Computer, film, sound, Ranma... Ranma?!?

[vakkotaur]

The new computer is almost ready now. The modem has been pulled and a cover plate put in. The hard drive and its cooler have been installed. Now it's just a wait for the memory to arrive. Also, I have a name the new machine. It will join my herd as belgian. Yes, like the trolley horses. I still need to put pasofino back into the machine room and make in the office space for belgian, but that's something I can do tonight.

I finished the first roll of film for the Hall Lake project but forgot to drop it off Friday, so I get to do that this afternoon. I'll pick up the prints on Thursday (if I remember) and will see how things look. I'm curious to see how well things have turned out.

One of the various ongoing projects is digitizing all the stuff I have on cassette. Mostly this is stuff from the Dr. Demento radio show. I've been reasonably impressed with Audacity for this. Generally I can take out, or at least minimize, tape hiss and with care can eliminate at least the worst clicks and pops (like from a scratch on the original record). And while I've been using Audacity on Windows, it's a cross platform open source thing, so I'll be able to use it in Linux as well.

I actually sat through a full episode of Ranma 1/2. Jay was laughing at it quite a bit Saturday night and so I was somewhat interested. So before supper we watched it. The amusement park episode. The watercolor look of parts of it didn't do anything for me, and I guess I'm a stereotypical westerner as most of the characters looked the same to me. I wasn't laughing at it. Too much seemed to be trying to get humor from people being jerks or clueless or hapless. There's enough of that in the real world I don't see a need to generate more in the name of entertainment. During supper Jay related the characters' backstory. Okkay, so it's not a cartoon, it's a freaking soap opera that happens to be animated. What's scary and depressing is that this was the episode that generated a lot of laughter Saturday night, and this was in season 6. What that tells me is that one has to slog through seasons 1-5 to get to the point where the season 6 episode seems funny. That's scary and depressing. I'm glad I didn't spend any on money it, I'd want a refund. That this (anime) is supposedly the big thing in animation is downright depressing. I wonder, yet again, how long before there'll be good cartoons made again.

And yes, overall Sunday was a slow day compared to Saturday. Not a great amount accomplished, but no burnout either. It did get hot enough that the air conditioner ran some. Not something I'm used to so early in the year. Today it seems a bit more reasonable. To me, anyway.