Why work when there’s Sweetwater?

Got a call last night from Carrie at the Sweetwater Brewing that they were having a bottling run today at 11 am. I’ve had two fairly slack days, so I went ahead and showed up. When you do the work you pretty much take home as much beer as you want. It is work. I was beat by the time I left at 2 pm. I’m sure they kept going until 5 pm or so.

They just moved into a new facility so they’ve got some new (used) equipment on the bottling line including a new case packer. The bottles slide into position, the box is lifted and the bottles are dropped. The box drops down and bam – four five six ten bottle break. Over and over. It was interesting. When they get that machine working though it will really do some work.

I walked out of there with 29 beers, but for some reason all that I’ve tried tonight are flat. I’m sure they didn’t intend that but hopefully we didn’t package several thousand flat beers!

Staging?!? Moi?!?

Well believe it or not, after 10 years I’ve completed another staging gig. Nick D’Allen of Staging Directions called me early last week and wanted to know if I wanted to be a graphics (PowerPoint) operator at a large business meeting general session on Sunday (setup/rehearsal) and Monday (show). Since times have been hard and frustrating lately, I’ve been thinking about a return to meeting work so this was a good opportunity to dip my toe back in the pool.

It actually was a lot of fun. I don’t miss the long days and strange hours, but now I’m curious about it all again. Much of the technology has changed making many things easier, but many similar problems still exist.

One cool thing they were using was a Folsom Research ScreenPro Plus, which can switch video signal to up to six screens. What’s cool about it is that it’ll take pretty much any kind of video signal including computers up to 1600 x 1200 and scale the output to the native resolution of the video projector.

Nick invited me up to his office next week to meet with him and show me how they use Folsom’s BlendPro and ScreenShaper, as well as Dataton’s Watchout product. It should be interesting.

I’m curious as to why they’re using Watchout which is used to create presentations and does the edge blending for you using a computer at each projector when they also have BlendPro which does this to a widescreen image without needing additional computers and allows you to use PowerPoint, Director or whatever to create your widescreen presentation.

Janet Cooke, Sensei

So I get an email from the Zen Center today saying that there will be a memorial service for Janet Cooke. She was a friend that I met during my second and more serious foray into Soto Zen. She had a big influence on the growth of my practice. So Janet has died and I’m left wondering why. She was overweight which may have been a factor. Heart problems? Complications from undiagnosed diabetes? I can relate. I’m overweight and diabetic myself. With more searching on the web, I find out that she committed suicide. What the fuck?!? Now I’m upset. Angry. Pissed .

Rodney Bigenheimer Changed My Life

Blottner and I saw a free screening of Mayor of the Sunset Strip last night. It is a documentary about KROQ DJ Rodney Bigenheimer. Outside of LA, very few people know who he is, but this oddball has changed my life.

I don’t know how I heard of him. Probably from listening to Mike Halloran’s Radios in Motion show on WDET in Detroit. While visiting family in Riverside, CA in 1980 I was able to record part of his show featuring Holly Beth Vincent. I still have that tape. Years later I had a friend, Cari Avila on the Prodigy (running on DOS!) Redd Kross board that would send me cassettes of his show. Through these tapes I became a fan of many bands – primarily The Muffs, Suede, Best Kissers in the World, etc. I actually called him once while his show was on to tell him that I listened to him regularly even though I live in Atlanta. It was awkward at best – as you might be able to understand if you’ve seen the documentary.

Rodney is the consumate fan. He taught me to be proud of being a fan. After years in the doldrums he taught me how to love music again. It’s a shame he isn’t recognized for the influence he has had.

Thanks Rodney!

Nice work AJC.com

I just found out that ajc.com, the web version of our local paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is now requiring registration in order to access content. Now I’m happy giving my public email address and some demographic information, including my zip code, but why in the world do they need my home address and telephone number? Are they trying to drive people to arch-rival Creative Loafing? This is an idiotic move.

Minimize a Fullscreen Browser Window

I’ve been working on a flash project for the last couple of months. This project runs in a borderless, control-less, fullscreen browser window. Now as to why the project was designed this way is beyond me, because every time there is a call to open a pdf or an email or if the user needs to get to their computer somehow they can’t unless they know to use alt-tab (windows) to switch between applications. We couldn’t add the window controls back in because the interface (and a TON of content) was designed for 1024 x 768. Adding the controls would cause content along the bottom of the screen to be cut off. They wanted to add a minimize button to the interface. What they didn’t know is that you can’t really do with with javascript. It’s a security/sandbox restriction.

We ended up running the program from the desktop with an exe created with Jugglor. This had it’s own problems – many of which had to be resolved – some of which I didn’t think couldn’t be resolved. A potentially unhappy client right at the deadline.

I mentioned it to my friend Rob Mathea (Creative Digital Group) and a few days later he showed me a Korean movie site that had the functionality. Wow. I did a bit of view source and found that they were using the Microsoft HTML Help Control embedded in the page with an object tag. Cool. Since we were standardized on Windows, I gave it a shot and it worked. The program is now able to be run as originally intended, without having to utilize the iffy exe from the desktop method.

I searched and searched for a solution to this problem and I can’t belive this never popped up!

Director, locH, and two screens

I was working on a little video controller slider in Director and for some reason every time I clicked the sprite and tried to slide it the locH of the sprite would register at something in the range of 65,000. After several hours of frustration and not finding any answers, as it usually happens I had a brainstorm in the middle of the night. I’m using dual monitors and the stage was on the second monitor. Move the stage to the primary monitor and it works fine. Watch out for this bug!

Alegria? Save your money.

We went to see Cirque du Soliel’s Alegria Saturday night. We’ve seen every Cirque du Soleil performance that has come to Atlanta except for one. While some were outstanding, others were just good, I’d have to say that the word that came to my mind after this performance was “lame.” I actually started to feel like I had been ripped off. I could have been unimpressed with the DVD for $30 bucks instead of being unimpressed for $150. There were only six acts and of those, three were very impressive, and one was just okay. The comedy bits inbetween were absolutley NOT funny. The set and the lighting, however, were outstanding. A friend of mine, Brooke from Creative Digital Group, saw the show a couple of weeks ago and didn’t like it, but I tried to keep an open mind. Joyce thought it was good, but I can’t recommend it. I think we had more fun going to the North Highland Pub afterwards. BTW we stopped at the tragically corporate Taco Mac on North Highland for some takeout and ran into a former work colleague from my staging days Ricky Henderson. What a coincidence! I hadn’t seen him for nearly 10 years.

Friday night we ended up with Marson’s hockey tickets for the last Thrashers home game….lame lame lame. And this was against perhaps one of the worst teams in the league, the Pittsburgh Penguins. I’m glad they won on Saturday in Tampa. Oh and congratulations to Georgia Tech in making it to the Men’s basketball finals! After the hockey game we headed to Grant Henry’s Sister Louisa art show, but they were out of booze and the whole thing was winding down so we just said “hello” and went to the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club. We hadn’t been there for quite some time. After a drink there we went to El Myr for some food. Hangover time.