Category: Uncategorized

I forgot something I wanted to put in that last post, a bright point.

In my time off, I actually had a use for the Taguchi Method of experimental design! It wasn’t, perhaps, the most complex thing I could have used the method to solve for, and the end result was that I proved that my intuition was correct and about half the people posting about this thing on the camerahacking forums are idiots… but it worked. See, I wanted to set the cameras to have the best possible image quality, and there are several different settings with several different options and some people said the best quality was one way and other people said the opposite and a handful had random weird choices they preferred. To test all the combinations of settings individually would have meant shooting not less than 32 videos (and re-setting the camera’s settings after each one) and then judging all 32 videos’ quality individually (preferably twice, in two randomized orders of playback, to remove bias). I used the Taguchi method to design the experiment, I shot 9 videos and my result was surprisingly conclusive. Not to mention that watching all 9 videos twice (with my brother giving additional, independent ratings to mine) took less than a quarter of the time it would have taken to watch a full set of experimental videos. Yay!

That is all. I just … I spent a while a year or two ago putting Taguchi into my brain and have never had anything to do with it, since I’m not an engineer and don’t work with large data sets to solve problems… So I was glad to have something semi-useful to do with it. Even if it did just confirm what I intuitively knew before I ever had the camera in hand.

I bricked on camera and I couldn’t get the other to short so i can use it and the first one keeps freezing up and I didn’t buy any lighting or sound equipment and I didn’t get myself to draw the storyboards or flesh out the outline into a proper script and I didn’t do the animatic because I hadn’t done those and I certainly didn’t film the movie I didn’t write or have the equipment for. I did design the concept around not needing lighting or sound equipment, so that’s not a project-killer, but I couldn’t motivate myself to storyboard a movie I couldn’t shoot, and I don’t want to buy another new camera when the working one I have can’t be downloaded from and I’ve killed another and the movie requires not less than three working cameras for the best gag to work. It’s frustrating, I’m not happy, and ultimately it doesn’t really mean anything because I’ll just keep working on it. On a nicer note, I did get a mount on the semi-working camera I do have and it works with my tripod and the two steadycam rigs I did successfully build in my time off, and the still camera I bought hacked no problem and plugs into the semi-universal-dock I successfully constructed this weekend (it’s compatible with any of the still and video cameras that I’m trying to hack, but only once they’re hacked, and it’s USB-out and cross-platform and I’m happy with it).

A young woman I’ve been chatting with off and on for a couple of months who I met online reached a point tonight where I had to give up on her without ever even meeting her because she doesn’t feel like she’s comfortable meeting anyone in person right now. That one is mostly frustrating and a little unhappy (because otherwise she seems nice and I’d like at least to have had the chance to meet her and get to know her properly) but ultimately meaningless – I meet lots of people online, and I’ve met a few of them in person since first trying to convince this one to meet with me. Not the end of the world, not even a really big deal, just … mostly frustrating. I told her to let me know when she’s over whatever is preventing her from being able to meet people, if she likes, but that it’s not worth my time and energy to keep beating my head against a brick wall.

The house is a mess. My laundry is clean but not sorted, folded, or ironed. The other woman I was trying to date (we actually had a couple of dates) has been (understandably; it’s the holidays) too busy to see me the last couple of weeks and (understandably; she’s job hunting) probably won’t be available soon, either. I didn’t finish those three books last year. I’m still pretty depressed. Sara still won’t agree to marry me. Israelis and Palestinians are still killing each other. Last year was a second longer than I was expecting it to be, and flew by much faster than I expected it to. I have to go to work today.

Oh, and I put that books page I showed a while back as the default page for prose.modernevil.com and press.modernevil.com and added book descriptions to the mouseovers on the main page at Modern Evil. It’s a new year. Resolve to buy my books.

Alright, so. There were … 53 titles with stars on the last list (indicating that I really liked them). The following six were also italicized, meaning that I feel stand out in my mind/heart as all-around great, great movies. I have sorted them here in order of preference, with my favorite, Junebug on top:

Junebug
I Love Your Work
Natural Route, The
Crickets
Beat That My Heart Skipped, The
Green Street Hooligans

The next list is movies that I already own on DVD (alphabetical):

Continue reading Movies of 2005, my favorites

The following is a long, generally uninteresting post. It is mostly lists of movie titles that either debuted theatrically in 2005 or that I Netflix’ed in 2005. The lists are in alphabetical order and I have not yet given thought to any “top n movies” lists, I’ve just taken the time to compile lists of the movies I watched (or expect to watch).

Continue reading Movies of 2005, unranked

…I’m doing such strange things lately. Today I turned one $30 purchase into a brick unintentionally (a CVS “one time use” digital camcorder, now useless), and one $5 purchase into a brick intentionally (a self-hardening modeling substance which I combined with $7 in electronic bits to form a sort of USB ‘dock’ that the CVS “one time use” digital still cameras and digital camcorders can plug into). I created a sort of steadycam device from less than $20 of hardware, but when I bought the parts I did it from memory, and got it a bit wrong. I’ll go buy a couple of pieces of additional hardware to “fix” this one, and a couple of additional hunks of metal and I’ll have two steadycam devices for under $30. Of course I’ll have to buy at least one more camcorder from CVS (which I don’t brick) in order to make use of dual steadycams…

Continue reading insert title here