The production company has assured me that they will never run out of straws.

Whew! That's one less worry for me, at least. I'm sure Darth Vader has this problem, too.

I'm told that rampaging around in costume through a factory decorated to look like a secret government research facility is really good exercise. It'll be a little different from long-distance bicycling, but it'll be good. Ripping apart elevator doors and crashing through drywall does more to target the upper body, I bet. It'll be better than one of those stair-climing machines. But, once again, I'm in a role that leaves me with dark circles under my eyes. Or, rather, all around my eyes. In last month's blog, I'd described myself as looking like a racoon, but I've since been informed by a highly reliable (and extremely cute) authority that I really look much more like a panda. A vicious, evil, killer panda, of course...at least if that's what the script calls for.

I'm flexible about these things. I'd be a good panda, too, if that's what the director wanted, but when was the last time you saw a *good* panda rampaging through a secret government research laboratory destroying the very experiments that created him (and shredding the experimenters themselves)?

I just don't think modern audiences would believe it.

Still...you'd think that, occasionally, an experimental creature would be happy to have gotten the strength (and anatomical enhancements) to be able to bite through elevator cables, but I guess not in this case. But I guess I can understand it. Being able to bite through inch-diameter steel cables is a great skill, but it's a definite drawback if this particular adaptation makes you incapable of eating or drinking without the use of an elbow straw.

But like I've said before, I've been assured of a bountiful supply of straws throughout the production, so at least you know that the heros (the ones left alive, anyway) will eventually save the day through efforts even more dramatic and exciting than hiding all the elbow straws.

Tomorrow I'm going to start the day off by having stuff attached to my face again, which is okay--at least I'm not allergic to latex or any of the other plastics, fluids, and adhesives they use in the movie biz--but this is shaping into a potentially disturbing pattern:

It all started a few months back when I'd gotten cast as a bald, fifty-something mortician with a severely out-of-date sense of fashion. No problem, though it's a bit of a departure from how I normally look. But since then--at least in anything that's actually making it into production with my part still in the script--all of my parts have involved wearing some kind of mask, scuplted rubber things on my face, or a bag over my head. A guy could start to get a complex about this after a while. It's almost like going on a date or something. ("Here, put this bag over your head so I can pretend you're somebody cuter.") Dunno. I suppose I could always start showing up at auditions *with* a bag already over my head (or a suitable mask on) and save the casting director the trouble of imagining one.

I don't go out and get plastered very often, but sometimes it happens. Getting molds made from your face and some of your other favorite body parts is all part of the job when the makeup and FX department is going to be custom-making all sorts of stick-on rubber face and body appliances to attach to your body.

This time it's because I'm playing the result of some secret government experiment to create the ultimate mutant humanoid killing machine gone wrong. But, you know, these secret government experiments to turn people into ultimate mutant humanoid killing machines *always* go wrong. Why is that? You'd think that they've done so many of them by now that at least *one* of them would turn out just according to plan. I don't get it. But, even back when I did work for a secret government laboratory, we never did anything involving mutant humanoid killing machines, so I just not as familiar with the finer detals of that branch of research as I should be.

Still, in the next edition of whatever textbook they usually use, whether it's "Applied Mutagenics for Humanoid Killing Machine Development" or "Advanced Humanoid Killing Machine Creation: An Interdisciplinary Approach," I really think they need to devote a *whole* chapter on "Keeping your experiment from going wrong and eating your research team" instead of just touching on it in one short paragraph towards the end of Appendix B.

I think we'd all be happier and the life expectancy of secret government genetics researchers would be a lot longer.

For the last few days, I've been biking up north further than I have for a while. It's been nice. Though I like biking on familiar territory, not least because I know where the bumps are, the occasional change of scenery is nice, too.

Not that things have changed a whole lot since the last time I'd been biking up in those parts, but there were a few differences. One thing I'd never noticed before was that someone had been going around spray-painting "stop vandalism" on things. That seems like an interesting pastime, but I have to wonder whether this is some new plan instituted by the municipality or whether some noble-but-perhaps-misguided freelancer has taken to doing it on his own initiative.

It reminds me a little of a street not so very far from here where the medians have been landscaped and groomed and covered with free-standing signs informing all within visual range that the posting of signs is strictly prohibited.

It's very true that the occasional "lose weight/work from home" sign can be unattractive, but I'm not sure that having twenty times as many "posting of signs is strictly prohibited" signs of similar attractiveness and proportion is an improvement, at least as far as my aesthetic instincts are concerned.

But today it's raining and I'm not in a rainy-day-biking mood. I'm also enjoying what is almost certainly a temporary lull in the latest crisis-of-the-moment in which a fine film distribution company which has been sitting on the master tapes of a fine feature film for a few perfectly fine months has suddenly decided that There Are Problems With The Film and that They Must Be Corrected Immediately.

Watching movies is definitely different when you keep ending up doing it frame-by-frame in an editing suite. Plot? Was there a plot somewhere? I may not know about that, but I could tell you a lot about the color shift at timecode 01:21:24:18 where the telecine operator was off a bit on adjusting the color timing during the "best light" transfer.

It's funny; in science fiction movies, Star Trek, and anything like that, all the aliens and actors in front of the camera all speak fluent English with a reasonable grasp of contemporary American slang. Sure makes life easier. What I wish, though, would be if I could say that about more of the people working *behind* the camera, so many of which seem to have evolved a whole new language that's theirs and theirs alone.

So far, on the set, I've been able to figure it all out from context. Some directors seem to have their own technical terms and ways of describing what they want you to do that, as far as I know, have never been used by anyone else. Maybe that's part of their style; who can say?

In the case of the Problems With The Film (mentioned above; feel free to insert a quick flashback to four paragraphs up if you like), I've got a list from a very fine film lab of all the problems they found with the film while giving it a thorough Quality Check. What's slowing me down in figuring out how fixable they are (and whether or not they should be "fixed"--more about that later) is that the technician has his own personal language for describing defects in the film that, not only have I never encountered before, they even fail to show up in a single hit when searching on Google.

For various random, unrelated reasons, I seem to be doing a burst of server upgrades and replacements out here at the treehouse. Nothing urgent--everything's been working just fine--but getting some prodding from different quarters about some things I should be doing and my general hope of slowly replacing older, bigger, more-power-hungry equipment with newer, smaller, less power-hungry equipment has been motivation enough.

Since it's a rather heterogenous network out here, encompassing a few flavors of Linux along with Solaris and the one remaining SunOS machine, I've spent a surprisingly large amount of the last few days pulling down ISO images of the various install and update CDs needed for the different machines.

I do think the world's ability to make install packages and files bigger has always exceeded the rate at which people can make the net faster. It's a losing battle, I think, so no matter what computers you have and how big your data pipe is, it'll always feel a little slow for comfort.

Just for fun, I've bitten into my small stack of Compaq servers. I haven't spent a lot of quality time with Compaq servers before, but I've got some DL380 machines on hand with six LVD hot-swap bays on the front panel in a nice 3U-sized box. With modern larger-capacity SCSI drives, that would give me enough storage to replace Nyx's current dedicated NFS server, which takes up about three-quarters of a full-height rack unit. Five inches versus 50+ inches; there's a diet plan for your servers.

Just so you know, when installing Slackware Linux on a Compaq DL380 server and using the standard Compaq Smart-2 Array Controller, the procedure is a little quirky. Instead of the logical drives showing up at sda, sdb, etc., like they would on any other SCSI raid controller I've ever used, they show up as "/dev/ida/c0d0", "/dev/ida/c0d1", etc. (yes, I'm putting the commas outside the quotes in a manifestly grammatically incorrect but technically less confusing manner; I do that in documentation sometimes)

The partitions, in case you're interested, show up under "/dev/ida/c0d0p1" and so forth--sorta reminds you of working on Sun hardware, doesn't it? To get everything to work, you pretty much just have to know these things, and be prepared to jump in and override things when they're about to try to work their magic on /dev/sda anyway, even though your DL380 doesn't actually have one.

I thought it was odd that none of the searching I did on the net turned up anything about these little quirks, but now--as you can see--at least there's *something* on the net pertaining to the subject. If I start seeing a bunch of search engine traffic coming in about it, maybe I'll write something longer.

But in the meantime, I suppose I should get back to the testing and upgrading. I suppose it's not such a bad idea to do these things when there's time...this way, with luck, nothing will crash when I'm in the midst of a movie shoot or some other event where there's *no* time to be building and upgrading systems.

As we last left off in April, we were still trying to determine whether the IRS was going to categorize me as a chocolate muffin for tax purposes and how this might affect any future alternative minimum tax calculations.

Whereas, judging from IndieBuyer's new ad campaign, it looks more like I'm also in danger of being mistaken for an avocado.

I suppose I should go squeeze myself to see if I'm ripe yet.

Note to self: put up sign in kitchen that says, "Guests must clean up their own blood."

There was a somewhat messy scene shot in my kitchen the other day and I didn't notice until afterwards how much fake blood got left behind to dry. If you think the stuff is hard to clean up when fresh, try leaving it for a day or two. At least when *I'm* the one covered in it, I can spend some quality time in a hot shower afterwards, which you must admit is hard to do with a whole kitchen.

Though, when it *is* me, there's often considerable delay before getting to the "hot shower" part because so many blood-intensive scenes get shot in locations lacking in showers, hot water, and all those fine things. WIth the kitchen, at least I had an ample supply of hot water right there.

Unfortunately, it wasn't until just *after* I'd finished cleaning up the stage blood that had been spattered about the kitchen (and the lines of it that had run down the cabinets under the countertops) that the Jehovah's Witnesses showed up at my door.

Usually, I don't bemoan the lateness (or lack) of religious proselytizers of any ilk at my door, but in this particular case I could have asked them to come in and help me mop up after last night's human sacrifice. They'd be up for that, don't you think?