The DVD came out half-right. The second half, that is. For some reason the audio sync on the first episode started out correct and then, about a minute into the show, went horribly wrong. I think I know what went wrong (attempting to trim the video within Nerovision Express, which wouldn’t have been a problem except I was replacing the original audio with a reworked separate track), but I suspect the only way to fix it for the next test burn will be to find a way to trim the raw capture file from outside of NVE, demux the audio track from the resulting file, re-tweak the audio, then put those two files into NVE and not worry about trimming.

Sure, that should only take a couple of hours. Did I mention that remastering the files takes about five hours for the two episodes? Whew. There’s a day’s work.

So, today, I’m not going to bother. Instead I’m going to bring over to the kids’ place a bunch of UT2004 stuff… the latest patch, some map packs, a couple of new mutators, a mod, some models, and a stats generator. We’re gonna have fun today! Heck yeah.

I was reminded, thanks to this bit of gaming humor that someone emailed me this evening, that on the way home Sunday the in-train movie was Madagascar. I won’t bore you with a lengthy review (in short: not horrible, occasionally clever, decently animated, minus points for major plot obviousness, and the lemur dance party song is too catchy for its own good) but I had to tell you about the one bit that made me laugh out loud.

Yes, I get weird looks from people I travel with quite regularly. C’mon, this is me we’re talking about.

Anyway. At one point the lemurs are in a state of panic, and one random lemur holds up a black book on which is written, “To Serve Lemurs,” and he cries out, “It’s a cookbook!”

See, it’s funny because it’s a reference to one of the more subtly dark Twilight Zone episodes. I mean the original TZ, not the watered-down nonsense we’ve seen in recent years. Anyway. During this year’s 4th Of July festivities here at the house we caught a lot of TZ (SFC runs a marathon every year), and “To Serve Man” was one of the selections. If you haven’t seen it, well, if you’ve paid attention up to this point you can guess the twist in the story.

How did I get here from there? Look at entry #8…

I probably won’t leave it like this, but I’ve swapped out the random signature picker (that which provides the silly text just below the big site logo, up there) with a random slogan picker. At first I was going to use the Sloganizer, which is awfully cool all by itself, but their code refused to play nice with Monaural Jerk’s template-based system. This merely provided me with incentive. I took some time and learned how to make my own!

function gdSlogan() {
  $sloganfile = file('/PATH/TO/YOUR/slogans.txt');
  $sloganraw = $sloganfile[rand(0,count($sloganfile))];
  $slogantag = 'XYZ';
  $sloganname = 'YourName';
    $sl1 = '<span class="randquote">';
    $sl1 .= str_replace($slogantag, $sloganname, $sloganraw);
    $sl1 .= '</span>';
  return $sl1;
}

The “slogans.txt” file consists of a bunch of… er… slogans, with the characters XYZ where one’s name should go. I then have that string replaced with, in my case, “GreyDuck” but you could use anything else you like. (Note: I also have a “span” wrapper to make the text behave accordingly with my particular stylesheet.)

Why didn’t I just write the slogans file so that my nickname would already be in place? Don’t be silly! How would I learn these little tricks if I didn’t push myself just a little bit? Besides, this means that someone who’s equally-or-less skilled at PHP-fu can take that bit o’ code and, say, my slogans file and plug them into their own site, huh?

It’s a public service, I tell ya. I’m all about helping others.

It’s a scary thing, when a geek starts getting restless. He (or she) is prone to puttering around looking for something to tweak, install, experiment upon, or otherwise futz with.

Today, I got restless. One subtle result is a slightly-modified site banner. Less-subtle results may appear in the next week or so… if, by then, I’m still interested in the projects I started today. Such is the nature of the geek-dilettante.