I don’t want to go on the cart!

I’m not dead. I’m getting better! I feeeeeel happyyyyy!

Yeah, I’ve had a tough time keeping this blog going ever since I got the dogs. However, I’ve found more time for writing and audio editing lately.

About the podcasts: I feel like I’ve let Erik down. Erik Burnham and I have a huge inventory of podcasts ready to go, but the editing has been lagging. I still have one about reviewing what we got for Christmas…and it’s now MAY. I interviewed Erik about his announcement that he’s writing some A-Team comic books…and now they’re published!

One of the big problems is that my audio editor, Adobe Soundbooth, does not have a slicing tool. This is such a fundamental element of audio editing that its absence is astounding. I have a sound bite from a movie that I’d like to insert into our conversation, right? I should be able to just slice our conversation apart and drag the second half over, then insert the sound clip on another track, right? Nope. Can’t do it. What’s even more aggravating is that the software Soundbooth is based on, Cool Edit 2000, HAD A SLICING TOOL! The only reason I can see that they don’t do this is that Adobe thinks that the ONLY thing people will be editing is the soundtrack to a movie file.

In other news, I’m creating a Zazzle store. Look for some cool merch this next week.

Erik and I will be appearing at SpringCon in the Twin Cities next weekend. Hope to see you there! I’ll be wearing my new Zazzle shirts.

Finally…a new announcement today from Mr. Plinkett:

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I’ve upgraded our WordPress

Hopefully, this will help contributors to our site to post videos. All you have to do is paste in the URL of the video and WordPress embeds it.

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Monitor Duty is alive and well

Sorry to disappear, everyone. We got a new puppy in October, so we’ve been crazily preoccupied with training and classes, and sometimes days would go by where I’d not even turn on my computer! The new puppy is named Chewbacca, by the way. Chewie for short, which is appropriate. In addition to that, my wife came down with H1N1 (swine flu) and was home for three weeks, so I had a lot of chores to do around the house.

Please excuse my absence.

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Okay, everyone. Fine!

I’m on Facebook, too.

So now I’m on Twitter and MySpace and ComicSpace and Facebook and LinkedIn, and none of them are going to be maintained well enough because I’m trying to keep this blog going and I’m not even doing THAT very well!

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How to post YouTube videos in a WordPress blog

Update: Some say that only Admins can post…which makes no sense at all.  I’m checking into that.

I was going to make this a private page just for my fellow Monitor Duty authors, but then I realized that there may be many non-MonitorDuty users who could be having the same problem and this might come in handy.

Everyone else can just skip this post. No geek goodness will be discussed herein.

I can’t believe Birds of Prey was canceled. I loved that book. Oh! Oh, right. How to do a YouTube video in a WordPress site.

My guess is that most of you are trying to do it via “QuickPress”, the little area on the Dashboard home page. 

Don’t use QuickPress.

Don’t ever use it, really, since it doesn’t offer categories and tags, and I want everyone who posts to categorize their post and, if possible, tag it as well.  Otherwise, I just have to clean up the posts later.

What you want to do is go to the “Posts” section and choose “Add New”.  (Your view may not match mine, as I have Admin level authority and I’ve applied a style to my view, but you should be able to find it.) When you are ready to paste in your YouTube video code, click the right tab that says “HTML”. Then, paste in Embed code for the YouTube video.  You can then either switch back to “Visual” for further editing/writing, or hit “Publish”. Voila!

Oh, you can also use the “Embed Video” icon and just paste in the URL for the video.  I’m going to test that out:

Secret Wars Reenactment Society

Doesn’t look like that worked.  What ARE they smoking over at the WordPress documentation site?

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Hey, It’s My Film on DVD

One of the last things I posted before my long sabbatical from Monitor Duty was a trailer for a film my wife and I have made. In the interim, we’ve made another feature and we’ve begun writing yet another still.

For reasons explained in this interview, we’re self-distributing our films on DVD via Amazon.com and CreateSpace, with V.O.D. looming in the near future, starting with that afore-trailered film, The Man Who Loved.

Read the rest of this entry »

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In other news of a technical nature…

I finally figured out why few of the Monitor Duty authors were posting.  They’ve almost all been locked out ever since I installed Sabre in order to fight the spam registrations.  I fixed that tonight.  Any and all registered users have now been okayed to author posts or comment.

My apologies to any and all who have been hitting this “Invalid registration status” block, and a hearty “welcome back” to all of the MD authors who were locked out.

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Hulk smash technical problems! Rar!

Even before the release of our first podcast, I ran into technical problems with my microphone.  I simply could not get my front microphone plug to work.  That’s why I had to end that installment with a clip from the old Batman show.  Parts 2 and 3 have languished while I’ve tried to resolve this issue.  I finally dragged my desk away from the wall, climbed back there and re-plugged all of the audio plugs while my wife ran the SoundMax menu confirming which plug is being plugged in.

I think what happened is that the pink (microphone) plug was being erroneously used in the back end, and when there’s something plugged in the rear microphone jack, the front one is ignored.  So I pushed the desk back against the wall, tried the front microphone jack, and voila, I can finally record!

Except, now there’s no audio to my headphones.  Oh, and no sound to any of my surround sound speakers, just the front ones.  Agh.

Tonight, I finally got it to work?  Want to know how?   This will totally make sense.  I researched the problem and discovered…I swear, this is so logical, I don’t know how I couldn’t figure it out myself…I discovered…

…that if you want to use the headphone jack on the front of the computer, you should NOT…that is, NOT…have selected “Independent Front Headphones” in the SoundMax options menu.  If you select the option to use Independent Front Microphones, this has the effect of muting the sound from the jack in the front.  And I only find this out when I Google for the answer and find someone else detailing the same problem:

Selecting the option SoundMAX Control Panel | Preferences | Independent Front Headphones sounds like it would work, but all this seems to do is mute the output on the front jacks.

Tonight, I turned off the “Independent Front Headphones”… which has the effect of allowing me to use Independent Front Headphones.  Good job, SoundMax!

Tomorrow, I’ll put the finishing touches on the next podcast.  Again, apologies to Erik Burnham for the delays.

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The Birthday haul (a/k/a “Game reviews to come”)

I had a lovely little birthday party with my wife, Melinda, and niece, Jenny.  They bought a glittery banner and I realized I’ve never had a banner for my birthday party before.  They also restarted a long-abandoned tradition of lighting a candle on the cake for every year I’ve been alive, and there’s a reason why we abandoned it: the lighting took forever and the cake is now covered in wax, and now the top of the cake looks like a squirrel couldn’t find his nut and dug everywhere for it.

Here are my presents, presented not to gloat over the big haul (it’s not) but to show what a wonderful wife I have:

This was from my wife. Fun for the entire family. Review to come.

This was from my niece Jenny.  Allegedly.  Next time, Melinda, tell Jenny what “she’s getting me” so that she doesn’t take it from my hand and say, “What is it?”  It kinda spoils the subterfuge.  Anyway, it’s a Wii version of a game I’ve found addictive on the computer.  Will that translate to Wii play?  We shall see.

This was “from Melinda”, inasmuch as when we were at Sam’s Club buying my cake and steaks earlier on Sunday I threw it in the cart and we counted it as one of my presents.  It’s a bargain game.

And then here is a present from my cats Nina, Doris and Natasha.  (I named “Doris” so that she could be criminal partners with Natasha.  Would have been Boris but who names a female kitten Boris?)  The cats have good taste.  These are the original Peanuts cartoons from back when the Peanuts gang was first being conceived.  It’s rather dark stuff for the time, which seems odd considering that Charlie Brown and Snoopy came to symbolize the tired, trite and boring of the comics page.  Charlie Brown, the boy who never wins anything, who loses every kite he’s ever tried to fly, who is ridiculed by his friends and is tricked repeatedly by a girl who offers to set up a football for him just to mock him when he falls on his back.  Charlie Brown, whose baseball team is a bunch of losers who would rather hold rubber cats, fluff their naturally curly hair, hang on to their precious blankets or debate philosophy than play ball, and whose meanest pitches get batted back at him so hard he winds up lying in his underwear on his pitcher’s mound.  In a world of Blondie, Family Circus, Alley Oop and Prince Valiant, that’s actually pretty edgy.  I think my favorite moment is when Charlie Brown actually wins something, and it’s a coupon for a free haircut.  He points out that his dad is a barber and gives him haircuts.  And he doesn’t really have a lot of hair.  (Maybe I just like that because it’s meta-referential; the strip rarely commented on itself.)  I’m anxious to dig into this volume.

Surprise!  I got one more present on Monday.  My buddy Robert Bavington (who has done many of the costumed Fuzzballs for this site and Fanzing) sent me the season 3 box set.  I’m over the moon.  Thanks, buddy!

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Today I’m as old as Jack Benny

Today’s my birthday.  The big 3-9.  For the first time, I’m turning 39.

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New poll feature

Note the new poll on the right, there.  Please vote!

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Keep up with Phil Meadows

Many of you know Phil Meadows from his time as the art director for Fanzing.com or as the illustrator of the comic works I’ve written (Job Wanted, Time Meddlers and Metro Med).  Phil and his wife Sherry are currently in China adopting their second child, and you can follow their adventures in their blog.  Their new son, Keith, has some arm injuries and may be legally blind, and they will no doubt be investigating what American medical science can do for him once they return.  Let’s all wish the Meadows family the best in all their years of joys and challenges ahead.

P.S.  Check out this joke.  Cute, Phil.

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Batman podcast part 2 is coming

I’m determined to get the microphone issues resolved.  I know, you think I’d have done this by now, but I’m trying to track down the color-coding schematic for my Logitech surround sound soundcard.   Then I have to pull the computer away from the wall and get my skinny little niece to crawl behind it, sit on the floor with a flashlight and rejigger all the wires.

In the meantime, Bat-fans, enjoy this tribute to the 1966 Batman TV show.  I’ve found it a treasure trove of information.

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Classic comic recommendations from the readership?

Hello everyone.

My birthday is coming up and I want to add more variety to my Amazon wishlist.  With my local comic shop kaput, I don’t really read many comics anymore.  I’ve finally gotten down to the dregs of my stockpiled trade paperbacks, like The Transformations of Jimmy Olsen.  After years of everyone raving about Turtle Boy, I finally read that story and it is all kinds of lousy.  I mean, that story fails on every other level except for being able to entertain a small child.

What I’m looking for are titles of trades of quality classic stories.  For instance, there was an early Popeye book that Chuck Dixon once recommended.  The collected Peanuts books as well (from back when Good Ol’ Charlie Brown was the central character instead of Snoopy).  Are there any similar suggestions you all might have?

Also…are there any recent trades that you would actually recommend?

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Movable Type is going bye-bye

Erik Burnham pointed out that WordPress is included with my Powweb hosting, so why don’t I just give up on Movable Type and switch to WordPress.

And frankly…I don’t have a single good answer to that!

All of my blogs are currently in template hell. I’m losing money because the templates with my banner ads are not working. I would never recommend Movable Type to anybody at this point.

WordPress, from my limited experience, is much more user-friendly. And it appears to me that it is winning the blog wars, while MT is by far a loser. I mean, they laid off one of the guys who designs their best plugins; how much of a future can this software have?

Please bear with me, everybody.

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They don’t make this easy

Sometimes I think I started using the wrong blogging software.

I like Movable Type. I like that it’s hosted on my site, so I don’t have to have a whole ‘nother URL such as monitorduty.wordpress.com. However, it is user-UNfriendly to the extreme.

Look what happened today. I just want to update from version 4.1x to version 4.23 and then install the latest plugins so that I’m all ready for podcasting. That’s all. Should be simple, right? And what does it do? Makes my custom color scheme go away, changes the way the widgets work (widgets are the little boxes on the side of the blog that offer links to the tag cloud, archives, search, subscribe, blogroll, etc.) and doesn’t provide any instructions on how to do the new widgets.

EVERY update is like this. No wonder I only update every couple years.

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So you’re NOT cheapskates, I guess!

My apologies, everyone.

I’ve been wondering why NOBODY uses my Amazon links on this blog. Turns out that my plugin was set up to give the traffic to the owner of the plugin, Byrne Reese. Oh, I’m no dummy. I set it up right for my site…but then each particular blog has its own setting as well. I didn’t discover that until I was double-checking today.

Hope you enjoyed my money for the last two years, Reese. Consider it payment for a well-crafted plugin. But from here on out…that money is MINE!

And here, for no reason, are some Amazon items, just to make sure it works. Everyone click on one, please. (You don’t have to buy it. Just let me see that the clicks are tracking. Thanks!)

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And Awayyyyy we go!

Here goes. I’m finally removing and reinstalling the blog software. Yeah, it took an extra day. My computer was overheating due to a massive accumulation of dust inside.

Here’s hoping I’ve backed up everything correctly.

Yeesh. It shouldn’t be this hard…or this scary. There should just be an “update to latest version” button that you press.

Dang Movable Type.

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Warning: Blog updates

Our blog system is two years old. So are the plugins. So tonight I’m going to update the MT system and then reload the plugins as well as adding some new ones that we have needed.

I have no clue what it will do to our templates and such. You may not notice any problems, or everything may disappear. We shall see. (Don’t worry, the database is backed up.)

Then we’ll be in fine running condition to post the podcast.

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Something to tide you over

I’m editing our first podcast. It’s an hour and a half long…at least, originally…so it’s taking me a while to repair all the little technical glitches and throw out the bits where my computer decided to only keep every third word out of my mouth.

In the meantime, here’s something funny to keep you entertained:

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