X-Men Origins: Wolverine Trailer. By now I should just stop getting excited by these things, but I just can’t help it…
Blog
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Recession
Bad news: We’re officially in a recession. Good news: We have been for a year… If you consider that good news…
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The Things I Do…
I’m a sucker for a good movie trilogy… Star Wars, Godfather, Back to the Future, Pirates of the Carribean, Bourne, The Matrix (well, not so much the last two)… Especially Lord of the Rings. I own them all on DVD (multiple times as I double dipped for the extended versions of Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers before I moved to America) so while I have 3 movies sitting in our vastly reduced DVD library (damn you Netflix and TiVo) I still made a point to watch the HD versions on TNT this weekend. Unfortunately we think out TiVo has a bad cablecard as it keeps resetting it’s self at irregular intervals, so recording a 3¾ hour is a bit like Russian Roulette until we can get it sorted out. Plus you have commercials to fast forward, and TNT’s on-screen graphics overlays… But I digress…
So after dealing with Fellowship, and getting halfway through the Two Towers, I gave up and now I’m starting to rip the extended DVDs of them for viewing soon. Why not just watch them you ask? Glad you asked… They are from the UK, therefore they are DVD Region 2, so no play, and even if they were Region free, the PlayStation3 doesn’t output a PAL signal as I found out with a few region free DVD’s I have. So rip I must or buy new ones (which I’m tempted to do) or wait and see if the mythical Blu Ray versions ever come out.
So for those following at home, here’s the things I do for an “easy” life…
- Insert DVD (duh!) also if you have 2 DVD drives in your desktop this helps a lot as you can have one permanently set to Region 2
- Use AnyDVD to rip to Hard Drive removing nasty things like region coding and the likes
- Use Handbrake to convert .vob to .mp4 or (for the easy life) .avi
- Use VirtualDub to join the two .avi files (2 discs you see)
- Burn to a data DVD and put that in PS3
- Done!
Reasonable simple, but as an XviD avi, you lose the 5.1 surround and alternate commentaries, or at least I’m yet to find a way that works. As an m4v I could use the AC3 direct sound to get surround sound/alternate commentaries, but it takes forever to transcode, especially if you want to upscale it to 720 for faux-HD, plus I’m yet to find a route to join 2 m4v files that works well enough to do this particular task with it…
This is the kind of thought process that takes up my Sundays, but rarely do I get the time to act upon it…
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The Lamest Duck
We have “only one President at a time,” Barack Obama said in his debut press conference as President-elect. Normally, that would be a safe assumption – but we’re learning not to assume anything as the charcoal-dreary economic winter approaches. In the end, though, it will not be the creative paralysis that defines Bush. It will be his intellectual laziness, at home and abroad. Bush never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that was necessary to make markets work. He never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and equity that was necessary to maintain the strong middle class required for both prosperity and democracy. He never considered the complexities of the cultures he was invading. He never understood that faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness. He is less than President now, and that is appropriate. He was never very much of one.
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Truth In Advertising
An Apple iPhone advert has been banned in the UK by the advertising standards watchdog for exaggerating the phone’s speed. There was only 17 complaints and it got pulled, if there was something like that over here there would be no adverts on TV at all…
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When Twitter Met Facebook
About three weeks ago, Facebook and Twitter ended several weeks of serious talks, in which Facebook was offering to acquire Twitter for $500 million of its stock. So why did the deal break down? Well, as is usually the case, over price… Was $500 million worth of Facebook stock actually worth $500 million?
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Last Chance Saloon
Adam “Pacman” Jones is down to his 4th and final chance as he must strictly adhere to the terms of his reinstatement otherwise any missteps will lead to a lifetime ban from the NFL. Now I sincerely hope he doesn’t get tossed out for something like “breaking curfew”, if he must go out, at least go out in a blaze of glory like Billy Cole at the start of The Last Boy Scout.
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Ray of Light
Finally, after what seems like a million years, I’ve finally got a job. Well, technically I got a job back in July, but after a mere 8 days it was deemed that it “was not working out” and frankly I wasn’t thrilled about the 40 mile commute and burning through a quarter tank of gas a day at the height of high gas prices… But I digress…
It’s not much, it’s a drop in pay from my old position, but in these times beggars can’t be choosers, but I couldn’t be happier. Mainly as I was feeling very stuck, and probably depressed (though I’d deny it) and cabin fever had set in yet again. Believe it or not, when you have no job to go to, you really don’t have as much freedom as you’d like, many people I spoke to said they’d love to have a 6 month “sabbatical” but really, it’s no fun. Sure you have all day to do whatever, but you can’t go out and have fun as fun costs money, and you don’t have any, and every penny counts, so invariably you hang around the house with a great plan of all the projects you could do, but none get done as you go through the motions of a monotonous schedule of nothing. Once you start talking to the cats, that’s a sure fire sign things are bad.
So hopefully now I can try and get back on track just in time for the holidays. It’s mainly a matter of pride, as men are supposed to be the main breadwinner, and in my 3 years of married life with Robyn, I’ve never been. But to bring in no bread at all (except for unemployment), well, that’s a big blow to one’s ego and self-esteem.
The weird thing was I had been applying for jobs every week, but after an extremely dry period of nothing (which sent me to a therapist to combat my depression) I got a ton of calls, and for a period last week I had 4 interviews in 3 days before a company made an offer Friday lunchtime. Strange how things work out sometimes, especially when North Carolina’s unemployment rate is hovering around 7%, I had all but given up hope.
Now I just need to knuckle down starting next Monday, and not blow this great opportunity.
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Pushing Daisies Is Pushing Daisies
ABC cancel Pushing Daisies after Wednesday night’s episode pulled in the lowest ratings of the season. The writers strike of last year killed it’s momentum after 9 episodes, at least they will be airing the remaining 7 episodes instead of dropping it dead (so to speak), so get it while it’s still around.
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Corporate America Makes Good
Back in March of this year, Dr Pepper offered a free can to every person in the country if Guns N’ Roses released the much delayed “Chinese Democracy” album in 2008. Well, as this CD is now dropping any day now, they are doing just that by offering coupons on November 23rd. The twist: The coupon is available for only 24 hours and will expire on Feb. 28 so get it while you can.
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WordCamp Roundup
Well, the hooplah of the first Charlotte WordCamp is over. I found it to be a very interesting experience, as I mentioned before, I wasn’t really there to learn the basics, I was more interested in networking and things of that nature and all in all I think I succeeded as I managed to put faces to many twitter names.
The camp it’s self was very informative, the Promotion panel with Wayne Sutton, Lisa Hoffmann, Corey Creed and moderated by Donna Maria Coles Johnson was probably my highlight of the event (other than Mark Jaquith’s keynote speech/WordPress 2.7 preview/release of the latest WordPress 2.7 Beta which I missed some of due to ambient distractions (ie. someone turned the lights off and I nodded off for a few minutes)) as they had a lot of great ideas to pass along.
And there was some comedy to be had as one of the attendees got stuck in an elevator, sadly I know that feeling as I was stuck on my way to an interview back in Atlanta many moons ago.
Overall it was a great event, a great turnout and it has definitely inspired me to do more, so a big thanks goes out to Jason Keath who organised the whole thing as well as the volunteers who made the day run as smoothly as it did, as well as the Charlotte Observer who provided the location for us “new media” types to mingle.
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Live and Direct
I’m sitting at the Charlotte edition of WordCamp, sitting through the technology and design panel hoping this will spur me back into the blogging game, and so far it’s working as I’m here now, but mostly I’m here to network… So far, so good as I’ve met a ton of people I follow on Twitter.
So far it’s as boring as sin, but I consider myself an advanced WordPress user who knows how to bend it to my will. But everyone needs to start somewhere and you can’t please all the people all the time. I’m also surprised at the demographic of the attendees, I was expecting a younger/nerdish group but it’s a broad scale of young and old, and more power to them.
I’m also hopeful that I can network my way into a job, every major Charlotte company is here and I ain’t too proud to beg…
