Radified News for August/September/October 2000
28 Oct - Wendy finished her first 16mm film. Workprint screening at USC, Lucas bldg, projected on big screen. Saw 7 student films, all b&w, none longer than 5 mins 33 secs. No sync'ed audio. Biggest hurdle of the toughest semester. Cause for much celebration. Was a party afterwards at one student's apt (on Melrose), but Jan wasn't into it. So we headed instead for Japantown (Frank's idea) for sushi & sake. Frank knows all the best eateries in LA. I learned a long time ago to say, "I'll have what he's having." We closed the place down - 1AM. Sianara, Charley. Stopped in at a club along the way that was having a (Halloween) costume party. Seemed surrealistic.
Workprint is a lower-quality print. Next semester, studentsl get Answerprint, a high-quality version, for entering film festivals & such.
Painfully obvious that digital technology allows the movie-maker to accomplish much more in much less time. Can see more about the project here.
24 Oct - Updated CUSL2 User's guide with input from UncleJoe & cicada. Glad people are finding it helpful. Appreciate the positive feedback. CrazyJohn dropped a link to the guide on cusl2.com homepage. Didn't take long for my In box to fill up.
6 Oct - Posted CUSL2 set-up lessons here. Also, spent the day recording voiceovers for Wendy's 16mm film. Recorded Louie & Zarena. Posted some samples (MP3s encoded at 128kbps, 16/44) here. Recording set-up here.
25 Sept - Posted Radified guide to SCSI -> booting your workstation from a small, fast SCSI workhorse. 5 pgs. See here.
16 Sept - First 16mm film shoot yesterday, at the house. Shot two 100-ft rolls, worth 3 minutes each. Took all day to set up & shoot. Using Arri/s cameras (German made, circa WWII) 16mm is cool. See here for pix from first production meeting and test-shoot.
14 Sept - Finished posting pix from the Half Dome climb last month. See here.
11 Sept - Been working on the Half Dome pix. Posted a dozen more scans of the climb. Not many more pix to go. Been fun remembering.
6 Sept - Almost back. Been installing + rebooting forever. Only few more apps for W2K. WinMe is done. Surprised at how stable is WMe is - much more than W98. Has nice feel to it - not unlike Win2K. Did clean install. Heard of probs w/ upgrades from either W98 or SE.
Learned a bunch about the CUSL2 mobo (815e chipset) - what works + where probs lie. May bust out a Radified guide later.
3 Sept - Mobo arrived, but swap did not go smoothly. Tried to get around having to reformat & re-install + re-configure everything , but twas not to be. Win2K almost made it, but Win98 was having fits from the git-go.
This is my first chipset upgrade, & I learned a lot - maybe if I could do it over, I'd get it right. Learned what not to do. =) Most say a clean install is the way to go for chipset upgrade.
Finally bit the bullet, reformatted both the W2K & W98 partitions & did clean installs of each (a few times). Figured that I might as well install Win ME if I was gonna be doing a clean install anyway, so I picked up a copy of that.
Feels like I rebooted a million times in the last few days - weary of entering serial #'s.
Aug 28 - UPS brought the CPUs today, but still no mobo or slocket (ordered from another reseller). Why doesn't everything ever come at the same time? (orders placed at the same time.) So I'm sitting on two P3-700's (should run at 933), with no place to put 'em. First CPU upgrade in over 20 months.
Also received a phatty box of cooling supplies - Sunon case fans, Artic Silver thermal paste, Golden Orbs, heatsinks, various goodies for myself + tinkering / overclocking friends (fiends?).
Posted first pages from the Half Dome trek. See here. Should be done within the next few days if I don't have probs installing the CPUs & mobo.
Wendy had a bunch of her classmates over for a little end-of-summer get-together Saturday. They went to the beach first, then bar-b-q. Crisis when the gas grille ran out of propane with steaks & ka-bobs cooking. Wendy + Lisa ran into town for more. A few tried their hand at Quake 3 & Unreal Tournament. Ron did okay, but most should stick to making movies. =)
Aug 25 - Wendy's first day of school today. Mandatory meeting. Classes start Monday. She's excited about doing a 16mm film project - her first. She held auditions for the parts both yesterday & the day before. Lani went along with her - tied pretty scarfs on the door handles and prettied-up the otherwise industrial studios at USC's Zemeckis bldg (still under construction). She's trying to get a jump on the semester. Everyone says this semester (508) is the most grueling of all. We hear a killer 508 film can do a lot for a filmmaker's career.
She got to ride a horse thru parts of LA yesterday as part of the location scout. Sounds like a tough job, but somebody has to do it. =)
Working on new site design & getting the Half Dome feature posted. Lots of great pix. Should be up in the next few days.
Ordered new CPU + mobo yesterday -> Pentium III 700 (retail box) new cB0 stepping, & Asus CUSL2 (815E chipset). Most say these puppies will do 933MHz without much trouble. Should be here soon. First CPU/mobo upgrade in over 20 months (still running overclocked Cel300a's @ 464MHz on Abit mobos - what a deal that turned out to be!).
Aug 22 - New site design. Been reading books on website design. All said I was doing everything wrong. My buddy Krish thru together some Photoshop mojo & whipped up a new site design before I could say HTML.
Wendy was jealous of my site's new face lift, so Krish busted out a cool, frames special for her. See here.
Got the Half Dome pix back - from hiking to the top of that mtn. Have already scanned & will be posting in next few days.
Have one more person (Valerie) who wants to climb Half Dome next year - which will be the 3rd annual. More people every year. Let us know if you want in on next year's trek. Climbing Half Dome is something no one should miss. If you got feet, you should climb it. You'll never be the same.
Aug 19 - Have begun scanning & posting pics from our Yosemite trip. See here. This will take a while, cuz we took a million pics.
Aug 18 - Posted a couple pieces from The Dog. A script, titled Benefactor, and short story titled Road Trip - both done for classes at Stanford Univ. See here.
Aug 16 - Back from two weeks of camping, hiking & backpacking in Big Sur and Yosemite. My first-ever time back-packing - to the back country, where there are no roads (or people). My calves are still sore. I had to carry all the heavy stuff.
Bears tromped through our (backpacking) campsite within 30-mins of arriving (a little after sunset) - not one, but 3 of 'em! Big ones. Saw more bears than at the San Diego Zoo. California black bears (actually brown in color).
Heard the big one is named Cinnamon. We stashed some of our food up a big tree and the dang bear climbed the tree and got our food. We woke to a garbage pile of empty cans and wrappers at the base of the tree. They rip open cans of tuna with their bare hands. Amazing strength. But they don't bother people; they only want food.
Finished posting A Semester in the Life of a Film School Student.
Wendy mailed in her 508 script today. It's due Friday. She spent the big coin and sent it overnight. Made the guy promise it will get there tomorrow. That'll give her a one-day safety buffer. She doesn't want it to be late. See here for the script. All of the cool, script formatting was lost when I pasted it into a Word doc, but you still get the gist. It's about six well-spaced pages, crunched up into a couple.
Wendy uses FinalDraft, which she likes. Got it at USC book store, student discount. FD has the most elaborate protection scheme I've ever seen. You have to call them for the secret code every time you install the thing.
She has a mandatory meeting on the 25th (Friday), & classes start Monday the 28th.
Jahmar has begun scanning & posting some of his pics on Wendy's site. See here. Notice the Rastafarian national colors. :)
July 30 - Wendy posted a movie about dolphins paying us a visit during recent sailing trip to Catalina. Need broadband (Cable or DSL) to stream. Dial-up will need to download. Nice black background to watch movie. Set the View to 'auto-size' for best viewing. See here.
Linkage to -> News for June & July, 2000
Linkage to -> News for November, 2000