Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in hvideo's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
8:59 pm	An E. B. White day Today was a day to go outside and just marvel at the sunset. We get such a gorgeous one maybe 4 times per year. Looking west there was yellow and orange, interspersed with swirls of greyish purple. From the horizon due north to straight overhead to the horizon due south it was mostly pinks, and back to the east there was pink and purple. The clouds were swirled, almost like strokes of a paintbrush. Not fluffy or herringscale, there were great depths to these coulds. Often clouds have rather generic features that just sort of remind you of the outline of an animal or object. This evening to the northwest there was a beautifully detailed cloud in the form of a person. The light was making highlights in marvelous detail - not only the outline of upper body and head, but details of two eyes, nose and mouth, complete with mustache, drawn in orange against the purple-grey background. It had rather a viking look to it - one could easily imagine someone seeing this colossus stretching across the sky in earlier times and thinking that it was Thor. If I had noticed it earlier there would have been time to dig out the camera, but when i first saw it it was already past its peak. I simply hurried outside in bare feet, quickly walked two blocks to get the best viewing spot, and watched. I MARVEL AT THE WAYS OF GOD E. B. White (1899-1985) I marvel at the ways of God, For time and time again I see him paint such lovely clouds Above such awkward men. Current Mood: enthralled (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
7:13 pm	Want to Beta Test some Dark Chocolate? This company is still tweaking the formula and has been using feedback from those who have been buying the early versions (betas 0.2, 0.6 and 0.74 have been mentioned). It sounds from this review in our local paper: http://tinyurl.com/2un79w that it is already darn good. Their website, to buy (or read other reviews), is http://www.tcho.com/ And hey, if someone wants to bring some to the ConSonance Interfilk Auction, interesting chocolates always go over well.... (Comment on this)
Friday, January 25th, 2008
5:01 pm	Wish I was there.... While a bunch of you are going to be having fun filking up at Conflikt tomorrow, I'm going in for dental surgery. As you can guess, this is NOT my first choice on Things I Want To Do, but that gets trumped by Things That Need To Be Done. Hope there is much good singing and comraderie. Then the next phase (in a couple of weeks) should make DunDraCon problematic as well. Oh, joy. Then the final (expected) work in another two weeks, right up against ConSonance and a certain wedding. Oh, rapture. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 31st, 2007
2:19 pm	End of Year Vampire Visit I became eligible to donate blood again in mid December.  My last donation was around Labor day, a Double Red donation (deferral time afterwards is 16 weeks instead of the usual 8 weeks).  I usually try to donate at the holidays because demand is up (traffic accidents are up) and donations are down.  With a choice between Christmas and New Years I chose to donate at New Years this time around.  Not only will traffic accidents be up tonight, blood donor centers are closed tomorrow so they have to make do with what they have in stock.  To compensate they don't generally schedule elective surgury at such time.  I went to Stanford, as they seem to care more about their donors than the American Red Cross people (though I donate to them as well every now and then.) I offered Stanford their choice - whole blood, ABC (Automated Blood Collection where the machine separates out various parts of the blood), Double Red (they take twice the red cells but give you back the other parts like plasma) or even a platelets donation (which takes a lot of time).  They chose to take whole blood.  In the post-donation area they had some interesting people with unusual medical backgrounds.  One person had received a transplant of bone marrow.  He was a special guest, meeting with donors while his wife donated blood.  I explained that I was already on the Bone Marrow Donation list and had even been a preliminary match once, but the second round of testing had shown I wasn't a good enough match.  The person representing the blood center had been a "bubble baby".  She had been born without a working immune system and had been kept in isolation until she was 5 years old, when her immune system finally kicked in.  She had also gone blind from complication of regular Prednisone and had regained her sight through Cornea transplants.  Finally, the director of the Marrow Donation program stopped by.  He had had a major systemic infection that had caused life-threatening ketoacidosis just a couple of weeks back.  So we had a very interesting time discussing these problems.  They normally ask that you stay in the post-donation area for 15 minutes.  I actually stayed for over an hour.  I also had my picture taken with the marrow recipient and signed a release in case they want to use it for publicity in a newsletter or on a website.   Current Mood: drained Current Music: Vampire Baby Boogie (in my head) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
8:07 pm	Major Shake We just had an earthquake here, and it was one of the strongest I've ever felt. That could mean it was small and very close or large and further away. It lasted about 15 seconds at a guess, knocking stuff off shelves but no serious damage that I can see. Edit 1: Medium size and pretty close. 5.6 magnitude right here in San Jose. There were sirens and fire engines going out within a minute after it stopped, and I'm still hearing more sirens. I tried to log onto the USGS site for reporting earthquakes but couldn't get through - the info on strength is from a newsflash on the TV. Edit 2: Around 15 miles from my house and pretty shallow, thus allowing it to be felt quite strongly. On the Calaveras fault, one that is pretty good about letting things slip periodically and thus avoiding the build buildup. The last significant one in that general area was 1989. I did manage to log onto the USGS site to their "Did you feel it?" section. Current Mood: calm Current Music: All Shook Up (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
9:56 pm	What is that Term? In making mathematical proofs, sometimes one makes a particular type of error. I seem to remember that there was a Latin phrase for it (or maybe Greek?), but I'm coming up blank. In English the error is "Accepting as given, that which was to be proved". Can anybody come up with the phrase I'm looking for? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
9:07 pm	Dutch TV info?  Lee Gold asked in rec.music.filk and I thought I'd spread the request a bit further afield: Is anyone here familiar with Marieke Oudejans and the "popular Dutch television show" that seems to be coming to Loscon? (also posted to FILK) (Comment on this)
Monday, August 27th, 2007
1:54 pm	Double Dipping Vampires I don't generally do a lot of nagging, but if your local blood bank is like mine, it's critically short on blood right now.  I went in earlier today and gave them a Double Red Cell donation.  Twice as many red cells as normal, but they give you back the plasma and other stuff.  Of course, now I can't donate again for 16 weeks instead of the 8 week deferral period for a Whole Blood donation.  That will be just in time for the Christmas/New Years holidays when they'll be short on blood again. ( I track them to their lair.... ) Current Mood: satisfied Current Music: Baby Vampire Boogie (in my head) (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 16th, 2007
3:20 pm	Long night last night There are a whole bunch of Microsoft Windows Updates that have been released yesterday and today - and at least one of them is crashing my machine. It appears that I'm not alone, as there are already some posts on the Windows Update site about other people with the same symptoms I'm seeing. They believe they have narrowed down which update is the culprit. The symptoms involve the machine refusing to let you access ANY program, giving an error message like "The program has either been moved or you are not authorized to use it." This not only includes things like word processors, but also such fluff as the Hearts and Freecell games (not exactly your High Security Settings Programs). Usually when an update gives problems it is easy enough to simply use the Restore program to get you back in time a day or so to when everything was working. Unfortunately, this time even the RESTORE program was "either moved or you are not authorized...."! Fortunately, a Safe Boot (hold down F8 while booting on most machines) lets you get to the Restore program, and the Restore then fixes things. Not too bad - except that I managed to time things with exquisite precision. My old external hard drive that I used for backup had died. I had just started a brand new backup on a brand new external hard drive when the machine announced that in 5 minutes it was going to shut down and install the program that had locked things up the previous time. I really, REALLY wanted to make sure I got a full backup done BEFORE trying this. So I hit the "don't do it right now" button. I wasn't sure how long the backup would take, but because the new drive was using a firewire connection instead of the old USB 1.1, it =should= have been going along at about 10 times the old rate. It wasn't. The "Don't shut down now" button gets you only 10 minutes before it starts another 5 minute countdown towards shutdown. To be absolutely sure that it wouldn't shut down before the backup was finished I had to push the "not yet" button every 12 minutes or so - for about 14 hours. It should NOT take that long at Firewire speeds (roughly the same as USB 2).  So I worked on other projects and kept an eye out for the countdown.  Anyway, I've disable the automatic update program until I see some indication that this problem has been fixed.  So far no hint as to why some machines are getting hit with this and others aren't.  But at least the system is no worse off than a couple of days ago and I've got that backup taken care of. Current Mood: sleepy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
6:58 pm	My Backup is Back Up The external hard drive that I had been using to do backups crashed.  So I went out and got a larger and faster unit.  It's currently doing the initial backup (which I won't touch).  I'll then make two more backups and rotate incrementing them. The importance of doing all this was underlined when I tried to install the latest updates for Windows just recently.  The updates normally go smoothly, and when there is a problem it usually is just a matter of using the RESTORE function to set things as they had been (and try again after a new download of the update).  This last time doing the update was a bit worse - it wouldn't let me access ANY programs on my computer.  It said it either couldn't find them or I wasn't authorized to access them.  It wouldn't even let me play Hearts or Freecell - and it ALSO wouldn't give me access to the RESTORE program.  I had to do a boot in Safe Mode to gain access to that, and then a Restore command put things back as they were. It reminded me of how many things I have on the computer that are just SO much easier to access via a computer with a working hard drive.  I've got CD-R and DVD-R backup files, yes.  I've also got the "possibly salvageable" old external drive.  But it would be a real hassle to work from all that. I'm making new backups on the new external drive - but I ought to do something about an external storage backup (in case of a house fire or something).  If nothing else, a new set of DVD-Rs at my brother's house.  Or maybe just get another external drive - the prices are low enough that the convenience might be enough to justify it.  There are online backup services available as well - is anyone using them?  If so, what do you think of them? Current Mood: satisfied Current Music: Try to remember.... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007
7:40 pm	Hippo Birdies Two Ewe Happy Birthday to vixyishand many more (at the standard rate of no more than 1 per anum, fewer if you choose) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 14th, 2007
3:59 am	General thoughts on HEROES, season 1 At the beginning I was quite taken by HEROES.  My enthusiasm started dropping in the second half of the season, enough so that I left the last 5 episodes unwatched until just recently.  Those last episodes didn't do anything to change my opinion. Part of my lessening enthusiasm stems, I believe, from my general dislike of "massive conspiracy" storylines.  HEROES had started as a bunch of isolated people coming to grips with powers never seen before.  These people were presented as being very rare and unknown.  They presented several interesting episodes about the people coming to grips with these new powers.  But along the way there were just too, too many people being revealed as part of background conspiracies.  It wasn't anything NEAR to what was originally presented - a single Indian geneticist making a groundbreaking discovery that no one took seriously, whose son took over the task after the geneticist was murdered.  Instead, we find out that all sorts of people and agencies have been working on this for a long time, the lives and bloodlines have been manipulated all along.  We find out that far too many people (for my taste) that had previously been shown as incidental were now being presented as being part of conspiracies.  Far too much information was known by far too many people.  Far too many people had been manipulated too far in the past.   Now, I fully expected that the storyline would expand as the season unfolded.  They just took it out of my comfort zone. Oh, it would also be possible to object to a few EXCEPTIONAL blunders on the part of certain characters.  But one often needs a few blunders to further the plot.  People are not infallible, underestimating the enemy is a common mistake, and it's a heck of a lot easier to make certain decisions as an better-informed audience member than it would be to actually have to be making such decisions in a real world situation based on less information.  And truth be told, some of these are absolutely CLASSIC mistakes of the comic book world - so having the TV characters make the same mistakes is being true to the genre.  (Of course, if one is to be that true to the genre they really should have had somebody say "No one could have survived THAT" towards the end of the last episode....) I will watch it when season 2 rolls around.  But I may record it at lower resolution, or I may dump it onto RW disks without going to the trouble of stripping out the commercials so if it continues to disappoint me I can just erase them with a lot of work saved. The progression sort of reminds me of LOST.  While I was enthusiastic about LOST at the beginning, by about 3/4th of the way through the first LOST season it had gotten to the point that I had stopped watching it regularly.  LOST had never been high enough for me to record-and-save, though.  HEROES started out higher up on my list.  Hopefully it can recover a bit in Season 2. Current Mood: contemplative (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 29th, 2007
10:54 pm	Sigh. Expecting to miss WESTERCON A week ago I came down with bronchial spasms. I'm now taking bronchodilators, anti-inflammatories and antihistamines. While this has cut down on the severity of things, I'm still having coughing fits. That not only means I'm not fit to sing, I'm also not fit to sit in the audience (at concerts or circles or panels or pretty much anything else at Westercon). I'd just be spoiling things for those around me. So unless things improve significantly in the next few days I expect to miss the whole thing. Current Mood: blah Current Music: Scurvey with the Fringe on Top (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 28th, 2007
9:15 pm	Overall Thoughts on BayCon 2007 Overall BayCon went well for me.  The new heavier-dose combination of anti-inflammatory supplements I've been taking recently has made a big improvement in how much guitar work I can do before having to say "That's enough for now".  So a big Thank You to Fish Oil, MSM, Glucosamine, Hyaluronic Acid, Co-Enzyme Q-10 and so on.  A month ago I had considered it quite likely that I would only be able to play my concert and would have to skip out on everything afterward.  Instead, I was able to add more and more as the con and concerts approached.  I wound up rehearsing with cflute at the regular mdlbear houseparty Wednesday, rehearsed on my own Thursday, then played in the Tribute to Frank Gasperik/open filking Friday before going home early. (I had hoped for more rehearsals but the wrist said "enough".)  I did more rehearsing Saturday, played in my concert, played more songs in cflute concert (also with jenkitty on a couple) and played in open filking after that until maybe 3 AM.  On Sunday night I played open filking all the way through to 6 AM on Monday morning - and while there was a lot of rest time between songs when the circle was full, I was playing very often at the end.  After perhaps a hundred songs in all, my right wrist is in better shape now than it was after ConSonance, when I only played about 10 songs all weekend. More details later, but for now let me just say that the actual playing in the concerts was a lot of fun.  There was a fair bit of scrambling to get things organized and rehearsed, there were a couple of problems with my recording equipment (I had a tripod head that didn't want to tilt and I left the power supply home Saturday and had to rely on battery power, that sort of thing), but actually getting up and singing was loads of fun. Much thanks to cflute and jenkitty for making the concerts special.   Thanks also to ifics and Greg for doing Sound on short notice for the filk concerts  They did a fine job.  Better communication between the performers and the sound crew ahead of time would have made their job easier in a few cases, though.  Those who have been going to BayCon concerts know that a specific name or names on a program does not mean that only those performers will be on stage.  There were 7 concerts.  Of these, 5 had "extra" performers.  The first concert night the program book indicated 4 single names so they thought that the "simple" sound system setup would be best - it takes less time to set up and they weren't given much setup time in the first place.  If they had known the complete lineup for cflute's concert when originally setting up they would have used the "full" sound setup instead, which would have saved a bit of adjustment time later during the concerts.  But they did a fine job of adapting to the situation.   Even if basic information is presented to the Sound Crew well in advance, sometimes changes just come in very late.  I didn't know that I'd have cflute with me until earlier on the day of the concert.  My role in cflute's concert likewise expanded the day of the concert - and almost expanded again 5 minutes before she went on.  She had been busy with nailing down the final setlist of songs in order and had courteously put a star next to the ones that I would be playing on.  I had some lyric/chord printouts and the Echoes Children Songbook to work out of.  I'm putting things in order and notice that there are 6 songs with a star next to them.  Eep!  I tell her that I have absolutely no memory of having rehearsed one of them.  She assures me that we did.  She was very confident about it.  She told me I did fine at rehearsal. So with about 2 minutes to go I've opened the EC book to that page.  It doesn't jog my memory at all.  Still, the chords weren't hard.  She gives me a 30-second runthrough as I get ready.  I'm still puzzled but willing to go on.  Before that song comes up it's realized that mdlbear is actually the one that would be doing that song.  (From what I understand, itainteasy had also been considered for some of the ones I wound up with but he was busy with not only his own concert with fireskin but also playing with cadhla.  Sometimes it's hard to tell the players even WITH a scorecard schedule.)  When people are living in different cities these last-minute lineup changes are very common as Real Life (TM) often makes it difficult to do things in any other way besides "when you're already at the convention".  But we really should make there be an easy way to funnel the information to the sound people as soon as changes are made.  Perhaps we should put up a drop box in Program Ops or at the room for Filk Dept. Head or something like that so a note can be sent "As of CURRENT DAY/TIME, NAME OF ACT scheduled at DAY/TIME will have 3 people with 2 guitars, both guitars with direct plug-ins".  If the Sound Crew has this information before they start setup it makes their job easier.             (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 20th, 2007
4:47 pm	Small, Very Local Earthquake At 4:10 PM PDT I felt a small earthquake. It felt like a wave-like motion rather than a sharp jolt. It turns out that there was a 3.4 quake 9 miles east of San Jose's City Hall (and roughly 4 miles deep) at that time. I live something like 5 miles south of City Hall, so it was pretty close. No damage, nothing fell or swayed, just some creaking in the attic besides the floor movement. Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: Shake, Rattle & Roll (in my head) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 15th, 2007
10:34 pm	HEROES marathon on SciFi channel Saturday For those who may have missed episodes, SciFi is running the entire 1st season up to date (i.e. everything but the season ender) on Saturday starting at 9 AM (Pacific Time). Check your local schedules.... (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 10th, 2007
12:08 am	Hot Peppers I was over at mdlbear 's weekly gathering and the discussion turned to hot peppers.  I had thought I recalled an article about a new one from our local paper, but a websearch didn't find it.  It turned out my memory of the source had been faulty - the item had been in the recent issue of National Geographic (May 2007), not the newspaper.  The "new" pepper comes in at 3rd on the list of hottest peppers (and is related to the first two).  The Bih and Bhut Jolokia peppers come in at over a million SHU, the newcomer to the list is called Dorset Naga at 923,000 SHU. For those not familiar with the SHU, a Jalapena is around 5k, Cayenne is around 23k, Scotch Bonnet around 75k, Tobasco is at 190k, Habeneros run from 150k (Red) to 301k (Chocolate Brown) - and these three peppers are three times hotter than the hottest Habenero.  The newcomer is also related to the Naga Morich. Current Mood: thirsty (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
7:37 pm	Speaking of speaking Not a huge surprise since I spent the first 5 years as well as the last 25 years of my life in this area, but in other tests I have also come is as a different "neutral" accent.  ( Probably getting stronger, too.... ) Though to tell the truth, I wasn't really sure about what that "everybody knows" bit was in the last question  After thinking about it a bit I took a guess at what they meant -  but it wasn't automatic knowledge by any means and I still could be wrong.  That probably didn't affect the accuracy of my answer, though, since I answered that I don't say things that way - whatever that way is. Current Mood: thoughtful (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 15th, 2007
11:15 pm	DRIVE with Nathan Fillion In general I liked the 2-hour opener for DRIVE.  I see what appear to be several similarities between DRIVE and LOST.  This is not a bad thing by itself, as LOST has been quite successful overall.  But it may not be a good thing as far as I'm concerned. ( My guesses for the future of DRIVE ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
6:44 am	Michele Pennington, RIP Michele Pennington, my good friend and fellow musician in the folk group QUARTER MOON (along with her husband Mike), died on Monday, March 12th. She was found in her RV, the suspected cause of death is carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty heater. I first met Michele during filking at ChiCon V (the 1991 Worldcon). At that time she lived in Texas and I lived in San Diego. She and her husband moved to northern California, and later I wound up there as well, about 40 miles away. We didn't have regular rehearsals or play local gigs, but she did manage to get to one BayCon filk and one at Bob Kanefsky's Clubhouse. We made our first home-studio tape at that time. She and Mike then moved away to the central valley in CA. We made our second home-studio tape while she and Mike were living there. But when they moved to Colorado Springs, that pretty much ended things from a group standpoint.  But she had an unlimited long distance phone plan and we kept similar (late) hours, so we often had long talks in the wee hours of the morning. She was proud of her army career as a reservist. She held the rank of Major when she died. She was also proud of having been a "Patient Rights" advocate during her entire 30+ year civilian career in nursing in various locations (in addition to her moves, she took travel assignments). During her last years she had written a fantasy novel and was actively revising it for submission to a major publisher. She and Mike had also been very active in the Catholic church they attended, running the music program there the last two years. She was one of those "larger than life" personalities. Of those that got to know her, many people liked her, some disliked her, but almost none were neutral. I liked her, and I miss her. Current Mood: sad Current Music: Searching for Summer Roads (in my head) (Comment on this)