brykmantra.com

Jewish One-Minute Movies

The New York Minute Film Festival.

BBC

Amateur filmmaking is within the reach of most people this days, but putting together even a short feature is a daunting task — as I know personally as the producer of some ten-minute training videos that each took weeks to write, film, narrate and edit.

That’s at least part of the reason for the recent explosion of popularity of the one-minute film.

Check out these galleries of 60-second video works:

Brickfilms, stop-action animation using Legos and other techniques.

The One Minutes.

one minute video’s made by young people.

Croatian one-minute films.

Coming this March, the Lithuanian short film festival, sponsored by Pravda.

OneMinuteFilms.com

As I said earlier, most of today I wore my Geek hat (figure of speech; no actual headwear was involved), so here are the details:

I don’t know what all our computers did over the long holiday, but the apparently had more fun than I did, because they were all still a little messed up this morning. First Vickie (hi Vickie) calls to say that her computer has been having a chronic (heh) problem of rebooting itself, and it’s getting worse. Long story short, I disabled some software startups, and we’ll see if that helps.

The our microbiologist called, saying that she keeps getting the error message, CMOS setting incorrect and something else similar. I looked this up on the Internet, and no one solution had a majority of references — a bad sign — but one of the more popular suggestions was to change the mobo battery. Since the computer is over 3 years old, I decided to try that.

Unfortunately, now I can’t get anything to come up on the screen at all.

D’oh …

So it’s back to the drawing board (figure of speech) tomorrow.

Next: Accounts Payable said I have to reboot the server, because the IT guy at the High Holy Corporate Office told her that’s what she needed to do.

So I restarted the server, and all its sessions, and darned if the IT guy wasn’t write.

Extra, Extra, Blind Squirrel Finds Nut!

A few minutes later she’s calling me back, saying she couldn’t get on the Internet.

I told her she’d better ask her precious Corportate IT Guy what to do.

No but seriously: I told her to see if she was getting email.

She was, so that made it a snap to fix: It was her IP configurations, that had reset as everyone’s computer had rejoined the server.

Yes, yes, I know that doesn’t sound right, but that’s what happens with our server every time it has to restart. We don’t bother to understand it, we just deal with it and move on.

Last mission: Vickie called again, this time telling me that the UPS computer wouldn’t boot. This time it was a corrupted ISAPNP.SYS file. Never mind that the computer is new enough to to have an ISA slot on its motherboard; stupid Windows still has to have it for boot.

So we had to wrangle the XP installation disks, and by that time didn’t have time to fix it today.

Here I am recovering (barely) from an infection, running myself ragged all over the warehouse.

Just thing I felt somewhat better …

But anyway, even though it’s frustrating, it might also be a large part of the reason they put up with me …

We’re a third of the way through, so it’s time for some random links!

License to Pill, a satire on our prescription drug culture, to the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.

(Via Zfilter.)

Really funny T-shirts
(via Found on the Web.)

Check this out: Signpaintr, a new Flickr group about hand-painted signs. (Via Drawn.)

This one’s for The Wife: The Virtual Tour of Heaven (via our friend at Look at This).

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You’re welcome!

Here’s what my desktop looks like. I store photos and other files on it, because it’s easy for uploads, and it makes downloads easy to find.

The only problem is that I’ve let it get way out of hand and now there are 362 objects on the desktop.

I didn’t know why I bother with wallpaper.

(That’s Iceland in the background, in case you’re new here …)

Over the weekend, people asked me if I thought I would feel like going back to work on Tuesday.

I told them it didn’t matter, because I WAS going to work today. Period. I’ve missed to much work lately, with my arm and my mom’s emergencies, plus I wouldn’t be paid for a holiday if I took a sick day at the end of it.

Sleeping in was not an option; I knew that come Tuesday morning, I would be dragging what was left of my carcass into the office.

And, I told myself, the worse I felt and looked, the more of a trooper I would look like just for showing up.

Actually, aside from headache in the early hours, I felt surprisingly good this morning. My fever had resurfaced last night, and I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep.

But today I guess my four rounds of antibiotics (and 12 hours of sleep a day all weekend) accumulated to actually get me back on my feet.

And it’s a good thing I got more energy, because there was working waiting for me: Documents for a shipment to Japan, update three different multipage Mexico Nafta documents and print two originals of each, and, the thing I’ve been dreading, having a meeting with New Boss in Training about my apparent lack of progress on a bizarre long-term project.

That actually turned out better than I expected, due in large part to extensive documentation of my phone calls, so I’m off the hook on that for now.

The rest of the day I’ve been running around trying to fix computers.

But that’s for a later post …

Like I’ve said previously, I haven’t let my aches and fever stop my enjoyment (and documentation!) of the holidays. True, I didn’t quite take as many pictures as I might have, including screenshots of holiday TV shows, but at least I snapped to consciousness long enough to preserve a few memories.

I’ve uploaded my Christmas pictures to Flickr, so check it out.

Check this out: Apocalypse Chow: How to Eat Well When the Power Goes Out.

Apparently capitalizing on the current trend of Disaster Chic, this volume tells you how to keep your dining standards high, even when you’re struggling for existence. Offerings include Shiitake-Happens Mushroom Soup, which should give you some idea of the spirit of the project.

People keep feeling sorry for me for getting hit with this respiratory infection right at Christmas, like it somehow dampens the holiday for me.

That didn’t happen at all; the fact that it was Christmas gave a nice, sparkly background to my achy, feverish haze.

Right before the first Halloween of my school years, I came down with one of several of those first-grade diseases, and I remember being initally crushed when told I wouldn’t be trick-or-treating like every other kid in school.

But my parents let me put on my Casper costume anyway, and stand in the doorway to greet all the trick-or-treaters that came by, and I had a blast. I got to see all the other kids and how they were dressed) something that probably wouldn’t have happened if I had been on the door-to-door circuit), and I got lots of candy from everybody who felt sorry for me.

It’s like I was the star of Halloween, and on a stage with everyone coming to pay (candy) to see me.

That potentially traumatic event turned out to be one of my happiest childhood memories.

So I don’t worry about sick holidays much.

The Wife was shocked that I was able to get her a Christmas card this week, with all that I’ve had going on. I said, Hey, I’ve been in drugstores eight times in the last five days, getting things I needed for being sick; I’ve spent more waking hours around greeting cards that not around them.

When a really, really famous celebrity dies, I sometimes don’t mention it here — like last week, with Richard Pryor — because what can I add that a thousand other bloggers and journalists haven’t already?

That’s why I pay particular attention to the passing of supporting actors — the people whose names most folks don’t know, but you’ve seen their faces a million times.

Here’s a good example: Vincent Schiavelli has died at age 57. You might not recognize the name, but you’ve seen him: He was the organ grinder (one of the Penguin’s circus henchmen) in Batman Returns, the subway spirit in Ghost, and the science teacher on Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as well as 150 other movie and TV appearances. He was a regular feature in Milos Forman’s films, including Amadeus, The Man in the Moon, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Valmont.

You also know his wife, Allyce Beasley, perhaps better known as Agnes diPesto on Moonlighting.

Schiavelli also authored three cookbooks several cooking articles for magazines and newspapers.

So the next time you keep seeing the same actor in several movies or shows, find out his or her name and learn more about this person.

You might be surprised.

One last post while it’s still Christmas Day:

Our friend ILuvNUFC at Look at This has posted lots of Christmas link, and you can find several bunches more of his Christmas links here.

And while I’m at it: hope y’all had a great Christmas!