Fucking furries..

So two fursuiters at a charity event in New Jersey apparently decided to get it on explicitly on the hood of a car outside in broad daylight. Local council saw it, kids saw it, photos were taken.

In addition to the usual embarrassment & mud-flinging, the ~$600 fundraising for new medical equipment is likely going to cost over a quarter of a million dollars in lost equipment, fines and penalising budget-cuts, as well as possibly the jobs of 5 people who were hosting & organising.

Knock-on effects are likely to include not only the prosecution of the two douchebags (we can hope), but complete destruction of community events in that area and the community becoming an overnight anathema to the close-knit Fire and Emergency Medical Service community.

[Redacted due to threat of libel]

Okay this is all in the USA, so I’d hope it can be avoided in the UK, but frankly we’ve already had more than enough similar events the community’s dodged the bullet on previously. That sinking feeling you get when these things occur? Remember when you were little and broke a plate or a window or something? It’s the feeling of not knowing if this is the time you’re going to get the full wrath of god down on you for your actions. You can’t dodge bullets forever. This is why you should do things to fix shit rather than ignore or hide it. Deciding to contront a fear is the only control we ever have over it.

If I had one of those “furry pride” stickers or T-shirts, this is the point I’d be burning it. Reading this sort of thing makes you feel like a bunch of people have decided to dunk you bodily in a septic-tank. It feels like it’s cloying to every bit of you. Especially when you remember there is no way there won’t be some clutch of the group who close-ranks over it, either for self-protective interests or because they find a way to justify the actions of the people involved.

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3573735/

SMARTEN THE FUCK UP YOU THUNDERING MORONS.

Not leaving this soley as a FaceBook ramble

Lordy fuck, I have managed by myself to drink a whole bottle of leftover 12% rosé without meaning to, alongside a quarter tin of Quality Streets, and am neither sugar-buzzing off my tits nor blisteringly drunk.
Surely my kidneys deserve some sort of medal; they’ve over the past few months achieved the sort of level-grinding that’s usually associated with a power-ballad training-montage.
I would say I’m officially looking for a friendly, trustworthy and tactile lady-person who is equally willing to be a snuggle-buddy as they are to indulge carnal pleasures the likes of which are know to tear the heavens asunder. But I won’t, because most previous relationships have included leaping in at the less-than-metaphorical deep-end, so I’m actually on the look out for someone personally compatible.
Though the monkey-sex thing is probably on the compatibility list somewhere.
And while we are on the topic of mind-boggling vag, to the artists out there; the female sex organ is not a slit that can simply be positioned anywhere on the bodies mid-line from breastbone down up under & around to taint without incurring some degree of factual inaccuracy. If you’re going to vainly attempt to draw the mystical and long-sought joining of male and female bits, at least have the decency to look at some actual porn first and get their googlies in the same fucking postal code as each-others!

Salvage: Adjustable bed and rant

Grabbed the electric adjustable bed from up the road earlier. Could tell it contained at least some angle-iron and a motor, as well as an oversized controller.

It’s about what I’ve come to expect from all commercially available “medical” appliances. Off-the-shelf parts in a design so basic it’s crude. It smacks of zero product development; no refinement beyond the first working demonstration model.

Controls all run on mains voltage so the flex to the massive hand-held controller is about half an inch thick, the controller itself being slightly larger than that used to control industrial gantry cranes. All angle-iron frame, welded, with M6 bolts and nylon washers as hinges. No nylocs, all counter-tightened slim nuts to hold them in place. Even using two bolts as load-bearing end-stops. Considering the bed has two separate “massage” vibration motors, it seems dangerous to use pivot nuts and hold the bed portions raised with a scheme that could easily shake loose over time (and many of the nuts were already loose enough to undo by hand). The internal control box that I expected to contain relays only contained some fuses and a small transformer (probably for the vibration timer in the controller), the rest of the box being 3/4s empty. Another off the shelf project box you could pick up from any electronics hobbiest shop. Connector bundles also held together with a project box. MDF covers for the vibration recesses have been neatly and pointlessly bevelled on all edges, where no-one will see it or or any wire would touch it. The vibration motors themselves have a bolt and washer as a weight drilled into the cooling fans at each end.
Also noticed there’s no packing on the pivot bolts for the actuators so they twist in their mounts when changing direction. This will surely lead to metal fatigue and sudden unexpected failure of the mounts in the actuators cast aluminium housings.

Why is it every single piece of consumer medical equipment is apparently designed as someone’s final GCSE Design & Technology project??

It’s no wonder the devices needed by our most vulnerable are also so expensive when they never refine the designs at all. Even a courteous bit of refinement could drop construction prices by a large amount. Even if they didn’t drop the sale price, the companies would make more money! Where’s the downside? Or is there some bit of safety legislation that demands any “medical” equipment be explicitly built like a 1920s farm tractor?

That said, I now have some short sections of sturdy angle-iron and a pair of mains 250Watt linear actuators rated at 2500N with about 200mm travel.
The reason for it being thrown out? They’d accidentally yanked the mains cable out of the controller box. I plugged the pins back in, changed the fuse, and it worked fine.
Except for a week outside, the foam mattress portion smelled like rancid fish.

Truly, it pays to remember that when something breaks, it generally only means one single part of it has actually broken.
The attitude of the consumer however is far more often that the magic box is dead, so they need a new one. Well, I suppose that is why they’re called consumers.

Wondering if the actuators would be sufficiently powerful to make a small crane. I doubt it actually. Could probably shift a large satellite dish or similar though.

[20/06/2010: Amalgamating old posts from “Dreamwidth Creative Blog” into sci-fi-fox.com to re-purpose DW blog account.]

Video production woes

A little list of my video-capture woes.

*sigh*

Adobe Premiere only captures from DV sources. My SAA7130 capture card isn’t recognised by it.

AvidFreeDV is the same.

VirtualDub disconnects from the capture device when I try and change the capture resolution. And when I reconnect it resets to 320*240 anyway. Capture output files contain no video.
Attempting to capture with any compression crashes the capture system.

WinDVR doesn’t capture the audio due to the RealTek onboard video card. I can reinstall a separate soundcard, but few of them work on XP and none have the extra I/Os I need.

WinDVD Creator crashes when trying to connect.

When it doesn’t crash instantly, Windows Movie Maker won’t capture in anything but WMV.

So far my best option looks to be to capture in WinDVR using mpeg2 compression and capture and sync the audio manually afterwards.

And attempting to simply connect to the card in MPC bluescreens the machine.

REALLY getting pissed off with this. I bought cameras and playback units so I could actually do something with recorded video. It’s been nearly 4 fucking years and upgrading to XP has stopped me from doing any of it! VirtualDub worked PERFECTLY on Windows 2000. Not a single frame dropped at full PAL resolution, directly from my SVHS playback unit.

I can’t even connect to the fucking video source on XP without something crashing or having to physically replace hardware, let alone getting to the point of TRYING to record it!

Am I seriously going to have to BUILD a Windows 2000 machine just for recording video? Not even for editing it; just recording it??

I’d happily farm the capture out to someone else at this stage except the files produced would by several gigabytes a piece, and getting them onto this machine to edit them would be an equal nightmare!

[20/06/2010: Amalgamating old posts from “Dreamwidth Creative Blog” into sci-fi-fox.com to re-purpose DW blog account.]