Waiting

If you watch fluffy ‘making-of’ pieces on tv or dvds, you get the impression that most of the time in production is spent saying ‘action’ and ‘cut’. But the reality is much more boring than the puff pieces imply. Most me the time is spent waiting for things, like the lighting or the sound, or the actors. From my perspective, i’d say 66 percent of the time is waiting, 33 percent of the time is doing actual work. This isn’t to say we’re a bunch of lazy bastards. The director certainly works all the time. But given the number me things that need to be coordinated and checked, moving faster would cause more problems than it would solve

Working

On a shoot today. It is very very cold and windy. But, i got donuts and donuts are delicious. My fingers are nearly too cold to text

mythtv upgrades

There are certain aspects of my mythtv PVR system I’ve been unhappy with. They are:

  • Low hum on all recordings. “hoommmmmmmmmmmmmmm”
  • Bad video output — the display flickers and you can see pulsating waves

Hums are usually a sign of an Audio Ground Loop. If two electronic components are at slightly different potentials, usually because they are plugged in to different sockets, an audio cable will actually create a complete circuit. A small amount of charge flows between the two components, and you hear a hum out of your speakers. Radio Shack makes a cheap doohickey called a Ground Loop Isolator that solves the problem.

Unfortunately whenever I tried using the Ground Loop Isolator, I would hear a different, even more annoying squeal. So for a while I lived with the hum. Today, after some experimentation, I discovered the the squeal occurs because the onboard sound jacks are close to the monitor plug. If I disconnected the monitor cable, the squeal would change! So I bought a 24$ sound card on clearance, positioned it far away from all the other jacks, and now there are no annoying noises coming out of the speakers.

As for the video problems, my PC->TV converter was the cheapest possible model. The next version up from the same company solved all the problems. The one I have now is a Grandtec (like my old one) but it has a little remote, supports more resolutions, and outputs to component as well as svideo. It seems scan converters is one place where it does no good to get the cheapest option (unlike 24$ sound cards).

Taco Kitty

When Char and I first got Sigmund, I ran around like a giddy parent telling everyone about our new little guy. One of my coworkers at MIT also has a cat or two, and so of course
we gabbed about utterly inane cute things cats do. She mentioned that she had an old cat bed that her current cats don’t use, and she said I could have it. I accepted, and we added it to the pile of things we hoped Sigmund would use. You can see it in this old entry. Sigmund did lie in it if you plopped him there, but he didn’t really go there on his own. We tended to put it in places he was going anyway to increase the chance that he’d learn to like the bed.

Char discovered that if you lift the bed up by the sides, Sigmund doesn’t move at all, and you can carry him whereever you want. Because of his weight, the sides fold up, and it looks like you have made a giant Sigmund taco. So char dubbed the bed The Taco.

As the months went by, Sigmund basically stopped using the bed. Like the hub, he just stopped using it after a while. But that’s how cats (and I assume children) are — you get them stuff and hope
they like it. Sometimes you hit (fishing poles!) and sometimes you miss (hub). I had chalked up the cat bed to one of those misses, perhaps because he didn’t like going for rides,
although I still left it around for the heck of it.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I caught Sigmund daintly testing out the cat bed last week. He put a paw or two inside, and then moved the rest of his (now fat) butt into the bed. He was still standing up in it, which looked pretty silly. After a minute or two of standing, checking for whatever cats check for, he gave it his approval. He plopped down, and napped.

Now he can be found in the bed from time to time, looking around or sleeping. This is of course terminally cute, and requiring of a photograph.

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taco kitty

Buying a new mobile phone

When I was looking to buy my new phone, I found it very difficult to do research on features, quality, models available, etc. Google is not what it used to be, and performing a basic search like “buy gsm phone” doesn’t return very good results. It should return such sites as mobilefly, puremobile.ca, or bongowireless, which are all good places to buy unlocked phones, but it doesn’t. There are also a lot of buzzwords relating to features that phones can have, and it’s tough to figure out exactly what they mean.

I ended up buying the Sony-Ericsson T610 direct from T-Mobile, and I’m happy with it. But now I can more intelligently talk about the features my phone has, and if they are worth considering.

  • Polyphonic sounds: This means that your ringtone can be a MIDI file. It does not mean it can be a wave file! Some phones do support wave file ringtones, like the nokia 3650/3660.
  • EMS: a standard unique to sony ericsson, now obsoleted by…
  • MMS: the new standard for rich messaging, with pictures and sounds and videos and stuff. So I can take a photo and send it to someone else whose phone has MMS. Or I can use email to send it to an email address.
  • Downloadable games, Mophun: DOWNLOADABLE GAMES ARE WORTHLESS. They are slow, suck battery life, are on a tiny screen, are impossible to locate online, and aren’t fun. I’ve tried a bunch of different games, and they aren’t very enjoyable. Maybe phones with bigger screens and faster processors will make gaming possible, but on my phone, it’s not worth it
  • Ringtones can be assigned to phonebook entries: This is cool. Char’s ringtone is unique from everyone else’s, so I know right away when she’s calling
  • Built-in digital camera (288×352 pixels): A camera at this resolution isn’t too great. Check out my pictures for an idea of the quality you’re going to get
  • Java: only used for games and useless apps. worthless.
  • Bluetooth: extremely cool. If I get a bluetooth connector (it’s wireless) for my laptop, I could use my phone as a modem whereever I get a signal, even under linux. This is good
  • WAP 2.0: This refers to the web browsing standard your phone supports. Phones can’t browse regular web pages (since the screen is small and regular pages are so big), so they use a standard called WAP to browse a subset of the web. WAP 2.0 is actually important, since it’s a big step over wap 1.2, the other standard you see everywhere. For instance, it allows for color. It also can browse simple web pages, so you don’t need to retool for WML and figure out the right mimetypes to make it work. This allows me to transfer files from my computer to the phone using the wireless web capability
  • T9: predictive text input. this is a must
  • POP3 email client with attachments: some people might like this
  • Calculator: good for tip calculation I guess
  • Scheduler: good for setting alarms in the future, but mostly useless
  • Voice memo: I don’t use it, maybe some people like it
  • Themability: The t610 is fully themeable, down to text color and such. Most phones only let you change the wallpaper. I like this a lot
  • Symbian: Some phones (nokia 36**, sony-ericsson p8/900, and more soon) run a software platform called Symbian. These phones are generally called “smartphones,” and have more pda-like functionality. They tend to have more memory, more programs, bigger screens, better cameras. Some can play videos. I have no experience with these in real life.

    So I would have gotten the Samsung V200 from tmobile, but it only has wap 1.2.1, and I think that’s a dealbreaker for me. I use WAP a lot, for news, movie listings, weather, and sports updates, so having the latest version is important to me. I was also considering getting the Nokia 7250i, but other than twice as much memory and an FM radio, the t610 beats it feature for feature.

    Anyway hopefully someone will benefit from this information. Paying a ton of money for a new phone is a big deal, and the lack of a good site out there to explain what everything means is a shame. One last good resource is the Howard Forums, which practically have one forum for every phone in existence. It’s good stuff.