The continuing adventures of little lost robot are now taking place here on my wordpress blog. Chances are you ended up here becuase of my Blogger profile or something. Hope to see you there!

little lost robot

I've been locked out of my blog for the past few days. I've been able to update my blog for YEARS without a problem, but all of a sudden it just mysteriously doesn't work. Apparently, Blogger changed the way stuff uploads to my Yahoo-based server (or is it vice-versa?), so I had to do a bit of forensic HTML and FTPing to figure out a workaround.

The solution I came up with involves nothing more than a randomly placed "/" character on my FTP string. Luckliy, some poor bastard had this problem 4 years ago and it was still up on his website.

Anyway, I'm on the new version of Blogger now - which sports a ton of new features(apart from randomly deleting your index or locking you out) and I'm eager to test them out for the week until I switch to something else.

Saw this sign in the beer and wine section of the local supermarket today and smiled.



Aside from that, here were other exciting highlights from this weekend:

1. Had this whole, "Let's go out tonight!" thing planned for Saturday, but Hasser and I ended up getting sucked into watching the entire third season of Little Britain instead. And now,we'll be talking like Lou and Andy all month long, much to my wife's discomfiture.

2. For the most part, I'm not a very big fan of holiday music and movies. Seriously. But I have found one thing (apart from my robot ornaments) that makes me all warm inside. Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas. I've always been obsessed with it as a kid, and this weekend I got the DVD - and watched every single feature on the disc. The making-of video was great, and it makes me hates CGI characters like Jar Jar and Dobby just that much more.

3. Someone mentioned that should check out the USB Snowbot from ThinkGeek. But it just so happens that I featured the snow-cylon a few weeks ago on my "Click on JL" podcast. It afforded me the opportunity to write the following line into WYFF4's 5pm newscast: "It will enforce holiday cheer with it cold robotic gaze."

This year my holiday robot tree is out of control. We got a fiber optic tree, and another half-dozen ornaments. I was planning on taking a photo to post on the blog, but I got carried away and made a little video [below].



It was thrown together pretty fast, but you have no idea how hard it was figuring out whether to edit the photos to the robot voice or the music - which obviously didn't sync up because they lack a soul (or rhythm). Eventually I just said "F-it." Also, I've discovered that there's about a thousand different lyrical interpretations to "O' Christmas Tree". Some of them were so in love with the tree it was creepy.

Anyway, Happy Tuesday!

I had a heart attack this morning when I went to glance over my website...and it wasn't there! Instead was my 404 redirect page, which routed traffic into the folders and files of my site. Scary.

Somehow the index was deleted from my blog, so I quickly republished and then changed passwords like mad. Paypal, Blogger, MySpace - you name it. Like I said: heart attack.

I'm so switching to wordpress this week.

"Oh snap!" I believe is what I whispered during the newsroom meeting yesterday when Andy Still (the news director) announced that Jane Robelot will be joining the WYFF4 news team in January. We were all rounded-up from our daily assignments and called into the newsroom, where moments later the Robelot made her grand entrance [video].

I didn't stick around for too much more after the introduction, as I was on deadline. But, apparently that was long enough for me to be caught in a rather enthusiastic photo in the Greenville Journal.

Anyway, when I got to work this morning, I realized that everyone still had "Robelot fever".

"Did you see her?"
"Did you talk to her?"
"Who's going to be working with her?"

This went on for most of the day, so when I finished up with all my work, I went Robelot hunting.



I heard she would be making an appearance on the one of the early shows, so I staked-out the news set and caught a glimpse of her through the peep hole. I quickly ended my spying when I realized there was a tour group of cub scouts on the other side of the door and I stood a good chance of freaking one of them out.

A few minutes later, after losing her trail (she left the set through the other door) I stumbled upon her in the newsroom and quickly snapped this semi-covert shot.



Just as I was finished taking the photo I heard someone yell out, "JL! Hey, JL...come over here!" I realized that it was the Robelot, since I was looking at her in reverse - over my shoulder - on the LCD screen. Talk about awkward. I was kinda confused how she knew my name, and she was probably confused as to why I was taking semi-weird-covert photos of her from across the room.

Anyway, she introduced herself, but before we had much of a conversation she was whisked off to do a phone interview. What was my impression, you ask? Answer: Nice lady, class act. She'll fit in nicely with the fine folks here at "We're Your Friend Four".

I have no idea if we'll ever be teamed-up, but I think the Robelot should have a chance to experience "the robot treatment" - which actually sounds cooler that it really is. [It basically involves riding around in my news van listening to techno music, and occasionally being interrupted during interviews while I swap out my wide angle lens.]

At the very least, maybe we'll become MySpace friends - I'll be sure to save room for her in my "Top 8".

Earlier I was going on about how Cinemax has been playing the Star Wars marathon over and over again every weekend. Well, I neglected to mention that prior to the actual marathon, Cinemax constantly played this (really long) music video set to Coldplay's "Fix You" (prompting Stereogum to write a post a few weeks back, titled "Coldplay are Star Whores")



After watching that, I'm still kinda torn about how I feel about both Coldplay and Star Wars. One thing I do know: I'll no longer associate this song with Kaleb Michael's funeral on season 2 of The OC - now it'll be people crying about Han Solo getting frozen in carbonite. Is that better? I'm not sure.

It's Monday morning here at LLR headquarters and I'm recovering from the holiday (shopping weekend). Here are a few random thoughts:

1. On Thanksgiving I was the lucky photographer who landed "vo/sot patrol", meaning that I ran all over town shooting various Thanksgiving-related stories. At each of these events I sampled some turkey. Later that day, we had a make-shift Thanksgiving lunch, at which I ate turkey. And even later I had turkey at home (all weekend). Next year we're having ham.

2. I was really tempted to get up early and "hit the stores" for some Black Friday deals. The deals that I was most excited about were somehow all at Staples and were gadget related. I snapped out of it when I realized what a dork I'd be, getting up at 5am so I can get (another) stupid memory stick to carry around in my pocket.

3. I can't believe that Cinemax is still showing the entire Star Wars double trilogy every weekend. More than that, I can't believe that I end up watching bits and pieces of it all weekend long.

4. The robot holiday tree has began to take shape. Stay tuned for photos.