The other day David bought himself an SD Gundam action figure. SD Gundam is some kind of Japanese cartoon that he’s seen on TV. The figure looks like a robot in bright white, red, and yellow samurai armor. We had the following conversation about it.

“I think I’ll call him ‘Ninjer’,” says David.

“You mean ‘Ninja’,” I say.

“No, I mean ‘Ninjer’,” says David.

“But that sounds like he has a ninjury,” I say.

David looks at me with withering scorn.

“Dad, you just don’t get it.”

Here’s the timeline. Last Thursday evening, I received my new camcorder. By Saturday afternoon, I’d shot a bunch of footage of the kids, and just for fun a little animation of a couple of David’s toys (An SD Gundam action figure, and a Lego Bionicle named Rakshi, if it matters to you). By the end of Sunday afternoon, I’d edited the rough footage into three short little movies totalling about five or six minutes of video, deleting infelicitous moments, tweaking the recorded audio, adding music, a few judicious transitions, and finally titles, and burned the whole thing onto DVD. We watched it on our TV before we had dinner.

And thanks to David Pogue and his book iMovie 3 and iDVD I even avoided the worst of the clueless newbie mistakes while shooting the footage. I held the camera steady; I didn’t use the zoom while I was shooting; I shot a variety of close up, medium, and wide shots; and I didn’t move the camera except to follow moving children. For these things, I can take a little credit–I might be clueless, but I’m teachable.

For the rest, I have to thank the folks at Sony and at Apple. It’s amazing what you can do when you have the right tools.

Around Christmas last year I started working my way through my library, winnowing out the books that I no longer wanted. I thought it would be appropriate to keep a list of them for future reference, and for fun I posted a full list to this weblog, with reasons. And then I got involved in other things, and now, about nine months later, I’m finally getting back to it. So here it is, still more books I no longer want.

Generative Programming, by Czarnecki and Eisenecker

This guys wrote a book to persuade everyone that “generative
programming” is going to be the next big thing. Now, generative
programming isn’t just one thing; they try to tie together a whole
bunch of disparate stuff, including some really exciting research done
by Charles Simonyi at Microsoft on something he calls “Intentional
Programming.” The authors really get quite excited about it. It’s a
pity that Microsoft pulled the plug on the research around the time the
book was published.

The XML Companion, by Neil Bradley

By now, you either know what XML is or you don’t care. I’m quite
possibly in both camps.

Windows 98 Annoyances, by David A. Karp

Blissfully, I am no longer annoyed by Windows 98.

Manuscript Submission, by Scott Edelstein.

I picked this up second-hand some years ago when I still thought that
submitting manuscripts was a good idea. Posting them on-line is
easier, and it’s more likely that somebody will read them. Life’s too
short to chase the publishing companies, unless one has no other choice.

Tcl/Tk Tools, by Mark Harrison et al.

A fine book, but it was published in 1997. There’s been a lot of water
under this particular bridge in the last six years.

Bloodwinter, by Tom Deitz

I went through a Tom Dietz phase some years ago; more recently I tried
re-reading his books, and discovered that the phase had definitely
passed. I bought this one (alas) shortly before I discovered this. It
was on a different shelf, or it would have gone with the rest.

The Gryphon King, by Tom Deitz.

So was this one.

Man-Kzin Wars VII, by Benford and Martin.

This might be OK; but I tired of this franchise before I got to this
book, and though I’ve had it since 1995 I’ve never been sufficiently
interested to read it. Out it goes.

Guerrilla Guide to Great Graphics with The Gimp

I no longer use the Gimp, so I no longer need the book.

2000 Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market

Yet another vestige of a dying past.

2000 Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market.

Ditto.

Saint Maybe, by Anne Tyler

This was one of my mom’s books. I’ve read a little Anne Tyler, and I
wasn’t so thrilled that I felt the need to read more.

The Way of the Explorer, by Dr. Edgar Mitchell

My sister gave me this some long while back. It’s written by one of
the Apollo astronauts, and is subtitled “An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey
Through the Material and Mystical Worlds.” As I work in the space biz,
she thought I’d find it interesting. Alas, I find it rather appalling.
Leafing through it I find such sentences as

In many religious traditions (including Christianity in its
early years), subjective experience is believed to be carried forward by
the reincarnation of souls into successive life experiences.

Whoops! Nope, sorry, unh-uh.

He ends up espousing some kind of weird pantheism based on the notion
that the cosmos itself is conscious. Bad astronaut. No cookie.

The Hollowing, by Robert Holdstock

When Holdstock wrote Mythago Wood, I thought he was just
amazing. I’ve since decided that there’s less here than meets the eye.

The Children’s Hour, by Jerry Pournelle and S.M Stirling

It was OK the first time, but that’s enough.

Ten Philosophical Mistakes, by Mortimer J. Adler

I bought this hoping that it would interesting and fun. Interesting,
yes, somewhat, but deadly, deadly dry.

Python and Tkinter Programming, by John E. Grayson

Now, I’m a programming language junky. I like the language Python,
though I’ve never had the opportunity to use it for anything important.
I’m a big fan of the Tcl language, and its “Tk” GUI toolkit. So when
this book came out, explaining how to do Tk GUI programming in Python,
I grabbed it. And frankly, despite being an experience programmer, and
despite knowing Tk pretty well already, I couldn’t make heads or tails
of it.

HTML: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Ed., by Musciano and Bill Kennedy

A fine book, but obsolete.

PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, by David Pogue

Perhaps once upon a time it was, but now it’s garbage.

The pressure of having three kids in the house finally caused my brain to snap the other day, and I bought me a camcorder.

Actually, it was only partly the kids’ fault; some of the blame rests on Steve Jobs, and that computer company of his–the one that ships digital video editing software with every computer they sell. I suddenly realized that not only can I shoot video footage of my winsome young’uns, I can edit out the dull bits, keep the cute bits, and put it all on DVD for my extended family to roundfile expeditiously.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. I’ve bought a camcorder, as if I had time for yet another expensive time-consuming hobby, and so clearly I’ve gone stark staring mad. Remember that as you read on.

The camcorder is a low-end Sony digital camcorder that uses MiniDV tapes and connects to my PowerBook via Firewire. It’s a nice little unit, about the size of a mass-market paperback of Gone With The Wind. Or perhaps Les Miserables; we’ll see. So far it appears to work quite nicely.

But the real star is iMovie, which as I say comes shipped with every Macintosh. iMovie knows how to talk to my camcorder; all I did was connect the camcorder with the PowerBook using a Firewire cable, and iMovie announced detected it immediately. I installed nary a driver, nor did OS X offer to install for me; it was true plug-n-play, right out of the box.

And then, iMovie effortlessly imports the video I’ve recorded, breaks it up into scenes automatically, and then allows me to view it, stretch it, chop it in pieces, run it through filters, add soundtracks and titles, and then export it back to tape, to a Quicktime Movie, or to DVD. I cannot express how much better even the goofiest home movie sounds with some decent music backing it up.

The iMovie interface, like most of Apple’s recent software, is deceptively simple. There’s definitely more there than meets the eye. Usually I like this, but in a few cases, they’ve made it a little too simple. For example, I added a title to a clip; later I wanted to get rid of it. I simply could not figure out how to do it! Finally I looked up the answer–you highlight the clip and press Delete. Silly me; I’d never have guessed that in a million years. I’d have thought–how stupid of me–that pressing delete would delete the clip altogether.

The book that came to my rescue is iMovie 3 and iDVD, by David Pogue; it’s one of the generally excellent “Missing Manuals” series, and it’s excellent. The book begins with three chapters on shooting digital video: what to look for in a camcorder; basic videography, including lighting and sound; and how to shoot specific kinds of things, including interviews, weddings, and so forth. How to use iMovie doesn’t come in until the fourth chapter; and then the book ends with several chapters on how to use Apple’s DVD authoring software, iDVD.

Now that I’ve got the camera and the software, I’m embarked on a special project that involves shooting video of the kids, turning various camera features on and off, and all the other things one does at a time like this; I’m calling it “The Usual Foolishness”. It’s sure to be the next big thing in home video.

Chapter 34 and Chapter 35 of my novel Through Darkest Zymurgia! are now available for your delectation at Once-Told Tales.

This week: ascending the tiger!

Every year, my section at work has a big picnic in a local park. There are a hundred or so people in the section, divided into six or seven groups, and each year each group is supposed to devise some kind of entertaining game to be played at the picnic. Our group typically doesn’t put a whole lot of thought into it; last year, we had a water balloon toss, and this year we provided a jar filled with M&Ms for people to guess the quantity of.

But there’s one group that always outdoes the rest of us. Last year, they did their own version of Fear Factor; this year it was sumo wresting.

Yes, sumo wrestling. I neglected to bring my camera this year, and truly I am paying for it. Picture this: a large blue gym mat, about twenty feet square, with a red circle marked on it, and two big overstuffed flesh-colored sumo suits, complete with diapers.

The suits open down the back. You have to slide in feet first while lying on your stomach. Then helpful people do up the velcro and lift you to your feet, because heaven knows you can’t get up on your own. And there you and your opponent stand, looking like Tenniel’s illustration of Tweedledum and Tweedledee as they prepared to go into battle.

Small children ooh and ah as you rush at each other, flailing your arms and legs madly but achieving only a diffident wave of your hands and an astronaut-like hopping motion. You bang into each other–it’s the clash of the titans! Eventually, one of you slips and falls out of the ring. It’s best two falls out of three.

Finally, the match is over. Your helpers lay you down on your stomach, and undo the velcro, and you struggle to free yourself from the sumo suit. It’s a miracle of nature, how the suit splits open and you emerge, moth-like, from your cocoon, dripping with sweat and tired in every bone.

Several of my co-workers tried it; one of them was still wobbly when we left, over an hour later.

Dearest Lord, this I ask:

For the victims of 9/11, and all victims of terror everywhere in the world, may they rest in your heavenly peace.

For the terrorists of 9/11, and all other terrorists who have killed themselves while murdering other people, may they be forgiven, though they have done great evil, for their leaders lied to them and trained them in wickedness.

For the leaders of al Quaida, Hamas, the PLO, and all other groups that teach their children to worship death, may they be led to repent of their wickedness and live their lives making restitution to the families of those they have killed.

And if they will not repent, may your judgement be swift and sure.

Amen.

It would be hard to summarize the plot of this book adequately in a
paragraph without completely butchering it since the text runs, in the
Oxford World Classic Edition, to 1,095 pages without including the notes,
the biographical information or the tedious and obligatory forward by a
literature professor. I will try.

Essentially, it’s a tale of revenge. Edmond Dantes is falsely accused of
treason on the eve of his wedding to the beautiful Catalan, Mercedes. I
won’t go into details about how or why. He ends up in the Chateau d’If, in
solitary where he goes thru a cycle of confusion, anger and despair. The
Abbe Faria tunnels his way into Dantes’ cell and over the next ten years
teaches him everything he knows. He also tells him the secret of the Isle of
Monte Cristo, containing an enormous treasure. Dantes escapes from the
prison, again, I won’t say how, and finds the treasure. He then goes about
exacting his revenge armed with unlimited wealth on everyone who had
anything to do with his imprisonment, which actually comprises most of the
book.

It’s not light or easy reading. There is so much detail that sometimes the
minute plot twists are not apparent. Read originally as a serial, which is
how it was originally published, that may have been easier to deal with.
However, I enjoyed it completely. I waffled from liking the Count and
feeling sorry for him to thinking him a complete jerk, especially in the
bits with Mercedes or Haydee. There were parts that were just a little too
fantastic to be believable and I thought the end, which I am not going to
divulge, just a bit too neat and tidy for a revenge novel. Overall,
however, it was a rollicking good tale that I was sorry to finish.

So my four-year-old boy, James, just came downstairs for his bedtime story. More specifically, he came down the stairs head first, on his stomach, saying “Slith. Slith. Slith.” as he slid from stair to stair.

Yes, that’s right. He was slithering.

“I slithered down like a snake,” he told me. “Do you know why, Daddy?”

“No, James, why?”

“Because it’s fun, that’s why.”

Now this is just too silly for words–but it’s all in good fun. Using a sophisticated geographical database and analysis software, a couple of P.G. Wodehouse fans claim to have identified the original of Blandings Castle.

(Via Mirabilis)