Nirvana - In Utero
February 27th, 2006
Categories: Music, Movies, etc | No Comments
Weekly update: Accounting
February 27th, 2006
It’s Monday and you must be dying to know how the class from hell went. Well, I got my first paper back and the grade is 85% If you know anything about me, you’ll guess this number is absolutely not acceptable! 8 hours of work and this is what I get?!? It warmed my heart a little bit to hear yet another classmate blow up at the instructor. That person is an older gentlemen and also a professor himself, so those were not empty accusations he was letting out. The problem with the assignment was that the book didn’t have good examples and the only correct example we had was on the blackboard written very fast in chicken scribble. No hand-outs, no answer keys, no samples on what’s correct. It was quite enterntaining to hear someone use words “pissed off” directly to instructor’s face. My university career first.
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New Stuff
February 27th, 2006
So I was surfing the web, which is one of those things I do when sitting in a hotel room…..and at home I guess. But more so on the road.
Anyway, to the point. I was surfing around and reading Genya’s blog and ended up clicking through to someone who (presumably) knows Genya, who has an idea so good I wish I thought of it. She is reviewing the songs on her iPod with the goal of reviewing them all. Now, I have a 20 GB iPod with about 5K songs, our new friend has a 40 GB unit, which adds up to roughly 10K songs. If you review one a day, every day, that adds up to about 30 years of reviewing music. Which is pretty ambitious, but really cool.
I am not so ambitious, but, did decide to create a new category to handle album reviews. Hopefully there will be numerous album reviews in the stead of a complete list like we have for DVDs and Books. Also, while there will be links to Amazon for reference, we do not get any kickback if you want to buy it - no shilling here.
Enjoy!
Categories: Music, Movies, etc | 2 Comments
Back in the Pacific NW
February 27th, 2006
Here I am, back in the greater Seattle area. This is week 4 of 4 in a row on the road. The real bitch of it is that I get to be home for a week and Gina leaves for business!
At any rate, I really like Seattle. Despite the on/off rain/mist and general overcast, Seattle is just a really nice area. These is so much green, and around 45 F it’s like a cool day in late spring.
So, I like Seattle, but I am so damn tired of travelling every week. And Bothell is no where near as much fun as Seattle proper. But, I did find Garlic Jim’s Pizza, which was pretty good.
Only two trips are planned for March, and one is for pleasure, which is a much more reasonable level.
Categories: Travel | No Comments
New Tech Fun
February 26th, 2006
I’ve been having fun with technology this weekend, so, here’s some usefull and fun tech stuff.
A confluence of factors led me portable video. I want a new video iPod, but I’m not ready to invest just now. I do have a palmone LifeDrive equipped with 4 GB of storage. This device has pretty good resolution, and I thought it should play video at least as well as the iPod, if not with the coolest design.
Then, this post bubbled up on digg. The post describes using The Democracy Player along with a simple yet clever hack of TVrss and feedburner to turn the entire internet in to a DVR. I won’t rewrite the post, but basically pulling these three together you can get all the TV you want on your computer, not quite on demand, but almost.
So, now, going mobile. I downloaded The Core Pocket Media Player for my LifeDrive. It seems this media player is broader than the built in media player, even if the controls don’t look as fancy. The last step is to compress and encode the media files for playback on the go.
Normally, I try to go for Free/Open Source Software. I’d rather offer a donation for software that works well than deal with a crippled trial version until I know that it works. But, I couldn’t find any F/OSS option for what I needed - something could be out there, but I didn’t find it. I did choose Pocket DVD Studio which seems to work well, for less than $30 US. This software has a number of options to determine the output resolution and file size for the video. I like it.
Ten to fifteen minutes after beginning the encoding the smaller, Palm ready file is ready. With the options I am using the file comes out 25% to 30% smaller than the source .avi - not too bad. This leaves a 30 minute TV program at about 100 MB, good size to be able to bring 5 - 10 shows along with me anywhere. Last step is to copy to the LifeDrive using the Palm software, and try it out.
The video plays smoothly and with enough brightness and contrast I think it will be very watchable on a plane. Perfect for those times when I’m too tired for my serious reading material, but not tired enough to sleep.
Now I just need to find some TV shows I’m actually interested in watching. So far, The IT Crowd, The Daily Show, and The Office are on the list, suggestions welcome.
Categories: Science/Tech | No Comments
Updates
February 26th, 2006
We just found out that this site doesn’t render will in IE (at least not IE 6). I would guess this is due to some failure in rendering XHMTL, since there really isn’t anything fancy going on with site.
Consider Firefox as a free, secure, exstensible alternative to IE. It is generally much more pleasant to use, but you may need to keep IE around for a few crappy sites.
In other news - you can use the RSS link in the sidebar to subscribe through feedburner. This is a handy feature.
Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments
Right Wing Sally
February 25th, 2006
So I was driving home yesterday and came up on a smaller, older car covered in bumper stickers. Usually this leaves me a little warm as it is usually a liberal/hippie/environmentalist type with “Save the Whales” and such. But not today.
This time the car was covered in every right wing, “Christian”, pro-life sticker ever produced. Cover the back, sides and some windows, it was intense. It had stickers from every right of center politician going back to Reagan (recall that the last time he ran for office was over 20 years ago). But the one that caught my attention was this:
“If you’re against logging try plastic toilet paper”
Now this is stupid on so many levels. First, just semantically, if it is plastic, it is no longer paper. Seems obvious, but hey, I don’t need to stick a strict definition of marriage on my bumper.
Second, it is an extremely small minority (less than the number of hard core anti-gay, pro-life types) of extreme environmentalists who would advocate a complete cease and desist of the utilization of all natural resources. Most of us are concerned with maximizing the utility of every unit of natural resources (through efficient use and recycling) and protecting at least some areas, leaving them in a pristine state similar to the one we found them in.
Even more stupid is suggesting any environmentalist would suggest plastic as an eco-friendly alternive. As many third grade children know, plastic is made from petroleum, and petroleum (often known as oil for the sub-third grade crowd) is not generally environmentally friendly, in extraction, processing or disposal. Toilet paper will disintegrate in approximately 8 seconds of getting wet, plastic will last approximately 80 brazillian years, wet or dry.
So, the statement is obviously silly and somewhat non-sensical. But the sticker’s owner seems able to make some sense of Bush’s incomprehensible ramblings, birds of a feather I guess.
At the same time, the sticker did its job, it got a liberalish type worked up enough to put something out on the internet. But it had an unintended consequence - this liberal now thinks the average right wing/conservative bumper sticker carrier to be dumber than I did before, just by association with this fool. And, on top of it - someone had to produce the sticker, someone had to pay for the damn thing.
OK, I’m done ranting now, hope you had a laugh somewhere in there.
Categories: Politics | 2 Comments
Defenders of the Motherland
February 23rd, 2006
Today is a holiday in Russia– day of the Defenders of the Motherland (previously known as the Day of Soviet Army). Nobody is working today and tomorrow but in return, people are working on Sunday.
So, to congratulate the soldiers, Moscow government put up these lovely billboards. Looks nice, right?
Well, people who are into the planes and ships, will be able to tell that depicted are USS Missouri and a Russian fighter plane that crashed at the 1999 Paris air show. Naturally, all the vets raise the big scandal about the disrespect and the mockery and such. Government’s answer? The damn graphic artists! True civilians, they picked something that looked close enough and photoshopped it.
Categories: Random/Funny | No Comments
Visitors
February 22nd, 2006
This weekend I had my very good friends Eden and Case visit us from Indiana. As anyone in Midwest can imagine, the weather was not inviting to doing touristy stuffs, so we ended up shopping, drinking coffee, stuffing a lot of people of various sizes in a very compact car (mine) and trying to stay warm in general. We visited a few used book stores, found the best gaming store in Twin Cities (”Source” in Roseville, who knew!) and had Ethiopian food for one of the lunches. I was a bit of a party pooper though because I kept worrying about my International Accounting paper that was due two hours after my friends were scheduled to leave.
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