Except for the sounds coming from my speakers.. Heh.

So bouncing's been upstairs installing a new Slackware distro on Festery, and in the meantime making the hub lights flash like crazy as he downloads the Loki demos from Argo's ftp server. (And no, Argo's ftp server is NOT open to the great wide world; If you want 'em, there are plenty of mirror sites that are much better equipped for being stormed by the hordes.)

He came home from SoftPro today with a very familiar looking silver box featuring logos of both id Software and Loki on it. Hahaha. Now what game might that be? We're probably gonna do some deathmatching after he gets his stuff all setup. Now it's official: I am GOING to have to visit that store. Everyone says it's great. An O'Reilly paradise. And they have LOKI games! Over the counter! No waiting for shipping! Gotta get my ass down there.

And myself today? Between lazing around and taking naps, I picked little by little at the movielog code. The dirt is in the details. I also decided it would be advisable to fix the behavior of showing EVERY bit of secondary content which happened between the previous entry and the next when displaying a movielog entry. What I came up with was sort of another ugly hack, but at least it doesn't flood people with a millennium's worth of Content Solutions data.

I need to rework and rethink that entire section of the code, really. It's ugly as hell right now. It's sort of modular, but not in the right way. What I REALLY need to do is find a way to get back to the lounge object model which I drafted way back when, and devise a way to implement it in a way that is elegant, comprehensible, AND maintainable. Of course, doing something like that the right way would require a significant block of time. Time which I just don't have at the moment. At least not in the desired quantities.

I think I am with code as a certain other web author is with site designs. I keep going over it, redoing it, reworking it, throwing out the old, and replacing it with the new. Then I decide I hate it again and start over. Never satisfied. Hehe. We do amuse ourselves though, don't we?

So yeah, delays. I was planning to get started on the code last night, but then my movie ended up being sold out for the 2015 showing. So I bought my ticket to the next available screening at 2250. That left me time to wander around, so I went to Arby's, got drivethru, returned home, ate it, hung out for a bit, and then went back to see the show.

I won't even bother talking about it here, since I think that was sufficiently documented in the movielog entry. I ended up going to bed very late.

So today, while hacking at movielog lounge code between naps, Argo has been pumping all sorts of music into the receiver. I never did find a way to make it play 2 channel sound uniformly in both the front and rear speakers. I presume that feature is unavailable. :(

Listining to 2 channel audio through the Dolby Pro Logic Surround is pretty cool though. Listening to the rear speakers, it's apparent that the thing is doing some sort of wacky heuristic to guess which sounds should be front and what belongs in the rear. For example, it's obvious that human vocals go almost exclusively to the front. (Sort of like the xmms voice removal plugin, but cleaner.) Except when it's backup vocals. Often (but not always), those will go to the rear.

How do they accomplish this magic? Even if someone who truly understands could explain it to me, I probably wouldn't understand, but the more I listen, the more interesting it is. Like echos. I'm sure it's got some sort of echo detection in there, because whenever there is one, the echo comes over the rear speakers. On Enigma 4, during Endless Quest, when that flutey thing is playing, the sound sweeps across the front, reverberating back to the rear. I was cranking that earlier.

[Bitscape goes to xmms, selects Endless Quest, and plays it again presently.]

Amazing stuff. Heh.

I was thinking about going to rent a DVD tonight. I haven't even started on the Content Collective color code I was going to do today. Fortunately, I planned my goals somewhat conservatively because I know that these things inevitably end up taking longer than I initially think they will. (At least they do when I plan them. At times, when I don't plan anything, and go off on a spontaniously random coding spree, I can get a lot more done than normal. Think some of those exteremly early pre-Jaeger fests, when bouncing and I would just say, "Okay! Let's fest this weekend. Woohoo!" Two nights later, we'd have these massive piles of code that did shit we would only have dreamed about a few days prior.)

I do feel like renting a movie. I'm pushing the Content Collective color stuff back to later tonight and/or tomorrow. (Notice that I wisely left tomorrow almost free of other projects. Except for the cvs import thing. I don't think that will take long though. Famous last words, I know.)

[Bitscape resolves to get up, put on some long pants, rouse Tobias, and proceed to 2 destinations: Taco Bell and The Video Station.]

After I finish this song. :)