Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

  • Testing The New Lighting Gear

    Following Dad’s suggestion, I picked up a couple of “sunlight” bulbs for scene lighting from Freddy’s. A quick trip to Office Depot netted me a pair of flexible desk lamps to put ’em in, and here are the results:

    Lighting Test: Li
    Lighting Test: Li
    Lighting Test: Li, Rusty, Score
    Lighting Test: Rusty, LI, Score

    The colored towels are there for testing purposes. As you can see, these ducks look pretty good now. My next trick will be to come up with a “set” of some kind. Mind you, I don’t plan to restrict things to just the one location, and in fact with sunnier weather on tap this weekend I’m considering getting some usable shots out-of-doors if at all possible.

    Another, albeit less critical, task that I’d like to accomplish involves some softening of the lighting. Both Dad and Uncle Pete have given some good suggestions on that, it’s just a matter of acquiring materials and performing more tests. (Oh, shucky darn, I’ll have to take more pictures. Boo hoo.)

    Progress, it is being made. Once the physical requirements are met, though, I’ll have the really tough work: Cranking out enough scripts to get a few weeks’ worth of material into the queue… and there’s the whole “gotta do something about the website design” thing, too. Ack. What have I gotten myself into?

  • Dialog Bubble Test Image

    I tried to tweet about this, but for some reason folks were getting a 404 error… even though the image link was 100% correct. So. I don’t know whether WordPress or Apache is at fault. I don’t have the luxury of time to spend tracking it down, either, especially when a simpler solution can present itself: I can blog about it! Duh!

    So. Here you go (click the image to embiggen):

    Meet Poe. He’s a pretentious little twit duck. Figures he’s named after Edgar Allen, but everyone else knows that his name’s just short for poe-zur

    (Also, I won’t be using the Dragonbones font in the actual project. I just liked how it looked during testing so I kept it in the “final” image.)

  • Ducks, Redux

    I still need to get my hands on a good light source for indoors (so if there any shutterbugs in the Rose City who have good tips on inexpensive lighting, let me know) but I wanted to show you what that earlier picture of my recently-cleaned ducks was supposed to look sort of like.

    From left to right in that photograph is the starting lineup for that silly little project I’ve been prepping for: Rei, Shimako, Roger, Sachiko, Li, Poe, Neil, Rusty and Score.

    The next bit of preparation will involve layout, image editing software & templates, and… fonts selections. Stay tuned, duck fans…

  • Duck Bathing And Color Correction

    In anticipation of taking more pics of my modest collection of not-actually-rubber ducks, I decided to clean up some of the critters that’ve been… ahem… collecting dust for a while now. Spruce them up, you see. Ready them for the limelight, or at least the flashbulb. So I gave seven of the nine “main” ducks a quick dip in warm, soapy water and a good rinsing, followed by gentle patting-down with a towel.

    Why only seven? Well, one of the stars of our show is Rusty, the cast iron duck. I don’t think he’s interested in watersports. Bad for his complexion, don’t you know. The other abstainer is our newest addition to the flock, a lovely Chinese-themed fellow that Kyla gave me this past weekend. He’s squeaky clean… thus far.

    I also learned something about Rubba Ducks. Turns out that because of their unusual composition, over time some of them start to get… a bit sticky. Treatment with dishsoap and considerable patience can keep the condition under control, but he’s never going to be the sort you cuddle and carry around for kicks. Then again, he’s the one with the lip ring. I doubt that he wants cuddles.

    Speaking of flashbulbs, I need to come up with a good indoor lighting system. Incandescent and CF bulbs aren’t going to cut it, as evidenced by the picture you see here of our starting lineup:

    My color-adjustment skills aren’t up to the task of showing you that the towel is actually a nice deep green color. Ugh. Apparently I have a long way to go before indoor photography is a viable option… and as Dad warned me, the built-in flash is probably the weakest feature on the otherwise-splendid Pentax *ist DL.

    One thing at a time. Progress is being made.

  • Or Else!

    When the scary hook-handed pirate insists that you wash your hands before returning to work, by Davey Jones you’d better pay attention! I mean, look what happened to him:

    I’ve been amused by this sticker on the bathroom door at work for years now, and finally I could no longer resist snapping a picture…

  • The Thousand-Dollar Alarm Clock

    Searching through the archives here I see that I haven’t related the backstory behind a comment I make from time to time in conversation. I joke about setting my “thousand dollar alarm clock,” and most people shrug it off as just another weird thing Karel says.

    But I’m not actually joking. My alarm clock cost $1000… after upgrades. I didn’t pay for it, of course.

    The HP 620lx “palmtop” computer hit the market in 1998. I was the newly-appointed, albeit still-part-time, wrangler of all things computerized for Entercom Portland. We were just beginning a wave of hardware purchases and expansions that would see us, eventually, in a new building and three major expansions projects thereof. At the time, however, my boss decided that I should have a PDA of some sort. After a bit of research I settled on the 620lx. Color screen! PCMCIA slot! Infrared! Windows CE 2.0! (I didn’t realize at the time that banking on a nearly-new Microsoft OS is a foolhardy endeavor at the best of times. I was young and new to the gig; cut me some slack!) Price tag, with extra-life battery: $850.

    A few months later HP released an upgrade to Windows CE 2.1 but you had to buy a ROM chip rig to get it. Another $150 later, and the machine was just a bit more useful than before… which is to say, sadly, still not all that much.

    (My friend Ben got his hands on one of the successors to the 620lx a few months later. Known as the “Jornada” something-or-other, it featured a big touch screen but only a tiny bit more processing power and memory capacity. Neat toy, ultimately useless.)

    Over time, the HP “palmtoy” simply didn’t work out for anything more useful than taking notes in meetings, scoring family Scrabble games (oddly enough, I did recently use it to score a game with the kids… Pocket Excel to the rescue, saving us all from my sloppy penmanship and questionable math skills…), and as an alarm clock. Here it is, shortly after once again performing its primary function over the past decade:

    Hey, it has five programmable alarm options! This means that I can switch between my two different wake-up times (“Am I riding public transit or carpooling tomorrow?”) and have custom alarm times for special events.

    Yes. I know. There’s another clock sitting right next to the really expensive one. The Totoro Clock is used for actual checking of the current time, not for alarms. Would you want to wake up every morning to a strident, chirpy rendition of the “My Neighbor Totoro” theme song?

    I didn’t think so.