I’ve had Quicksilver, a rather nifty little program lurking on my hard drive for a while now, even prior to February’s Great Computer Fuck-Up. But until just a couple days nights ago, I had not one clue how to really use it. I’d fucked around with the Automator app for a while before getting a bit fed up with it, so I turned to Quicksilver and decided to figure it out, once and for fucking all.

It took me a little while to get the hang of the program and how it really worked, but once I’d had that epiphany, I knew there was no going back to my Mac without. I’m trying to retrain myself from using the mouse for almost everything to invoking Quicksilver. I swear to God, on every single website I found, the word invoke is used to mean open the program. So far, I’m 35/65, still favoring the mouse, but that percentage is getting closer and closer to 50/50 all the time. I’m just lazy, I suppose; honestly, within actual programs, Word, Excel, or their open-source equivalents, I definitely use the keyboard more for tasks than the mouse. I predict it won’t take me too much longer for the same to hold true using Quicksilver.

Honestly, the program still stops me up quite a bit, but at least I know how to use it now; I used to just get mad at it and call it names and close it. Once I started reading about it, though, I realized what was going on and made a simple adjustment to the reset command in the preference pane and I was off and running.

What I’m still trying to get a handle on are the plugins; I’m sure there’s a huge part of the overall picture I’m missing when it comes to them, but I’m also sure there’s going to be one of those, “Well, of course that’s how the plugins fucking work! DOH!” That point has not been reached quite yet.

I love the glassy, bezeled appearance of the interface and have already lost quite a bit of time playing with the colors. When it got on to about 0130 Thursday morning and I was trying different color combinations, I realized how insane it was and went back to the defaults. The purple is quite attractive, but I’m really leaning towards changing it to Mac’s aqua shade or a nice pink. The jury’s still out on this one.

And because there are others much better at explaining how Quicksilver works and what it can do, here are some links to articles I found most helpful in explaining the conundrum Quicksilver used to be.

Quicksilver at:

Lifehacker - an introductory tutorial; has links for more advanced usage
Dan Dickinson - this is a little old, but it got me off to a pretty good start
43 Folders - a list of Quicksilver posts can be found here

As much as I love Quicksilver at this very moment in time, I hate VLC, in particular the Windows version of it. I’ve bitched about this already: using this on the tele-top has recently rendered it absolutely unusable for anything but collecting dust and vexing me, for reasons beyond my simple comprehension. I was quite distraught, for not only is the tele-top my tv of choice these days for everything, but I was in the middle of screen capping for Sarah Jane Smith - Fashionista Fever!, part one. I needed that fucker to work!

When this started, I thought it was the disks, or the content of the disks (namely season four of Doctor Who) fucking it up. But after testing the external DVD R-W, the internal CD-ROM/DVD drive, and various other disks, not to mention Windows Media Player (I know, I know. I felt so dirty afterwards) and Nero something or other, I came to the conclusion it was neither. Thinking the most logical place to start would be a reinstall, I did and hoped for the best.

Well, it didn’t work; I still had the same weird lag/stutter/syncing issues. I went back to the drawing board and started poking around the internet to see if anyone else had experienced the same thing. Of course, I wasn’t alone, but the forums and articles I found were of very little value to me, for the most part. Many of them were far too technical for me, although some of the initial forum queries described my problems exactly.

The one possible understandable fix I found without getting a headache reading it was to reset the entire program to its defaults. I’ll tell you what, I never messed with the defaults because I don’t understand most any of them, but I reset them, anyhow. Silly, I know, but at least it was something.

Well, that didn’t work, as I kinda secretly suspected it wouldn’t. Off I was again, in search of something, anything to fix it. Unfortunately, I continued running into those very techie fixes and despaired of ever finding the answer I needed in language I could understand. Just as I was about to give up on ever using the tele-top again and realizing I’d have to press my beloved Mac into service (naturally, there are no issues with this program…it’s for a Mac!), which is a huge pain in my ass, I found a little codec thingamajig called K-Lite, purported to play even more file types than VLC, and downloaded it, installed it, and voila! The issues I had on the tele-top magically disappeared for the most part and I smote VLC.

It’s not perfect, this K-Lite; it doesn’t work so well with full-length movies and lags considerably. After discovering that, I tried watching something that wasn’t a movie and had the same result. Not wanting to fuck around with it any longer, I shut the entire machine down and haven’t returned to it yet. That was yesterday and I’ve been avoiding it like the plague today.

K-Lite also lacks the ability to screen cap, which pretty much leaves me back at square one, at least where my recent (and now ongoing) need for them is concerned. So, although it really is a huge pain, I am using the Mac; the inconvenience of this set-up is the simple fact that I refuse to sit in my TARDIScloset to watch television.

Naturally, that makes it necessary to move the Mac from the TARDIScloset and into the living room on a pretty much daily basis. In doing so, I guarantee two things: the added benefit of grabbing audio from whatever it is I may be watching (good!) and needing to reboot the Mac once it’s back in the TARDIScloset so I reconnect to the internets (bad!).

To be honest, so adverse I was to the constant moving back and forth with the Mac, I downloaded the Linux version of VLC early on and thought I’d use Myrna Loynux as my tele-top. It wasn’t simple aversion; it was more like breathless desperation to avoid the entire work-around with the Mac. It’s obvious how desperate I was because Linux is beyond me, very much like all those forum posts I read about VLC, and I’ve made my peace with the situation.

So, as far as VLC goes, I’m pretty much back to where I was when this all started. But at least I’ve got Quicksilver to sweeten the bitter pill. Anyway, I’d rather use my Mac for everything, relocation be damned.

Click on the picture - it works!

The School Song
British Racing Green
When Britain Refused to Sing

Yes. My goodness, yes.
Oh, sixty times over, one
For every birthday.

Turn Left

There have been other things filling my days and sometimes even my early morning hours. No longer am I waking up at 1:30am or 2am like I was for a while. Now there are nights I’m just going to bed at 1:30am or 2am. That hasn’t happened too often, but in the last week or so, I’ve definitely noticed a change in the hours I keep at the end of the day; mornings are still early, but not ass-crack-of-dawn early, though. A nice change, after all the years of getting up early for work and then in the last few months at the factory, getting up even earlier for work.

Sarah Jane mp3s are being uploaded pretty regularly; I’ve got only two more serials left to re-watch as back-end work for Fashionista Fever!, so I suspect this will slow down by week’s end. But, then there’s always the last two episodes of Doctor Who with which to work, not to mention season one of TSJA…

Entirely too much time is being spent creating images for lol capshunz, but I’m having entirely too much fun with it. I’ll eventually need to incorporate more than just Doctor Who capshunz, but due to the insane number of screen caps I’ve got scattered amongst two laptops, that might not happen for a while.

Fashionista Fever! has taken on a life of its own and is now a multi-part project; “A Clotheshorse is Born” has been uploaded and will cross-post on scary-crayon tomorrow. I had no idea I’d have such a blast writing it, but as I said to Wes in a recent email, “It’s been really quite fun, the obvious joy of rewatching all the S! J! S! serials again notwithstanding. Writing again has been good for me, makes me use the brain I feel sometimes atrophying.” Thank goodness, since there are at least three more installments for sure, with the possibility of at least one additional critique of non-serial specific observations - what some may call total over-analysis - but we’ll see.

In order to make these projects (and any others) more accessible, I’ve included direct links to each one’s page in the left-hand sidebar. Handy!

Lest anyone think I’ve been working on these outside projects and watching movie after movie (I’ve pretty much abandoned TARDISvision because everything I’ve watched recently has been a repeat - or a three-peat - until last night, actually) exclusively and conveniently forgetting I’ve now been unemployed for two months to the day, believe me, I haven’t. There’s a pretty rigid schedule I’ve instituted and have been very successful in adhering to it Monday through Friday. Afternoon naps are pretty much a thing of the past, although I will admit dozing off yesterday after lunch while trying to watch “How Awful About Allan.” To be honest, saying I tried watching it isn’t exactly right: I dozed off during the beginning credits. There was something about combining the talents of Aaron Spelling, Anthony Perkins, Julie Harris, and Joan Hackett into a made-for-television vehicle that signaled snoozeville.

Speaking about TARDISvision, I need to post an update. Yes, it’s true. I finally watched a current episode. With the tenth Doctor. And companion Donna Noble. Just as this season is coming to an end. Since this is the first show I’ve actually watched this season most of the references to previous current episodes went right over my head as I watched. But reading the wiki article refreshed my memory on a few others. I was going to bitch about the causal nexus/”Logopolis” reference (thank you, wikipedia!) just now, but then realized how sickly ironic that would be, since there was a certain reference to a certain companion working for a certain magazine that totally didn’t go over my head.

The only other two episodes I’ve seen from this season were “Poison Sky” and “The Sontaran Stratagem,” and I was sick as a dog for both; thus I don’t count them at all. Perfect, since I’ll have almost a full season to get me through the upcoming drought.

I think I may know why my brain blocked this book out of my memory for so many years, except for the front cover. It’s a damn creepy story, although when I was fourteen, I’m sure I didn’t appreciate all the levels of creepiness. I stopped at my post office box Saturday morning, picked up the book, and when I got home from other errands, promptly started reading and didn’t stop until it was finished. I absolutely could not put the book down. There was no way that was possible; the story of five teenagers plucked for an insidious psychological and behavioral experiment pulled me in, hook, line, and sinker.

That the book was published in 1974 isn’t something you’d necessarily know if you didn’t look at the Library of Congress information page; because there’s not a lot of period slang (probably because the story is set some time in the future), the story’s held up exceedingly well over the past thirty-four years

Unfortunately, the copy I bought has a different cover than what’s pictured here, but that’s probably just as well. This picture itself makes me uneasy enough and obviously did the first time I read the book, since it (the cover) made such an impression on me, to the exclusion of just about everything else.

There are certain parts of the book that float across my mind unbidden, the two that stick in my brain the strongest are the dedication:

This book is dedicated to all the rats and pigeons who have already been here.

and the last two sentences:

And then the wall came to an end, the path took a sudden turn, and they were face to face with a traffic light-a green, blinking traffic light.
Without hesitation they began to dance.

I’m really glad I finally googled this to find the name and now have a copy of it. Certainly, I won’t forget the book’s name again, and when I’ve got a bit of disposable income lying around, William Sleator will definitely have more shelf space on my bookcases.

1976

1974

1972