive.

  October 17, 2004 macintosh

• Damn, Dirty Astronauts

  I came home tonight and took a look at my "Now Playing On Tivo" to see if there was anything I felt like watching. I discovered that my intrepid little box decided to record an episode of "Simon & Simon" for me. Remember that one? From about twenty years ago, two private investigator brothers trade barbs and solve crimes? I never really watched it as a kid. Shows like "The Greatest American Hero", "CHiPs" and "The Dukes Of Hazzard" were much more my style.

  October 15, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Don't Gimme No Back Talk, Sucka!

  Yesterday we received news that yet another TV show is heading to the big screen. This time it's Stephen J. Cannell's 80's action-comedy "The A-Team". I pity the fool who didn't watch this show. I was 9 years old when this was first on the air and it was one of my favorites. Even to this day the theme song is the ringtone on my cellphone, I have a Mr. T t-shirt that I often wear, and I even have this little keychain that when you press a button, it gives you choices bits of Mr. T dialog like "Quit yo' jibba-jabba!"

  October 13, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Farewell To A Place Now Gone

  Yesterday morning I met my father for breakfast in Pasadena. He was in town most of last week teaching a seminar at the Hilton, just outside of Old Town. We were saying our "goodbyes" before his flight back home to Florida. After a buffet of scrambled eggs, hash browns and some assorted melons, I left at about 9:45am to drive back to my apartment in Burbank.

  October 11, 2004 musings

• Head Above Water

  Well it has been a long, crazy several days for me culminating in a 26-hour marathon day in the office. But now it is done. The movie has been screened for the studio. Every one is happy. And I was finally able to get some sleep.

  October 10, 2004 musings

• Too Many Hours In The Office

  Subsisting off fast food, candy bars and coffee:

  October 6, 2004 musings

• May The Force Be With You

  On my way into work this morning, I stopped by the ATM and Vending Machine room on the Fox Studios lot and snapped some pictures of the awesome display of "Star Wars" merchandise they have in case there.

  October 3, 2004 photos

• Where Is Jon?

  The good news is that I have been working a lot recently. The bad news is that it's been crazy busy and things like reading my favorite websites, writing for my own website and sleep has suffered for it. The show that I'm working on right now makes me wish I could give more details that I can about the movie. It is so goddamned funny I wish I could share with everyone. So I'll say this: there's a moving coming out next summer. It's very clever and quite funny. You should go see it.

  October 2, 2004 musings

• Count Me Among The "Stoned Slackers"

  From the AP newsire:

  September 29, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Movers Anonymous

  Today I moved offices yet again. Boy, I sure am getting sick of playing pack-horse. My actual office just moved down the hall from the room I was in for the last two weeks. However, several editors were starting on a show today and we had to move a couple Pro Tools systems from the offices / storage rooms at Universal to Burbank. Four hours of manual labor plus several hours of assembling Pro Tools systems. Long day.

  September 28, 2004 musings

• That's No Moon

  Ok, probably everyone has already seen this but I finally caught all of the animated "Star Wars: Clone Wars" that the creator of "Samurai Jack" made in conjunction with LucasFilm. It's a series of twenty 3 to 5 minute micro-episodes. The series recently won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Programming of One Hour or More. Cartoon Network showed them all last night.

  September 27, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Dealing With SCSI Devices Without A SCSI Card

  My recent experiences with doing almost all of my sound assisting on my laptop with an Mbox got me thinking about other things I could do to expand on that model. One big sticking point was SCSI. Firewire is awesome, but in the post-production sound world, SCSI is still king---if for no other reason than the Tascam MMR-8 and MMP-16 still deal exclusively with Kingston-style removable SCSI drives.

  September 25, 2004 audio

• You Can Call My Laptop, Popeye

  From the Washington Post as reported in MIT News:

  September 24, 2004 musings

• I Am Un Chien Andalusia

  Dear Pixies,

  September 24, 2004 musings

• Running Tape In OS X

  You know how much I dislike Tape, the only program to print cuesheets for Pro Tools sessions, right? Well, I still don't like it but I did get it running in Classic in OS X. (And finally getting it running really did prove what a piece of shit software it really is.) Here's how:

  September 23, 2004 audio

• If The Bard Had A Sweet Tooth...

  ...perhaps "Hamlet" might have been a little different:

  September 23, 2004 musings

• Deus Ex Machina

  Latin: god from machine.

  September 22, 2004 books

• Me Like Tivo

  For the last two years I have been recording a few of my favorite TV shows on an old Macintosh with EyeTV. The cool thing about this is that I didn't have to remember to switch videotapes. I could quickly copy the shows on to my laptop to watch anytime, anywhere. Plus I could burn it to a VCD for archiving, taking up much less space than a videotape.

  September 21, 2004 tv-and-movies

• I Dub Thee, Temp

  Today is the first day of our temp dub. For all you non-movie-industry-types, a temp dub is a kind of mini-mixdown of the movie's soundtrack at its current state.

  September 21, 2004 musings

• More Ninjas, More Samurai

  A couple of days ago I finished the second book of the "Tales of the Otori" series, "Grass For His Pillow", and now I'm about half-way through the third, "Brilliance Of The Moon". If I didn't explain it well enough before, let me just say that this is really a great series.

  September 20, 2004 books

• Party With Pierogis

  Yesterday was my friend's 30th birthday and in celebration her husband rented out the patio behind Warszawa, a Polish restaurant in Santa Monica. I've never had "fancy" pierogis before. I born outside of Detroit and lived there through my early childhood years, and I went to college in Chicago. I have had plenty of Polish influence and cuisine in my life over the years but this is the first time I have encountered the trendy, hipster Polish spot. It was very nice.

  September 19, 2004 musings

• Hub Heavy

  Is there a legitimate reason why USB hubs can weigh a few ounces but their power supplies need to be made out of 5 pounds of lead? Can anyone answer me this? My cellphone power supply--charger is small and light. The little white square that Apple ships with its iPods is very portable. For some reason I cannot fathom this does not seem to be possible for USB hubs.

  September 16, 2004 musings

• Goodbye, Johnny

  From the AP newswire:

  September 16, 2004 musings

• Beneath The Radar

  I couldn't get to my website for about 20 minutes this morning. Pair.com, my hosting company, now has this up on their status page:

  September 16, 2004 musings

• The Curse Of Chalion

  Lois McMaster Bujold's "The Curse Of Chalion" is a fun little book. It's a bit more of a "popcorn" read than some of my recent undertakings, but at least it has a engrossing story and enjoyable characters---unlike a certain other fantasy book.

  September 15, 2004 books

• The Software I Use

  We got moved in to our new office today without too much trouble. I'm sharing a very small room with the ADR editor but thankfully it's only for two weeks. Tomorrow I have to finish installing the necessary software on my computer. When I was at Universal I did most of my work on my own laptop. I would just have to jump on to the other assistant's computer to digitize picture. But it's certainly nice to have a full-blown Pro Tools sitting in front of me again.

  September 14, 2004 audio

• Moving Day

  Today I'm saying 'goodbye' to Universal Studios. The show that was giving us space (not the show I'm working on right now) had an audience test screening last week and now it's hunkering down for some additional shooting and lots of editing. They're putting the sound crew on hiatus for several months.

  September 13, 2004 musings

• Playing Igniter Digital Picture On A DC30+

  Those of you who have dealt with Pro Tools and digital picture over the last couple of years may have already encountered this:

  September 12, 2004 audio

• Hello Kaiju!

  Last night Cameron, Dana, Jesse and I experienced something extraordinary. We learned the true meaning of fear. We learned that "Danger Can Happen". We went to the Avalon in Hollywood for the Los Angeles premiere of "Kaiju Big Battel". I think Xeni Jardin described it best when she referred to it as part Japanese Monster Movie, part Mexican Wrestling Match, part Indie Rock Concert.

  September 9, 2004 musings

• Hero At Large

  It's very hot today. And very muggy too. We've been having this heat wave in Los Angeles and it hasn't been pleasant. I work all day long in a well air-conditioned building. So well air-conditioned that I often have a sweatshirt with me. To step from that 68°F indoor temperature to 100+°F outdoors is rather shocking.

  September 8, 2004 musings

• Another Week, Another Lounge

  Once again I find myself sitting in the customer service lounge of Robertson Honda working on my computer. When I took my car in nearly two weeks ago for a check-up, there was one thing they couldn't complete without special-ordering a part.

  September 8, 2004 musings

• Me And LBC

  I spent the day down in Long Beach enjoying good-natured political arguments, BBQ chicken and a 60" HDTV with my aunt and uncle. I can't believe how hot it was down there---easily in the 90s. That's very strange, especially for this time of year. I took some pretty pictures out the window on the drive home as the sun was sinking low in the sky.

  September 7, 2004 musings

• Heavy Metal Parking Lot

  I forgot that I was planning on mentioning this over the weekend until I showed up at work again today...

  September 7, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Across The Nightingale Floor

  Today I finished Lian Hearn's amazing first book in the "Tales of the Otori" series, "Across The Nightingale Floor". Ninjas and samurai are totally sweet!

  September 6, 2004 books

• Ghost Town

  You can always tell if it's the Friday before a three-day weekend on a studio lot. The place will be a ghost town. Yesterday was no different. We were cruising around in our sad little golf cart passing row after row of empty parking spaces. Streets between sound stages that normally bustled with activity were quiet.

  September 4, 2004 musings

• No. Unless You Pay Us Lots Of Money.

  I received the official word today from the "powers that be" at pair.com that they will not adjust their Reaper settings to accommodate Movable Type and publishing via XML-RPC. I understand their desire to keep their servers safe and functional. It's good business practice. The thing that is a bit annoying is that I'm asking for support for something that is very common on the web. Commercial software that thousands of people use.

  September 3, 2004 movable-type

• Capturing Video For Pro Tools With Sync Audio In OS X

  Here's step-by-step instructions for loading digital picture for use in Pro Tools in that cool way that I briefly talked about the other day. I can't take credit for this one. The amazing Ron Eng came up with it. It definitely works with OS X 10.3.4, Pro Tools|24 Mix hardware, Pro Tools 6.2.3 software, Final Cut Pro 3, Adobe Premiere 4, Miro DC30+ videocard and DC30 Xact driver. I'm sure it works with newer versions of hardware and software like Pro Tools HD and an Aurora Igniter card, I just haven't tried it out myself.

  September 3, 2004 audio

• My World Of Film Sound

  Yesterday I started working again with the fine folks at Universal Studios. Yes, those damn trams full of tourists are once again driving by my window every 5 minutes.

  September 1, 2004 musings

• Movable Type 3.1 & Ecto 2

  I upgraded to MT3.1 last night. I haven't really done anything with it other than check out all the different interface pages. Since I had already been using MT3 for several months, 3.1 did not seem like that radical of an update. Obviously its support for dynamic pages is pretty huge but since as far as the interface went, that was relegated to 3 radio buttons on the Templates page it didn't appear significant.

  September 1, 2004 movable-type

• I'm Shocked

  Both my previous post and an update I did to it went through properly to my server. The Reaper didn't kill either. I don't dare hope that either pair.com has changed things to allow XML-RPC to function properly or MT3.1 changed things enough that it's no longer a problem. More likely this is more of the same thing I've been seeing for the last several weeks. Sometimes the posting works. Sometimes it doesn't.

  September 1, 2004 movable-type

• A Truly Suck-tastic Book

  I finished reading "The Dragon's Son" by Margaret Weis today. It's quite amazing how much that book sucked. No, seriously. Through the entire book I kept asking myself, "Who cares?" I have one of those life-size cardboard cut-out Stormtroopers. You know the kind you could take your picture with and say, "Hey, look I'm in Star Wars!" Well that Stormtrooper has more personality than the characters in this book.

  September 1, 2004 books

• The Day Everything Was Upgraded

  Hey, hey party people. I'm typing up this entry in my brand-spankin' new copy of BBEdit 8. Perhaps you don't know this, but I love BBEdit. If I were still in third grade, some clever person would undoubtedly quip, "Then why don't you marry it?" That's how much I love BBEdit.

  August 31, 2004 audio

• HD Has The Sharpest Pictures

  You know I was at my friends' house tonight enjoying good company and great tacos. They have a monster flat screen TV and an HD Direct TV box hooked up to it. I hadn't been over there in a while and I was disappointed to discover that a couple of the very few HD channels that are offered were only showing the damn Republican National Convention.

  August 31, 2004 musings

• Woop! There it is.

  I feel a bit like Microsoft. To get my redesign done and up I ended up tossing out quite a few goodies I was working on. I figured the major "look and feel" was the single most important thing. And since I'm going back to work this week, I had to get something up or it would languish for a while.

  August 30, 2004 news

• Solution For Mac IE5 CSS Problem?

  Are there any CSS web designers out there who can offer a guy a bit of advice? This problem is bugging me:

  August 29, 2004 macintosh

• Tinker Toys

  I am still here. I've just been busy tinkering away behind the scenes. I've been wanting to do a major revamp of this website for a while now. Some of you may have noticed a few bits and pieces as they've been installed, like my photo moblog. I've been working on a new look to go with it---and practicing my CSS.

  August 28, 2004 musings

• Don't Fear The Reaper

  The good news: Thanks to a lot of patience from the wonderful Adriaan and some great advice from the fantastic Ben Trott, we've figured out why I can't always successfully post to my website from ecto.

  August 27, 2004 movable-type

• Some People Are So Very Annoying

  There are several of us sitting here waiting for our cars in the customer lounge at the Robertson Honda service center. Most people are reading or just sitting. Two young men walked in about 20 minutes ago and they are quietly to each other in Spanish.

  August 26, 2004 musings

• Perhaps This Will Fix My Problems

  I continue to have posting problems with ecto. I started searching the Movable Type forums to see if anyone has any ideas. I'm trying something out here to see if it helps.

  August 26, 2004 movable-type

• Brave New World

  Ok, this is cool.

  August 26, 2004 musings

• AIM On Cingular Cellphones

  Last night I was poking around with my online and playing with my Motorola V600 cellphone. I've been curious about doing IM on my phone. I saw that the V600s from T-Mobile come with AOL Instant Messanger software preinstalled, but I'm with Cingular. So I looking at the various ways of getting that software installed on my phone. Most of them seemed a bit more involved that I cared to try. Then I noticed a chart (I think I found it at AOL's AIM site) that listed the phones from Cingular that supported AIM. Now I'm not just talking about the AIM Forwarding which you can do with basically any cellphone. You can't started IMs with that, only respond. I was interested in full AIM service. The chart didn't list the V600 (I think Cingular has already stopped offering it) but it did say that AIM software could be downloaded for the V400. That got me intrigued.

  August 26, 2004 mobile

• Pro Tools 6.4.1 For Mix Hardware

  Digidesign has finally released the long-promised Pro Tools 6.4.1 software---the last version to support Pro Tools 24|Mix hardware. It requires a G4 PowerMac, OS X 10.3.4, and obviously Mix hardware.

  August 25, 2004 audio

• A Storm Of Swords

  Tonight I finished reading the third book in George R.R. Martin's "A Song Of Ice And Fire" series, "A Storm Of Swords". I'm almost speechless. I previously wrote about finishing the first book, "A Game Of Thrones". Since then I've read the other two. This one of the best fantasy series, in fact one of the best series of any genre, that I've read.

  August 25, 2004 books

• Request For Help: MT + pair.com + ecto

  I would love to hear from anybody who has a Movable Type website hosted by pair.com and is using ecto to publish. I've been attempting to beta test the new version 2, but I've been having problems simply posting. Adriaan has said it's a rare thing that he's seen twice before where certain combinations of software don't work well with ecto. So if anyone is doing this please email or post a comment below. I'd be interested to find out about the version of MT, the version of ecto, whether you're using a cgi wrapper, what settings you had to change in your mt.cfg file, and any other tips or tricks you might have.

  August 24, 2004 movable-type

• Blacklist 2 Is Awesome

  Thank you, Jay Allen, for creating such an amazing product. MT-Blacklist 2 is the coolest plug-in I've run on Movable Type---and I'm running Markdown which is super-cool in its own right, so I know how great plug-ins can be. In the 5 days since I started running it, I've blocked 231 comment and trackback spams. Prior to this I had moderation turned on for my comments so the spam never showed up but I'd still have to delete them from the database. And there was nothing I could do about trackback spam. It would show up on my site for as long as it took me to find it and delete it. With Blacklist I don't have to do that. It just doesn't show up. It's truly great stuff. Plus with the auto-update feature I always have the latest list of ne'er-do-wells and blackguards.

  August 24, 2004 movable-type

• The Universal Photo Shoot

  I've fixed most of the problems I was having after reconfiguring my website a few days ago. My email to Gallery gateway is working once again. I've updated my photo moblog with pictures from the last several days at Universal:

  August 23, 2004 photos

• Recovery Room

  I slept away most of the morning trying to play catch-up after all those hours at work. Yesterday was another long one---9am to 1am. The good news is that as of about 12:30am this morning, I am going back to work next Monday on a little horror movie. In fact the words "if not sooner" were used, so I might not even have a full week off.

  August 22, 2004 tv-and-movies

• The Long Walk

  Well I'm finally home from work---8am to 1am yesterday, 9am to 12am today. It's getting tough to concentrate. Thankfully it will all be over after tomorrow when I enter back into the world of the unemployed... wait a second, maybe that's not as cool as it was sounding. :)

  August 21, 2004 musings

• What A Crazy Day!

  I've been so busy the last week. Most days at work have been 8am to 10pm. I've been trying to squeeze time in for testing ecto before I go to bed but there's not a lot for that. I was having a lot of trouble posting to my weblog with ecto. I think I have all the bumps worked out. I'll write about it later when I'm sure.

  August 20, 2004 musings

• I'm A Fiddler Crab! Why Don't You Shoot Me?! It's Fiddler Crab Season!

  In honor of the new Blacklist 2.0e, it's open season on comments over here at MFTI. I've turned off moderation. I'm hoping that will encourage more people to join in the discussion. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Blacklist will be able to keep out most of the spam. Of course by signing up for a TypeKey account you can post comments to this weblog and many others around the world, quickly and easily bypassing the spam protection. So it's up to you.

  August 18, 2004 movable-type

• First Mbox Problem

  I encountered my first Mbox Pro Tools problem yesterday. I was converting a massive dialog session from BWF to SD2 via "Import Session Data" and it seemed to stall at the very end. I tried to force quit and it ended poorly. I had to hold down the power button to shut down my laptop and reboot. A second test wound up with the same result.

  August 18, 2004 audio

• Christmas In August

  

  August 18, 2004 movable-type

• Say 'Hello' to Mr. Murphy

  Tape wouldn't print. Pro Tools kept crashing on "Save Session Copy In". The copier decided it wanted to smear the right half of all pages so they'd be unreadable. The printer overheated so we couldn't even print things outside of Tape. The narrow SCSI drives refused to mount. A crew member's grandmother suddenly got deathly ill. And even though someone was nice enough to give us the left-overs from Brett Ratner's dub stage for dinner, it was all Chinese food and I don't really like Chinese food.

  August 17, 2004 musings

• Never Forget

  The Shoah Foundation is set up in the building I'm working in. They're all about documenting the Holocaust through survivor testimonies. It's a remarkable undertaking.

  August 17, 2004 musings

• You Gotta Love The Mbox

  My regular digital audio workstation that I use for my job is a Pro Tools 24|Mix Plus. It's the old hardware, I know, but I haven't really needed to upgrade to HD. (Though that support for breaking timecode in the 6.4 software makes it awfully tempting. Loading production sound roll DATs would be much easier.)

  August 15, 2004 audio

• What Up With That?

  So I'm over here at Universal Studios working away. This place has to have the absolute slowest internet connection I've ever seen! And it's a major film studio! I don't know if the IT guys are throttling things back so that employees can't waste bandwidth with streaming internet radio or something but it can absolutely crawl at times.

  August 15, 2004 musings

• In Dreams You're Mine All Of The Time ...

  What is it about horror and oldies songs? There's something about the sugary sweet melodies of late 1950's, early 1960's teen pop and romantic crooners that makes horror movies and television even scarier.

  August 13, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Hate The Tape

  This program is the bane of my existence. Ugh! Tape is the worst piece-of-crap software I have ever had the misfortune of using. And I'm forced into it. There's just nothing else for printing cuesheets from Pro Tools.

  August 12, 2004 audio

• I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

  Sometimes the serendipity of things startles me.

  August 10, 2004 mobile

• Some UNIX on Mac OS X Resources

  Following up on the idea of configuring Apache with virtual hosts on your own computer, you will probably need to install some extra software to more closely resemble your web host.

  August 9, 2004 macintosh

• Monkey Hate Clean

  Who can forget the Bathroom Monkey?

  August 9, 2004 musings

• Local Virtual Hosts For Development

  This is brilliant. Setting up Apache with virtual hosts on a local machine that mirrors a live server is a great idea for development. I've always setup other directories on the server, not accessible unless you knew what URL to enter. But with this method you wouldn't even have to be online all the time.

  August 8, 2004 movable-type

• Installing J2ME Software On Your Cellphone

  Ever gone to a website with your cellphone and had trouble installing the J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) software from there? Do you find that it's much easier to download the files on your computer?

  August 6, 2004 mobile

• On The Job

  Since I've been busy with work I'll keep it simple with some more pictures:

  August 5, 2004 photos

• For Whom The Coffee Breaks

  I'm helping out a new show. Tomorrow we are going to do a temp mix on a couple of reels so that a studio executive can give notes over the weekend. Unfortunately the first reel just showed up this morning and the I haven't seen the second one yet. Might be a late night.

  August 4, 2004 musings

• Sucks To Be You

  I run a lot of different pieces of software to try and figure out what's going on with my website. Pair.com gave me the choice of Webalizer or Analog. Plus I've got Sitemeter and ExtremeTracking javascripts loading at the bottom of the pages. Not to mention my Refer page. Maybe it's overkill but this site is still in the "building" stage. How do most people find my site? Who are my return visitors? What pages are the most popular? That kind of thing.

  August 3, 2004 movable-type

• Henchman Inventory and Battle AI v1.03

  The new version of Tony K's henchmen smartening, monster toughening, inventory improving add-on to Neverwinter Nights is available. I just finished up putting together the Mac installer. Windows version here.

  August 3, 2004 neverwinter-nights

• Phuture Phreaks

  Since I've been on the subject of cellphones recently:

  August 2, 2004 mobile

• A Bit About Gallery Photo Moblogging

  It turns out that the email to Gallery gateway that I set up was uglier than I thought. I would strongly recommend not using these scripts to post photos from your camera phone to a webpage. I thought it was just that my implementation of procmail was bad because I didn't really know what I was doing. Well it was bad, but the scripts aren't very good either. At least the mimesave.pl one isn't. I'm still learning Perl so I only have a bit of an idea of what's going on, but it definitely does a few bad things. I would stay away from it unless you're willing to rewrite some sections. The parsing of the mime attachments is the real culprit. It decodes the mime attachment and reads the raw data into a new file and generates a random name for it with a .gif extension instead of looking at the actual name of the attached file.

  August 2, 2004 movable-type

• Mobile Fun

  In honor of getting my new phone setup, I present you with some goodies:

  August 1, 2004 mobile

• Motorola V600, Wireless Internet, Bluetooth And The Macintosh

  As previously mentioned, I have a new Motorola V600 cellphone and I got it setup with all the Wireless Internet fun you could hope for from Cingular Wireless, including getting it to talk to my Mac PowerBook via Bluetooth. It was quite a struggle, let me tell you. I'm going to document the salient points here so maybe others can learn something. If you're a Windows or Linux user, it doesn't mean there isn't good stuff here, it just means not all of it will be applicable. There's probably some useful stuff here for Cingular Wireless customers with other phones too. I should mention that I'm in Los Angeles. The settings should be the same here as in other parts of the country, at least for GPRS, but who knows.

  July 31, 2004 macintosh

• Eat Your Heart Out On Plastic Tray

  Wow! What a wacky couple of days. And it's not quite over yet. I've been in super-geek tech mode for a while now. I succumbed to temptation and decided to get a new cellphone. Motorola's überfon, the V600.

  July 30, 2004 musings

• This One Goes Up To Eleven

  Wired has this article about a new "super" surround sound which uses more than 300 speakers in a theater to truly recreate an environment and place sounds anywhere within the room. Three hundred speakers is a couple more than the 6 that most theaters have today. (Actually theaters usually have more than 6 speakers. You'll often see many along the sides and in the back corners but they broadcast the same sound. There's still only 6 individual channels of source material that get played through those speakers.)

  July 28, 2004 audio

• More At Eleven

  Xeni, the author of the "Wired" article about spatial sound, wrote me a nice letter this morning about yesterday's post. She basically said I should go read Iosono's website and my technical questions would be answered. I was a bit abashed at first. Here I was proclaiming the problems I thought I saw with this new technology and I hadn't even read their website. (Hey, our president has fully admitted that he doesn't watch the news or read the paper because he doesn't want to be exposed to those lies and biases. Can I use the same excuse?)

  July 28, 2004 audio

• A Game Of Thrones

  I just finished reading "A Game Of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin. What a great fantasy novel! Or maybe I should say, what a great medieval novel. There's definitely a touch of fantasy in there but it's not full of wizards and goblins like many fantasy books. This one sets up a mysterious and possibly supernatural event right from the start and proceeds into the tangled web of politics.

  July 28, 2004 books

• The Best Of Both Worlds

  No, this is not another Star Trek post. Nor a reference to the choice of Dave or Sammy in the new Van Halen greatest hits album. (We're all desparately trying to forget the fact that for a brief time there was a third.)

  July 27, 2004 movable-type

• All Tomorrow's Parties

  I watch a lot of Star Trek. I love that show---in all of its forms. I know I've said it before that I'd rather watch an episode of Star Trek then pretty much any other TV show out there. That's why I was glad when "Star Trek: Enterprise" was renewed for a fourth season. It's also why I love the fact that you can get every episode of every show (nearly) on DVD now. Ok, so they're about half-way through the "Voyager" release schedule and "Enterprise" hasn't started to show up yet. Still it's pretty awesome for Trek fans.

  July 26, 2004 star-trek

• Trackback Spam Sucks

  I have been getting hit pretty hardcore with the Trackback Spam today. It seems that every time a take a look at my email there's another 50 messages from MT saying that I have new trackbacks. And they're not real trackbacks of people writing about something I wrote---they're links to sex sites. So every couple of hours I've been going in and clearing them out. It's not terribly difficult under MT3, but it is annoying. I sure hope that Blacklist 2.0 is released soon. (Hell, I'd even go for a beta! hint hint.)

  July 25, 2004 movable-type

• Once Again The RIAA's Claims Are Shown To Be False

  This is a good article from the UK's Guardian about a study of illegal music downloads versus music sales. (Of course I found it because of Boing Boing. Those guys have everything.)

  July 24, 2004 musings

• Occasionally Glancing Up Through The Rain

  I've been listening to a ton of Pink Floyd recently. You know how you get in those "moods"---there's that one album or maybe a particular genre is really speaking to you at the moment? I'm going through that with Pink Floyd. I'm not sure what sparked this. I've always been a fan, but I've only had the big four albums on CD. Ok, maybe the big 3 plus a smaller 4th: "Dark Side Of The Moon", "Wish You Were Here", "The Wall", and "Meddle". Oh yeah, I did have "Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" for a long time too. Oh, and "Momentary Lapse Of Reason" and "The Division Bell". Oh well. So I had a few of the very well known ones and some others.

  July 24, 2004 musings

• Gooooooaaaaal!

  Jay Allen creator of the amazing Movable Type plug-in, Blacklist, that helps greatly reduce the amount of comment and trackback spam on your website, just won the Grand Prize in the MT Plug-In Developer's Contest.

  July 23, 2004 movable-type

• BBEdit And Finding Differences Between Two Documents

  Last night I decided to update the templates for my website. Movable Type basically uses webpages with custom variables to generate the pages on the website. MT3.01D was released a couple weeks ago. I upgraded the server software then but nothing else. There were several fixes to the way comments worked so I knew that I was going to have to update my templates if I wanted to use those. Plus they were supposedly truly XHTML 1.0 Transitional which the 3.0 versions were not.

  July 23, 2004 macintosh

• Why Can't I Touch The Sky?

  Thirty-five years ago today Neil Armstrong stepped on to the surface of the moon. He was the first human to walk on the ground of something other than our own planet.

  July 21, 2004 musings

• Unfortunately Frank's Not Around To Save The Day

  Since I've already started out the day with a political stance, I might as well continue. Paul Krugman wrote a fascinating editorial in the "New York Times" yesterday called "The Arabian Candidate" where he puts forth the idea that despite all the bumper stickers to the contrary, Al Qaeda would probably much prefer a second term Bush to Kerry.

  July 21, 2004 musings

• It's Ok To Say The President Is An Idiot

  I found this quote at the top of the Download for Democracy website:

  July 21, 2004 musings

• Copyright Law And Public Domain

  Yesterday I read an interesting article from Reuters by way of Boing Boing.

  July 20, 2004 musings

• Working For The Man

  I picked up another week of work assembling and phasing dialogue tracks for a friend. She likes the fact that I'm willing to start on Saturday so I can turn over things to her Sunday night for the editors to work on Monday. It's been taking up my time and focus but at some point I'll take a break and offer up some more insights into things.

  July 18, 2004 musings

• The Best $5 I've Spent

  You know those commercials where they say, "What can you get for a buck?" and then some ex-athlete proceeds to inform the public of benefits of dialing 7 extra digits for long distance phone calls? Well I often feel like, "What can you get for 5 bucks?"

  July 18, 2004 macintosh

• What Is Popular?

  I find it interesting to see what others consider interesting articles on my site---or at least which ones are popular. A few a pretty obvious. In one post I listed all the links Avid Quicktime Codecs. Avid does not have a very well orgainzed site and they're extremely difficult to find. After the second or third time of spending an hour and finally finding them, I put together the page so that if I ever forgot, I could go there. Of course I'm not the only one who's had that trouble so it gets a lot of visitors.

  July 16, 2004 musings

• A Couple Of Semi-Audio-Related Things

  A few notes of interest for the audio pros in the house:

  July 15, 2004 audio

• Ender And The Net

  I've started listening to my next audiobook, "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card. I first read this book about 10 years ago and loved it. Enough time has passed since then, that I remember that I loved the book, and I remember the basic story but most of the specifics were gone. So experiencing it again but in a different format, audio, is a real pleasure.

  July 14, 2004 books

• What Kind Of Japanese Geek Are You?

  This was posted over at Boing Boing:

  July 13, 2004 musings

• I'm A Writer Because The Pizza Delivery Person Says So

  I ordered a pizza for a little nourishment this evening and it was just delivered. Thin crust. I've decided it's really the only way to go. I went to college in Chicago so I know how thick pizzas can really get but I have to say that thin is better. Thin and crispy.

  July 13, 2004 musings

• The Sound Of His Voice

  I need your help. As you may know, I'm an avid listener to audiobooks. During the 2 hours of commuting I do every day, I typically spend my time listening to others read books to me. When I do get into the office, I'm a sound guy. I, along with the other people on my crew, make the movies you go and watch sound good. To do this I have all kinds of gear (boys' toys) in my room.

  July 12, 2004 audio

• Discount On BBEdit

  I have talked about how cool I think BBEdit is. Bare Bones Software, the makers of BBEdit, is offering a discount on the software from now through Thursday, July 15. It's $150 instead of the usual $180. Plus you get a free t-shirt.

  July 12, 2004 macintosh

• Time Is Of The Essence

  It's been quite a busy week for me, in fact it seems to have slipped right by me.

  July 10, 2004 musings

• New Toys

  Recently I've been adding some new audio gear to my Pro Tools system. A couple weeks ago, I upgraded my speakers. I won't tell you what I was using before---it's a bit embarassing, and I'm supposed to be a "professional"---but my new Blue Sky speakers are awesome. (In all fairness to myself, prior to this recent purchase if I had to do really critical listening, I would do it on headphones.)

  July 10, 2004 audio

• Mackie 1604 5.1 Surround Layout

  As I said before, I recently bought a Mackie 1604 mixer and added it to my Pro Tools workstation. I came up with what I consider to be the ultimate layout for the mixer. Obviously everyone has their own needs and their own gear so this won't work for all. But it might give you a few ideas of how you can improve your own audio monitoring.

  July 10, 2004 audio

• ISO Macintosh Programmer

  I'm looking to hire a good Macintosh programmer to help me develop a Carbon application that would run in both OS 9 and OS X. Interested people should send me an email by clicking the link in the sidebar. Include a resume and your desired salary. I'll get in touch with you with all the details. You don't have to live in Los Angeles, but I think you would have to live in the US. I don't know how the whole international employee thing would work out. I'll have to check on that.

  July 8, 2004 macintosh

• Where's Bones When You Need Him?

  This from AP:

  July 7, 2004 star-trek

• This Is Not My Beautiful House

  Oh come on. You know you've done it. Everyone does it. At some point, no matter how many times you tell yourself that you're not going to give in, you type your own name into the search field at Google. Just to see what pops up.

  July 6, 2004 musings

• How To Make Those Big Hollywood Sounds

  Now's the chance for the people of Los Angeles to see a bit about what those of us in the sound industry do:

  July 6, 2004 audio

• The One Where Angel Is Turned Into A Muppet

  This one is for all you fans of the "Angel" telelvision show.

  July 4, 2004 photos

• Real Assistants Use BBEdit

  You call yourself an Assistant Sound Editor and you don't use BBEdit for EDLs and change notes? If you say that you're still using Vantage, I'm going to smack you. Microsoft Word is what you're using? Well, I guess I understand. We've all kind of grown up with that whole "Word is the program you use for typing things". But seriously, yuck. Maybe you just don't realize what you're missing.

  July 3, 2004 audio

• MTools To Soundminer Cleanup Tip

  This is based on a little tip I posted on the Soundminer beta tester message boards:

  July 3, 2004 audio

• Stereo vs. Binaural Recording

  Yesterday, Boing Boing posted a link to an article about surround sound research at UC Davis.

  July 1, 2004 audio

• Damn The Machine

  Recently I placed an order with Amazon for a few goodies. The shipment arrived today. I got this cool Star Trek Star Chart book. (Ok, maybe it's pretty geeky, but it's also cool.) I've always been curious how it all fits together. Where's the Federation--Romulan border? In fact the Federation also has borders with the Klingons and the Cardassians. Where are they? Sure it's all a fantasy, but I have a great Atlas of Middle Earth which I love too. Those kinds of things always fascinate me.

  June 30, 2004 musings

• Quickly Adding Smilies To Movable Type

  When I did some upgrades to my website a week ago, I added in support for smilies. I used Lisa's excellent tutorial to set them up on my site. I'd suggest you do the same. I can offer one extra bit to make things go a little faster.

  June 28, 2004 movable-type

• Instant Karma's Gonna Get You

  I stopped by Barnes & Nobles this morning and picked up a couple of books on writing style---the AP one, and Strunk and White. I figured it couldn't hurt if I refreshed my memory on the best ways to put things to paper (or screen, as the case may be). Maybe gussy this place up a little bit. Comb its hair, and slip on a nice button-down shirt.

  June 27, 2004 musings

• Getting Ems And Ens To Work In Smarty Pants

  This one's painfully obvious when you think about it. Unfortunately I had get the author to explain it to me.

  June 27, 2004 movable-type

• Express Yourself In 10 Easy Steps

  This is my new favorite smiley:

  June 23, 2004 musings

• Truly, Truly, Truly Outrageous

  The iTunes Music Store has a new music Tuesday just like every record store in the US. Tuesday is the day that the new albums come out. Ever since the introduction of iTunes 4.5, Apple has offered a free track for download on Tuesday. Sometimes it’s rock, sometimes hip hop but it’s always free.

  June 22, 2004 musings

• Qualification: You Are An Organic Meatbag, Master.

  Knights of the Old Republic is perhaps the greatest game I’ve ever played. I literally spent a month last year trying to finish it. I was in the middle of doing the sound for a movie, I think it was “Honey”—might’ve been “SWAT”, but I’m pretty sure it was “Honey”. On a normal night, I don’t get home until 8pm and I’m usually off to work at 7 or 7:30 the next morning. Sometime during that short period of time, I try to catch my 8 hours of sleep too.

  June 22, 2004 musings

• Using Another Weblog For Link Lists

  In the course of the most recent redesign of my website, I setup the various link lists on my site—Your Blogs, Favorite Sites, etc.—as separate weblogs that are fed into my main weblog. Anyone who has gone in and updated the templates in Movable Type knows what a pain it can be. By using a separate weblog for link lists with one entry per link, it is very easy to make changes to those lists.

  June 21, 2004 movable-type

• More Site Changes

  I said it would be back, and it is. I’ve brought back my Monsters from the Id title graphic. In that previous post I said I wouldn’t bring it back until “all the bells and whistles” were in place. Well, as anyone who does their own website probably knows, all the bells and whistles will never be in place. But I did do some major upgrades.

  June 20, 2004 movable-type

• Where Did You Come From?

  It figures. I don’t know whether it was Murphy or the previously mentioned “narrative convention” but the very instant that I installed Dean Allen’s excellent Refer scripts to keep track of referrals to the various pages of my website, I was referral porn spammed by a passing bot. I have now made some changes to the scripts to reduce referral spam. Hopefully that helps.

  June 19, 2004 movable-type

• Strange Things Are Afoot At The Circle K

  I have a day off today. In fact I have this entire weekend off. I went from no work for 3-some-odd months to two weeks straight work including the weekend and it was a bit of a system shock. It’s nice to fart around.

  June 19, 2004 macintosh

• Sound Convention

  Terry Pratchett has a running joke in his Discworld books about narrative conventions. For example, due to “narrative convention” every carriage wreck (it is a fantasy-based series) ends with a lone wheel rolling down the street. On a similar note, after the “Star Trek: Enterprise” season finale, I mentioned how much I’m sick of the currently popular narrative convention that heroes can out-run an explosion.

  June 19, 2004 audio

• SCSI As You Wanna Be

  Yesterday I finished most of the system upgrade I did on my Pro Tools workstation. I still have a few programs to put back on, but it’s mostly there. Probably the coolest thing about the upgrade has been the new driver for my ATTO ExpressPCI UL3D SCSI card. The new 3.10 driver for Panther is brilliant! Finally we can once again hot-swap hard drives like we used to do under OS 9. It doesn’t work exactly the same way but it is still much faster than a shut down and reboot.

  June 18, 2004 macintosh

• I'm Quickly Using Up My 15 Minutes

  Would you look at that! I guess I’m famous now. I’ve been quoted in eWeek. :P :)

  June 18, 2004 musings

• Zombies = Power Interruptions

  This is an awesome article: When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?. Those of you who’ve read my take on zombie movies know that this is right up my alley.

  June 16, 2004 musings

• Today Is A Good Day To Upgrade

  Right now I am sitting at my desk in my office watching a little blue bar crawl across the screen of my computer. I’m in the process of upgrading my Macintosh Pro Tools workstation to Panther. The average end user might not realize it but tall these system updates wreak havoc with those of us in speciality hardware and software situations. Apple basically rewrote the underlying audio framework when they made OS X 10.3. Suddenly those of us with laptops or home computers were enjoying all the cool benefits that Panther brought, but couldn’t use it on our Digital Audio Workstations because nothing was compatible.

  June 16, 2004 macintosh

• New MT3 Licensing

  Those folks over at Six Apart have updated their Movable Type licensing yet again. Personally I think they’ve got it perfect now.

  June 16, 2004 movable-type

• I'd Buy That For A Dollar

  Actually I did.

  June 15, 2004 musings

• Giant Monsters From My Childhood

  This one can be filed under “So bad, it’s good.”

  June 15, 2004 tv-and-movies

• That One Person Who Spoils It For Everybody

  Since I was talking about how much people can suck earlier, I thought I would share this with you. Ever been in a situation with a group of people and one of them totally sucks? I mean where that person can make things so miserable that you’re not sure if you want to shoot them or yourself first? My friend Ben recently got back from a two month trip to Japan and Australia. He relates his misadventures with a fellow camper in Australia:

  June 14, 2004 musings

• Oh Nigel, Wherefore Art Thou?

  I am almost done reading the Discworld series of books. Or I should actually say, I am almost done “reading” the Discworld series. For about a year and half now I have slowly been making my way through listening to the audiobooks of all the Discworld books from audible.com.

  June 14, 2004 books

• Lessons In Japanese

  Now that I own a license to Movable Type 3, my weblog is listed on the “Recently Updated” sidebar at MT HQ whenever I post a new entry. This always results in a burst of traffic from Japan. I’m assuming that it has to do with the fact that I have Japanese characters in the name of my weblog. And it might even possibly say something meaningful.

  June 14, 2004 musings

• People Can Really Suck If They Put Their Mind To It

  I got a call this morning as I was driving into work from Cameron. We are trying to finish up the sound for a scene that’s due in NY at noon on Monday. Since that’s 9am here, we basically need to get it all done tonight and load it up to the internet. (Just a side note, it was only a few years ago that this would not even be possible. We would have had to hire a courier to buy a plane ticket to NY and take a red-eye there.)

  June 13, 2004 musings

• Sci Fi And Fantasy Books To Read

  This is a list of all the all the books in the Sci Fi Masterworks Series and the Fantasy Masterworks Series put out by the British publisher Gollancz. These books and stories are all considered to be “classics” by the Sci Fi and Fantasy community.

  June 12, 2004 books

• Easier Text Entry And Formatting

  I made couple of upgrades to my site which you may have noticed in my last post. I installed Daring Fireballs’ excellent Markdown and Smarty Pants plug-ins.

  June 12, 2004 movable-type

• Worldizing Sound With Altiverb

  Recently we've been working on new movie and using Altiverb to place sound effects within their environment. What a great piece of software! There's a new version 4 that's recently come out.

  June 11, 2004 audio

• Goodbye Mr. Quine

  I didn't see this one from Reuters:

  June 9, 2004 musings

• Automatically Sending Trackback Pings To Your Own Posts

  If you're a repeat visitor to this website, you might have noticed that I have a few running threads. I make use of the Categories to "file away" posts in an appropriate area but I also link back to previous posts when appropriate and I have started sending Trackback pings to those posts so that people starting from the earlier post can continue the topic. A very recent example has been my look at various RSS newsfeed aggregators. (Well, to actually focus mostly on PulpFiction.) Even though I have Movable Type set to automatically ping posts that I link to on other servers, tt would not do it on my own. I would have to manually enter each of them.

  June 9, 2004 movable-type

• Another Problem With PulpFiction

  Ok, maybe I'm not using the program the way it's supposed to be used. Here's what I'm doing. I've subscribed to all the feeds I want. PulpFiction automatically checks for new posts every 30 minutes. They are downloaded to the Inbox on my machine. I read the posts and the ones I don't want to keep, I delete by hitting the delete key. For some reason though, I those same posts that I've read and deleted are sometimes re-downloaded a few hours or even a day later. It's very strange. It's not the end of the world. But it's a bit annoying.

  June 9, 2004 macintosh

• More On RSS Feeds

  I've been using PulpFiction Lite for several days now to keep up with the websites I read a lot and it's working out great. Once I got over the initial onslaught of hundreds and hundreds of posts to slog through it's fairly easy to stay up to date. One super important thing for people to do though: do not subscribe to more sites than you can handle. That was my initial problem. I added all the sites I read regularly to the ones that were already in the program and I got so overwhelmed so quickly that I almost gave up.

  June 8, 2004 macintosh

• To Read Or Not To Read, That Is The Question

  I read a lot. Or let's put it this way: averaged out over the years, I have read a lot. It kicked in pretty hard when I was in third grade. That year I read "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien. The next year I read the complete "Lord Of The Rings". And I've never looked back since. By the time I was in junior high and all through high school, I was devouring books. Sometimes one every couple of days.

  June 7, 2004 books

• Fun With High Definition Television

  I wound up in Long Beach today at my aunt and uncle's place fixing the setup on their new Panasonic 60" LCD Projection TV. It's a gorgeous set. And huge! The guys who delivered it didn't take the time to, or know how to, or whatever, do the little things like auto-program the channels. I did another nice picture calibration with my Avia DVD just like I did for Cameron.

  June 6, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Cool Song Intros

  The other day Retrocrush posted their list of 50 Coolest Song Parts. Since it was listed on Fark I'm sure that everyone and their brother has already seen it. It's really a fun list to go through. I don't agree with some of their choices. (They are completely crazy with the whole Lionel Ritchie thing.) But it will definitely bring a smile to your face.

  June 6, 2004 musings

• Continuing The Deva / SD2 / BWF Discussion

  I've been getting quite a bit of traffic to my website the last couple of days from both the DevaII mailing list at Yahoo Groups and the rec.arts.movies.production.sound newsgroup. Hello all!

  June 5, 2004 audio

• Feed Me

  I'm starting to look into RSS newsfeed aggregation. I know big words. Basically it's kind of like the list of news stories you get on a lot of web portal homepages like My Yahoo, Earthlink's Start Page, MSN, etc. Instead of reloading a thousand times a day all those websites that you read regularly to see if there's a new article, you subscribe to the RSS feed and use a news aggregator to do the checking for you. Like checking your email. You get a little synopsis of a new post when it's available, and clicking on "Read More" takes you to the website to read the whole post.

  June 3, 2004 macintosh

• A Few Things I've Noticed

  So I've only been playing with this a few hours. This isn't the be-all, end-all of the RSS newfeed thing.

  June 3, 2004 macintosh

• A New Look

  Well, I've finished up with a "quick and dirty" version of what MFTI looked like under MT2.661 with the new MT3 templates. It's not perfect, but it's mostly there. (I haven't put the title graphic back in place. I figure I'll save that for when I have all the little "bells and whistles" in place.)

  June 2, 2004 news

• Movable Type 3.0D is here.

  I have upgraded this site to MT3. You may have noticed that it looks completely different from how it looked yesterday. You may have also noticed that it looks suspiciously like the default templates that come with MT3. That's because it is. I'll be changing this soon. The whole backend of the site is different and I had a lot of redirect problems to work out. They should all be taken care of now. If you notice any problems, please let me know so that I can fix it.

  June 1, 2004 news

• You Are Entering Another Dimension

  I wrote this on:

  May 31, 2004 musings

• It's The Little Things

  I mentioned some of the "features" of the room I stayed at in Missouri when I went to my uncle's wedding. I thought I might show you a few of them.

  May 31, 2004 photos

• On The Road Again

  Tomorrow morning I'm getting up quite early to go to the airport. I'm flying to Memphis, TN for my uncle's wedding. The 5 hour flight to Memphis isn't the truly fun part though. The truly fun part is the 4 hour drive I have to make after the 5 hour flight to get into the remote part of Missouri where this is actually taking place. In fact I'm staying at a hotel that is half-an-hour drive from the place where the wedding is being held because that's the closest hotel.

  May 28, 2004 musings

• Alien Nazis. I Hate Alien Nazis.

  Well the third season of "Star Trek: Enterprise" has come to an end and we're left wondering how Captain Archer escaped from the exploding Xindi weapon and wound up on what is apparantly 1940s Earth with an alien dressed up as a Nazi. That one came out completely from left field. Hopefully it'll be a cool and interesting little mystery to solve at the start of Season 4.

  May 27, 2004 star-trek

• Number One Reporting For Duty, Sir.

  I've picked up some work helping finish up a movie that'll be a big summer release in July. Today I was conforming predubs, which is quite cool for me. I need to spend more time editing. My official title (not on this show, I'm just helping out on it) is First Assistant Sound Editor. You can think of me as the general manager of a store, while the Supervising Sound Editor is the owner. Or in the way I prefer to think of it: I'm Commander Riker to Cameron's Captain Picard. Basically I lead the away team missions and look quite dashing in my beard from Season 2 on.

  May 26, 2004 audio

• So May This Strife Of Men And Gods Be Done With

  This just in from Reuters:

  May 25, 2004 tv-and-movies

• What's It Gonna Take?

  Dear Pixies,

  May 23, 2004 musings

• I Just Wanna Go To The Rock 'n' Roll Show

  Both Wednesday and Thursday night I saw Sleater-Kinney play El Rey here in Los Angeles. (I've mentioned this already.) They are such a great band. There had been some talk on the wordsandguitar mailing list that someone had recorded the Wednesday show. This morning I decided to check it out.

  May 23, 2004 audio

• You're No Rock & Roll Fun

  Last night I was able to make it to the Sleater Kinney show at El Rey. It was very cool. Quasi opened for them. Yes, Janet is doing double-duty on drums for both bands. This show is part of their "mini" tour before they go into the studio to record their next album.

  May 20, 2004 musings

• Totally Devoted To You

  Let me tell you a little story:

  May 19, 2004 musings

• Insert Aphorism About Rain Here

  Today was a very busy day at work. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to plan things out ahead of time. It always changes. Of course I'd rather be organized about my job and have to modify my plans, then rely on total chaos. Chaos theory makes good quirky movie characters as played by Jeff Goldblum. It's makes real life a pain in the ass if you have deal with it.

  May 19, 2004 musings

• Men At Work

  I had my first day back at work today. It was exhausting. Not that a ton of stuff happened. The first day after a chunk of time off is always tough. Inevitably during my free time I slip in the habit of staying up as late as I want and sleeping until whenever I feel like getting out of bed. When I'm working I usually follow a strict regemin of getting up at 6am and going to bed somewhere between 10pm and 11pm. These two schedules clash hard those first few days back to work.

  May 18, 2004 audio

• 15 Minutes

  In celebration of my going back to work, I'm going to let you in on a little secret...

  May 18, 2004 audio

• Damn Damn Damn

  I just finished reading "Crossroads of Twilight" by Robert Jordan, the tenth book in his Wheel of Time series. Damn! This series is really good, and there aren't anymore books to read yet. I'm having a hard time figuring out how large it will be by the time he's finally done. At this point it would seem that it could easily reach 20 books. Massive.

  May 16, 2004 books

• set mt3 to "good" as string

  (What can I say? I'm more of an AppleScripter than a programmer.)

  May 15, 2004 musings

• Good News

  Back to work on Monday. Woohoo! Bad news. We're on a week to week basis. So I've got one week of work guaranteed and we'll just see from there. Hey, work is work. I'm not complaining. And since I can make as much in a week doing sound as I can in a month on the state's unemployment, it'll be a nice little cash influx every once in a while until we can get on another show fulltime.

  May 15, 2004 news

• MT3. Is It For Me?

  The thing that everyone who has one of these websites was talking about yesterday is the new version of Movable Type. Six Apart, the company that makes the software, unveiled Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition complete with a new licensing scheme. The uproar began.

  May 14, 2004 musings

• Looking At Iraq Through A Soldier's Eyes

  I stumbled across this very interesting weblog written by a female soldier in Iraq. It's cool to find someone in an extraordinary situation doing something that many of us would have trouble imagining ourselves doing, and yet talking about life in a very ordinary way.

  May 12, 2004 musings

• My 'To Hit Armor Class 0' is 12

  Some time around third grade, probably about 1983, I had my first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons. My friend Dave, his older brother John, and I would play it after school with some of the other kids in the neighborhood. I still remember the day my mom took me to the local hobby shop and I bought my very own copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set in the red box. John was the person who introduced me to J.R.R. Tolkien, and that year I read "The Hobbit" for the first time. We used to spend hours making characters--using the lists in the back of "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion" for names--and playing adventures.

  May 11, 2004 musings

• Weird Stuff I Found On The Net

  There's a Kikkoman Soy Sauce commercial on TV here in the US which is totally insane. A mother yells "Kids! Dinner!" and they all come running from where ever they are playing. Except it's some bizarro "Crouching Tiger" thing where they run across tree tops. It can't hold a candle to this one. (Thanks to Neil Gaiman for pointing it out.)

  May 10, 2004 musings

• How Old Will I Be When I Finally Learn?

  Since I haven't been working for the past few months, I've been spending much more time outdoors than I usually do. It mostly consists of reading books in a park, but it is still outdoors. So I have managed to develop somewhat of a tan. Considering my typical color is very white--"clear" might be the appropriate word--I consider myself to be quite tan right now.

  May 9, 2004 musings

• A Crown Of Swords

  I finished up book 7 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, "A Crown of Swords", and started on book 8.

  May 8, 2004 books

• Birthdays, Pizza & TV

  Today was Dana's birthday. For those of you who don't know, Dana is Cameron's wife. And for those of you who don't know who Cameron is, we work together doing sound. For the past several years we've always gone to Little Tony's, a local pizza place with red-and-white checked table cloths on the tables, for Dana's birthday.

  May 7, 2004 musings

• I Was So Much Older Then, I'm Younger Than That Now

  Today I spent several hours teaching a friend Pro Tools 101. It was an unusual experience for me. I have taught people things before. My work study job through college was working in the various computer labs around campus teaching people how to use software they didn't know, and also doing telephone tech support. I had a lot of training in how to take a problem, break it down, and work through it in a logical progression. Plus I taught a series of classes on Pro Tools at AFI on three different school years. Teaching is something I'm some what familiar with.

  May 5, 2004 musings

• How Good Can It Sound?

  Stereophile magazine has published an article on iTunes. Most of it is yet another rehash of new features of iTunes 4.5. However the most interesting point is that the New York branch of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) is gathering this month to discuss the impact of portable digital audio players like the iPod using compressed audio files on the sound of music.

  May 4, 2004 audio

• Smell The Glove

  What bridge have I been living under for the past few years? How did I miss these guys?

  May 3, 2004 musings

• One Step Beyond

  A Pro Tools update for everyone.

  May 1, 2004 audio

• Avid Quicktime Codecs

  This one is for me as much as anyone else.

  April 30, 2004 audio

• Lossless Is Good

  If you keep up with Apple developments at all you probably already know that today is the one year anniversary of the iTunes Music Store. In honor of that Apple released iTunes 4.5 and Quicktime 6.5.1.

  April 29, 2004 audio

• Great Googly Moogly!

  ... or How To Blow Your Website Statistics Right Out Of The Water.

  April 29, 2004 musings

• And The Winner Is

  One of the fun things about keeping statistics about my website is seeing how people managed to find it. Referrals will tell me which pages linked to me when someone clicks that link to get to my site. It also tells what words someone entered into a search engine thereby finding my site. Today I believe that I have found my favorite search that resulted in someone getting to my little corner of the web:

  April 27, 2004 musings

• A Prayer To A Supreme Being

  Dear God, Baby Jesus, or which ever higher power has executive control over Tom Cruise's movies:

  April 27, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Hints And Allegations

  No one is going to come out and say, "Guess what? We only have enough oil left on this planet to last another 75 years." At least no one in the U.S. government or in the U.S. main-stream media. The evidence is there but they try to deny it or only hint at it.

  April 25, 2004 oil

• Badges? We Don't Need...

  A few pictures of the room I stayed in at The Hotel at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

  April 23, 2004 photos

• The Quest For The Knob

  t goes without saying that the most important thing about an audio workstation is that you are able to hear what you are working on. This often leads to the continual quest for the best sounding speakers and headphones. The question that those of us who work in the sound field don't always think about is "What is the best mixer to use?"

  April 22, 2004 audio

• Star Trek: SP1

  Yet again, Wil Wheaton has turned me on to something funny. According to BBSpot, Paramount is releasing Star Trek Service Pack 1 to fix all the errors in the original series. Maybe w3.org can work with the studio to come up with a strict validation for Enterprise.

  April 22, 2004 star-trek

• Digital Audio Field Recorders

  For many years the DAT recorder has been standard for both timecode and non-timecode field recordings. Now that Digital Audio Workstations are supporting file standards beyond the 16 bit, 48 KHz limit of DATs, it makes sense to look at other options. I was able to check out 3 cool new recorders at NAB.

  April 22, 2004 audio

• Art Of Rock

  Lee is looking to sell some of his paintings. He has some very nice ones of rockstars, and others as well. You can find more information about the paintings and his contact info at his website.

  April 22, 2004 news

• Home Again. Home Again. Jiggidy-Jig.

  Oi! My feet are killing me! I'm back home after much walking around Las Vegas. I have things to say about stuff I saw, and places I went. But not now. Now it is late. Or at least late enough. And I'm tired. And the kitties missed me. Goodnight.

  April 21, 2004 news

• Amazingly Colossal

  Insanity! The NAB trade show is huge. Think of something big. Now think of something that could beat up that big thing. Now triple the size of that. You're starting to get the picture of just how big this thing is.

  April 20, 2004 audio

• Bright Light City Gonna Set My Soul On Fire

  I'm writing this entry from Las Vegas. It's quite the town. I usually manage to make it out this way once or twice a year. Though I think this is the first time that I've ever come here for something other than gambling and booze. (And since I gave up the booze three years ago, there's only gambling.)

  April 19, 2004 musings

• I'm Leaving On A Jet Plane

  In just under 3 hours I will be getting on a plane for Las Vegas. The NAB geekfest awaits me.

  April 18, 2004 audio

• I Heart Microsoft

  Yesterday was nominated "Fun With Windows XP Day!"

  April 18, 2004 macintosh

• My God, It's Full Of Stars.

  This is cool. Beethoven's 9th Symphony time stretched to 24 hours with some really sophisticated software. (A standard performance of the 9th Symphony is usually just under 74 minutes. The original CD standard was set so that an entire performance could fit on one disc.)

  April 17, 2004 audio

• Do Or Do Not. There Is No 'Try'.

  You are now looking at the Movable Type version of my website. After a lot of work I was able to get back to the same functionality that I had under iBlog plus a few extra little features. I'm hoping to add some things in the future. Some of them you won't even notice--like an interface on my end so that I can quickly add new links. And some more style sheets including one optimized for printing. But all that is down the road. I think the only thing that hasn't carried over from my iBlog version are the comments that people left for me at Haloscan. There weren't many. I will add them in over here. Unfortunately the original dates of the comments won't carry over. Oh well.

  April 17, 2004 news

• The Pattern Weaves

  I just finished reading "The Dragon Reborn", the third book of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. I have to say that these books are amazing! I've read the first three one right after another and I think I'm going to go out tomorrow and buy a few more. (The first two books are "The Eye of the World" and "The Great Hunt".)

  April 16, 2004 books

• Someone's Knocking At The Door

  It looks like we worked out part of the problem we were having with the Digidesign Core Audio Drivers that came with Pro Tools 6.2.3. If you remember from my earlier post, we are trying to use this on an officially unsupported system: PowerMac G4, OS X 10.3.3, Pro Tools 6.2.3 software, and Pro Tools | 24 Mix Plus hardware. I haven't really used the OS X core audio drivers before. I didn't realize that there was a Core Audio Setup program in the Digidesign folder. Once we ran that, and selected the proper interface, everything seemed to work fine. There is still one little bug though: both Pro Tools and the Core Audio Driver think that the 888 | 24 that is hooked up to the Mix Plus cards has 16 channels in and out. (Not the 8 that it actually does.) If haven't tempted fate to see what would happen if I selected Outputs 9 through 16.

  April 15, 2004 audio

• Serendipity

  Good things always come in threes, right? Today I saw an amazing documentary, and it's weird how well it fits in with the two documentaries that I had meetings about last week. I caught a matinee of "Mayor Of The Sunset Strip" appropriately enough at the Sunset 5. Wow! Just awesome.

  April 14, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Let's Go Out The Coast, Have A Few Laughs

  Let's Go Out The Coast, Have A Few Laughs

  April 13, 2004 oil

• Thank You, Easter Bunny. Bawk. Bawk.

  Did everyone have a nice Easter?

  April 12, 2004 macintosh

• Keep On Movin'

  I'm still working away, behind the scenes, on my new version of Monsters from the Id. The first release probably won't look much different from what you're seeing right now, but trust me... it is. I have to say that I'm very impressed with Movable Type. It's a very slick system. And so many people make use of it that there is a lot of information online about tips and tricks that you can do.

  April 12, 2004 macintosh

• The Horror. The Horror.

  I just bought tickets for the two Sleater-Kinney shows at the El Rey here in Los Angeles from everyone's "favorite" legal scalper, ticketmaster.com. Fifteen dollar face value on each ticket. Twenty-five dollars after Ticketmaster has had its way with you. Sixty-six percent markup?! WTF?! Loan sharks offer better interest rates.

  April 10, 2004 musings

• Maybe It Won't Be That Long

  Ok, so in just a few hours after my last post, I did some more research into various weblog and BBS software, and got Movabletype installed on my server. It's a very cool piece of software. I didn't realize. It's not all that different from iBlog--though it definitely has a lot more "bells and whistles." The authoring software just runs on the server as a set of perl scripts instead of on your local machine. But then it generates all the pages. I was thinking it was going to rely more on pages that we generated "on the fly". That's how a PHP-based system like Geeklog would work.

  April 10, 2004 musings

• One Part Panther, Two Parts Sound, Mix Thoroughly

  I spent most of another day with Cameron today. Dana, his wife, is always making jokes like "So when are you moving in?" They are such great people.

  April 9, 2004 audio

• I Don't Think I'm The Only One

  April 9, 2004 musings

• But I Don't Want To

  Sometimes it would be much easier if I could just accept things they way they are.

  April 9, 2004 musings

• I Need New Batteries For My Remote

  Bioware, the company that created Neverwinter Nights, is kind enough to provide a Dedicated Server for their program. What this means is that you can download this application. Install a copy of any modules you have into it's module directory, and run the server without needing another CD Key. Of course it's dedicated which means you can't play on that machine. That's the whole point, you play on another machine and connect to the server.

  April 7, 2004 neverwinter-nights

• Another Day Another Doc

  Session drummer turned aspiring filmmaker, Gary Gardner, met with Cameron and I today about a documentary he's been working on for the last two years. It's about an LA jazz club called The Baked Potato which opened in its doors in the early 1970s. Practically every jazz musician has played that club in the past 30 years. Gary was recently able to interview Lou Rawls about his experiences at The Baked Potato. I suspect he still has a ways to go before he gets this whole thing pulled together, and even though I'm not a jazz fan, this is one exciting project.

  April 7, 2004 audio

• We Passed Upon The Stair

  Everyone and their brother is talking about the fact that 10 years ago today, Kurt Cobain killed himself. You can check out Wil Wheaton's take on it or numerous other writers over at Black Table.

  April 6, 2004 musings

• That Leads To Your Door

  I just got an email from my buddy Ben who's taking off for Japan and Australia tomorrow. His girlfriend and her friend have already been in New Zealand and Australia for a bunch of months checking things out. So they're reuniting in Tokyo which I'm very happy about. And thankfully we all get to read about it in their weblog, The Adventures of Katie and Emma.

  April 6, 2004 news

• The People Behind The People

  I had a meeting yesterday about a documentary. Denny Tedesco has been working on a documentary about his father, Tommy Tedesco, one of the most prolific Los Angeles session guitarists, and the other session musicians he worked with. People like Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye. The Wrecking Crew as they came to be known.

  April 4, 2004 audio

• Spring Ahead

  Note to self: Don't stay up half the night watching movies when you're going into Daylight Saving Time. Losing that hour is killer.

  April 4, 2004 musings

• A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

  In fact it is right now.

  April 2, 2004 musings

• Goin' To Las Vegas With An Aching... In My Heart

  Well, I'm already in California.

  March 31, 2004 musings

• Digging For Sound Effects

  Yesterday I was shown a demo of a great sound library program called Soundminer. It's very exciting: 58 metadata fields, SQL search functions, Rewire support for multichannel monitoring, Quicktime support for auditioning against picture, all kinds of fun stuff. But I get ahead of myself...

  March 31, 2004 audio

• And Then The Dinosaurs All Died And Turned Into Oil

  Com\Bat\Rac\Coon mentioned that there is a "Business Week" European cover story about how it's getting tougher to get at the oil in Saudi Arabia.

  March 31, 2004 oil

• Stupid Windows

  Stupid IE6.

  March 30, 2004 macintosh

• Seeking Out Strange New Worlds

  There's another website of fan-created Star Trek episodes. These are done in the style of the original series and take place aboard the starship Exeter. I think it's very cool that fans are taking the time to make these great shows.

  March 30, 2004 star-trek

• I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

  A recent study by professors at Harvard and the University of California shows that illegal MP3 filesharing has not hurt the record industry. They said that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero...." Of course the RIAA thinks this is completely untrue.

  March 30, 2004 musings

• Ten Years, Man! Ten Years.

  I've spent the last two days learning XHTML and CSS. Actually I didn't spend ALL day both days working on this. I had a very enjoyable several hours on Saturday in a park in the mountains here in Burbank--I'm still a little red from the experience. I read a lot more in the Robert Jordan book I've been working on, "The Eye Of The World." Watched a little TV last night.

  March 29, 2004 macintosh

• Hey, Rocky, Watch Me Pull A Rabbit Out Of My Hat

  It is done. After a little bit of wondering where my title graphic when off to and then trying to figure out why there was an orange stripe above the graphic, the Monsters from the Id revised website is done. Please let me introduce you to a style I call:

  March 29, 2004 news

• Problems

  I seem to be having a little trouble with my program. Grrr.

  March 26, 2004 musings

• I'll Have A Pepsi To Go With My Zombie

  In my last post I talked a little bit about some of my thoughts on zombie movies. It brought back a lot of memories of the year that my friends and I spent putting the few issues of Right Turn Clyde that ever saw the light of day (or the glow of a monitor). Those were fun times figuring out what would be the next snarky comment about Hollywood. I might have put together the website but MNKE was the driving force behind that effort. And without the four of us who wrote most of the articles and tracked down the photos and got the interviews, I don't think it can exist again. At least not like it did.

  March 26, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Emergency Broadcast

  This is a test post of the TV & Movies section. This is just a test. If this had been a real post, the title would be followed by instructions on which visual entertainment you would be required to enjoy. This is only a test.

  March 26, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Runnin' Zombies

  I was over at Wil Wheaton's site reading about his twisted views on life. He recently went to see Dawn of the Dead and posed the question, "When did zombies start to run?"

  March 25, 2004 tv-and-movies

• Who's A Big Dummy?

  I am.

  March 24, 2004 musings

• Bigger Is Better

  A new officially unofficial expansion has been released for Neverwinter Nights. It's called the Community Expansion Pack (CEP). Several brave souls have gone through the new NWN content created by fans and posted to the Neverwinter Vault. They've categorized, standardized, and compiled the best of the best into one large pack. It includes everything like 440 new monsters, 1400 new placeable objects, 17 new weapons, 121 new NPC portraits, and a whole lot more.

  March 24, 2004 neverwinter-nights

• Sync? What's That?

  Did you know that these cool new LCD and Plasma TVs add a delay into the video signal? Well, they do. I'm no expert but I would imagine it has something to do with converting the analog video signal to a pixel-based digital display.

  March 23, 2004 audio

• Gas Prices Up Again

  According to this article, the average price of a gallon of gas nationwide has reached a record high. Experts are predicting it to go higher in the next two months during the "run-up to the summer driving season". Still no mention of peak oil though.

  March 23, 2004 oil

• Henchman Inventory and Battle AI v1.02

  Tony K has developed a great add-on to Neverwinter Nights which improves the AI of the game. In its default setting, the new AI will make your henchmen (the computer-controlled people who fight with you) much smarter. There are many additional options in this add-on including making the monsters you encounter smarter.

  March 22, 2004 neverwinter-nights

• Get Your RPG Game On

  Neverwinter Nights is an amazing fantasy computer game that comes as close to reproducing traditional pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons as is probably possible. The original game has a large single-player adventure and there are two official expansions available (Shadows of Undrentide, and Hordes of the Underdark) which add new content and options, and each also has a new adventure. For those of you who like to play RPG computer games by yourself this is pretty great.

  March 22, 2004 neverwinter-nights

• The Big Picture

  This isn't strictly an "Audio" entry. In fact it's more of a "Video" entry, but I since those two things are often tied together I thought I would include it here as opposed to "Musings" or "Star Trek" or something.

  March 21, 2004 audio

• Maybe It's Because I'm Now 30

  I had a conversation with my mother today about buying my own house. (Or more probably my own condo.) This isn't exactly a new conversation, in fact we've been having it more or less regularly for the last year now. It's a bit of a scary proposition, especially here in Los Angeles. Property values are very high--that's why I say it's more likely that my first purchase would be a condo. I can still live in the Los Angeles area are actually buy a condo for something around the $200,000 to $300,000 range. And by "the Los Angeles area" I mean LA proper, Hollywood, near Valley areas like Burbank, Glendale, North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks. Something on the westside might be nice. Closer to the beach means cooler weather. Of course if often means higher prices too. I have no desire to go live out in the high desert, Palmdale or some such place, just so that I can own a cheap home. And an actual house in the areas I'm talking about is going to start at half-a-million for a piece of junk.

  March 19, 2004 musings

• So Long And Thanks For All The Tracks

  I was driving around looking for lunch--as I often do in the 12pm - 1pm timeframe--listening to Steve Jones' radio show on Clear Channel's take on indie radio here in Los Angeles, 103.1 FM, when Jonesy said that J.J. Jackson had died of a heart attack last night. It was like someone hit me with a hammer.

  March 18, 2004 musings

• Sign the Peak Oil Statement

  Com\Bat\Rac\Coon posted a link to the Citizens Committee On Oil Peak And Decline statement that is "designed to be published in national and local newspapers, news magazines, the United Nations, NGO newsletters, and any other organ of public discussion". It would be good for everyone to read the statement and sign it. Peak Oil is going to be the single most important political, social and economic factor in the nation's and world's development in the next 50 years.

  March 18, 2004 oil

• Other Kitty!

  March 18, 2004 photos

• Get In The Ring For Round Two

  I've mentioned before my trip to Saginaw for my cousin's wedding. It was great to see a lot my relatives from my dad's side of the family. I hadn't seen some of them in 10 years or more. A big problem with the wedding is that my cousin is 21 and I'm 30. So of course it was open field day on Jon time.

  March 18, 2004 musings

• What's With All These Enterprises?

  There have been many ships called Enterprise over the years. The opening credit sequence to "Star Trek: Enterprise" shows a few of them including the 19th century British warship H.M.S. Enterprize and the Space Shuttle test vehicle Enterprise.

  March 17, 2004 star-trek

• Monkeys + Robots

  Wil has a new show, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! Reminds me of some of the things talked about in an old zine I worked on. Of course the new show sounds like it's going to feature robot monkeys. As we all know monkeys and robots don't usually get along, sometimes they just bicker, but often it results in all-out fighting.

  March 17, 2004 musings

• Kitty!

  March 17, 2004 photos

• Say What You Mean

  I've recently seen several ads of TV supporting G.W. for prez. In fact G.W. himself says something like "Approved by George W. Bush" at the end of all of them.

  March 16, 2004 musings

• Deva Sound Files and Damaged Resource Forks

  A lot of sound recording for film and television is moving to the Deva II hard disk recorder. They've been around for several years but if the recent conversations I've had with production mixers are any indication, we fear change.

  March 16, 2004 audio

• Star Trek Timeline

  This is a simple timeline for the Star Trek TV shows and movies to help new fans keep the events straight.

  March 15, 2004 star-trek

• To Boldly Go

  There are a lot of Star Trek fans out there. There are a lot of people who can talk about the minutiae of the various series. But I also suspect that there are people who are interested in Trek but might be a little afraid to "get into" it. There is a certain amount of geekiness that goes along with being a Trek fan, and that can be a little scary to new-comers. There is also a huge canon of material that makes up the Star Trek universe. Where do you start? How does it all fit together? How can you hope to make sense of something that has been established over decades?

  March 14, 2004 star-trek

• Peak Oil

  About a month ago I came across a website that changed my outlook on life. Frankly it scared me. I haven't as yet completely figured out how this will change things for me in the long run, nor have I entirely come to grips with what this will mean for the future. However, I think it is critical that everyone out there is aware of this, because we as a society, as a nation, and as a species need to decide our fate.

  March 14, 2004 oil

• Fearless Leader

  I'm so glad that these people are in charge of our country:

  March 13, 2004 news

• Real Life Adventures

  I have my car back! Woo hoo!

  March 11, 2004 news

• Tension Mounts

  I could be receiving good news literally any second now. I'm not going to jinx myself and say anything else. There'll be a full update when the final word is in.

  March 10, 2004 news

• It's Too Damn Hot

  I don't know what the weather is like where you are but here in Los Angeles it is literally 90°F (32°C)! In March! Yes, this is Southern California. Yes, we have warmer weather than other places. However, it is still technically winter and we are having temperatures that many places have during the summer. I just checked the weather on the South Shore of Boston (my hometown)... IT'S SNOWING! 90 on one coast, snowing on the other. Crazy.

  March 8, 2004 musings

• Days Go By So Slowly

  Illness really isn't all that fun.

  March 7, 2004 musings

• I'll Be Back

  I've been half-watching The Terminator in the background while working on the how best to use this program to publish a weblog. I have to say, even twenty years later, it's a pretty great movie. Yes by todays standards a lot of the special effects are definitely dated. But still there's something about practical effects--miniatures, puppets, and other pieces and events that interact with the actors in "reality"--that is so much more convincing than CGI. Yes, you can get shots now that were never possible in 1984, but somehow sticking an actor in front of a green screen and painting in the special effects later doesn't seem as realistic as an actor being menaced by an actual evil robotic arm.

  March 6, 2004 musings

• Hail & Well Met!

  Welcome to the newly redesigned MFTI. I hope to occasionally update this page with my thoughts, interesting websites, and programs that I'm working on.

  March 6, 2004 news