Current Mood: embarrassed

Due to circumstances beyond my control (ie. they called my bluff), I’ll be attending Frolicon as an invited guest and speaking on several panels:

• Friday, March 21, 2008

  2:00p-3:15p - Chronicles of Gor Discussion in Hunnicut C

  3:30p-4:45p - Amateur Erotica Discussion in Dekalb

• Saturday, March 22, 2008

  2:00p-3:15p - Erotica in the Mainstream discussion in Dekalb

  3:30p-4:45p - Hentai discussion in Medlock Auditorium

No, there will not be tentacle-demon-thing demonstrations in the Hentai discussion. I promise.

No, really, I promise.

C’mon down and catch my madness if you’re so inclined. I’ll be the guy with the burned out retinas and the horrified look on his face.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Black Label Society - Kings of Damnation: Era 1998-2004 - Sold My Soul (Squid's Redoubt)

You know, I’m aware I’ve just not been blogging here in any significant sense lately. I really need to do something about that at some point, but with Operation BSU eating so much of the venom I used to put into blogging, it’d just turn into a rambling morass of gaming issues and design ideas, and who wants to read that.

Still, if you’re interested in tracking my comings and goings in a more meta-sense, check out my tumble-blog at Tumblr, Madness and Flames. Properly, it has “goddamn RSS” so you can follow it through your favourite reader and conflates my Twitter feed, my Flickr posts, the links I save to my Jaanix system, and my Google Reader shared articles. One stop shopping for the stuff I think is interesting, and tracks the things flowing across my eyes regularly.

Perhaps not as exciting as my rambly, perverse thoughts, but certainly will keep you up to date.

I’m debating working up some kind of audio-blog thing I can just mutter into when the mood strikes, but I haven’t decided on technology, yet. Probably that’ll involve yet more RSS feeds.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Paul and Storm - News To Us - That's The News of the Week - Live (Squid's Redoubt)

I’m experimenting with glomming the diverse aspects of my digital shadow together into a single cohesive whole. For the moment, you can find that on my new Tumble-blog, http://squidlord.tumblr.com, which puts together photos taken, Twitters, bits shared from Google Reader, and my Jaanix additions.

Ultimately, I’m hoping Jaanix will be able to take live RSS feeds and thus replace Tumblr as the core technology there, because it lets me (and others) find new things more often..

One stop keeping up with Squid shopping!

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: MC Hawking's Dark Matter Band - Rhyme Torrents, Volume II - Mountain Kind (feat. MC Frontalot) (Squi

Or at least in an hour or two, it’ll be the moment.

Headed down the highway tryin’ to loosen my load, got multiple days of DragonCon on my mind.

You folks know where I’ll be.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Billy Joel - Complete Hits Collection, 1973-1997: Limited Edition, The - River of Dreams, The (Squid

Off to see Six Flags Over Georgia and ride a dizzying array of roller coasters and such today. Hopefully, the sunlight doesn’t kill me and I won’t feel an overwhelming need to take a nap.

What? Sunlight puts me to sleep. I don’t get it either.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Sword, The - Age of Winters - Winter's Wolves (Squid's Redoubt)

I wasn’t quite done with getting things done, of course. The BSU card was pretty much prototyped, but I need a personal card, right? One with my contact info on it as a primary thing.

So, yeah …

I originally intended to play it a lot straighter, I swear. Simple, black lettering, blocks of blue-grey with some overlapping shading, that sort of thing. I swear that’s the way it was going.

Not exactly the way it turned out.

I did pick up the salmon colour from the squid-body and echo it slightly darker on the text, which pulled the whole thing together nicely. The halo around the text is actually “paper” colour, so it’s a place where there’ll be no ink. I love being able to layer that sort of thing in InDesign … you get some nice interlacing if you want it.

I’m pretty pleased with this design. I’m vaguely tempted to redo the text and make it the official Operation BSU card, except I’d keep getting the two confused in my wallet and that’d be a bad thing. Maybe I’ll just find different squid art for it, or a nice nuclear explosion. I like the way the fonts and space work in this design. Hmmm, maybe strip the red out of the old one and just move the background grey text words over under a nuke sillhouette.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Bloodsimple - A Cruel World - Cruel World (Squid's Redoubt)

Getting things done is strangely addictive, especially if your friends have kept you distracted for most of the day. Still, I managed to get a lot of things done today, including getting Stuckey and Murray almost lined up for a show, sending an invite off to Ghoultown, and producing a commercial for BSU.

Pretty productive.

Now … tired.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: KMFDM - Xtort (2007 Remastered) - Craze (Squid's Redoubt)

I love Google Calendar. I really do. Combined with some other life methods changes, it’s making it far easier to keep up with my life.

Next up, if you want to know what’s up with the krewe and where we’ll be at Dragon*Con, possibly to join us, you can subscribe to seeing the schedule here:

Look, does anything get any easier than having your times and places to be all laid out for a Con? What time, where it is, and you can even set events to remind you on your cell! Life gets little better.

If you want to get in on this, let us know and we’ll pencil in your event or appearance for the krewe. You could have us appear at your party, just for the cost of a drink or, in my case, a cute schoolgirl!

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: W.A.S.P. - Headless Children, The - Real Me, The (Squid's Redoubt)

Just as a random note, while I’m updating things, if you want to keep up with my personal calendar of events you can subscribe to it by hitting this button:

If you look hard, you might discover secret information that the wider public doesn’t know yet! Keep it under your hat.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: W.A.S.P. - Inside The Electric Circus - Easy Living (Squid's Redoubt)

Hey, while I’m thinking about it — anyone want to go see 69 Eyes, Wednesday 13, and Fair to Midland with me on Saturday night? I mean, I could go by myself, but I’ve really been looking forward to seeing this bunch of bands together and it’s more fun with at least one more person in tow. It’d been nice if it’d been a different date, but, alas, one gets what one gets.

Just throwing it out there. I’d be willing to drive, if need be. No complaints there.

Anyone? Anyone?

Bueller?

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Various Artists - Arena Rock Classics - Get Ready For This (Squid's Redoubt)

Well, it's true.

I think by now everyone knows my Laconic Fourth of July plans. If you haven’t signed on over there to mark attendance or not, do so — now. Because, darn it, even if it’s just __oni_no_kaze__ and I sitting around drinking squidoritas and making bad-ass noises at each other as we set things on fire in my front drive, I’m having a damn party. And I’m — OK, probably not drinking, truthfully. No one deserves to see that nightmare.

That said, there’s still the matter of the 4th itself, this coming Wednesday. But we have the fix in for that, too.

That’s right. Ladies’ 80’s Night at Wild Bill’s. Teh Oni, me, and possibly stellabambino and that lot, all heading down to the biggest hardwood dance floor in the US, just to listen to the house band jam out to 80’s tracks and watch hot chicks get liquored up and squirm! Bonus: Given the average age of the 80’s enthusiast, I’m not likely to get uncomprehending stares when I admit that I like Knight Rider.

Looks of horror, yes. Uncomprehending stares, not so much!

So, yes, if you’re not otherwise engaged on the 4th, sitting in massive traffic and feeling like you really ought to be drinking and getting rowdy, come join the Squid and the Krewe out at the bar, and indulge your perversions!

If I’m feeling particularly rambunctious, I’ll take my digital recorder and get some interview bits for this coming Sunday’s show. Now won’t that be a hoot?

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Trace Adkins - Rough & Ready (Squid's Redoubt)

Just a bit random tonight:

• I dare say I think I’ll start posting shorter blog bits.

  I think Twitter has begun both spoiling me and changing how I think about blogging in general. I’ve been feeling a kind of compulsion to only post long-form writing, extended rants, or that sort of thing to my LJ, but that’s essentially irrational. There’s no reason I can’t or shouldn’t post ideas, thoughts, and/or rationalizations that are only a paragraph or two long. I’m not required to go on at length.

  I know there are several folks out there boggling at the idea of me not going on at length. Totally fair.

  Anything under 140 charas will still go to Twitter though.

• I’m going back to being nocturnal.

  I don’t really have a reason to be up during the morning hours, and frankly I haven’t been doing so much of it since I finished ABI, plus I’m just generally more aware at night. Better to stay up, get some things done between 3a and 5a, when there’s no one but me about but I feel conscious and competent, and simply not worry about it. I’m not working right now (plenty of resumes out — no call-backs) and not going to school.

  Why bother getting up?

• I need to start doing the Top Ten Podcast more often.

  Not just because it’s fun, or because it’s a solid production, or it’s good practice.

  All of those are true.

  No, the real reason is because if I post them to the Squid’s Redoubt TalkShoe feed*, the downloads will be counted, and the more downloads I get, the more jingle I’ll see in my pocket at the end of the month. Though we’re talking about “jingle,” not “crinkle,” since even with nearly 200 downloads last month, I only saw about $4. But that’s $4 I’d never have seen otherwise!

  Incidentally, Operation BSU saw 55 downloads last week across all posted episodes. That’s up from 29 the week before. Why the huge leap? I have no idea at all, but I’d like to encourage everyone that can read this to go out and tell all your friends about this fantastic call-in talk show that’s podcasting recorded episodes and that goes live every Sunday night at 9p. Oh, yes, and that can support up to 250 folks tuned in via the phone lines at any given time.

  Yeah, so, call.

  This coming Sunday, we’ll have the band Fire and Ice as our special live guests in via fabulous technology, and the week after … well, that’s a special treat. I’ll announce it closer in.

I think that’s about it for the life-updates tonight. More thoughts as they ping through my brainmeats.

I know there are some people who read my blog and not my Facebook postings, and for them I wanted to bring this:

Extremely Laconic Fourth of July

ANYONE can have a 4th of July party on the 4th. Nearly anyone can have a 4th of July party on the 1st or 8th. Only the SquidLord can have one on the 14th, though, when all the fireworks have gone on 60% off sales and the groceries are full of cheap meats! It’d be downright Unamerican NOT to attend! Drop in, eat meat, and record bits for both Top Ten and Operation BSU! Get fed, drink too much, and become an international recording star, all in the comfort of a modern evil villain’s lair!

I figured the best and most reasonable way to avoid stepping on the toes of anyone else’s party, and to arrange things so I can provide the mostest for the cheapest, would be to schedule off-axis, as it were. What’s so special about the Fourth that we can’t get sated enough on each of our individual kicks that we won’t know the difference?

To that end, I humbly ask folks to sign up on the Facebook event profile and, perhaps, mention what yummy, delicious goodness you’ll be bringing to the party, whether it be offerings of meant to be burnt ritually on the sanctified grill, fluids suitable only for the Gods of thunder and might to be drunk by we merry band of archons, or merely the bodies of schoolgirls, dressed in the right and proper fuku as sacrifices for and to the pleasure of the Dark Master. Bringing such things isn’t strictly demanded, but the powers will smile upon you more beneficently if you do.

And this being a seat of high geekery, bring your mobile gaming platform! Preferred are PCs, of course, and games which are honoured are Supreme Commander (for Blow Shit Up Points massively), Dawn of War (for the eternal pleasure of killing the infidel — which, come to think of it, I do in SupCom as the Aeon all the time), or Overlord (which might be rare, but it’s violent!). Other means of pleasure (and violence!) will be entertained at the Dire Lord’s whim. It’s possible that we’ll aim for a LAN Party and hit Arkham Horror or Twilight Imperium!

So, plan to be there, folks. Sacrificial schoolgirls are appreciated but not required. Video games requested but not required. The desire to kill and rampage?

Absolutely demanded.

No exceptions.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Gary Numan - This Wreckage (Squid's Redoubt)

I recently, finally got the posting system I wanted, after complaining so energetically about not having everything I wanted.

The key was being reminded of my old-school sensibilities. I have Cygwin installed, mainly for the X-client, but I was reminded forcibly that it has more tools than that in it. Specifically, there’s an embedded tool that copies from the cut-n-paste buffer to stdout. Likewise, there’s a tool that takes stdin and pushes it into the buffer.

You know what this means, yes? Pipes!

In the Old World, before the coming of disgustingly bloated OS’ and GUIs, we craftsmen used to labour in our dark caves, crafting individual tools to do one task, and do it well. Then we’d take these single-task tools and string them together in grand pipes to end up creating whatever effect we needed most. It was another era of software design, one sadly lost today with overarching frameworks and strangely twisted sorceries involving DOM and ORB and other such incantations.

I have reached back into the dark days of software design to build my new architecture.

In effect, it works like this:

• I edit together whatever needs to be done, using Markdown. I can be as elaborate as I like, as grandiose, I can embed HTML for specific things, etc.
• Then, I mark and cut or copy the text…
• … followed by double-clicking an icon on my desktop called “Convert Markdown to HTML”…
• … and then paste back into whatever editing frame I’m using.

That’s it. That’s the whole process. If I need, for whatever reason, to convert it back the other way I just load up the buffer again and pop “Convert HTML to Markdown” on my desktop (which calls html2text via a similar pipe setup) and paste. Voop, back to Markdown. Edit and retry.

The best& part is this works anywhere. In LJ’s online editor? Sure. In my favourite text editor? Why not. In a random forum? Absolutely. Anything connected to the *Windows buffer and takes HTML, I’m golden.

It’s very, very nice.

Next project: Building a micro-blogging solution to send posts to both LJ and Twitter. This may be less than a brilliant idea, if only because it pollutes the nooetic space created between my blogs of various types with replicated info, and because posting to LJ via text from your cell sucks so darn hard.

Decisions, decisions.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: WASP - Rubberman (Squid's Redoubt)

Sometimes I have truly terrible ideas.

Like realizing that the stand-alone command-line implementation of Markdown in Python could be tied together with a command-line Python posting interface to LiveJournal and Eric the .5 Bee’s Twitter command-line tool, a good mix of scripting, and whatever text editor I feel like using at any given time to build a tool that not only posts with whatever format I want as my interface, but simultaneously updates my Twitter feed to reflect the subject line. The only thing it doesn’t do natively well is grab whatever music I’m listening to for the LJ post…

But, I could just have SAM4 write out a single-line update of whatever it’s playing on the Redoubt at any given moment, and just plug that in instead. Hmmmm. With some pre-processing on the file I’m submitting, it could strip out things like the Title and intended tags and even cons up some kind of Technorati tag block link, too. A generalized LJ template posting solution of my own, and all without having to write a whole new client, just bits and blocks as it goes…

The old-school Unix design spirit (”Here, let me plug these things together with pipes!”) lives on!

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: Warrant - I Saw Red (Accoustic) (Squid's Redoubt)

I don’t think I can be too expressive about how annoyed I am at the moment with the state of LiveJournal client aps. Too many crashes and too much annoyance in formatting design. What I want right now is one that can actually embed images with a simple formatting directive to put it right/left as appropriate, make it a link, and let me go on with my life. SEmagic was my poison-of-choice, but it’s taken a significant dip into madness and chaos of late, and it’s less than usable now. I’ve had it crash three times today on me, and I find that unacceptable given my modest requirements.

What I wish I had was a simple Markdown to HTML editor that was reasonably stand-alone and had some additional ability to let me add-on to the syntax it understands to get things like quick-and-dirty tables / character formatting beyond bold/italic / embedded images with alignment tags and height/width working. I don’t think I’d need much more than that for my purposes. It’s almost enough to make me go digging around to see if there’s a Python-implemented Markdown processor that I could hack on. Or think about implementing something like it in Erlang.

Who’m I kidding? It’s not like I don’t have my hands full as is with Operation BSU. Which was what I was going to post about in the first place, today, and which led to this frustrating spiral of irritation with blogging tools available.

How, you might ask, am I posting this? I’m using the online Markdown parser (called “dingus,” in a rare sop to my cruel ego) to convert it into decent HTML, then I’ll cut-n-paste into the web posting facility of LiveJournal. I hate their implementation of rich-text editing because it’s insufficiently key-boardy, while Markdown is nothing but. Plus it rewrites to use the cool typographic quotes, an issue perhaps only I’m interested in, but there you go.

Grrr, say I. Grr.

Current Mood: grumpy
Current Music: Various Artists - Bigwig - War Ensemble (Squid's Redoubt)

Alright, I'm not at FMX the rest of the weekend, and this is probably a good thing. I can only take so much sunburn, I ended up caked in red clay -- which I'm still horking out of my nose -- and, frankly, an hour drive to the station followed by a 2hr drive to the site only to be there, be pretty useless in general, then pack up to head back ... yeah, as Heather would say, "Not my favourite."

So, today, I'm concealed in my dark, cool, relatively-quiet cave of a Lair, letting my eyes and skin regenerate. If things go well, I'll feel up to leaving it by mid-afternoon.

Current Mood: tired

Guys, I'll be headed out to Project at 5a so that I can staff the FMX event all day. Every day of the weekend.

If for some strange, twisted, deranged reason you're going to be at the event or want to be there, or just want to hang out with me, or have a secret -- or public! -- crush on me, you probably have my cell already and can get in touch, giving me the opportunity to possibly save you the measly $10 at the door. If you don't have it, well, I'm not sure how you'd get in touch with me. I suggest dropping email to me and expecting I won't get to see it until the night, when I roll exhaustedly in home, check email, take drugs, and go to sleep with the intent of doing it all again the next day.

In case you're curious as to location:

Directions to Durhamtown Plantation:

I - 20 East (twoard Augusta)
Use EXIT #130 turn left across the bridge
Turn Right onto Broad Street in Greenboro

Follow for 11 miles and cross over Hwy 77 in Woodville

Continue on the main road for 3.3 miles to the stop sign

Turn left onto Randolph Church Rd and go 3.5 miles to DP

"Double-penetration" is only how I'll feel on, say, Saturday at around 5p after two days in the hot sun. By Sunday, I may be looking for DP if it'll get me out of the hot sun.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Various Artists - Wet 'n' Wild (Squid's Redoubt)

Over to the right is the location I spent a good five hours this afternoon in.

No, that's not a far messier version of the SquidLair, it's Project961's editing studio, right on the other side of a clear glass partition from the live broadcast booth, where Lita (Amy Dumas) was in the studio chatting up Chris Williams.

But that wasn't why I was there in the middle of the afternoon.

Around 3.30p, Knox gave me a call on the red line, and asked if I had anything going on. Now, given that I was lounging around in pyjamas and watching the Janice Dickerson Modeling Agency marathon, I couldn't exactly say I was swamped in work, but he wanted me to actually physically manifest down at the studio, which was complicated given there wasn't anyone handy at hand to dress me. But a little problem like being a horrifying physical and psychological mutant wasn't going to stop me, so I summoned up resources, called in favours, and got out the door in about 30min.

(Incidentally, shaving myself ... a no-go. If I could reach the right side of my neck, though, I'd be golden. Life, thou taunt me.)

So, down to the studio the Kowai hurtled, at no point breaking either the sound or light barriers.

Once I got there, it was revealed that the audio tech had gone on vacation before creating the CDs for this weekend's Steeplechase tent. So, I needed to pull the tracks off the NexGen system, realtime, normalize them, grab sliders, normalize them, take Aly's announcement bit for the tent (which I ran over with a couple filters because the volume was inconsistent and it needed a little ambiance), and put the whole thing together into a 2 CD set that was good to go and sounded right.

I think they were mildly surprised when I broke out my own wireless mouse from my omnipresent backpack, threw it on the floor for my toes, and set to without asking much in the way of HowTo. I mean, this is me, how complicated can a distributed ap running several radio stations and Adobe Audition be? After some initial technical issues (not my fault, I promise), I settled on basically just mixing two long single-track CDs just as if I were putting together a podcast. I settled in the fades, appropriate overlaps, etc.

I also lurked around in the broadcast booth a little bit while CDs burned or large groups of things normalized. If you were listening to the Project tonight and heard a random twisted and glutinous snicker, that was probably me, peering at the editing suite live in production.

I'm such a geek.

On the up-side, looks like I'm pretty much likely to be a solid, responsible Project Ninja mostly apprenticed to the guy that does their editing and station imaging for multiple stations. When, y'know, he gets back from vacation.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: I Am Ghost - Crossing The River Styx (Squid's Redoubt)

Short version: I survived. And they even let me have a piece of paper that says so.

Somewhat longer version: I'm now the proud owner of a diploma in basic and advanced broadcasting and announcing from the Atlanta Broadcast Institute. At no point did I actually kill anyone, despite any overwhelming desire to do same, nor did I actually burst into flame and immolate, despite it being suggested that I could really use a Valium. The 60min radio show we had as a final actually went off without even the slightest hitch, which I can only lay at the feet of obsessive and hyper-aggressive pre-planning and the truly lazy geek's helper, not over-rehearsing.

There are a few pictures from the graduation, but unfortunately, power to the camera died before more than just a few basic shots could be grabbed. Despite that, somehow I managed to be in a couple of them.

Bugger.

Tomorrow, I'm headed down to Project961 with Swan and Speir to see if they'll actually accept me as an intern. ("The 35 Year Old Intern" sounds like a movie title.) Hopefully, they will and I can start memorizing the manual for the NexGen VoiceTRACing system they use to semi-automate the station.If anyone can become familiar with a complicated, interlaced, multi-node distributed audio database in under three days, it's me. Who's better qualified? Besides, the thing's built on Novel Netware 6.5. How complicated can it be, with a retro underpinning like that? Novel is migrating to SuSE Linux, itself, so I'm already positioned ahead of the curve ...

Regardless, we'll see if I get on. Could be you'll be hearing me on broadcast radio in under 6 months. Not bad for a guy going through the equivalent of a midlife crisis without the 20 year old models