Movie Collector OH

"Robby, buddy ol' pal... You scratch my back, I scratch yours. See?" [shuffle shuffle click] "That will not be necessary" "Well can I interest you in a beautiful 1956 John Deere transmission? Sitting out in the old barn, behind the straw. She's a real pile of gears, just your type" [shuffle shuffle click] "I can hardly contain myself."

I think someone at the top is just hooked on latest trends, sight unseen. It need not go any further than that.

I'll reword that. They "did" send it out to someone. A sample email "did" get temporarily posted on here (I saw it for myself). That email had a link to a marketing company in it. The marketing company is where the new online NPG is located, not TCM. You could only see the NPG if you clicked on that marketing company link. TCM may email the notifications out, but the marketing company's link is in there, thus setting off the spam filters. It is treated no differently than the fake emails you get that look legitimate, but have links that go to strange international websites.

Dick Miller and Robby the Robot. Hard to tell what is going on here. Is Robby getting him juiced so he can get compromising information from him?

The emails from TCM are probably ending up in everyone's junk or spam folder because they contain metadata from a marketing company that is known to usually send out junk. This is just something I noticed from a couple posts where someone temporarily shared these emails. (Actually an email just containing a personalized link to the resources, said link has a questionable reputation among email providers, based on previous reported activity.)

Based on the thoughts of others, maybe from another forum, college film courses really only have a chance to scratch the surface. Now if you could sit in on a symposium with notable directors and writers, or have one of them for an instructor, then that would be different.

My project updates are posted for this month. http://moviecollector.us/reports/Future_Premieres.htm A big thanks to poster yanceycravat for providing me with 9 months worth of older schedules. That leaves me with just under two years worth of total months that I don't have yet, from TCM's entire history (1994-present). This recent addition helped to fill out some of the statistics numbers between 1997 and 2001.

I had a chance to have a look at the temperatures. My main unit, a Genie HR44, is at 80 degrees F. I remember the main unit being closer to 100 degrees in my entertainment center before I set it on top of a laptop cooling pad.That is the one that matters, as it has an internal HDD. The clients are the much smaller units without a HDD. I looked at one of those and it is 134 degrees F. I didn't know about there being a shutdown feature on the DVR itself. What I was talking about was the possibility of the processor used inside having a voltage limiting function activate if it gets too hot. This has nothing to do with Directv's software, this would be internal to an off-the-shelf component they use, which is there to prevent component failure. If it is processing video and begins to exceed a safe operating temperature, then it would continue to run but would run at a degraded performance. This could cause "pixelization". Also, hard drives are going to be the component most sensitive to temperature. Heat kills hard drives. They usually go bad via the "death by a thousand paper cuts" route, unless there is a catastrophic event first which takes it out entirely. So by the time a system thermal shutdown was activated (as you point out), there is probably a good chance it is already too late and the hard drive has started to degrade (from the long-term heat leading up to that incident). A hard drive on its way out would have longer seek times and data it can't find, also resulting in dropouts or "pixelization". So same approximate result, two different problems, same cause. Heat. This device has a computer inside, and computers have always had fans, until recently. Basically it comes down to customers not wanting proper cooling fans in their AV equipment, because they are too "noisy", so they get a convection-cooled device that typically has a shorter lifespan or MTBF (mean time between failure) unless kept cool. This would apply to any of this cheap high volume mass produced value-engineered consumer crap that has the tendency to overheat: cable boxes, cable DVRs, satellite boxes, Tivo, Roku, Haiku, Meeku, Youku, younameit...

RIP Stanislav Petrov: Russian colonel who saved world from all-out nuclear war Quiet hero dies at 77 ... Petrov's job wasn't to push the metaphorical red button, but to warn Soviet high command if it might need to. If an ICBM was launched from a US ground launch site, it would take about 30 minutes to reach the motherland, and it was highly likely that Soviet commanders would trust his launch recommendation. Has this thing passed QA tests? September 26, 1983 Petrov knew that the Oko system was new and still had bugs to iron out. He also knew that logically the US would never launch just five missiles against the USSR and await retaliation – first strike doctrine was that you threw everything you could at the enemy in hopes of blunting the response. So Petrov held back from letting his superiors know until he could correlate Oko's data against other sources. As a result it was found that, due to faults in the system, what Oko had been detecting were flashes of sunshine on the tops of heavy clouds. While initially Petrov was praised for his perspicacity, that didn't last. Before long top brass acted against him, demoting the officer for a paperwork error. He got the message and retired a year later to become a military contractor. ... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/18/stanislav_petrov_obit/ To tie this in to movies, this docudrama was made from the incident: The Man Who Saved the World (2014) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2277106/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1a

I guess the speculation will have to continue, won't it.

There aren't that many things that can go wrong here. The only other things I can think of, off the top of my head - maybe the dish somehow became misaligned (maybe a bear used it to scratch his back), or maybe the hard disk drive in the DVR has issues (happens with DVRs from any provider). The HDD issue is not uncommon. It reads and writes from the HDD even if you are just watching TV live. Also maybe Directv's network provider had issues, though not likely if it is a recurring issue for you, simply because it isn't a recurring issue for me I'm not near my unit right now to check it, so I'll have to post back with stats.

Tightly focused lights above and behind him. During tech rehearsal they likely made an "X" on the floor with tape and told him to stand right there. In this scene there were probably bright beams of light cast on either side of the camera. For moving scenes some of it may have been done with follow spots. For a halo effect, lens filters.

Hey slayonf, just wondering more about your Directv situation. Two key factors to consider are "line of sight" and "thermal management". I have Directv too and no issues, outside of occasional "rain fade". 1) Did it happen when it was raining or snowing? 2) Are there trees in the way? Not knowing what your installation looks like, something might have grown in the way to block the satellite dish. Or for that matter, maybe a structure is blocking it. Just go where the dish is, and look in the direction that it is pointed. There is also a utility on the Directv DVR to look at all the different satellite transponder strengths. 3) Is your Directv DVR/receiver box in an open area and does it have plenty of air circulation? I had heard about the challenge of getting a service guy out, so early on I put my DVR on top of a laptop computer cooling fan. That may not be absolutely necessary, but heat kills electronics and in-between it can cause devices to go into thermal-protect mode (where applicable). In my situation it is sitting in an entertainment center. It has two walls and a roof over its head, it is completely open in front and in back. It does tend to run a bit warmer than if I were to set it up on top. (You can check the temp of your unit too with the on-screen diagnostics.) I have some ideas on how to record a streaming Internet connection on schedule, just like a DVR, but for right now I'll defer to those who have actually tried it and use it.

I was glad to see they kept him in the wings with those wine commercials. Sort of an indication of more to come. Now he is back! I too would like to see Eddie as one of the permanent hosts.

As I have said in other threads, I just stick to the primary delivery medium. It is what has been worked out on a large scale, is in place, and is most likely to deliver. In my case it is using Directv and a DVR. There is more to my setup than that, but that is all I use to bring TCM in. In many areas cable TV works fine too, just not in mine. [Cable TV is more complicated than satellite, so it has more hoops to jump through in order to work. Satellite has a simpler distribution model, in that it is basically just a hop up to the satellite and then a hop down to you. No cable plants.] Plus I didn't like how my cable co programmed their boxes. I agree with being at least suspicious about bundling. We have three different providers for these things: satellite TV, cable Internet, and land line phone. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way, but that mostly has to do with the order which we subscribed to these services. Land line came first, then cable TV with Internet. We discontinued the cable TV and replaced it with satellite due to picture issues, but kept the cable Internet because it was fine. Directv's bundle option for us would have included DSL, and in general cable Internet is a superior technology to DSL. This has to do with the type of wire used.

Might be an infrastructure problem, where certain files may not have uploaded successfully during a certain frame of time, due to an outage or other problems. You'd think though that someone would be checking on this.

Okay, to get this back on track, this thread beats the Royalite out of 95% of the other threads on this board (Robby was mostly made of Royalite - a plastic formerly used to make suitcases). Would you care for some coffee?

There's a lot of material there to upload to Youtube, or even someone's own site. (Most people know how to make DVDs from VHS tapes. It is not that much harder to make computer files from these VHS tapes or DVDs that can be uploaded to a video hosting site.) I am talking about the ephemeral stuff like the commercials, TV interviews, and possible TV movies not seen since. There is no guarantee though. It would take a large team and/or many man-hours to inventory it. I think if I had an infinite amount of time and an large amount of resources like this guy apparently did, I'd train and volunteer at a film archive house and preserve actual movies, rather than incidental bits and pieces of 80s culture such as MTV and other various and sundry programming. The thought of what might be on those tapes is interesting though, even though I couldn't care less about most of what is mentioned in the ad.

Beats the snot out of 95% of the other threads on this board.

Another look at the assembly required for Robby. [it might help to save this picture offline, then enlarge it in an image viewer.] Some of the text from what looks to be an interesting magazine article. (Maybe someone can figure out where this came from, I just found this doing an image search.): (Right page): Frankie Darro, inside of Robby, poses with crewmen Richard Grant (left) and Morgan Jones (right) as effects workers help him on with his feet. Darro wore black pancake makeup on his face so as to not be visible behind Robby's neon voice tubes. (Left page): Effects-men Cliff Grant (left) [Richard Grant??] and Andy Thatcher help Darro on with the metal and leather harness which attaches him to Robby. A wooden frame holds the robot's body in place during the operation. Frankie Carpenter stands at the ready with special shoes to be worn by Darro, to fasten on to the bottom of the robot's feet. At right in the background lies Robby's head dome, ready for installation.

Some judicious use of B-roll. Replace the happy music with shots of night-time rain, wet sidewalks and empty streets, someone walking down the street alone, post-production ADR work of a Monty Wooley impersonator saying "I don't know what came upon me that fateful night, I don''t know why I did it". It would probably have the continuity of a lesser film like The Beast Of Yucca Flats though.

As you are probably well aware, a turn around can be short-lived. Especially when nobody goes downtown as planned during the off season. I don't spend any time downtown there, but despite all kinds of recent renovations, I hear it's gone fairly unused overall. P.S. Maybe if you tweaked The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) to make it a bit more scary or paranoid, you'd end up with a Noir. I think that was supposed to be set somewhere around Cleveland.

AT&T Voice Technology Commercial (2006) With special cameos by the 1939 World's Fair VODER (VOice recordER), Robby the Robot (Forbidden Planet), WOPR (War Games), Rosie the Maid Robot (The Jetsons), and KITT (Knight Rider).

Linus TORvalds - the founder of the Linux kernel/operating system which is used on a significant amount of computing devices today: Android cell phones and tablets (Android just piggy-backs on an unseen Linux OS), vehicle navigation systems, DVRs, wireless routers, Internet web servers, supercomputers and many other devices that need to "boot up" or "initialize" when powered on, including some desktops/laptops like mine (Linux Mint), formerly a Windows machine, which I do all my online things with. Big guy... I don't know if he's as big as Tor Johnson though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

Just a random story in search of a thread: Mob Relatives Drawing Pensions From Chicago IATSE Projectionists’ “Endangered” Plan IATSE Projectionists Local 110 in Chicago was once widely believed to be one of the most mobbed up unions in America — a crooked outfit packed with members of the Chicago mob and their relatives, some of whom who are now drawing generous pensions from the local’s endangered pension plan. https://deadline.com/2015/09/mob-relatives-drawing-pensions-chicago-iatse-projectionists-endangered-plan-1201504406/