Ardath Rekha

Star is fine. He stopped by several times today, although he's apparently worried that I'll try to put him back in the aviary, so he's keeping his distance. But he's also apparently having a great time living free. No hunger or desperation about him. And he has lots of friends. Awesome. :D

My father finally bought a new computer -- a laptop -- and so I spent a bit of time this afternoon doing some configuring on it for him. I have more to do to it, and I have to find out why the hell my old, uninstalled copy of Acrobat Pro is insisting it's already activated on the maximum number of computers when I could swear I deactivated and uninstalled it from everything it was ever on. I'd like him to be able to use it, but I might have to fight with their tech support before he can. One possible lingering activation is the result of their updater crashing my computer so badly I had to reformat the drive without being able to uninstall it, or even access it. In which case, I think they owe me that activation back. We'll see if they agree. If not, I'll happily point out that there are a lot of other software companies offering .pdf-makers these days, and I'll happily give those guys my business in the future.

I have, by the way, completely deactivated the adobe updater thing on all of my current software, because it sucks rocks and should be blasted off the face of the Earth. I actually feel that way about most of the automatic-updates things; I consider them just a hairsbreadth above spyware.

Tomorrow I think I do a bunch of cleaning that got put off thanks to Star's arrival. He took over my whole life for two weeks... but now he's declared his independence. :D I'll celebrate by... doing laundry. XD

So, this morning, I got Star up and put him in the aviary, and after we played for a few minutes he tried to get some water from his dish, which hadn't been filled yet. I went into the house to get water... and when I came out, he engineered a breakout from the aviary while I only had one hand to try to prevent it. Argh.

Now, I'd been planning on giving him yard access on Monday, so he wasn't really jumping the gun by much... and I was probably being a bit overly conservative in my timetable for him. He's a runt... developmentally far ahead of other starlings his size and even the ones that are a lot bigger. But it's been a nervewracking day. My mother tried to help me, and he flipped out at her bright yellow gloves and fled the yard.

There have been several possible sightings of him all day, but I can't be sure. The fortunate thing is that, during the week he's been out in the aviary (a repurposed screenhouse we've had for years and years) all of the local starlings (and many other species of birds as well!) have been extremely friendly with him, so I know he has friends and allies all around the neighborhood. But I called out his name every time I heard a baby starling in the yard, hoping maybe he'd come down.

I have to remind myself that this is a successful release, and that he's been able to feed himself very well for the last few days and had almost completely stopped begging me for food. He can pull up worms, and if he's snotty about actually eating them, he won't be when it's the only choice on the "table," so he'll be able to feed himself just fine. And if not, I will be around alllllll day tomorrow just to make sure he gets whatever he needs.

Still. Nervewracking. Releases always are. Especially when they don't quite happen on schedule.

1. Star is male. He was trying to talk to the sparrows outside the window earlier today... trying to talk to them in their language. That's a guy thing with starlings. XD

2. Canned crickets smell almost exactly like canned black olives. XD XD XD

First, the good:

-- I babysat Mitchell the baby robin on Friday. Magical. I ended up digging up a whole bunch of worms for him because those are his favorite thing in the world. I will be babysitting him again on Tuesday and Wednesday. GLEE!
-- Shortly after we returned him to his foster parents, we got a phone call; a woman had found a baby starling who had fallen out of its nest and was bringing it to us the next morning to take care of. Said baby starling is a little girl named Star, and she is a sweetheart. She prefers pill-bugs, crickets, caterpillars, mealworms, and grubs. And she's hysterical to watch with them. She's still young enough that I generally pop them into her mouth for her, but she IS trying to figure out how to pick them up herself. So I let her mess with the container a little and she pecks at things and then, when it doesn't work out too well, opens her mouth and begs them to climb in. I can almost hear her saying "Get in mah BELLEH!"
-- 3 As and 1 B. Awesome. :D
-- My mom's birthday today. I got her a book about Christian the Lion, and the Born Free DVD. She loved them. :)

Now, the bad:

-- Wrenched my back a few days ago. Blargh. I'm not sure if all this digging makes it better or worse.
-- Financial Aid office says I have 23 credit hours left to attempt as an undergrad before I must graduate, or pay my own way or something. Ironic given that a number of them were not paid for with any financial aid, but still apparently count against my eligibility. I may wrangle, or maybe not; I really DID want to go half-time in the spring (my final semester) anyway.
-- I just smashed the little finger of my right hand between two bricks while hunting pill-bugs and grubs for Star. Ow. Ow! OW! It's a good thing I'm left-handed, but this is going to make things really tricky for a few days. The nail got cut but should be ok... it'll probably have a clot behind it, though. Fortunately I rarely use that finger to type with... Still. OW.

Okay, so I've been trying all of the different journaling media, right? And I've found something that really annoys the fuck out of me, that keeps happening lately.

I often leave windows open for hours, even days, while I do other things. Which means that I'll have LJ/IJ/DW windows open for a long time... and sometimes during that time period, my login expires. Big whoop, right?

So why is it that, on LJ and DW, if the login has expired, any link I click on on those pages -- even a bloody profile with no adult content, sends me not to the page in question but to a generic "log on if you want to see our shiz" page? WTF is up with that?

I'm sorry but if a service wants to attract outsiders into using it, it won't succeed by cockblocking people from passively viewing content that's supposed to be public. I complained about this to LJ a few months ago and they insisted it was impossible, but it kept happening. And now it's happened on DW too. So I don't know what to think about it. It's not a huge deal but it is a turn-off when I think about where I want to go and what I want to browse. I don't like barricades, especially ones that people keep insisting don't exist, no matter how many times I trip over them.

Interestingly enough, this has never happened to me on IJ (or, I think, JournalFen, but I'm not quite as sure). The worst that happens when my login expires is that f-locked content becomes inaccessible, and I think "oh yeah, I'd better log back in." But I can browse away quite comfortably without having to log in there.

Which, I'm sorry, adds to the edge it currently has over DW, in my book.

(LJ, in my opinion, is a total waste and I don't care if they try to fix it at this point; too much else is wrong with it.)

I went outside this evening and met up with one of the rabbits I raised two summers ago. We had a nice time sitting near each other. Very lovely.

And we also watched an aerial battle. A crow and a hawk in a dogfight that put Top Gun to shame. Impressive as hell. I wish I'd had my Flip with me, but it wasn't in my pocket. Or there would be uploaded footage. I really have to remember to carry that around with me at all times.

1. So the DVD is... well, not quiiiiite where I want it to be. I burned several of the files to their own DVDs so I could test them out, and the widescreen ones play just right in my DVD player, but are distorted when I play them in Windows Media player. Except for one, which plays fine in WMP but then gets given the pan-n-scan cutoff treatment in the DVD player. Oh, and, the graphic used at the end of the other videos has something wrong with it, too. Joy! I think some of it has to do with the fact that I started out working with hi-def asssets but want to make a standard-def DVD. The God Of Engineering and I will be discussing this tomorrow. Hopefully, by 4pm or thereabouts, I will have something resembling a working DVD. But I'm not entirely thrilled because I'm questioning how it might play on an actual hi-def TV now, too. (It's Festival footage and the intention is for it to be something that the admins of the Festival can use for fundraising purposes. Gah.)

2. No actual progress on my editing project since I last updated, because the DVD has been eating my brain. Hopefully I'll have been able to switch gears and focus on it before 4pm tomorrow, since it's due 1pm Tuesday. YAY! *cringe*

3. I've been syncing up the sound on my film footage. That's gone awesomely well thanks to a semester spent learning "advanced video editing" (see #2) and so I'm knocking it out nice and quickly. I should knock some more of it out tomorrow, too, while doing test-burns of the DVD. And then it'll have to be tabled until #2 is ready, at which point I'll start rocking out on it again. Once the footage and sound are synced up completely, it'll be time to cut the shots down to the beginning-end points that feel right. Essentially, right after I say "action" and right before I say "cut." Once that's done, the film will be in "rough cut" status, awaiting the fine cut and reshot footage. And I'm going to HAVE to reshoot some of it because my genius of a DP (who, thankfully, was flaking out so much during my shoot that he was absent for a whole day of filming, so that footage, shot by my AD, actually looks good) actually arranged the camera so that my lead actor looks like he's looking at it. (A no-no he should have known better than to do! I just hope that our prof doesn't blame me for trusting him.)

4. I've got some pages to code for the website. Yay! Not many, of course, but some! And I'm going to spend a good deal of the summer continuing to refine it with the prof. So that, at least, feels nicely under control.

Since most of my work requires actually being physically in the DVComm lab, which has been closed all weekend, I actually got some housework done for an amazing change. All of my laundry is done. (Well, okay, there are blankets in the dryer and a fluffy bathrobe in the washing machine, but THEN it's all done.) And... well, I have a ton more cleaning to catch up on, but I actually kind of feel... tidy again? Almost, anyway! Which is yay.

I'm not there yet, but I'm getting there. On pretty much every front.

1. So I've recreated ardathicons on DW, and ported over one of my icon posts from IJ. More to follow there. I might even get to make more icons this summer.

2. Status of my final project for the DVD authoring class: I've hit some kind of snag that keeps aborting the burn. I've narrowed it down to one of two assets on the disc volume... tomorrow I get to test out which one it is and brainstorm the solution with the head of the department, a man who is pretty much The God of Engineering. I have a solution or two in mind; we'll see which ones he thinks are promising. The DVD must be burned by Monday.

3. Status of my final project for the Advanced Video Editing class: Due Tuesday. I no longer hate it. I still have color-correction to do, and possibly some more video assets to add. But I feel in control of it. This is good. This is very good.

4. Status of my final project for Film Production II: The film arrived back from Alphacine last night. Today I took the telecine'd footage into the lab and captured it all to one of the Avid machines. I am deeply annoyed by several shots because one of the two DPs I was working with wasn't paying any kind of attention to what I asked of him, got the shot scales and the framing wrong on several key pieces of footage, and didn't understand what side of the camera some of the actors were supposed to be on. Since I was concentrating on directing the cast, and he kept assuring me he knew what he was doing, I didn't realize until it was too late. All of his stuff may need to be reshot. On the plus side, though, the performances and the lighting were awesome all around, and the other DP rocked. Now I have until Tuesday to get my rough cut done and a fine cut started. Yeah, who needs sleep?

5. Status of web project for my African-American Lit professor: about what you'd expect, really. None of my classmates have turned in their final versions of their pages yet. At least, not to me. A few say they've turned them in to her for final approval, so that counts for something, but until it gets to me it doesn't get up on the webspace. Which, meanwhile, is in flux because one department head says it should be on one university server, while another says it shouldn't... and we haven't been granted ftp access to either one as of yet. So I'm collecting the few files I already have on my computer, processing them with DreamWeaver, and waiting for definitive word. Fortunately she knows I'm on top of everything I've actually got, and she's really very relieved that I've said I'll keep working on it this summer and next year with her, so I think I'm keeping her happy enough.

Wow. That's a lot of stuff. But really, I'm starting to feel on top of all of it. A week left until the end of school. I'm going to be SO TIRED when it wraps, but not badly off. Still no idea whether or not I still have a scholarship (or even still want it, because the course load has been increasingly gruelling and stressful and I've fallen so behind in housework it's rather scary) but no matter what, I'm going to keep plowing through.

In... well, eight hours, anyway. XD

And what's your name there if you have? I'm there now, and trying to go on a friending spree. XD

Well, as much of one as I can go on while I'm dealing with final projects and upcoming final exams... LOL!

Okay, this might be the feature that totally sells me, LOL! More icons would be nice because I'm an icon whore but just being able to have my post land in multiple places at once is super-cool.

In about three hours I have to be ready to shoot. It's not a particularly complicated shoot but I'm still a tad stressy over it because loading the Arriflex BL isn't exactly easy. (Then again, my final practice runs before loading in the real film all produced textbook loops, as did the real film, so maybe I'm overthinking and overstressing. Still, it's going to be a long day, especially because the first actor we were going to be shooting abruptly told Eric yesterday that he couldn't make it in until noon instead of nine am. So that's three hours lost since he was first up for shooting.

Still, shouldn't be too bad, right?

AUGH GOD I know it can be. I've seen some of the shoots this semester. Of course, on the plus side, at least Eric's been to a film school with a more established program than ours, and knows how those places run their sets... but that doesn't mean he can manage to run one the same way. Just because my shoot ran like super-awesome clockwork doesn't mean that his will... or that I can do anything about that except smile and keep shooting. He'd better give me lots of caffeine if it gets late. Lots and lots of caffeine.

Speaking of my shoot... actors were spectacular and crew was incredible. The film is currently at the lab, and has either already been telecined or will be on Monday. Either way I should have it back in my hands by the middle to end of this week. Not much time to throw a rough cut together for my professor, but doable! (He actually told me that he'd gotten word (from one of my leads, who's in a band with him) that my shoot was the best-managed shoot of the semester. Which was awesome to hear.)

Okay. Three hours to get ready. Maybe in that time I can make the scratchy throat go away.

No, I don't have swine flu, shut up.

Happy Birthday aristoboule!!!!! I hope it's been a really good one so far and that you get to do lots of fun things this weekend to celebrate! :D

Total vindication! Of everything you've ever said about cats. :D

http://cats.suite101.com/article.cfm/social_structure_of_feral_cat_colonies

Awesome reading. :D

I just lost a shitton of faith in IJ.

I get it, inactive journals taking up space blah blah blah blah blah. Whatever.

Journals with actual content in them should not be deleted except by the creators of the content. Even if they did stop posting fifteen months ago. End of freakin' story.

I... was planning on renewing some of my paid accounts that had just expired. Until this.

So there's some ...person... named "altheamarch" on ElJay who started friending accounts today, another serial-adder type. I got friended. Blah. I have banned her from all of my accounts. I saw some other people's names that I recognized, too, so I'd recommend everybody do the ol' ban_set on this chick.

Although check out some of the replies to her treacly-sweet "U SHOULD BE A CHRISTIAN!" posts -- seriously, she's spammed her journal with a few dozen posts today. Hilarious stuff, especially the person who sent her a few dozen fresh penises... and the people who calmly have a conversation around her, excluding her from it, in her post. If you're going to be hassled by serial adders, why not make them into your entertainment?

Meh, though, I just banned.

Counting down to the film festival... which reminds me that I need to set my facebook picture to reflect that. XD

1. Pick 25 of your favorite movies you have on DVD.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote dialogue from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
5. No Googling/using IMDb search functions.

( Twenty-five dialogues you really ought to recognize. )

I am soooo getting this in about two weeks! Yes! For one thing, I will genuinely need it for my film editing work, especially since my next film project is likely going to involve digital special effects and I may have to hand-design the CGI elements myself.

*LUSTS*

Oh, and the Adobe CS4 Master Suite will be mine, too. For the insanely low price that my school has negotiated, for which I will love them forever and ever. Between those two things, I will be ready to rock out on digital editing. :D

I'm definitely not blowing a gasket or anything about the new Doctor, but I do admit I'm dubious. He looks like he's more of an age to star in a CW show than Who. Of course, Christopher Eccleston is my all-time favorite and I was secretly hoping he'd somehow come back (LOL, although after seeing him play "Dr. Lazer-Rage" in an episode of The Sarah Silverman Show, I suspect he has no intentions of returning to Whoville). So it's not like I was going to get what I wanted anyway. XD

What would be the height of hilarity, though, is if they brought Jenny (of "The Doctor's Daughter") back. Because she'd now look older than him... and that would be a hoot.

"This is my father."
"He's younger than you."
"Well..."

Plus if Jenny was his companion I wouldn't have to worry about another round of Companion Falls In Love With The Doctor ensuing. I mean, enough is enough.

It's 62 degrees right now, and going up to 68.

And my mother seems to have acquired a baby shark specimen. In a really bizarre way. She was doing some gardening work across the street at the church and someone tossed it out of a car and onto the lawn there. It's one of these bottled things. Really cool and strange-looking. She reported it to the police in case it was part of something that was stolen and the police officer's reaction was "this is a new one on me!"

It's supposed to thunderstorm tonight, and it feels like it ought to. I love this kind of weather. Wild that it's happening two days after Christmas!

Weather in the high 60s and... baby sharks.

Not things you expect in Cleveland two days after Christmas.

For some reason, all of the DragonCave dragons are turning into Pokemon tonight. EPIC weirdness!