ASCII by Jason Scott

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BBS Documentary Update —

One of my disks is acting flaky. All through the production, I’ve had to deal with the inherent lack of quality of IDE disks. I’ve had fifteen (15) die in the past few years. With over 2.5 terabytes of disks in use at any time with the video footage, I’ve just been playing the odds. I keep three copies of the video footage (one of them offline) as insurance, so it’s not bitten me yet. But it’s a bit of a pain when one drive dies to begin to move hundreds of gigabytes around to safer, higher ground. It takes a while, to say the least.

I can therefore focus on writing this news entry to tell you how things are. I am now getting mails on a very regular basis wondering what’s up. People who bought the documentary back in October of 2004 are of course worried about the long delay and the the lack of DVDs arriving in their mail. I feel horrible about this, but at the very least I can console myself that it’s about quality, about getting all the pieces in place into a package worth buying.

I have played various episodes for a number of people, as a final test for some of them; they are very well recieved, and I’m very happy about that. They definitely tell a story and definitely give people a sense of the BBS history that has happened. Now I just want to get them to the world.

My day job heated up, which has caused some unwanted delays, but on the other hand without that job, it wouldn’t have been possible to do the documentary, so it’s kind of get unhappy about it. I’m likely going to have to take some days off of work to nail the rest of the work.

So what’s left? Subtitles, some minor edits on FIDONET and MAKE IT PAY before they’re considered done, and finishing up any other descriptions for the photo album which is included on the DVD-ROM. Over a gigeabyte of photos are in the album; pretty big and intimidating numbers. But they’re all intimidating numbers, I guess.

I also just finished (finally) the formatting hundreds of paragraphs from the pre-orders. For folks coming late, everyone up to about November of 2004 could order the DVD set and give me a paragraph that would go on the DVD. I’ve now taken these writings and put them into a readable format. There will be a plaintext version, and an HTML version to choose from. The stories and paragraphs people wrote are very, very touching.

The Eye of Doom had flu this week and that tripped him up badly. He should be coming back with audiovisual changes for the episodes in his hands. He’ll be getting these other two very soon.


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One Comment

  1. BBS Nostalgic says:

    As long as I get to see the documentary before I die, I shall be happy.