I’ve fiddled with a couple of things, as you may have noticed. Okay, the one you’d notice most easily is the webcam link just above the webring bit. This isn’t my normal office-cam, but instead a cam pointed right at my (as yet unshowered) noggin here at home as I do my Blogathon duty. I think I got the caption the way I want it… and yes, I know that the colors are off. It’s a stupid old 3Com Homeconnect, and it’s finicky that way. Ugh.

A less-easily-noticed tweak is to the server itself. It turns out that the server’s been creeping steadily behind on time accuracy, so I gave it a swift kick (in the form of ‘ntpdate 10.21.80.102’) and now it’s at least within a couple of seconds of right-on-target. I noticed the problem when my first post was marked as being several minutes before 6:00 when in fact it was posted about three minutes after…

A geek’s work is never done. And by “work” I mean “tinkering,” of course!

Well, here we are, on just a few hours’ sleep, ready to tackle another Blogathon. Are you surprised that I managed to wake up on time? I’m not. It wasn’t the getting up I was worried about. It’s the staying up that gives me the ever-so-slightest bit of worry. (Okay, you pervs. Get your minds out of the gutter, now.)

What can you expect from me for the coming diurnal? I plan on throwing out some creative writing bits along the lines of the dialogues I’ve done recently. I want to review a few music albums, both new and older-but-obscure. Other than that… well, I can’t remember right now. It is awfully early in the morning for that sort of thing, wouldn’t you agree?

So. Let’s do this. Woo hoo!

Wow. Can you believe it? We’re three quarters of the way through this thing. It’s tomorrow, already. Wow.

That’s the good news. The bad news, of course, is that we’re going into the most grueling stretch of the event. We’re entering the oh-dark-hundred times, when our bodies want very much to tell us how this is quite past our bedtime, thankyouverymuch.

I’ve done without sleep before. I used to make a career of it, back when the equipment at work was far less reliable than it is today. (This was also back when I didn’t have as good of a handle on things, I admit.) I’m not as good at it as I used to be… but I still know how it’s done.

Watch me. I’ll be here. Six hours to go. Hot diggity damn.

Like many folks, my initial impression upon seeing trailers for the Michael Bay-directed summer flick called “The Island” went something like this: “Oh, they’re doing a ripoff/remake of Logan’s Run. How nice. Next!”

I then discovered that Logan’s Run has nothing to do with it. No, instead they’re remaking an entirely different movie… “Parts: The Clonus Horror.” (Or just “Clonus” if you prefer.)

Wait a minute! Are you telling me that really bad movies, bad enough to be riffed by the MST3K crew, are now fodder for big-budget remakes? What’s next, Tim Burton’s “Manos: Hands of Fate”? (Note to Johnny Depp: Don’t do it!)

This is horrifying in a new and not-particularly-delightful way.

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock for quite some time now, because I did not know about Konfabulator. How does a geek like me get this far without knowing these things? I love eyecandy, and even more so when there’s useful eyecandy to be enjoyed. If you’re running Windows on a reasonably powerful hunk of hardware, you owe it to yourself to give this baby a whirl.

(Yes, I did already know about SuperKaramba, which appears to be the Linux variant… I found it all of a couple of weeks ago. *cough, cough*)

Imagine a music video consisting of random video game footage strung together and set to a hugely popular rock song. It sounds amateurish, doesn’t it? And then, imagine that a major cable network decides to air a bunch of these videos. That sounds lame, doesn’t it?

Welcome to MTV2’s “Video Mod” program, where rock videos are reimagined using 3D game footage mixed with re-rendered band performances and what-not. There is some original content mixed in, but for the most part it’s game footage galore.

I have a little clue for the folks over at MTV: You might want to do your homework first. From what I’ve seen so far, your video editing skills are even more lacking than mine. (And I assure you that coming from someone of my meager talents, that’s a real insult.)

In case there are pedants among you who will point out that AMVs aren’t exactly the same thing: I know. I know. But it couldn’t hurt for MTV’s “Video Mod” creators to see what good videos created from existing materials can look like.