Flotsam and jetsam

Random things of today:

I completely forgot that I had access to a digital camera and could take, and share, the pictures of our big blizzard (yes, that's a joke) of yesterday. I did get five inches of snow in a 12-hour period, which was very cool, and everything looked exceptionally pretty, but I'm still not used to having real honest to god cool equipment around, and so I didn't even think of it. I could have taken pictures this morning of the aftermath -- the freezing rain that followed, and left my garden utterly destroyed. I was actually crying over my plants, because all the non-deciduous shrubs are pretty much goners and I will have to cut them down, since they've been bent over so badly or broken by the weight of snow and ice.

While I think Seattle and the northwest generally get carried away with the "snow storm of the decade!" coverage on television, I don't think it's that unreasonable to want to stay home and not go out in it. So I get weary of the transplants to the NW who go on and on about how Seattleites don't know what to do in snow; well, yes, we do, we usually have at least a few inches a year, but the thing is: you cannot drive in snow in Seattle or Portland. I learned to drive in snow when I was in Minnesota during a pretty serious blizzard, and there it was relatively sane, even in whiteout conditions. Because, you know, it's flat. When your entire city is built on insanely steep hills, and overpasses that are steep and/or go over water, so they ice up instantly, driving in snow, which always, always comes on top of a sheet of ice, just isn't this simple thing. Every time someone starts going on and on about the snow and how wimpy we are, I want to point at the auto body shop and say, well, okay, tell that to them. ;-)

I edit these case histories for our company, projects we've worked on, and today I got a doozy -- the Homeland Security agency. Man, oh man, do I have to put my personal politics aside when I read something about how they fiercely protect our freedom and our citizens, blah blah. I'm sitting there loudly muttering to the whole office, yeah, I guess they do this while they're destroying our inalienable, constitutional rights and putting our citizens in jail! Grrr. I'm willing to accept a lot of politics I don't agree with, but that Homeland Security thing is not one of them.

I am coming down from what sockkpuppett and sisabet were calling vid farr recently. I'm still twitching and itching to work on something, but don't have a macrovision hack to do the Firefly vid I want to, nor the Angel eps for that vid, but I'm just so psyched about my LFN vid I could plotz. Both morgandawn and barkley have kindly offered me the chance to maybe put the vid online if I can get it down in file size, and learn to do this online file thing, and I just may end up being selfish enough to take someone up on the offer. Being proud of my vids is uncharacteristic for me; mostly it's just that I've never done anything with edits like these, insanely fast and building and building, so that when I watched it, I found myself forgetting to breathe. It's to a techno song called Atom Bomb. I know there are hardly any folks who'd watch an LFN vid, but I'm still really psyched about finishing it and hope that the Club Vivid folks will accept it for the show at the next con.

Which leads to my last piece of info -- my external hard drive has arrived but due to weather, I still haven't picked it up yet or got set up with it. But this means that I can finally make copies of the Don't Fight in the Snow vid collection that feochadn and I put together last year at this time. We had a limited supply of DVDs, and those have run out, but with extra drive space, I can copy the source killabeez made for us (jesu christo, am I a name dropper today or what?) and make DVD copies of the vids for folks. It's a fairly disparate collection, with a vid each for LFN, Buffy (a Spike vid that's fairly angsty), Due South, Band of Brothers (this is Jo's famous vid to the aria Ebben? Ne andro lontana), Tombstone, Witchblade, Firefly, the Brit series Second Sight, and a couple vids for Magnificent 7 (we like cowboys. Sue us). All but one of the vids were made on VCRs. If you're willing to send me a postage paid envelope, I can send you a disc; I can also maybe arrange to send you two discs if you're interested in the five computer vids I've done since I got my iMac (Miracles, 2 Buffys - one a remake of an older B/A vid, LFN, Keen Eddie). Just contact me privately and I can give you the details. It might be a while before I figure out how to do this whole thing, but I'm assuming if all else fails, I'll yell for help.