IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Anybody got a Harold Jacob’s “Mathematics, A Human Endeavor” book they want to sell me for cheap? Never mind. I found a second edition copy that I purchased for $26.

I should not have. H.o.p. will hate it. But we’ll have it none-the-less.

I’m on a math list that is starting a study using the book, the plan being to use the first edition as it was very available and cheaper than the 3rd edition which goes for something like $75. But everyone started buying the first edition and the cost leaped to $50 and up for it.

In the meanwhile, Amazon tells me that I would be interested in all these books on the Mysteries of Mithras, which I would be, but there are so many and I can’t decide which one to buy. And I need other things besides.

Or I don’t.

Do I really need to buy a book specially on the Periodic Table of Elements with its own chart appropriate for hanging on the wall? A couple of months ago, I joined another list specifically for learning the Periodic Table of Elements and purchased a Periodic Table of Elements through it and was a little dismayed by the Table and accompanying material, that I paid for information that I can find better presented on the internet, nor have I been impressed with the list. But such is life and I didn’t pay that much. So…whatever.

Instead of buying any books on the Mysteries of Mithras I instead purchased for H.o.p. The Story of Mankind and A Little History of the World and The Story of Art and The Periodic Table, Elements with Style.

As my reward for spending my money on periodic tables instead of Mithraic Mysteries, I’m now going to go watch “Shakes, the Clown”.

I love that movie.

H.o.p. worked on this little movie today (even though it says January, we did it today). I aided him with the technical aspects of putting it together on the computer, but he did all the animation and the story himself, and found the music he wanted to add to it. I helped him to implement what he wanted in Photoshop and Quicktime and doing the recording in Audacity, then getting it up.

It was a long day as we did two movies.

A longer day because the conversion from a mov file to flv at Dreamhost was mucking everything up and I’ve spent TWO HOURS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHY after spending all day working on these two movies with him. Unable to figure out why it was all mucked up and stalling and cutting out, I finally just converted to the d**** flv myself and it seems to be working fine.

P.S. Forgive the background hum. I forgot to cut off the speakers when recording the Scott Joplin music for this. H.o.p. found a site with the music and I had to set up the mic next to his speakers and record it off his computer, but I forgot to turn off my speakers while recording and got this terrible, annoying hum. But H.o.p. likes it. He thinks it contributes to the antique ambiance. He put up the movie on his website and titled it, “Charlie Ducklin”. Cute!

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Unable to view? Download the Flash Player

This is the other movie we did today. Again, H.o.p. did the story and animation and I helped him with the technical aspects of putting it together on the computer.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Unable to view? Download the Flash Player

To my knowledge there are no parts 1 through 3.

It turns out he’d lost his camera (!!!!!!) and didn’t tell us, then found it yesterday under a bunch of his junk in a drawer. So now he’s all eager to get back to doing movies.

“I’m all out of practice,” he says.

Frankly, I think he was also going through a period of exasperation with the whole process of animation because today he admitted that he was getting tired of taking so many shots trying to get things to look right. Consequently, today he did not take that many shots for these movies. And, as he said…

“I’m all out of practice.”

I’m trying to talk him into not doing epics (he starts out with big ambitious projects and burns himself out) and instead try practicing doing little short scenes.

He’s very excited (VERY EXCITED!) about finally having sound on his movies, so I expect to see soon a number of movies of robot thwarting villains.

P.S. The Fire Rhino???!!! The Fire Rhino!!! Love it. The fire becoming a FIRE RHINO!

P.P.S. Yes, I know we misspelled “villains”. I could always blame it on H.o.p. and you wouldn’t know any better (would you) but that one is actually my fault.

H.o.p. did this animation yesterday, then we worked on it today.

He hopes it will entertain you.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Unable to view? Download the Flash Player

We also hit the Atlanta History Center again. I may or may not have a pic or two. The plan was just to walk the gardens, getting acquainted with them, but instead we ended up doing the tour of the old Tullie Smith farm house (dates from the 1840s), then roamed the auxiliary buildings and had fun looking at the sheep and chickens.

H.o.p. did the animation for this back in November (so I’m giving him as age 9 in the credits) but we finished work on it on the computer today.

He really likes Scott Joplin.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

The music is Manoel Carlos Motta Jr’s rendition of the “Pine Apple Rag” over at Youtube.

Unable to view? Download the Flash Player

Charlie Ducklin’s having a baaad day.

Another movie by H.o.p. I’m loving his Charlie Ducklin. H.o.p. went through a period, when he was five, of watching Charlie Chaplin. He loved his comedy.

The music is Chocotiger’s rendition of the “Maple Leaf Rag” over at Youtube.

Waited all day yesterday for a UPS shipment for Marty but then he realized it was coming in today instead so here I wait for UPS to knock at the window.

I started using the Flash Media Player via Dreamhost for displaying QT to FLV video on the blogs because Youtube can be pretty funky, videos not playing very smoothly, indeed so roughly that they have the appearance of dropping stretches of frames. (I already related the other night how Dreamhost’s conversion utility was behaving very badly so I’m doing the QT to FLV myself in QT).

BUT! Yes, but. There was no way to do a preview image in the Flash player and that was giving the blogs (H.o.p.’s and mine) the appearance of having big black gateways to nothingness instead of RICH MEDIA CONTENT!

So, yesterday I began my journey to previews via this nifty plug-in.

Well, well, I labored quite a while and couldn’t get previews to work, despite the fact my code was fine.

Turns out that you can use an absolute url for the movies (I have them located outside the blog folders since the movies are serving multiple blogs) but you must have a relative url for the previews, it seems. So, success, finally got that figured out. Moved the preview images inside the Wordpress folders and am doing relatives urls as the base url is automatically appended to preview images in this plug-in.

But wait! I discovered that on the category and archive pages and in searches the flash videos were appearing as code. So, I looked through the mac-dev.net forum and fortunately this issue had been covered. I found the couple of files in each theme in which the word “excerpt” needed to be replaced with “post” and did that and got both blogs looking right again.

No, wait! Other things were going on in the meanwhile where I had to update Wordpress to its most recent release, which meant also working on H.o.p.’s category template as it hasn’t liked the most recent Wordpress updates, but I had a fix for it and uploaded that.

But wait! I realized posts were now disappearing in H.o.p.’s blog. They couldn’t be reached via categories or archives or searches. They were THERE but were simply gone. Panic time! I backtracked in my browser and did a duplicate post of one I’d just made which was one of the posts that had disappeared. Now TWO posts were appearing, both the original and the duplicate. So I removed one of them. And both disappeared. I did this several times over. The theme we were using on H.o.p.’s blog hadn’t appreciated, apparently, my changing “excerpt” to “post” because this issue involved archives, searches and categories.

Forget it. H.o.p. loved that theme (Mistylook, the appearance of which we’d modified according to his exact specifications) but it was time to change.

I spent hours last night trying out themes. Seeking them out. Downloading. Unzipping. Loading them up. Almost all of them had the same issues with the plug-in where you would need to change “excerpt” to “post” but I didn’t see any posts being dropped at least. They were all present. Or so it seemed.

We also didn’t like the themes, not even after my changing the appearance of them. None of them were working for us. They were ugly and I didn’t feel like doing hours and hours of work modifying css to create a whole new theme essentially. I just wanted to do simple mods like changing colors and images. I didn’t want to have to redo type and spatial orientations.

Finally tried the Artsemerging theme and WONDERFUL it worked straight out of the box with the plug-in. I modified the appearance (images and just a little CSS) and H.o.p.’s blog is back in order.

P.S. DAMN IT! I WAS WRONG. I’m now losing posts in my blog, having changed “excerpt” to “post”. Damn, damn, damn, damn! I didn’t notice it last night.

I’m not working on that today. Will face that tomorrow.

P.P.S. My brain decided it had to face the problem. And VOILA a light clicked. I changed my archives and search php files back to what they originally were, restoring “excerpt” where I’d replaced with “post” (which was the fix supplied in the forum but wasn’t working well for Veryplaintext or Mistylook themes, which weren’t displaying the full post with the change and were dropping posts) and when I have Flash videos to display I will write an OPTIONAL EXCERPT (a summary), thus bypassing the problem. You see, excerpts strip away all coding, which was why it was showing the coding for the flash player. But changing from excerpt to post in the archives and search php files resulted in posts being dropped rather than full posts being displayed in Veryplaintest and Mistylook.

We like H.o.p.’s new theme so will leave that as it is. It’s already configured to display full posts rather than excerpts, and though excerpts are nice, well, it’s not so bad to have H.o.p.’s blog displaying full posts in categories, archives etc.

Told you my brain is mush. I should have thought of this last night.

So last night at around 12:30 am there was this huge but kind of muffled boom that sounded like either a thundercloud had exploded or a building a block away had fallen down.

Beat.

“What was that?” I said.

“What was that?” H.o.p. said.

“I heard it too,” Marty said.

We’re sounding like the momma and poppa and baby bear there, aren’t we.

No one else was doing it so I went to the front room and looked out the window knowing full well I wouldn’t be able to see anything out of it but a few yards of city street.

The boom was fading and in its place now there arose a sound like rushing wind. Bizarre!

Marty had followed. “It’s wind,” he said.

“No, look at the trees,” I said. “They’re still.”

The rushing wind sound continued for a bit. Then it died down and was replaced by the winding whining whir of a motor in bad trouble.

I heard people yelling.

I was still dressed so decided to step outside to see if I could find out what was going on. When I opened the front door I was met with smoke. And fumes. Though it smelled like burning rubber, when you live in an apartment building and there’s smoke you go check it out.

Walked up to the corner and somehow someway a car had whipped through the shrubbery of the building, torn up the grassy turf so it was all over the sidewalk, and landed itself in a telephone pole. The police were already there. Whoever was in the auto they apparently weren’t going to handle and would leave to the medics. I don’t know how messed up the driver was because I wasn’t going to get closer and in the way of things, but whoever had hit the telephone pole was not in a condition to be questioned.

A couple was standing on the corner across from me. Another couple of people were talking to the police, probably from the apartment building. That was it.

A policewoman went around and began banging the back of the car with her club. She’d look in the back seat and then bang the trunk of the car again, around the tail lights, with her club again. Then look in the back seat again. She did this multiple times.

I went back inside. Marty went out to take a look. The ambulance had arrived. He departed as they pulled up the gurney to the side of the car.

Hope whoever it was is all right.

Last we heard about robot, he was trapped in a dungeon. How did he get there?

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Now you know.

H.o.p. loves Carmina Burana.

I like.