I’ve got quite a busy amount of projects for this upcoming couple of weeks.

The movie is getting a lot of love, in the form of direct editing time. I expect to have days where I’m doing nothing but editing for 12 hours at a stretch. Hopefully this will lead to some workable sequences and rough cuts very soon. Along with that comes the wave of e-mails to the small army of supporters and people I’m doing related work with, the musicians and graphic artists and coders and people armed with soldering irons. The word we’re looking for here is “flurry”. So that’s going on, I promise.

There’s massive piles of papers here waiting to be scanned. I absolutely hate the software that comes with scanners, and I was recently given a pointer over to a program called Vuescan. What a difference! Instead of concentrating on being some crappy photo album/document messer program, Vuescan functions as a “scanner console” where it is negotiating the pathway between the scanner and the filesystem, getting in the way as little or as much as one needs. It can automatically take a scan and save in multiple formats, and it can be tweaked on the go. It also gives me instant feedback on what I’m looking at/scanning so I can see how it’s going. This may all sound obvious but there is a lot of really poor software out there for scanners. I expect my scanning productivity to be way, way up.

That said, tragedy strikes. I just scanned 300 sheets of paper and have discovered that my HP Scanjet G4050 scanner is adding a white line to all scans. It’s called a scanner streak in the scanning biz, and it absolutely sucks. After the current round of scanning this thing’s banished. I’ll be picking up something a little more worthy of scanning one-of-a-kind artifacts, shortly. Let’s do a shout out for the masses: THE HP SCANJET G4050 THAT I OWN IS A PIECE OF GARBAGE. Luckily, the streak is so consistent I can create a mask to remove it, but it’s a needless step in what has otherwise been a delightfully easy scanning process. Once I optimize it, this office is going to have a lot less in the way of to-do piles.

I spent time at Blip Festival 2008, and while I think other people are better equipped than I to talk about what a great time it was, I continued my tradition of buying up a galactic amount of CDs related to the bands performing:

As always, a festival with dozens of bands performing means that it’s an accounting nightmare for the poor folks running the sales table, so I send out my love to the 3 people it took with envelopes as I sat there going “this one”, “that one”, “oooh that one” and so on. It’s worth noting that this is basically the only remaining situation where I buy music in any sort of physical form, and even as I did it, friends of mine asked when they could borrow everything to rip it. It’s kind of not how things are done anymore, and I think of the entire endeavor as an irony-filled retro activity, like making your own cheese or binding a book. Sure, the result is satisfying and unique, but there’s so much else going on… regardless, I now have this massive collection in my house, ready to be pulled out at will. Did I mention I’m good for about seventeen minutes of chiptune music at a stretch?

2009 is shaping up to be another excellent year for both attendance and presentations; I’ve already got a dozen events I’m either attending and/or speaking at. I’m probably going to make a calendar page for just such an occasion. Expect that soon because I’m sure you can’t get enough of me.

While I have you here, this is the greatest machine I’ve seen this year. It is a part of my awakening to a whole range of neat projects and events that have come about due to the efforts of one Johannes Grenzfurthner. How much better my life has become due to him and others like him.

I also have a range of weblog entries coming, most of them bitter. But don’t be dismayed or concerned; it’s just that time of year when I have the urge to make a few unpleasant opinions known. It’s worked out so well for me in the past!

Bring it on.

Categorised as: jason his own self

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