Today was a day of deliveries. The Spike Jones biography came in the mail, and FedEx made a half-hearted attempt to deliver most of the parts for my little media computer. Normally, if we're not home, they'll leave it at the apartment office. Not so this time; I picked them up from the depot on my way home from work. And then a UPS guy arrived around 9:00 to drop off a book Karen ordered from Amazon a while ago.

I'm hoping I can find an attachment for my Dremel tool that will actually cut through this steel ammo box. If not, I'll have to design a case from scratch. (Hmmm... I wonder how much RF interference a mini-Lumenglass would produce?)

Drat... While glancing around my room for potential case material, my eyes alighted on a couple of Scientology E-Meters from the early 1980s I couldn't bear to part with when I divested myself of my collection of cult paraphernalia, but they're just a bit too small for the purpose — only fifteen centimeters front-to-back, and I need seventeen. Now that would have been a unique casemod!

Speaking of Scientology, something's gotten me on their radar again. In the last couple of months, I've been getting angry emails about my Narconon pages, usually on Wednesday or early Thursday (just in time for Stats Day), but tonight I got one ranting on the subject of reincarnation, almost as incoherently as the Timecube guy. Experience has taught me the futility of attempting to respond to nutbags like that. It's almost as bad as trying to hold a rational discussion about politics or religion on a 3D-graphics forum. *cough*

I finally feel like a human being again, having slept nearly until noon yesterday, gone to bed before midnight and sleeping again until about 10:30 this morning. On the bright side, I can put 28.5 hours towards comp time so I can take that trip in April.

After I got up yesterday, I picked up some supplies for my computer project: some cutting discs for my Dremel tool, safety goggles, since I couldn't find mine (which, naturally, I found as soon as I got home from buying the new pair), a cheap mouse, and some spraypaint. I couldn't find anything that exactly matched the ammo box, but it's a greenish gray that doesn't look entirely inappropriate to a military theme.

I visited the local army surplus store first, in hopes that they had military paints (they didn't). However, I picked up a half-width ammo box to hold the computer's smaller accessories (mouse, power adapter, etc.) for transportation. I also saw a large ammo box, and I got thinking — I've been wanting to do a casemod for my desktop machine for a while, and the big box is about the size of a desktop case... but I was good and didn't buy it; only one hardware project at a time!

I pulled apart the mouse and an extra keyboard I had lying around (it was Karen's before she bought one of those funky split Microsoft keyboards that I hate with a passion because I hit the 'b' key with my right index finger, and they've put it on the left side of the split), cleaned everything thoroughly with isopropyl alcohol, and spray-painted all the parts. (Fortunately, I thought ahead and marked the inside of each keycap so I knew where it was supposed to go when I reassembled the keyboard.) Now I just need to find some yellow model paint, so I can put "stenciled" letters onto the keycaps. But which one to label "ANY"? I'm seriously considering using the Dvorak layout, as I've been wanting to learn it for years.

There's a warning label on the mouse cord: WARNING: handling the cord on this product will expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause [cancer, and] birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling. WTF?

Speaking of being good (that segue made a bit more sense before I reordered the paragraphs), someone on my ljflist posted a link to Second Life, an MMORPG which I need to avoid like the plague. Back in college, I was seriously addicted to MUDs; this would be like supercrack for me, since users can actually extend the game. That was the big lure of MUDs for me; I could build rooms and create objects, and write the code that would let the users do interesting things with them. But that was in a text-only world; add in the thrill of designing them graphically as well, and I'd have that monkey right on my back again. And the first hit is free; they've got a seven-day free trial. Bastards.

By the way, check out the nifty Spike Jones icon Karen made for me. I need to find my photo album so I can post a picture showing how eerie the resemblance is between my father and Spike Jones. Well, the physical resemblance, at any rate; somehow I can't imagine my father ever having the chutzpah to play the xylophone with his private parts. Oh, great, now I've got that image stuck in my head.

Tonight, I saw yet another commercial for a product which heralds the downfall of our society. I don't remember the exact words in the voice-over, but I believe it went something like this:

Here at Smuckers, we like the simple things. So we made a simple thing even simpler. New Uncrustables, for parents who are too smucking lazy to make their kids a measly peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Now, mind you, that's just a paraphrase. But that's the gist of the message I got out of it.

(And don't get me started on the SUVs that have DVD players included so the parents don't have to actually talk to their kids, or — heaven forbid — encourage them to read books...)

Last night, my little motherboard finally arrived. Unfortunately, the right-angle PCI riser didn't arrive until today, so I couldn't cut any holes in the ammo box. However, I did put it together and make sure it works.

Someone recently expressed to me his hesitance to try building a computer. Here, then, is a photo-journal of all it takes to turn a pile of components into a working (albeit naked) computer:

1. Install the memory.
2. Snap on the hard drive adapter. This was necessary because I'm using a 2.5" laptop drive. For a regular 3.5" drive, this step isn't necessary.
3. Connect the hard drive to the motherboard.
4. Connect the DVD±RW to the motherboard. This could have been put on the same cable as the hard drive, but you can get better performance if each device is on its own IDE bus. Or at least that used to be the case; I'm not sure if it still is.
5. Connect the power supply to the motherboard. This is the tiniest power supply I've ever seen.
6. Connect the power leads to the hard drive and DVD±RW drive.
7. Optional: Install expansion card. The motherboard comes with onboard six-channel audio, but I want a better quality interface, with more than two inputs, for recording.
8. Optional: Connect the USB and FireWire ports to the motherboard. The motherboard has two USB connectors in the back, but includes headers for two more USB and two FireWire connections.
9. Install the operating system of your choice.

Now all I have to do is install it into the ammo box. I'm a bit wary of this part, but if I screw up the location of the holes, there's an army surplus store less than five minutes away with more boxes.

The particulars are different, but the overall theme is the same: when "morality" outlaws equality.

My final major non-essential purchase arrived Wednesday: a second monitor for my desktop machine. Now my evil lair's control room is complete.

(Click image to enlarge)

I always thought that having two monitors was a little silly, but I've come around. In quite a bit of the software I use — Animation:Master, SONAR, The GIMP — I'm forever switching between the active window and various properties panels or tool windows. With two monitors, I can put the main workspace on one and all the other windows on the other. What freedom! (Now I really need to hit those tangles of wires with a bunch of cable ties.)

The PVR is almost working... I can't get the remote working under GB-PVR, and if I use the bundled Hauppauge software, it locks up the entire system after a few minutes. Grrr.

I'm really looking forward to the weekend. A chance to relax, a chance to sleep in, and a chance to get together with good friends. I still like my job, but this getting up at 5 and having no social life is beginning to wear thin.

Last year, I went to MegaCon and hung out at the Hash booth, where I got to know a couple of the Hashes and met another Hash user (Hi, Elyssa!), all of whom were really cool.

I had fun, so I planned to go again this year — and then promptly forgot until around 12:15 yesterday morning — the day of the con (actually, it started Friday, but work interfered with that). D'oh! So I got a reasonably good night's sleep, then drove on down to Orlando.

Both the Hashes remembered me (James Hash spun around and shook my hand without even breaking stride in his demo), and I talked a bit with whoever was taking a break from demoing.

They were doing really well this year; there was a lot of interest in Animation:Master, and after a while I was pitching in by answering questions (I even made a couple of sales, including to one guy who rephrased just about every question in six or seven different ways, apparently because he didn't believe the answers). As thanks, they bought me dinner and gave me a set of their 2004 SIGGRAPH videos. (Why, why didn't I go to SIGGRAPH when it was in Florida? Apparently the closest it'll ever come again to Florida is Boston.)

Alas, no other Hash users showed up this year. C'est la vie.

I took a turn around the exhibitor floor looking for something for Karen, but didn't really find anything I thought she'd be interested in. There was a DVD booth across the aisle from Hash, and just as things were closing I decided I had to have the movie they'd had playing on one of their TVs all day ("Appleseed: The Movie"). It was cel-shaded computer anime; I have no idea what the plot was, but it was visually breathtaking.

I didn't see many frightening con attendees this year. The usual stormtrooper contingent (with two femtroopers), some Fetts (in both Boba and Django varieties), quite a few Sailor Moons (most of whom were actually Asian), and a lot of girls (and a couple of guys) wearing cat ears. I'm still not sure what that's all about. Furries, maybe? There were also a few cross-dressers (one of the con staff explained to the Hashes that it was an Orlando thing); one of them did a disturbingly good job; I honestly didn't realize it was a guy until I heard him speak. Oh yeah, and there was someone dressed as the Cookie Monster. Still not sure about that one.

Anyway, after dinner, the Hashes dropped me off at my car, back in the convention center lot. I actually spent about fifteen minutes trying to get out of the parking lot, as the only exit that didn't have those severe-tire-damage spikes poking up was festooned with signs reading "DO NOT ENTER". Finally, in frustration, I took the forbidden exit... and found myself in another lot with spikes at all the gates. So I parked and examined the spikes, and found that I could have driven over them, as they fold right down if you're exiting. Arrrgh.

The drive home was a bear, but I managed to stay awake by singing along to Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. My voice was shot by the time I got home, but at least I made it.

And now to watch the SIGGRAPH videos, as there are some techniques on there which will come in really handy for the next freelance job I'm doing.

Addendum: There was a Homestar Runner booth? Why the hell didn't I see it?

So I sat down and watched "Appleseed" last night. Absolutely gorgeous visually, as I mentioned yesterday, and it was so fluid it was hard to believe it was anime. No long static scenes where all that moved were mouths and eyes, or long slow pans across a still plate -- motion everywhere, even subtle things such as breathing or the slow tilt of a head. I'm pretty sure they used mocap for the actors, but I didn't even mind (I guess I'm losing my purism).

But the subtitles sucked so badly that I couldn't actually tell what went down in the last half hour. Who ended up being the good guys? Was Deunan, the main character, a human or a bioroid? Who killed Deunan's mother? And if she was a bioroid, why did she have a mother? If she wasn't, then why was her aunt one?

I suppose I'll have to turn to the Internet for answers. But damn, was that some splendid eye candy...