Hey look! A Poll!!!!!!

Yeah, I caved in.

We got "Star Wars" today and we're watching "A New Hope" right now. They did a great job cleaning it up. If it wasn't for the Lucassinine additions and changes it would be perfect. We also got "The Alamo" as well. I loved it in the theatre but I think that has more to do with me being a loyal Texican that the actual quality of the movie.

Nice box! Originally uploaded by pi22seven.

Hey that's my idea! Give it back!!!!!

Some Cannuckrian stole my word and fucked it all up!!!!

2 weeks is a long time.

Today at work we found out that there would be layoffs. This is the second round of layoffs for us since 9/11.

250 people will lose thier jobs corporate wide. About half will be at one property with the other half spread out between 12 or so other sites.

My station is running pretty lean as is and our GM said there would be 3 to 6 people gone. He said that it would happen within the next 2 weeks.

That's a long wait.

While I'm a little nervous, I'm not worried. I'm lucky that I went into the "creative" side of TV as a writer/producer/director/editor. Computers can't create, yet. But they can do other jobs.

We were going to lose staff next year anyway due to automation in our operations department and management will prolly try to wrap those positions into our cuts now to try to lessen the blow to our staff.

There's a "dead man walking" vibe in the building now. When you chat with someone you're wondering if they're gonna get cut.

Even though I've gone through the waiting before, it's not something you get used to.

It sucks.

GROW

You will hate me for this.

Sorry.

Gmail invites Part III

I still have about 12 Gmail invites left, but I got tired of looking at my silly little invite button and pulled it from the site.

If for some reason you want an invite and haven't gotten one yet feel free to let me know.

So you too can bare the burden of the Gmail invites.

a reminder

while it is the anvil that is beaten, it is the hammer which breaks.

the daily grind...

Work is work.

Even if it's something you enjoy it's work.

I love what I do. I get to create TV. It's still magic to a lot of people, myself included and I get to be a part of it.

But there are times when I'm not being creative, when I'm just stringing words and images together to appeal to the LCD; times when I am just cranking out "product" to make deadlines and to give the client what they want. At that point I am in the daily grind that millions of other workers live in day in and out.

While I don't do my job for the creative outlet, it's a nice bonus.

But none of that today. Today I made video Big Macs™.

LOST: 1 Camera Memory Stick

Imagine finding a camera memory stick in a taxi in New York City.

What do you do with it?

Most of us would either give it to the cabbie or we'd be thinking "Score!" and keep it for ourself.

This guy decided to make a blog posting a picture a day. And making up the story of the owner as he goes along.

I hope the owner sees the blog and gets his/her pictures back.

Brilliant.

Johnny Ramone dies at 55

I saw The Ramones for the first time when I was 14. It was my first concert and about 7 of us crammed into a car with somebody's mom driving and headed to Austin. Two of us didn't even have tickets. We got to the Armadillo and there were about 10 people in line. Then we heard music. It was The Ramones doing their soundcheck. After about 10 minutes it was quiet. Then one of our guys said "Hey, it's them" and bolted.

ramones Originally uploaded by pi22seven.

The other people in line said bullshit. But we followed and there they were.

They talked to us for about 15 minutes. Thanked us for driving from San Antonio to see them. When they found out 2 of us didn't have tickets for the show they had the their manager leave them tickets at the box office.

What strikes me now though is how normal they were. They weren't stuck up. They didn't act like rock stars. They were regular guys.

They split and we got back in the line that had grown to about 40 people. The guys at the front jokingly asked us how the Ramones were. We said they were doing great and that they got a couple of us in the show for free. They laughed then figured out we weren't joking.

The show was great. We wormed our way to the front and we had our arms on the stage right in front of Johnny. I couldn't tell what they played, just that the songs were loud and separated by Dee Dee's "1,2,3,4!"s.

But I had a hero after that night. And he played a Mosrite.

Crash! Boom! Bang!

Today was blech day and to top it off I'm writing this post on my
Handspring.

At work I had the pleasure of editing a poorly written PSA. I guess it
wasn't that bad, it just lacked heart.

Josh had a football game today at 4:30. I don't get off until 6ish. But
my boss Randy let me off early so I was able to see Josh's team win. He
stayed at the game while the B team play and to ride the team bus back
to school.

I left for home. And got into an accident.

No one was hurt and the other guy's car had minor taillight damage and
light fender damage. The Vista-Cruiser in some cruel twist of fate
suffered MAJOR damage to the front-right fender.

I was technically at fault, but that's more stuff than I want to tap
out on a Palm.

Oh yeah, I have a Palm...

Actually, I don't have a Palm. I have a Handpsring.

Yeah, I know, same thing.

I haven't used it since I got the PiPod last Fall. There is a limit to how many pieces of tech you can hang off your belt without looking like a total jackass. That magic number is exactly 2 so after the iPod and the phone got on my belt, the Handspring got to stay at home.

I dusted it off and tried to power it up.

But it didn't. Well, hell.

Thinking it needed new batteries I pulled it out of it's case and took off the battery cover. Here's the strange part, I was actually smart enough to pull the batteries out beforee I mothballed the thing.

I crammed some AAAs in and it started up fine.

I used to use that thing all the time at work, but now... it's really amazing how much information you can get on a scrap of paper.

I don't know what the hell to do with it now.

Advice to clients

Please don't feel like you can ask me to lie about how much time I have spent working on your commercial so your costs are less.

Don't try to bribe me with merchendise from your store in an attempt to get me to lower your bill.

Don't act like we are best friends so you can ask me for favors.

I guess what I am trying to say is that even though I am in TV, I haven't sold my soul. I have honor. I have self respect. I want to be the man that my family expects me to be.

Wear a helmet. Just wear one.

My next door neighbor Troy got a new motorcycle a couple of months ago.
He's ridden his whole life but took the last couple of years off.

When I got home from work Saturday morning he was riding down our
street without a helmet. He seemed to be having a blast.

Last night about 11ish my son bolted into the living room saying that
he'd heard a noise outside. I went outside with a flashlight to
investigate. There seemed to be something going on in front of the
next house so I went over to get a closer look. I dudcked back in for
a second to say it was nothing to worry about, then went back out.

Troy had hit my other next door neighbor's SUV from behind at a decent
speed. His motorcycle was laying in the road all busted up. Glass was
everywhere and I was bare footed. The guy across the street was in his
PJs holding a towel over Troy. Troy was bleeding. A lot. His wife and
his brother were standing nearby holding each other, just kinda
stunned.

Troy was busted up bad. He was bleeding bad from a few places on his
head, his leg was bent funny and his speech was slurred. He kept
trying to get up saying nothing was wrong, so I kept him down. He said
his leg hurt so we shifted him on his side and he seemed to feel
better. I took the towel and bunched it up on the side of his head to
keep the flow of blood down. I took his bike gloves off to make more
comfortable. He wanted something to drink but I wouldn't let them give
him anything because we didn't know what was broken inside.

The ambulance came about 15 minutes later. The put him on a back board
and locked down his head. Luckily he was inside the ambulance before
the news crews showed up so they couldn't get a shot of his face. The
ambulance pulled away I went inside.

Mary was waiting at the end of our driveway. I told her what happened
as we went in.

In the light I noticed that I had Troy's blood on my hands and arms.
When I washed up Mary thought it was mine.

Troy's family was at the hospital all day so we didn't get any news on
him. But the newscasts tonight said that his injuries weren't life
threatening.

When we went out today the pavement was stained where he laying. There
had been a lot of blood.

If he had been wearing a helmet he may have walked away from the accident.

Stoooopid FlickR!

isn't loading my images!!

Our new newcular pals! Maybe.

Evidence suggests that North Korea may have joined the Nuclear Club. This would be a bad thing since their leader might actually be crazy.

But this suggests otherwise. Hmmm. If this wasn't a nuclear explosion then the base they had there prolly isn't anymore.

So here we are, 3 years later...

I had a long post about 9/11 ready. I almost hit publish post, then I realized that nothing I could write would ever be worthy of what happened.

I hope we've learned from what happened. I'm still angry at the ones responsible for changing the world that my son has to grow up in.

I grieve for the victims and for what we've lost.

Now I'm pissed at Musician's Friend!

I had the bug a couple of weeks ago, but shook it off. I had the itch, but ignored it until it went away. But now, now I feel it hitting full force. And I know in my heart that I am weak, that I will break soon. I know that the forces that have kept me from buying some new piece of guitar gear will be defeated and I will have to explain some new purchase to my wife. My son got a Musician's "Friend"(ha!) catalog in the mail last week and with a Pavlovian response my mouth watered and I leafed through the guitars. They say love at first site is possible and I believe. There it is, the Gretsch Duo Jet. That's prolly what I'm gonna have to explain. And when Mary kills me for buying it, Josh will have a new guitar.

duojet Originally uploaded by pi22seven.

If only President Bush were President...

Yeah, I know it's a week late, but this article by William Saletan brings up many good points about President Bush's RNC acceptance speech.

Every time the President speaks I get a feeling that we are at a pivotal time in history. If Bush gets the office a second time I feel he will take the nation in a direction that we'll never be able to correct.

If you aren't registered to vote, please do so here.

Thanks to Lisa for the link.

w00t! teh 100th post!!!111!

I said w00t!

Just another day, again.

I hate 4 day work weeks.

I feel like I'm falling behind. But I guess that's because I am. I brought a couple scripts home to work on, but life just got in the way so they didn't get written. So I'll have to bust them out out early at work tomorrow.

Hopefully tomorrow goes by fast. I am so fucking ready for the weekend.

Newer site

This week I started working on a family site for my, uhm, family. I also tried to make it as easy as possible for my wife who's not as computer savvy as she likes to think.

I went with a combination of Blogger, iPhoto, Transmit and ms11.net. The Blogger bit is so it'd be easy for us to just throw up the quick update. She's pretty good on iPhoto already. But the whole ftp things gonna blow her mind.

I hate forgetters.

I wanted an address on Blogger for a family blog but some German dude
is camped on the site.

I can't get in touch with him because he left no way to contact him on
his site. He has 3 entries and that's it. Blogger won't contact him and
I respect that.

What it all means is that I won't get a chance to beg some German dude
for a website he's prolly forgotten about.

Public Service Announcement

Re-ripping 2000 plus songs from CD to iPod takes a long time.

SMART MOVE APPLE!!!11

I started having probs with my iPod about 2 weeks ago. It didn't want to play a few songs, so thinking they were somehow corrupted I deleted them. When I tried to put the re-ripped songs back on the iPod I got the error message "error ( -36)".

Hmmm.

I didn't think much about it at the time and just ejected and unplugged and listened to what I had for a while.

Then about a week ago the iPod started to act all goofy so I hooked it up to my iMac to see what was up and it wouldn't mount on the desktop and iTunes couldn't see it either. But Disc Utility could see it so I tried to repair the iPod. No go. It wasn't able to fix whatever was wrong with it so I formatted the drive and installed the iPod software on the pod.

Then I opened iTunes to throw my music back on. The transfer went good, then slowed, then stopped. The the -36 error message popped up again.

Aw, crap.

I repeated the process a couple of times and ended up with the same result. And it always stopped the transfer with 8.47 gigs of space left.

I didn't want to call Apple because the iPod is a 10 gig, 3G way out of the 90 free call service and I have an aversion to being charged $60 just to talk to anyone. So I searched the the support site for any info and found a thread where a guy with the same trouble as me was able to waltz into an Apple Store with his broken iPod and walk out with a new replacement. This sounded very promising unless the guy was full of crap.

I decided that sending my iPod off to get repaired was for losers and planned a road trip to the closest Apple Store. I was planning to drive from San Antonio all the way to Houston but found out that they had a store in Austin. So today after I got home from work the fam piled in to the Jeep.

Josh and I went to the SoHo Apple Store when we were in NY last summer, but this one was in a mall. When we walked in I almost got a headache from the whole store being so white. It was just so odd visually.

After signing in for an appointment to see a "genius", we walked the mall for a while until our time came up.

The genius guy was real cool and did exactly what I did to try and fix the iPod and said "Let me get you a new one" after about 5 minutes. I almost freaked. A new one? NFW! thoughts of me with a new 4G iPod danced through my head in a geeky way.

Then he came out with the box and said it would be no charge, did some warranty stuff at the computer and we swapped iPods.

Then I noticed that the iPod he gave me was a NEW 10GIG 3G IPOD. Where the hell did he get that? They haven't sold 10gig 3Gs for a few months and they already have the new 4Gs in the stores! But I guess they held on to that older inventory for people wanting replacements like me. Still I can't bitch, I feel like I pulled off some heist and got a free iPod.

This time though I'm gonna put a screen protector on it.

This could change everything

New Scientist says that we may have found a signal from another planet.

Maybe.

If it really does turn out to be a signal from a civilization from a far off planet then our lives will change.

We won't be alone anymore. We'll know someone is out there.

What if we're actually able to understand the message?

Stoooooopid iBook!

The stupid power connector socket thingy has gone all wonky on my rev a clamshell!

I need to get it fixed but I don't want to send it to Apple. There's a guy local who can fix it but I don't really have the cash. I do have a G4 Powerbook ac adaptor that I can trade for repairs.

I hope the barter system isn't dead.

trashing tv

I started another blog the other day using a different alias.

It was me posting acid stuff about the tv industry. I figured since I was in the business that I could offer some behind the scenes kinda commentary and dish out the shit when needed.

Great idea. But a suit from work who I turned on to blogger found the site.

So in a preemptive move borrowed from the Russian Army during WWII, I scrapped the blog before it could be used against me.

So now I have to come up with a new alias, and a new blog title and get going again.

I should have archived the site so I could do one big copy and paste.