Pug’s Place

This is actually a test of my wp-mail script after a request from Hans-Goeran Puke. He wanted automatic image scaling to be done for images posted by email and by Sprint phones.

If it works for him, I’ll post this new version at the standard place.

What is it about the Dark Knight that makes me want to cast Dominate Person on him and be the Bat? Is it his ninjutsu? The armor? The utility belt? The Batmobile? The Batwing? No, it’s the fact that he has no super powers. He is just a man who has Tom Sensei-like martial art skills and a boatload of money. He’s the sort of man every guy between the ages of 15 and 25 dreams of being. Every guy at some point says to himself, “If only I too could spend seven years of my life training in Aikijujitsu, Ninjutsu, Iaido, Kung Fu and Dim Mak Death Touch, gain several billion dollars and lose my loved ones to violent crime, I too could become Batman.”

So we watch and hope, hope that we might one day wake up and find ourselves capable of becoming the hero, the crusader.

This movie was an excellent piece of story and action. Even my Mom liked it! It’s what you expect out of a summer movie night, engrossing entertainment, things blowing up, swords clashing, evil versus more evil, depression, psychosis, very good acting and Alfred.

I’d write more but I must fall asleep soon. It’s been an entertaining and stimulating evening!

(Oh, and Yay Jen!)

Because I’m carrying a Starfleet Captain!

Sauron is out there, Hubble proves it.

Ash nazg durbatulûk…

A young Star Trek fan goes to school one morning and recites his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance, is written up by his teacher and suspended by the principal. His heinous words were:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.

This fan is Birdie’s son “8″ and the story Birdie tells on her blog is touching and entertaining, as are many of the comments. Of course, this is old news now, but I just ran across it.
Want a T-Shirt with the new pledge on it? Go here: http://www.cafepress.com/beautydishstuff. I’m thinking Graham needs one…

All I’ve ever done during pledge time at school is pledge allegience to Queen Mab and our mighty state of Hysteria…

It might not be a kilt, but it’s a good start!

My Aunt, Uncle and Cousins in Kansas City bought me this tie (MacFarlane Modern Dress) last weekend at their highland games and I, having received it on Friday, wore it to church today!

Just thought I’d share a picture.

Oh, by the way — it was two years ago today that we finished shooting Pizza Delivery Jedi. Principal videography occured from 13 June until 17 June with voiceovers done on 18 June.

Today I burned the first Pizza Delivery Jedi DVD from Linux, the first working DVD copy which has the rotoscoped lightsabres. Much of the legwork was taken care of by Any2VOB, a shell script which automates the process of taking most video formats directly to a .VOB file which you can put on a DVD. Menus and such I created with DVDStyler which, while not easy to understand, is well documented.

It works, and on the DVD I have:

1. Pizza Delivery Jedi - No Clashes (the version on Archive.Org now)
2. Pizza Delivery Jedi - Clashes (the version on Archive.Org from November until March, the first version with rotoscoping
3. Pizza Delivery Jedi Director’s Cut (no rotoscoping, 11 minutes long)
4. What Is Free Culture? - My video for Florida Free Culture’s first meeting, since it was handy.
5. The jacket art as a picture

The one problem is there is some interlacing weirdness on TVs. It’s only noticeable when there’s fast action going on, but the screen blurs like mad when things move quickly. I’m thinking that the interlacing has gotten backward in the movies through the iterations of editing and it may need to be deinterlaced and reinterlaced before I’m done. But now I’ve proved I can go from .mov files to a DVD which will play in any DVD player!And the menus and stuff are designed, configured and everything so I just have to update the .mov file, transcode it with proper interlacing and re-burn the DVD.
Then I need to go and have some glossy color laser prints of the jacket art done. Hmmmm.

Went shooting with Sean today for a little while. Too little of a while, really. Wasn’t an optimal time but it worked, and we had fun.

Continuing my quest through The Chronicles of Amber. Very entertaining.

Erle, Dorothy and J.C. + Apples to Apples = Fun

Oh, and happy marriage, Dorothy and Erle! (They’re getting married on Saturday)

On Sunday Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford University to its 5,000 graduates. It’s quite an interesting read, and deserves to be read in full as the quips diced out by Wired do it no justice.

Without further ado, the good stuff:

Thank you. I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said, “Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
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