Developments...
As my blast from the past week continues, my old high school friend Tyson Vaughan has returned from living in Japan (having recently moved to in Ithica NY, to work on a graduate degree at Cornell) and he and his wife have dropped in for a visit. We'll be putting them up for a few days. Should be fun showing her the good side of the city - she's already taken great delight in the gumbo at Charlie's Seafood, around the corner from the Secret Lab.

Aside from that, I fixed my recently (see previous posts) flood-damanged office fridge (yea!) by replacing a little $12 part (a thermistor - the only electronic part that was even remotely touched by water.) That just leaves my laptop... unfortunately there's little you can do to fix a complex circuit that's taken a swim while powered up (no it wasn't plugged in - but laptops have batteries, so they're never completely powered down.) Electrolysis is NOT your friend in a situation like this, and surface mount stuff is hard as hell to repair anyway. On the other hand, the laptop is quite old and is now worth something like $112 on ebay...

Aside from that, I hung out with VidVicious last night and we experimented with HDV editing in Final Cut Pro 5 (he's got a dual 2Ghz 'Cheese Grater' G5, so he can't really run FC Pro 6 very well. I heard it was a slug anyway...) Test was pretty smooth until we got to trying chromakey compositing, at which point performance took a nosedive. Methinks I'm gonna have to get a real modern (8-core, anyone?) Mac to pull off that level of work. While I was there, he also showed me this wonderfully stupid Brooklyn based amateur TV show called 'Electra Elf and Fluffer'... it was so horrible it was great! Hypnotically bad!!! And very much a Krofft ripoff, so I know exactly where his influences were based - the same Saturday morning cesspit I used to wallow in myself! While we were at it, I told him about Channel 101, which amazingly he'd not heard of.

Over the last few days, I've been making discreet inquiries into entering 'the biz', as my office job's been REAL slow lately. Having done music studio style sound work for two decades and high level amateur videography for the past 9 years, I've amassed a good deal of equipment that's almost good enough for pro level sound work. I really should make the effort to change that to better than 'good enough', and get some sound recording gigs. Sound has always been my first love - I just avoided trying to do it for a living because, well, musicians are generally broke! TV and movie producers generally have $$$, making it a much safer bet, and there's work everywhere. Sound for picture is a thankless task, but it's something I'm good at (and more concerned with than lots of videographers I know...) So we'll see. More on this later, I'm sure.

Latest 'working computer found on side of road' for me turns out to be an 800Mhz P3 on an ASUS CUBX mainboard - a heavyweight in its day, it sports 4 IDE headers. Must have been a server or something. Best thing about it though was the free hard drive - a 200GB (yay!) Maxtor (boo!) Hard drive had an 8GB partition with XP home installed on it. (?) Ahhh well, I'm sure I can find some use for it - maybe with a fan to keep the Maxtor's heat under control.

And finally, for all you DEVOtees, this hilarious tidbit comes courtesy of CT-project.