Canon Shots

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

By Lynn, on April 20th, 2009%

The question is the title of one of my favorite songs. It was written (and best performed) by Sandy Denny. (There are several clips out on YouTube). Sandy died, unfortunately, in 1978–another one of those musicians whose candle burnt a little too brightly at both ends–so, for her, the question became moot. I, on the other hand, find myself wondering where my time is going with increasing frequency.

It’s not as if I do nothing. I’ve even tried to de-over-schedule myself. I’m no longer president of the Condo Association, which after four years had become a depressing grind. The good news is that I’m no longer fielding complaints/problems from everyone here. The bad news is that I’ve become the Advisor and, sometimes, the Decision Maker. This has probably happened because I learned a long time ago that I’m not likely to die of embarrassment and therefore am always willing to offer an opinion.

But in terms of losing time, I lost a good part of Friday making decision about landscape plants for some (far from all) the Spanish-Oaks bare spots. With actual elected board members in tow, I plunged into the decision-making process and committed SOCA to six dwarf Podocarpus, seven Tuscarora Crepe Myrtles, eight “Ruby” loropetalums, and twelve “Little John” azaleas–which is all the more remarkable since a week ago I couldn’t have picked a loropetalum out of a line-up if my life had depended upon (and I’m not entirely certain I could do it now.)

Decisions, however, had to be made…and the next thing I knew, Friday was pretty much gone.

By tradition, Saturday is a chore day…the day when cleaning happens, shopping occurs, and maintenance is done. Yesterday shopping occurred in reverse: I extracted a cubic yard or so of serviceable clothing from the closet and hauled it down to Goodwill. It was a chore I’d been putting off for the better part of a year; and the closet looks much better, but I didn’t get a whole lot else done, meaning that next Saturday’s going to be frantic.

Today I supervised the actual planting of Friday’s purchases. (In order to keep our liability insurance premiums as low as possible, SOCA can’t let condo owners work on the condo property; we have to hire contractors who carry their own liability insurance to do the work for us.) When that was done, I went to an EGA board meeting, incurring more chores in the process. I had a nice dinner with my folks after that meeting…and was very glad to hear that their computers are behaving themselves, because when they aren’t, getting them beaten back into shape is pretty much my top priority.

After that, it was best two out of three, followed by best three out of five and best four out of seven with the Closed Circle website design. Life would be so much easier if I’d liked one of the dozens of site templates that come with my site-management software (NetObjects Fusion, for anyone who cares)… But I always insist on doing things MY way.

I *think* I know how make Fusion create the look/feel style that I’ve got in mind, but my eyes had begun to cross so I won’t be sure until I try again tomorrow…or later today.

Sigh…

I really should have turned out the lights an hour ago. But I promised my friend the Brilliant Lawyer that I’d get a long-ish blog post up tonight so we can determine if she has to “click through” from her blog reader (thereby registering on my site stats) or if the reader’s grabbing the whole post (and not registering on my site stats).

So…let me know…okay?

6 comments   Florida, thread-bending, wanderings   , ,  

Much Ado About Nothing

By Lynn, on April 14th, 2009%

The observant will note that Face of Chaos is looking a bit more austere right now.

Apparently my old look/feel theme wasn’t completely compatible with the version of Wordpress that I installed when I migrated everything to the new server last week. I could have simply ported everything into a fully compatible theme, but I’ve grown attached to my Face of Chaos graphic. Not that I created it or anything. It’s the header from a Portuguese theme called “Leia, Mi Princesa” which was written for something like Wordpress 2.0. So I wound up having to hack a compatible theme.

I’m really not happy with the look/feel, but everything seems to be working, especially in the comments section. I *think* that if you have a gravatar, it will get included in your comments…or not. That’s the joy of hacking code when you don’t know the underlying specs and syntax. But I’ll keep working at it

Which reminds me…I haven’t mentioned anything about why I migrated everything to a new server. CJ Cherryh, Jane Fancher and I met in Memphis a couple weeks ago to put together a plan for a future for our backlists and more. We’re calling our venture Closed Circle and I’ve put up the equivalent of a very rough draft of the site at http://www.closed-circle.net .

The fact of the matter is that the publishing landscape, especially genre publishing, is changing daily. I’m sure that it will survive, but I’m not as certain that I will be part of it, at least not in the way that I’ve been part of it in the past. The future’s going to be on the Internet and Closed Circle is how the three of us are planning to meet it.

It’s a conscious choice: you can dread the future or you can embrace it. We’re going to try to embrace it.

5 comments   techstuff, wanderings    

Another Two-Monkey Day

By Lynn, on April 13th, 2009%

I was having a fairly ordinary day for most of today…that is I was flailing away at my to-do list and falling behind at my usual rate. I’d really wanted to finish kitting the milkman’s wallet I’m going to be teaching at the Embroiderers’ Guild this week and next before I headed down to my parents’ house for Easter pizza. But things were not cooperating and I was about five minutes late leaving home.

Living in a condo complex means that there’s several hundred feet of parking lot between my door (there’s only one) and my car. A couple year back we installed speed bumps in the parking lot because non-residents had decided our purpose in their lives was to serve as a short cut. (Like there’s so much traffic in downtown Leesburg that anyone actually needs a short cut to avoid it.) The speed bumps have helped, but it’s still a good idea to keep the radar tuned outward on my way to the car.

So I noticed the honking-huge SUV with the chrome spinners and the grinning-skull front license plate as he backs into a guest parking space. I’ve seen the SUV before. It belongs to a friend of a guy who lives here–a guy with the worst case of arrested development I’ve ever encountered. Not, in other words, a friend of mine…not someone I say ‘hello’ to, but someone I track.

And maybe he tracks me, too. It’s no secret that there’s no love lost between me and arrested-development guy. Anyway, he was taking his time getting out of the SUV and I was already running late, so I got rolling. As it happened, I was rolling toward the SUV right as the driver started across the parking lot. He was juggling objects unknown. My first thought–absurd as it turned out to be–was that he was holding a dog that didn’t want to be held.

A moment later, though, he got a grip–literally–on what he was carrying and my brain managed to decrypt what my eyes were seeing: friend of arrested-development guy was headed into the Spanish Oaks courtyard with two firearms: one in each hand, swinging them like they were exercise weights.

Let it be admitted: I don’t know a whole lot about firearms. I know the difference between handguns and not-handguns. Friend of arrested-development guy was carrying not-handguns. My gut says they were rifles, but the way he was swinging them, they would have had handgun-type grips and I don’t know what sort of firearm has a wood stock and a handgun-type grip. One thing, for sure, neither firearm had was a patch of bright safety-orange at the business end.

I stopped the car…no, actually I stopped and the car, fortunately, stopped with me. About a thousand thoughts raced through my mind, none of them pleasant. Under the best of circumstances, I wouldn’t want to see arrested-development guy or any of his friends with a gun in their hands…and anyone who’s watched the news in the last couple of weeks knows that these are not the days of best circumstances. A part of me was saying–This is just my idiot neighbors being their idiot selves while another part of me was saying — Yeah, and it takes a special kind of idiot to go on a guns-blazing rampage.

I can think of any number of times when I’ve been more frightened, but I’ve never had such a time-frozen sense of being on the possible verge of horror. And when my heart started beating again, I got the hell out of the parking lot.

Obviously, nothing happened after I left…else you would have heard about yet another tragedy. The SUV was gone when I got home and the lights were out in arrested-development guy’s condo. I did call a different neighbor once I got down to my parents’ house — a neighbor who’s ex-military-police and knows most of the Leesburg Police force. (If I’d seen him carrying a gun, I wouldn’t have worrried…then again, he’d never be so brazenly careless with his weapons…) He wasn’t around, either, when I got back here. I assume he’d have left a message if there’d been any excitement.

I’ll check with him tomorrow.

Until then, it’s just another two-monkey day in Lake County, FL

8 comments   Florida

I Solve A Problem

By Lynn, on April 11th, 2009%

April 11, 2009

Actually, I solved the problem a while ago, it’s updating the blog that’s taken forever.

The problem was my parents’ television set. Back after the holidays, when we all thought that The Great Television Signal Shift was going to take place in February, my mom prevailed upon my dad to replace the world’s largest CRT television with a less monumental flat-screen HDTV.

Thanks to World War Two, my dad’s quite deaf. In order to enjoy watching television (broadcast, tape, or disc) he relies on closed-captioning (or subtitles) and two audio outputs: one feeding ordinary speakers and a completely separate one to feed his amplified headphones (’cause the volume he needs would deafen anyone else). After a bit of research I felt confident in telling him that all flat-screen televisions had at least two audio outputs and that picture quality and price should be their main criteria.

They settled on a 32″ Vizio LCD HDTV. Dad wired it up with the latest in HDMI cables and all seemed well with the universe: Dad had his audio and Mom wasn’t looking at a massive carbuncle each time she walked through the living room.

Then they tried to watch a DVD…

It had simply never occurred to me that there’d be a problem with the closed-captions and subtitles. Frankly, I hadn’t really considered that there was a difference between closed-captions and subtitles. I even thought that all things audio-visual, including DVDs, had to have closed-captions, ’cause that was the law of the land. And I was right…sort of: pretty much all things audio-visual do have to have some sort of text display, but, here in the USA, subtitles aren’t closed-captions, there are several flavors of each, and it’s kind of a crap-shoot as to which flavor is coded into a particular DVD.

In general, buttons on the DVD remote control subtitles, buttons on the TV remote control closed-captions and there isn’t a problem until you’ve got a closed-caption DVD. The folks at Vizio flat-out said it couldn’t be done: there’s no way to display DVD closed-captioning on one of their HDTV products. (The folks at Sony and Sharp said the same thing, meaning there wasn’t a magic television out there that would solve the problem.) My dad told me that he could live with the loss of the BBC series DVDs that he likes to get from the local libraries, but Mom said he’d get upset everytime they’d sit down to watch something and he couldn’t catch half the dialog.

So, I hit the Internet, figuring that if HDTVs weren’t capable of displaying closed-caption DVDs, then my dad wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the problem. With Google’s help I learned about CC1, CC2, SDH, XDS and Line 21. I hit the tech forums and the deaf forums. I was right: Dad wasn’t the only one having problems getting closed-captions to display on an HDTV. I read message after message of frustration and failure: When it came to DVDs, you couldn’t have a top-quality picture and old-fashioned Line 21 closed-captions.

It seemed to be an either/or: use an HDMI cable between the DVD player and the TV to get a good picture but lose the closed captions; or defeat the purpose of HDTV with component/composite cables but keep the closed captions.

I wasn’t looking forward to telling my parents that the only way to restore the closed-captions was to cripple their whizbang HDTV and I really hate it when technology defeats me. I like to think I’m smarter than the average circuit board.

Then it hit me, as I lay in bed not sleeping: DVD players are stupid. Oh, they’re bright enough when it comes to decoding a DVD, but when it comes to pushing signal to a television, they haven’t got the faintest notion whether there’s a male plug in any of their female sockets. If they’ve got three sets of output sockets on the back–and most of them have at least that many–then all three outputs are “live.”

To solve the closed-caption problem, all I had to do was run an additional set of cables–RGB component cables in my parents’ case–between the player and the television.

Now their setup defaults to the HDMI cable for great video and subtitles. But if it’s a closed-caption DVD, Dad just switches the television input stream from HDMI to Component.

(And there’s no loss of video quality. You can’t lose what isn’t there in the first place. The root of the problem is that the HDMI interface–the tech that conveys a digital, high-def picture to the screen–ignores Line 21 closed-captions and any DVD that’s got Line 21 closed-captioning is, a priori, not high-def.)

You may wonder why I’ve gone on at such length about this. I’m remembering the hours I lost to Google searches and how much I would have welcomed a blog or forum post telling me It’s not either HDMI or Component, it’s HDMI AND Component. I’ve incorporated every search term I used into this blog post, most of them more than once. With luck, I can save a stranger some time.

6 comments   techstuff, wanderings