Eyefood

It’s been 20 years since I went on a family trip to the Burren in County Clare. One of the highlights that I always remembered was seeing these two guys on the gravestones in the church at Kilfenora.

Things have changed a lot since I was there–there’s now a glass roof over the church, and a lot of the things have been moved around–presumably to preserve them. These two guys (the one on the right is my favourite) used to be inside the old part of the church, but have been moved inside the newer bit.

From having to do a lot of MPEG2 encoding over the past week, and a renewed familiarity with Compressor, it occurs to me that I could replace all of the scripts that I wrote that took uploaded video to the School site—and used ffmpeg to prepare them for the web—with some watched folders.

Plus it could link into the network and spread the encoding load.

Hm

I must just say, that the most beautiful woman in the world is finally not only in the same continent as myself, but happens to be soundly asleep next door in our bedroom, and that I am–frankly–the luckiest guy on the planet.

Just thought you’d like to know

I should, really, start making more pieces of work. I’ve had somewhat of a lull for the past couple of years, knocking out only a couple of pieces, tied up (as I am) with the more ‘developmental’ side of what it is that I do.

It’s a hard balance, to be honest, trying to make sure that all aspects of what it is that you think you do get satisfied–I teach, I make, I build–and it’s not always possible to not let one of those blot the others out.

Anyway, whatever, this is what I would call machinima, personally

I am known, widely apparently, for the number of old and deaded Macs that I have a tendency to hoard. I have no idea why I started, but somewhere along the line I decided that these wonderful boxes of potential shouldn’t be thrown away just because a new model came out, and tried to find uses for them all.

I never actually managed that (I tried to get an Ethernet->AppleTalk network working once so that I could use a Mac Classic to read my email, without much success, and my “Apache on a Mac Plus” plan came to absolutely nothing), but, for one reason or another, I seem to have a few of them in this flat that aren’t doing much.

Anyway, bleh, they all seem to have something wrong with them.

The battery on my MacBook Pro gave up the ghost long before I inherited it, and while I’m waiting for a replacement, I have a chain of extension cables attached to it so that I can carry it around the flat without unplugging it.

(Although I invariably manage to clumsily pull out the power cord at just the wrong moments - like half-way through a Skype conversation with Amiee)

Also, the CD/DVD Drive is borked, having been dropped, and I managed to get a CD stuck in it. So everytime I do knock out the power cable and have to restart, it takes about 10 minutes for the Mac to try and spin it up and boot off it, before giving up.

My beautiful little 12″ Powerbook’s hard drive has developed some bad blocks recently (just, coincidentally of course, at the moment when I dropped it at work), and has long periods of freezing while it tries to remember that it can’t use that bit of the disc.

My G3 iBook is still going strong, except that I’m using gaffer tape to keep the CD tray shut, and it’s just not powerful enough to do anything other than looking at four-year-old web pages on.

But (and this is the point of all of this), up until recently I had a trusty iMac here, nicked from work as a ‘replacement’ for my G5 which I took in (because I had no decent machine to work on there). I had this idea that it would be a perfect little home media centre - I was going to plug my EyeTV into it, and set it all up so that it had all our music and TV shows and films on it (all beautifully play-listed in iTues) and we’d be able to access them from anywhere in the flat.

But (again) something went wrong with it a couple of weeks ago, and I found myself desperately trying to rescue six months of work onto an external hard drive from the horrors of Single User Mode. (Hold down ‘Apple-S’ while rebooting, and prepare to completely screw your Mac up)

Ever since then, it’s been a bitch to work with. It freezes every few seconds, and has become hideously unresponsive. I tried to get EyeTV working on it (even upgrading to version 3 - which is stunningly good BTW), but the pauses were just too infuriating to be able to watch anything with.

I have absolutely no idea what is wrong with it. All my usual tricks (like fsck) seem to have no effect whatsoever. I even completely erased and reinstalled the system on it, to no avail. I used to be really good at fixing Macs - back in the days of OS 9 and before. Usually all you had to do was take out the odd Extension or Control Panel, and things would be zippy again.

Also. The hard disk I resuced everything onto, has stopped spinning up. This worries me.

Kisa Naumova posted a moving image.

Markay Olinger: yay
Kisa Naumova: hahahaha
Kisa Naumova: show me your ruin though
Markay Olinger: hahaha
Kisa Naumova: hahaha
Kisa Naumova: Hahahahahahahahaha
Markay Olinger: splendid
Kisa Naumova: fortunately, I wasn’t filming that
Kisa Naumova: ooooh
Kisa Naumova: do you mind if I film this?
Markay Olinger: sure
Markay Olinger: i dont know why this panel has flipped round
Kisa Naumova: which one?
Markay Olinger: this one
Kisa Naumova: ah
Kisa Naumova: could it be in the texture tab?
Markay Olinger: the texture was right before
Kisa Naumova: you can flip textures in there
Kisa Naumova: sometimes, SL does weird things
Kisa Naumova: it’s been playing up a lot recently
Kisa Naumova: you’ve got a bit of z-clashing texture going on there
Kisa Naumova: I think there are two prims?
Markay Olinger: hmm that one isn’t right either
Kisa Naumova: z-clashing happens when two prims are at the same level
Kisa Naumova: try deleting one of them
Markay Olinger: yeah i must have duplicated one by accident or something
Kisa Naumova: what’s the plan for the ruin?
Markay Olinger: firsat i need more photos to use as backdrops
Kisa Naumova: aha
Kisa Naumova: ok
Markay Olinger: then I’m going to continue with the building
Markay Olinger: and put up the work I do inside the buildings
Kisa Naumova: I see
Markay Olinger: hmm i just fixed that floor and now its gone back to how it was
Kisa Naumova: may i?
Kisa Naumova: move that up a bit
Kisa Naumova: see?
Kisa Naumova: two of them
Kisa Naumova: yeah
Kisa Naumova: you had a duplicate
Markay Olinger: yeah, not sure why :/
Kisa Naumova: shift-drag by mistake
Cyrus Huffhines is Online
Kisa Naumova: maybe?
Kisa Naumova: I do that all the time
Markay Olinger: probably
Kisa Naumova: cool
Kisa Naumova: anyway, I’m being dragged away by CAP students
Kisa Naumova: haha
Kisa Naumova: catch you later
Markay Olinger: cya
Markay Olinger: is there a meeting here?
Markay Olinger: i think ian mentioned something
Kisa Naumova: um, not tonight I don’t think
Markay Olinger: ok
Kisa Naumova: he’ll have put a notice on the site in the Habitat group
Ordinal Howdah Pistol v0.43: Currently drawn and loaded with 2 rounds of .61 buckshot ammunition. ‘/11 draw’ to draw or holster, ‘/11 menu’ for further options.
Ordinal Howdah Pistol v0.43: Currently drawn and loaded with 2 rounds of .61 solid ammunition. ‘/11 draw’ to draw or holster, ‘/11 menu’ for further options.
Markay Olinger: dont wanna be on fire again
Kisa Naumova: hahaha
Kisa Naumova: cu