First there was "Black Friday," then there was "Cyber Monday." I'd never heard of that before a few days ago. I guess it's a new, special holiday when strange people all over the world send you messages trying to entice you into having text-based sex with them over the net. I guess, anyway.

I was just talking to someone else who'd mentioned it and she claimed it was really a special day when people, disgusted by long lines and all the good deals being out-of-stock in the stores, flocked to online merchants and ordered a bunch of stuff.

Whatever. I really don't know what's the true spirit of "Cyber Monday," but I think the first version would have much better greeting cards.

Tuesday was the more exciting day anyway. Got contracts signed on three movie deals *and* the money wired in. That's pretty good for a day spent hanging around the house, not even being at a film market. If I could manage that every day, that'd be great. So far today's been a little quieter in the movie deal front, but the day's still young. One of the other exciting movie moments of the month was on Tuesday the 15th, the date of the US release on DVD of War of the Planets. I dropped by some of the local stores and, for example, the nearby Best Buy stores each had five copies on the shelves. For an independent release, that's pretty good.

I dove straight into the madding crowds both Friday and Saturday. I don't really need much of anything--but that doesn't usually stop me from shopping "just because." Especially if there are bargains out there, just waiting to be hunted down, defeated in battle, and carried back home. When there's a good deal on computer parts and random electronic devices, I figure *somebody* I know will need them sooner or later...even if I haven't figured out who yet.

There's a lot of sports I'm not especially well suited for, but when it comes to shopping, I have the great advantages of being able to slip through crowds easily and quickly, being considerably taller than the great majority of other shoppers, and having much longer arms. When you think about it, I guess shopping involves pretty much the same basic skills and traits as swordfighting.

You might guess that swordplay is the more dangerous sport, but I'd bet that a lot more people get injured each year in shopping-related incidents than ever find themselves hurt in sword-to-sword combat.

I don't normally go to malls to shop--there's rarely anything I want to buy (or that fits me) except in some of the factory outlet "malls"--but on Saturday I went to one of the bigger malls in the area just because I felt like it.

Sick and twisted. Yeah, I know.

That trip turned into much more of an adventure than I'd planned: from one end of the mall to the other (and back again) it seemed like I couldn't walk more than a few feet without having gangs of young women descend upon me, trying to sell a random assortment of lotions, exfoliants, massage devices, and other personal care items. Malls don't just have stores any more; the aisles between are now filled with a nearly continuous string of carts and stands selling do-dads and do-hickeys, generally organized around some unifying theme that just isn't quite compelling enough to hold together an entire store.

I didn't buy anything, despite being gang-massaged for extended periods of time by determined salespeople. Not that this was an especially bad experience. I certainly got to see (and feel) more new designs and styles of vibrating and pulsating devices than I had heretofore imagined were out there. All of them shared the drawback that they were just too light and superficial. (The *products*--I don't know about the salespeople themselves.) Nothing felt like a deep, strong massage--it was more like experiencing a succession of different species of beetles perform traditional dances from their countries of origin on my back, arms, or head.

Sort of like the Nutcracker Suite, except for the lack of a full orchestra, that whole mouse battle thing, and--oh, yeah--no nutcracker. But, apart from that, the basic concept was similar.

I'm okay with that. I didn't really want a bunch of mall personnel trying to demonstrate their various nutcrackers on my body parts anyway.

Now, if they had only been *real* beetles, we might have had something worth filming that would have a decent shot at getting on late-night TV. As it was however, I think the concept of "Mall Survivor" still needs some massaging itself before it makes it into syndication.

I told one saleswoman that there'd be no reason for me to buy the massager she was demonstrating because it would be useless without someone to operate it. (I'm flexible, but I'm not *that* flexible.) She offered to include one of the other saleswomen with it for an extra twenty bucks. I suppose that's a decent price for a saleswoman in good condition, but I knew nothing about *her* ability to operate the various massage devices.

I should have asked what their return policy was if it didn't work out. Oh, well; it's not like she takes up a lot of room anyway.

Eventually, I did escape the mall, but not before I'd been massaged, lotioned, exfoliated, and personally cared for by numerous products over much of my body. That usually doesn't happen when spending a day swordfighting, so that's one way that shopping is different. Plus, you do end up smelling a little different afterwards. To be honest, I'm not at all sure that the mall version is the better-smelling one.

The conventional wisdom is that you should retain your financial records for seven years. I'm not entirely sure why "seven"; maybe they're supposed to start getting ichy after that or something.

I don't believe it. Seven years is not long enough. Case in point: I just got yet another notice that I was a plaintiff in a class action suit I'd never heard of before. You probably get those kinds of things all the time, too, and unless you're lucky enough to be part of the law firm prosecuting the case (who makes millions), your share of the settlement is usually substantially less than the postage required to mail in the claim form.

This time, however, it was a securities case involving some stock I'd traded back in the 90's--and, based on the figures in the notice, my share of the settlement would have amounted to something respectably in the four-figure range. While I question the ethics of a lot of these "class action" suits in general, I'd say that I have less than a thousand dollars worth of ethical qualms in this particular case.

As you might have guessed by now, filing a claim required going through records more than seven years old...which, fortunately, I do have on hand, carefully filed away.

...unfortunately, after reviewing all my brokerage records, it turned out that I'd bought the stock in question just a few weeks too early to be part of the class in question. I'd still lost just as much money as anybody in the class would have (actually, a little bit more) when the stock tanked, but I'm not elligible for any portion of the award.

Oh, well. I still had to do as much work compiling my records as if I were part of the class, but at least this way I saved the price of the stamp.

Down in my little home theater, over the past several months, I've switched between an Enlightened Audio Designs (EAD) Theatermaster, a Proceed PAV, an Angstrom 200 Home Entertainment Director, and (today) a Fosgate Audionics FAP-T1+ preamp/surround processor.

Which is a lot of turnover, especially considering that I've been using the same amplifiers (Aragon 4004MkII), projector, DVD player, etc., for five to ten years, depending on the component.

They all have their advantages and disadvantages, but so far the only notable disadvantage (after less than two hours use) I've noticed with the FAP-T1+ is an audible 'pop' every time there's a change in the digital sound data stream. Unfortunately, that includes any time it does a layer change. But it does have this nice built-in monitor. That's a feature that's been a long time coming, after a whole lot of years when people have been designing video gear (and even audio equipment) to use an "on screen display" that makes them difficult to set up or operate unless there's a TV set connected and turned on. The Fosgate at least provides you with one--making it a lot easier, especially when you have your preamp located in an equipment cabinet or otherwise not in the direct line-of-sight with your main display.

Fosgate Audionics FAP-T1+ preamp/surround processor and Pioneer DVL-909 DVD/LD/CD player

But hooking up a new preamp/surround processor did male me realize one of the major benifits of serious high-end audio and video cables: cheap, no-name-o cables you want to run through the walls out-of-sight. Absurdly expensive silver cables with exotic internal geometries and dramatic-looking exteriors, you run right across the room in plain view so everyone can admire the quality and sheer spiffitude of your audiophile speaker cables, interconnects, and power cords.

Makes wiring (and re-wiring) a lot easier. Maybe I'll go check my closet to see if I've got some more super-exotic cables I'm not using before I start trying to set up two *more* speakers to make it a full 7.1 surround system.

Just a week after getting back from LA, it's off to the exciting world premiere of The Shadow Walkers, at Denver's historic Mayan Theater. This was a smaller-scale "sneak premiere" for the cast and crew, but we still managed to fill up the nearly 500-seat main theater. Executive producer Dave Marchiori and director Mark Grove were on hand to field questions and accept compliments, as was almost all the rest of the cast and crew. It was great to see everybody again and still a little strange sometimes not to be seeing them every day. I'd spent the day before the premiere printing out thirteen-by-nineteen versions of the movie poster and brought those in along with a handful of pens for the cast to sign them with--rather like, as one actor suggested, yearbook signing day.

It's always great getting to see yourself up on the big screen, and being surrounded by hundreds of people complete with popcorn and other theatergoing necessities just makes it better. Before leaping into the movie itself, we kicked off the festivities with a showing of the "Making of" documentary by Sean "Eschii" Callahan, complete with animated sequences of me snatching the titles off the screen. That was a very good touch.

I would have loved to hang out longer afterwards, but it was a mid-week night and even those of us who play creatures of the night occasionally have to work day jobs, too. The crowd had pretty much dispersed by 11:00PM, and so I did too.

I'd been all prepared for a formal event, but that morning I'd asked Mark and he mentioned that it was going to be "Colorado Casual" (whatever that means), but I figured that meant "no" on the tux. Kurt Van Ulmer, who had just gotten back to town that afternoon, didn't let that stand in his way of looking cool. I thought the silver spider on the tie was a good touch, too.

Kurt Van Ulmer and Trygve Lode

Suffice it to say that it was a good show and everybody had a fine time; I just don't get to do enough of these things...but I can think of at least one solution for that problem. :)

I've got a movie premiere to go to on Wednesday and today I decided to run off to a rock shop to see if I could find some...ah...findings for a few of the wardrobe accessories I have in mind. (We'll see if I also find enough time to make them, but that'll be another chapter.) That's a little tougher for me, since I'm looking for parts to make guy-type jewelry, being that I'm one of those guy-type people you may have heard of.

So I'm poking through their selection and having a little trouble locating things like cufflinks amongst the teeming hordes of brooches, pinbacks, earings, and clips. I go over to the counter and ask the woman running the store whether she knows where they are, and she checks under the counter and finds a few, saying, "I guess you magicians have to dress up more often than most people."

Magician? Lest you be worried, I didn't say that out loud. I make it a point never to argue with anybody who recognizes me, no matter who they actually think I happen to be. I've been in far more movies than I could hope to keep track of that way, but this is the first time I've been a magician. I have no idea who she thought I was, but she knew, and that's enough. When in doubt, smile and nod, and you can find out all sorts of things about yourself that you'd never before imagined (or experienced).

But I did resist the temptation to suggest anything like, "...say, how'd you like to see a trick involving your...cash drawer?"

The second magic-related experience of the day goes back to years ago when I was tossing together a costume. I wanted some interesting-looking tube-type things that would hold their shape in three dimensions without restricting movement. I eventually settled on flexible metal conduit, the marvels of which are numerous, but along the way I'd tried a pair of balanced interconnect cables that I'd gotten free with some piece of stereo equipment I'd bought. Their main shortcoming--and I mean that quite literally--was that somebody had cut one end off of each one. That made them somewhat less useful for hooking up audio equipment, but perfectly well-suited for costume use and they were, I must admit, cool-looking, which is important *both* for costume use and audio gear. However, since it was the conduit that made the cut, they ended up sitting neglected in the costume bits-and-pieces repository for the following seven years.

arts and crafts with conduit and a survey laser

That is, until now, when I had the urge to take them out. By golly, they just happened to be a pair of Wireworld Eclipse balanced interconnects that, believe it or not, matched the Wireworld Eclipse Speaker cables I currently have on my main stereo system. And I just happen to have a whole box of black Neutrik XLR connectors on hand (I'd ordered a few to build some camera adapter cables a few months back and I'd gotten extra), so after a few minutes of quality time with a soldering iron, I had a matching set of interconnects.

*This*, combined with a healthy dose of insanity, touched off a flurry of "redecorating," consisting of going through my collection of extra cables, making note of the cables that were in use, and then switching them all around between several different stereos. The high-end Wireworld stuff went onto the main system, most of the XLO cables ended up being used in the conference room, and then all the Audio Magic cables found their way into the library.

More film market stuff (go figure): from a technological standpoint, things got a little rough in the last days beforehand. One of the new highlights I'd planned for my suite was going from the 20" LCD displays I'd used for the last few years to a 37" LCD TV from Syntax Olevia (model LT37HVE). In the stores, I thought it looked quite good, was not too wide for the space I had for it, and it came in black.

That last was important because the rest of the display is black, except for the flame pots and the posters (which are illuminated by little LED lights on goosenecks). The point of the display is to highlight the movies, not to show off how nice the bright silver case of the TV looks. Even if you're not setting up a commercial display, I'd think black would make more sense for a TV anyway...though I suppose if the panel itself has trouble showing full black as anything but a dark grey, maybe the silver-colored border helps hide that in the store. Hard to say exactly way, but it does seem like the great majority of LCD and plasma TVs are silver or at least silver-ish.

It started getting more complicated when the TV came into town. Not to my house, as it happened. The shipper got it in right before I needed to have it checked out and then shipped back out again to the market for it to get there in time. While it might have made some sense to have had it shipped directly to California, I'm a little paranoid about these things and wanted to make sure it worked properly with the rest of my equipment *first* rather than have to figure everything out at the market. Mysteriously, however, the shipping company's instructions were to store the TV until sometime the following week and *then* deliver it. Why? Nobody knew, but they were willing to let me drive out to their warehouse and pick it up myself, which saved me a week and a whole lot of aggravation. I'd originally planned to drive it with a Samsung DVD-HD950 upconverting DVD player. I'd ordered that at the same time as I'd ordered the Olevia LCD, but there was no sign of it.

Inferno Film Productions entryway

• Test #1: use standard-video DVD player with progressive component outputs as a video source. Worked okay most of the time, but fast movement and, especially, camera pans and tilts produced an unpleasant strobe-y effect.
• Test #2: Bought "open box" upconverting DVD player/HDTV Tuner combo at Best Buy. Decided to try that because it had far more high-def output connections than any of the upconverting DVD players, most of which will only put out high-definition video through an HDMI or DVI connection. Still had problems on pans and tilts, but this particular machine would lock up after playing for about an hour and have to be power-cycled. That's a no-go.
• Test #3: Off to Circuit City to get a Sony DVPNS70H upscaling player. Worth a try, since it uses a different upscaling chip than any of the other players out there. It has some known problems, but at least they're *different* problems. Unfortunately, the display issues I had with that one still made it unuseable, and so on to...
• Test #4: Put new video card with DVI in "Piglet," the small form-factor media computer I've been taking to the market for years, connect with a DVI-to-HDMI cable, and do the upscaling in software. That worked almost perfectly, with just one minor problem: the native resolution of the LCD is 1366 x 768 pixels, but if I drive the display at any resolution with 768 horizontal lines, it squooshes the image to a small window in the middle of the screen. I can drive it at a lower resolution and have it stretch the image to 768 pixels high, or I can drive it with a 1080 pixel high resolution and have it squish that to an image slightly larger than the visible display. It took a lot of tinkering to come up with the resolution that best fit on the display, but the defects caused by the squooshing were mainly visible when displaying text.

  I do think the image quality would have been substantially better if the display would accept an input at its native resolution and not tinker with it, but I found no way to make this happen. Nonetheless, the image quality was acceptable and much better than any of the set-top players.

This just meant that I needed to build another small-form-factor video computer, load it up with all the movies, and ship it out that afternoon. (Piglet is the one I use to show things to buyers inside the suite.) Took some scrounging, but then I ended up with two matching SFF PCs at the market, and that level of redundancy always makes me a little happier. I ended up using a Shuttle Xpc SN41g2 base unit, which was old enough that it doesn't officially support the AMD Sempron processor, but even with a new Sempron, it *does* boot and run fine, and you can "overclock" the CPU to its real FSB and multiplier settings (also not recognized or supported officially) with no problems. I ran that thing playing video until it was time to ship it and then it ran for 12+ hours/day for nine days at the market without a single problem.

This approach turned out to have an added benefit: I'd installed new 16x DVD-burners in both Piglet and Telgip, and so I ended up coming in at 6:00AM most days of the market to burn new DVD screeners on the faster-moving titles in the hours before the market opened. Having two machines with ISO images of all the movies and fast burners made that a lot easier than if I'd only had one there.