Christmas Lights (Day 2)

So I missed a couple of days…

This one was taken in Christie Estates.

Christmas Lights (Day 1)

Last year I said I was going to do this. I didn’t do it. I am going to try it this year.

If you don’t remember from last year or didn’t read this last year, here is a little refresher. I said that I was going to go out and find cool Christmas lights and take pictures. I would then post them on my blog, like one picture a day. I don’t know if I’ll get one picture a day, but I’ll try.

The first one is taken in Sterling Springs. I just thought I’d mention that in case those of you who know where that is want to go see these lights for yourself. These ones aren’t all that cool, but it is the first one.

Anyway, here it is. It isn’t all that great because I was in a hurry and didn’t pay attention to the settings on my camera. The next ones will be better. If you click on it, it will take you to flickr where you can click on “All Sizes” to see it larger if you want.

Tesla Coils Playing Mario Bros Theme

This is so awesome. If you love Tesla Coils like I do, and even if you don’t, you will think this is cool.

From Youtube

Twin Solid State Musical Tesla coils playing Mario Bros theme song at the 2007 Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon sponsored by DC Cox (Resonance Research Corp) in Baraboo WI.
The music that you hear is coming from the sparks that these two identical high power solid state Tesla coils are generating. There are no speakers involved. The Tesla coils stand 7 feet tall and are each capable of putting out over 12 foot of spark. They are spaced about 18 feet apart. The coils are controlled over a fiber optic link by a single laptop computer. Each coil is assigned to a midi channel which it responds to by playing notes that are programed into the computer software. These coils were constructed by Steve Ward and Jeff Larson. Video was captured by Terry Blake. What is not obvious is how loud the coils are. They are well over 110dB.

I Paid 15 Pounds for WHAT?

So, I bought the new Radiohead album yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, Radiohead is not in a contract right now and they decided that they wanted to try something different. They put their new album up for download on their website. Nothing really new here, but here is the thing, you paid what you want for it. If that means nothing, then so be it. I really admire what they are doing and wish them the best. Now, how all this relates to me.

I thought the currency was Euros. So, I was thinking that I want to pay about $20 CDN for this CD. I know, that is a little more than what a CD would cost at Future Shop, but I wanted to support them and their decision to try this out. Since I thought I was paying in Euros, I did the currency conversion with CDN to Euros. $20 CDN came out to about 15 Euros. I went and ordered it, thinking I was paying 15 euros. I realized today at about noon that I paid in pounds. 15 GBP != $20 CDN. It is closer to $30 CDN. Yeah.

Here is how I have justified it to myself. I didn’t pay for some of their previous albums because my brother-in-law had them and I just got them from him. Now that I’ve paid a substantial amount more than I should have paid, I don’t feel so bad about not paying for some of the other albums.

Overall, it is a pretty good album. It was worth it. If you like Radiohead, I’d recommend going and downloading it. If you want to wait for the actual CD, that will be out probably in Jan 08. If you do want to download it, go to http://www.inrainbows.com

You’re Smarter When You’re Pink

This post has nothing to do with the title, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out. I like random titles.

Before I left on my trip, I bought a new 19″ LG Widescreen LCD. I bought it the day before we left, so I didn’t really get to play with it that much. I’ve now been home for a few days and have had time to use it. I love it. It is so sharp and clear. It has a 2ms response time, so it is really fast. Overall, I’m really pleased. I’ll post a picture of my new setup when I clean up my desk, which I was hoping to do today, but I didn’t.

I started writing this post a while ago and in that time, I’ve got some other new toys. The first is my new friend Issac, a black MacBook. I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB instead of the standard 1 GB. So far, I’m really enjoying it. My old iBook was having some problems, so i decided it was time for a new one. Yuri’s DVD drive didn’t work anymore. When I stuck a disc in it would stop recognizing the drive. This made it really hard to get the disk out. I’m surprised I ever did. I think it was mostly luck. Yuri’s battery is also shot, so that kind of defeats the purpose of a laptop.

My other new toy is the Halo 3 Legendary edition. I got it last Monday night at 7 PM, so 5 hours before everyone else. It was pretty sweet. I beat the game on normal difficulty by Tuesday night. I’m now almost done Heroic. If I didn’t have a stupid philosophy project, I would have had it beaten on Heroic by now. I’ve found all the skulls and the terminals. That was pretty fun. I was really impressed with this game. The graphics are awesome! There are some really cool new features in Halo 3, like the Theater. You can go in and watch previous games, including campaign. While watching, you can fly around and check everything out. You can take screenshots and upload them to Bungie.net. You can then share this replay with your friends. It is really cool. The map editor, Forge, is also really cool. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it, but when I did, I thought it was really cool.

I’ll post pictures of my fun new toys when I get a moment.

My External HDD Experiance

Last Friday was my grad class’s fashion show. It was a 007 James Bond theme, which was really cool. Anyway, I was in charge of a lot of the technical stuff, but mostly the video. See, we had James Bond clips in between each performance, which actually worked out quite well. They were a great transition. Anyway, I had to rip the scenes from the movies, then chop them down and add fades etc. I had this all stored on my Maxtor OneTouch III 300GB hard drive, the project files, the original scenes, the new clips, everything. The Thursday before the event, Amy and I were remaking all the store names and I started to get suspicious of my drive. I had always been a little suspicious of it because it didn’t always work and what not. Well, I thought that it would be better if I had all the clips on my internal hard drive, so I started freeing up space. I needed 15GB, and I had no more than 2 GB free. I know, I know I have a lot of crap. I started deleting and got it up to around 6 GB free. I really didn’t want to delete my pictures, but I couldn’t find another way around it. I backed them all up to my iPod just in case and them deleted them. This brought me up to the required 15 GB. Friday afternoon rolled around, the afternoon before the fashion show. I started to transfer the clips and got them all. Whew, a big sigh of relief.

That nice stress-free feeling didn’t last long. I had made the order into a playlist in iTunes and was just going to do it all through iTunes. I switched the location of all the files and was ready to roll. I proceeded to watch some of the clips and it was then that my stress level skyrocketed. The clips were extremely choppy and definitely unwatchable. I tried copying one of the worst ones again. It turned out the same. I was really freaking out. I thought for sure that the clips were ruined and I was done for. I tried many different things, all with the same result. I tried to phone Amy and Hailey to ask how they would feel if there just wasn’t video. I really didn’t want it to come to that, but I was preparing for the worst. I tried some more things, each with the same stupid result. My hair was coming out in chunks now. I then thought to myself that if I could open the project files and remake the movies, except go straight to my internal drive, I might be able to recreate them. I tried that with the same output settings as I had originally had. Same result. I then tried just High Quality. It worked.

Now I just had to go through and redo all the video clips in the new format. I was a little scared that my hdd would crash at any second. I slowly got them all remade and was very happy. It was then that my next problem appeared. I opened up iTunes and my library was gone. I was able to recover most of it, minus about 200 songs (of which I mostly got back now). I had lost all my playlists and everything. I would have to start my Fashion Show playlist again. I realized that iTunes doesn’t like .dv files, and then started to stress again. What was I going to use? I decided to try VLC and found it had a playlist function. I was saved. I recreated my playlist, this time in VLC and was now ready to roll.

I rushed down to the school, as I was supposed to be there 2 hours earlier and quicky set up and tested everything. It worked great, in fact, it looked better than it had before the fiasco. Fashion Show went off without any major hitches. One group was a little late, but other than that it was phenomenal.

Well, I know this is pretty long, but whatever. Oh, and I was pretty mad at my hdd because it meant that I would lose 300 GB of stuff. I have now recovered most of the important stuff and it is still under warranty. I’m going to get everything off that I can, then ship it back to them for a replacement. I ran a diagnostics test and it says it is toast but that it is a manufacturer’s defect. Hopefully, I will get it back ASAP because I need it. I depend on it.

Why NBC Sucks

So I’ve recently found out that NBC has canceled Andy Barker PI after four episodes. FOUR EPISODES!!!!! They have also pulled The Black Donnellys after six episodes, and numerous other shows. It is ridiculous. NBC seems to have become the new Fox, canceling shows left, right and center. They don’t even give a show time to become popular. If it doesn’t have good ratings right away, it’s gone. It took Seinfeld four seasons before it broke into Nielson’s Top 30.

I just think that they can’t judge how a show is going to do why the ratings, viewing of four episodes. What makes it even worse is that they replace these shows with crap, like The Real Wedding Crashers, another stupid reality show. I hate reality shows, I wish they would stop making them. Or with that new comedy one with the really dumb name. I watched part of it last night, and it was retarded. It was not funny at all. I watched CSI Miami instead, which bugs me too.

What gets me about CSI Miami is that it seems like Horaito has a personal connection with every single case. And his stupid one liners, and the glasses and how he stands when he talks to people, and how he talks to people. Yet I watch it anyways. I rarely watch new ones, yet I always seem to watch the ones on A&E or Showtime.

Well, that got off topic pretty quick. Well, NBC sucks.

Nikon and I are Friends

Well, it’s true. I like Nikon, and I like to think they like me. After all, I do give them my money. Anyway, that is beside the point. The point of this post really is to tell you folks, yes the three of you, that I went to the auto show on Friday and Saturday and it was awesome. I took about 350 pictures, which I got down to around 300. I then posted these on flickr for all to see.

I then organized them into manufacturer, and that can be seen here.

Three Red Lights of Death

Yeah, so the inevitable happened. I got the three red lights of death on Saturday night, and my Xbox 360 was toast. I have gotten them before, but I was able to restart and everything was fine. This time, however, it is done for. I was not very happy, but yet I wasn’t as mad as I thought I would be. I had always imagined what I would be like if such a thing occured to me, and it was not a happy Joel, let me tell you. Anyways, I called them up on Monday and they said that they would send out a coffin (okay, so they didn’t actually call it a coffin, but I think that it is appropriate). I then pack in my 360, just the unit (my hdd stays with me, YES!), and send it away to them.

Now, the guy on the phone said “exchange,” so I’m hoping that is what it will be. He said they would have it for a maximum of three business days, which is really good. Now I just have to wait for the coffin (box, if you don’t like my terminology). I was actually really impressed with Microsoft on this one. The last time I dealt with them, it was not a pleasent experiance. You can read all about my last encounter here. Well, I’ll give you an update when I know more.

Oh and look for something fun on my blog in the next week or so.

Car and Driver Issues

Okay, so I love Car and Driver. It is by far the best automobile magazine out there. I have a subscription to it, as you can probably tell, but there is one thing I do not like. Recently, they have been sending out the issues way to early in my opinion. I got my April Edition at the beginning of March, and May at the beginning of April and so on. This, in my opinion, is way to early. I would expect the issue to come midway through the month before. So April comes in mid March. They didn’t used to be this way. They were really bad actually. I would get say, my October issue in November. Why can’t they just figure it out. When I got SkyNews, I got it mid month, and everything was fine.

Oh, and how about this. For the past couple months, I have been getting the World of Wheels magazine for free. They keep sending it to me “Compliments of World of Wheels.” I’ve gotten like every issue for the past 6 issues or so. Why would I subscribe if you are just going to send it to me? I think it is quite funny actually. Well that is my rant for today, look for another one soon.