Rocks right now...

• Redline, a racing game from Ambrosia Software (Mac only, bitches!)
• Inform 7, a complete rewrite of the language used to write Z-code (i.e. Infocom-esque text adventure) games. Now in natural language. I can't emphasize how cool this is, even if I never do anything about it.
• The Nutcracker Suite performed by the Brian Setzer Orchestra.

And that's it, apparently. I need more rockin' in my life.

And yet I still don't have my own entry.

If Mike's name-drop is to be believed, I am one degree of separation from John Hodgman, and therefore only two degrees from two other Jons. Freaky.

Ask New Orleans.

I've already written about our practice of wrapping Christmas lights around newspaper, and writing messages thereon to be read the next year.

This year I opened up a string which we had last used on Jan. 1, 2005, right after the Asian tsunami. I had written "Any natural disasters of note?"

Sigh.

Hair Care or Digital Audio?

I got them all right on the first try. I'm quite surprised.

Hm...

Clearly when I said "liveblogging," I meant "two posts in one and that's it." But nonetheless, I'm writing this from the new iMac. I haven't really had a chance to do any speed comparisons, processor-wise, but I will say this: transferring videos to an iPod is a hell of a lot faster under USB 2.0. That is all.

Installation Liveblogging!

11:58 A.M.: Well, the new iMac arrived this morning. I'm not using it--I'm currently on my PowerBook, watching it transfer files from the old iMac. (Yes, we now have three Macs and a half of a Linux box. So sue us. We still only have one television.)

Favorite moment so far: watching K fruitlessly try to figure out where to put the Apple Remote. There's a magnet on the side of the Mac which holds it, but she was placing it on the front of the box and watching it drop several times.

Least favorite moment: watching the Transfer Assistant tell me that my old computer had about 4.9 million gigabytes of data in my home folder. Now there may be hard drives out there that hold that much, I don't know; but I'm pretty sure that my circa 2003 iMac only has an 80 gig drive. This would be, I'm pretty sure, a catalog problem with the old hard drive that I've been trying to fix for years.

So it's only transferring the Applications folder. I'll have to transfer the rest over manually. I'm not too excited about that, but what are you gonna do?

Updates throughout the day.

1:25 PM: I think I need to get a new Wacom tablet driver. After the apps and so on were transferred, a dialog box popped up that said "Tablet driver not operating because you aborted." So I hit OK... and it came back. So I hit OK... and it came back. This continued until I had finished the setup assistant and booted into Mac OS, when I ran the program to remove the tablet software entirely.

Now I'm manually transferring the files from my old home folder to the new one. Yawn...

Code Monkey like remixes.

So there's a Code Monkey remix contest goin' on, and being the huge Jonathan Coulton fan that I am, I just had to enter. So get your dancing shoes on and rave to this:

Code Monkey (Zach Brewster-Geisz remix) (4.3 MB, 3:54)

If you don't know the original song, you should listen to it and buy a copy here. Come on, it's only a buck.

What Kind of Dawg?

Hip-hop-happenings at the Gonnas myspace page. Just uploaded a new mix of our canine hit, "What Kind of Dog Do You Wanna Be?" There's also a new mix of Whoa up which I posted Thursday. Please listen and dance and enjoy!

Hello, I'm a Mac.

Well, this weekend--and I hasten to point out, at K's insistence--we bit the bullet and ordered a new Mac. We had told ourselves that we wouldn't until our savings account hit [undisclosed] dollars. Turns out we missed that goal by about eighty bucks. Ah well. K is a federal employee, which earned us a small discount, so we decided to splurge on the 20-inch iMac with a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo (standard: 2.16 GHz) and 256MB on the ATI graphics card (standard: 128). We stuck with 1GB of RAM since I can add a chip on my own if need be, and we also stuck with a 250 GB hard drive because... well, I don't have a good reason for that. I remember hearing the advice "Always get twice what you think you'll need" back when 20 MB was considered a HUGE hard drive. I've never managed to follow it, though.

We're moving on from a 17-inch iMac G4, 800MHz, with 1 MB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX (32 MB), so needless to say, this will be a step up. It was long past time, to be honest. The power button broke off last year, so we have to turn it on by touching the bare contact in the back of the machine (we have it scheduled to turn itself on in the mornings), and the (admittedly SuperSlow) SuperDrive no longer writes properly, and reads only spottily. And in the past few weeks, the USB bus has been acting up... clearly this cookie won't be fetching a high price on eBay. (We may, actually, be giving it to D; we haven't decided yet.)

Meanwhile, I won't be putting my PowerBook G4 out to pasture just yet. ProTools isn't yet available as a Universal Binary, and I haven't upgraded Final Cut Express or Soundtrack yet. I'm thinking next spring, when Leopard comes out, maybe. But I cannot WAIT to see how fast Animation:Master runs.

And for me, the big question becomes: do I partition the hard drive so that I can run Linux as well? You see, the GIMP doesn't support pressure-sensitive drawing tablets under Mac OS X, but it does under Windows or x86 Linux. And all I have is a Mac OS 9 version of Photoshop, so that's not an option (Classic doesn't exist under Intel). I sure as shootin' ain't gonna buy Windows, but Debian Linux is very attractive...

So now, the waiting (read: obsessive tracking) game.

A test.

Here is an excerpt from George Will's column for today:

Today there are many fewer Iraqis than there were three years ago. This is not just, or even primarily, because so many Iraqis, especially from the mobile middle class, have fled the country, taking with them the human capital -- skills, attitudes, mores -- requisite for a successful society. Rather, many -- and more every day -- of those who remain in Iraq no longer think of themselves as Iraqis. It is too dangerous to identify with the nation.

Can you think of another reason, possibly even the primary one, why there are now fewer Iraqis than there were three years ago?

Tell me there's no global warming.

This has been a bizarre week here in the greater D.C. area. It's been spring, except without leaves on the trees. For instance, I'm writing from my front porch stoop, while my kids play with the neighbors at a nearby playground. All of us without jackets. On December first!

The whole week has been like that, and in fact today is colder than most, with severe (albeit non-chilling) gusts of wind foretelling the end of the Indian summer, probably tomorrow (although it was supposed to end today, so who knows). I realize, of course, that much of the Midwest is blanketed under snow, and we'll be deluged with rain sometime after nightfall, but nevertheless, it's sure nice to enjoy this brief reprieve from the inevitable descent of winter.

What are we gonna do now, Brain?

The Gonnas continue in their plan to take over the world. Latest step: The Gonnas' MySpace page. A slightly smaller selection than the late, lamented Gonnas Radio, but infinitely better quality and convenience. Plus, you don't have to listen forever to get to the "studio" recordings.

The dirty secret: one of the listeners mentioned that the compression on the radio made Rex sound like he was singing underwater. Guess what: he always sounds that way.

The Bouncing Pictures Meme.

Here's something fun for you to try (probably better on an small-image-heavy site, like a forum or something). Copy the following text:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i<DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5 ); void(0)

Now paste it in your address bar, and watch the pictures dance...

edit: Yeah, it doesn't work here. Try it elsewhere.

More music.

The theme for this month's KVR song contest is "Eat Me"... create a piece about food.

So here it comes:
Pasta (Stay-at-Home Dad's Lament) 1.9 MB

I kinda like it.

Larry King...

poised to become chairman of the House subcommittee on the Internet. (via Mike.)

Slug Not So Power.

Hooray, I seem to have bricked it.

Letter from a putz weakling.

I know I shouldn't write this, because it'll eventually show up in the Google, but becoming Board President of the local nursery school may be the worst decision I've made since college (and the famous "study for LSATs, or streak in the quad?" fiasco).

It's not that the job is hard, or that I don't understand what it entails. Basically, it's far past time that I realized that, organizationally speaking, I'm a follower, not a leader.

I have consistently let things slide that I know must be done, and forgotten other things. I haven't been in good communication with my co-board members. Hell, I haven't even followed up on my own housekeeping tasks, which is required for all members of the school, let alone those in leadership positions!

Also, though it may well be that I'd have found an excuse anyway, I suspect that at least part of the reason that I haven't done much animation lately is the stress of this Presidency. Not that I've been doing much about it lately--as the previous paragraph proves--but the simple fact that it's there, sitting in the back of my mind, paralyzing me. It's like a story I heard about an airline pilot who, after years of perfect service, was rewarded with less flight time and a desk job. He started doing barrell rolls in the plane. They took the admin stuff away, and he was perfectly happy flying again.

My predecessor graciously offered to help with advice and so forth should I need it. But I have a feeling she didn't mean she would help me overcome my own neuroses, so what help would I ask her? No one can fix this but me, but I'm so beyond help, what do I do?

Wikipedia made a funny!

From The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (emphasis added):

Another possibility [that Marvin knows the answer] to the Ultimate Question is presented in the third book, Life, the Universe and Everything. Often complaining about having a "brain the size of a planet", (this would presumably be necessary to work out the Question, as the Earth was created for this purpose according to the series, and is also, approximately, the size of a planet)...

Nooz.

The Big Bad Swim won Best Feature at Annapolis. So at least I was associated with a winner.

(Best I could hope for, really, with the competition I had. I tend to do well at new festivals. Established ones, not so much.)

Bleargh.

Rather like a Philadelphia cheese steak, I do not travel well.

The good news, though, is that yesterday's screenings happened. Impressively, the kid-friendly screening at NYC Shorts was sold out. I figured they'd be lucky to get ten people, but I guess parents in New York pay attention to odd cultural events, unlike (gross generalization warning) parents in D.C. The Cell-Phone was very well received, and I got the lion's share of the questions afterward, though in fairness that's probably because my short was second-to-last.

The major standout of the evening--er, afternoon--was "The Danish Poet," a beautiful, hand-drawn animation that was both funny and profound. It featured the voice talent of Liv Ullmann, so it was a wee bit out of my league, obviously. But it earned my vote for best of the night.

(I see from the Wikipedia entry that Ullmann directed an adaptation of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, a novel which actually plays a major role in "The Danish Poet"'s plot. So I guess they had an "in.")

(Did I punctuate that correctly? "The Danish Poet"'s. "The Danish Poet's." Argh, I dunno.)

After the screening, I wished a fond farewell to Mike (we bowed, in the Japanese fashion) and hoofed/subwayed it to Penn Station, where I actually arrived in time, if I had hurried a bit, to catch a train an hour earlier. I elected to relax a bit instead. I arrived at the New Carrollton train station at 6:20, with plenty of time to make a 7:30 screening in Annapolis. So off we went.

As I've mentioned, "Soap Opera" was opening for The Big Bad Swim, a feature. I suspected that being a short opener is kinda like being the red-headed stepchild of the evening, and my introduction bore this theory out (and remember, kids, "Brewster-Geisz" rhymes with "Rooster Spice"):

Presenter: ... and also, the director of "Soap Opera," Zachary Brewster.... um, I'm not sure how to pronounce it...

Me: (from my seat) Geisz.

Presenter: Um, Zachary Brewster-Geese? Is he here?

Me: (walking down the aisle) Geisz.

Presenter: Oh, yes--this is Zachary Brewster-Geezy.

Me, the other director, and half the audience: GEISZ!

After that it could only get better, although the only questions I was asked were the usual: "How long did it take to produce?" and "How much did it cost?" I didn't begrudge this; The Big Bad Swim was a fantastic film which deserved the lion's share of the attention. In fact there was an odd connection which I think I've mentioned before: when I went to CTFF in October-ish with "The Cell-Phone," I met the film's producer, who like me grew up in Westport, Connecticut. At the time, though, Annapolis hadn't released its schedule, so I had no idea another film of mine would be opening for hers.

I passed out a few business cards (Microsoft Word specials I had printed out Friday morning) and then we headed home. In a perfect world, I'd be flying to Chicago today... but we don't live in a perfect world. I blame the Democrats.