Obligatory FC2007 Post

First few days were hectic, but things are... surprisingly quiet actually. No huge 'mile long line' rush at Reg on Friday evening or Saturday morning/afternoon, the usual 'weekend drunks' type of issues appeared, no other notable problems actually.

There is one surprisingly noticable difference this year though, 24-hour-a-day actively patrolling security on-site, actively hunting for things as minor as making sure the ropes between the movable brass poles are far enough apart the ropes are too high off the ground to jump or step over. Yes, they're acting that paranoid. Apparently they were hired on shortly after a recent management change, that's also resulted in the day shift being noticably colder to the furs in general. The night shift nutcases are still our best buds, but the DoubleTree has definately become far less fan-friendly and much more highly focussed on targetting things like EBay Seminars or Intel Expos.

Seperately, there's one suiter that I want to officially state I owe a beer or dinner or something to, and that's whoever's been suiting as Pepper(sp?) the bright-red vixen with the black/blue/purple hair in the vaguely schoolgirlish outfit. They're only the second suiter I've seen suit as actively as the owner of Cake.

Anyways, time for e-mail mostly, and then to get some sleep.

You can't stop the signal.

Serenity HD-DVD key to breaking HD-DVD encryption.

Time for new tires on the Jeep...

Goodyear TripleTred tires to be specific, for my Jeep Comanche. Why? Well, four of my five tires are wearing thin and needed to be replaced, but what's actually shoving me to get the replacements right before FC is that when I was driving to Sacramento today while talking to jwoulf on the phone to pick up some cables for FC, I noticed a sharp 'shimmy' and a thrumming coming mostly from the rear of the truck. JWoulf said, to paraphrase, "Get the hell to the side of the road NOW and check your tires!"

Checked the tires, the mate of the rear tire that blew out before (rear driver side, previously the rear passenger-side tire blew out on an earlier road-trip a year ago or so) had obviously started to fail, the sidewall could be squiggled around like the skin on your knee, but the tire itself felt taut and stiff still. AKA, the sidewall had seperated from the actual inner core of the tire. So... yeah, the two front tires have less wear but they're all approaching the legal limit and all getting replaced at once. The one previously-replaced tire will become the new spare tire, and the four TripleTred's will be the primary tires now.

Amusingly, one of the local installers TireRack recommended has the tire in stock(Gerard Goodyear #4861), but normally sell it for $175 versus the $122 from TireRack. They said they'd price-match though, for obvious reasons. If they didn't, I'd just buy the tires online and get them shipped and they know it, and at that point probably have them shipped elsewhere if they acted that arrogantly. So, save the shipping costs possibly, and get the tires before the FurCon staff meeting instead of after. Unfortunately I haven't been able to finish the one task I was supposed to. =-.-=

Battery cables are a pain to replace.

But having a battery it turns out was about 6 months past it's "lifetime" caused massive corrosion and deterioration of the battery cables near the terminals. Unfortunately, this means I had to replace the cables as well. But I over-estimated the length needed.

Not that big a deal, just had to make a coil of the leftover length on top of the new CostCo battery, tucked under the carry-handle on same for now until I can get replacement ends, take the cables off, chop em' to length and put new ends on. The Jeep does run smoother now though, and the radio doesn't "skip" anymore. I think I was suffering various minor quibbles because of power flucuations caused by the corroded/exposed battery cables.

And I can also say this is officially the first and only time I've seen a vehicle with the negative terminal NOT grounded to the chassis anywhere that I can locate. That... was surprising.

Civil Defense

This is short and brief.

First, read a very good essay on the retirement of the Civil Defense logo.

Now, go snag a distinct 'variant' on the Civil Defense logo I made if you want, or I can build a clone of the original logo if anyone would prefer that instead?

I'm sorry, but this... it just floors me. After Katrina, this move is five steps backwards, slapping the face of the populace each step of the way.

Abusing LCD Cleartype Techniques

The above is more a proof-of-concept than anything else at the moment, but an interesting trick to show one thing on most LCD's, and another entirely (a flat shade of grey) on most CRT's I've tested the image on.

Start with a 1-pixel checkerboard of pure green and purple, this is your 'universal background' to start with.
Add a layer of pure white, set to 'Difference', with an Alpha channel. This grayscale alpha channel is where you put your frames of animation of what-have-you one by one, flatten the image, save a frame, undo a couple times, lather, rinse, repeat. Note you want actual grayscale images, not sharp black-and-white ones, otherwise you just end up with green-and-purple blotches everywhere.

Edit: And as a side-note, an easy way to make visually understandable images is to draw your image elsewhere, then decompose it into CMYK, and duplicate the resulting K channel into the above-mentioned alpha channel.

And another one bites the dust...

...and I get a little more peeved at HP. Keyboard died on my laptop a day or so ago.

Wonderful hardware, honest. But geezus... they have some really arbitrary choices for what is user-servicable and what isn't. Having to ship a laptop off to get the screen replaced? I can understand that.

Having to ship a laptop off to replace the keyboard? The hell?

It's costing them a fortune to ship me a FedEx next-day-air box, and ship it back the same way when it's repaired. And the repair? They provide the complete manual on-line that shows how to do it. It takes less than five minutes.

I'm gonna have to say that despite how nice the laptop itself is, I'm not going to buy HP or Compaq ever again until they correct their repair policy and allow users to do very minor component replacements themselves. Asking for the broken part back or making the user pay for the part, I can understand. But they don't even allow their authorized service centers to stock any replacement notebook parts. It ALL has to get shipped back to HP/Compaq for service, in or out of warrenty, unless they deem the part as user-servicable. And they consider the hard drive user-servicable, but it takes the same exact number of screws (2, remove a panel, 4 more), and unplugging a delicate cable, that the keyboard does.

It just... makes no sense, at all. =-.-=