Archive for June, 2007
6/1/2007
Some more Ubuntu crap (because you just can’t get enough, right?)
(more…)
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6/1/2007
Title of this entry is a quote from a famous cartoon character.
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more sandal stuff
Since starting to wear sandals, my feet now have something they never had before.
Color.
And yeah, it happened that fast. My feet are finally “breathing” proper, and whoa.. color.
I am completely used to my feet being stark caucasian white. After all, they rarely ever saw daylight. The reason for this is because there was no reason to own sandals in New England. You’d maybe get forty-five days of use a year out of them if you were lucky (mid-July to end of August), but after that.. nope. Too cold.
Sometimes it feels like I’m wearing a “phantom” sneaker with the sandals on. My mind thinks I’m wearing a fully enclosed shoe, but I’m not.
Concerning sensitivity, the sandals make my feet very happy. By nature I have ultra-sensitivity on the bottoms of my feet, however, they seem to be not as “touchy” now. This is not a bad thing. I’m thinking that maybe I should have started wearing footwear like this years ago.
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where a depression is actually a good thing
Today marks the beginning of hurricane season in Florida. And, almost if it were set by a clock, a tropical depression is going to come over the Tampa Bay area tomorrow.
The tropical storm in question is “Barry”. Rain will be light to moderate and winds could gust up to 39mph, but I would guess the inland winds will be around 25 to 35mph. What this translates to is close-to-but-not-quite tropical storm wind force, or in layman’s terms: Windy enough to notice.
The good part is that the area is finally getting some much needed rain, and yeah, we need it.
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bug splat
June also marks the one month out of the year no one likes driving in Tampa Bay, that being June-bug a.k.a. “love bug” month.
Basically speaking, it goes a lil’ something like this:
Love bugs are called so because they’re actually two bugs joined together. They fly really slowly.. probably about the speed of a ladybug in flight. They are black with some orange, but even so, these bugs would not gross you out at all. In fact, some people I know would actually think they’re cute, but I digress.
The problem is that if you drive anywhere during the daylight hours on any road where you can drive faster than 40mph, your car will get splattered with love bugs. Regular washer fluid for your windshield is worthless. You have to buy the special “bug cleaner” kind (it only costs a buck more) to keep your glass clean enough to see.
The front of your car gets absolutely plastered with these things. I totally feel sorry for guys driving delivery trucks with flat front ends, because those above all others get nailed the worst.
Bug splat can be mostly avoided by staying off the highways and interstates. But note I said “mostly”. No matter what you do, you’re going to have to deal with it.
I have noticed that some people are tickled pink to mention this fact about Florida.
Oh! Watch out for the JUNE BUGS! You’ll never want to go again!
And I suppose dealing with ice storms and snow combined with salt/sand covered roads for a period of several months is better?
I think not.
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6/3/2007
Years ago (in my late teens or early twenties, not sure which) I spent an entire day inside and did not go outside once.
When I realized that I didn’t set one foot outside that entire day, it bothered me a lot. I had wasted an entire day of my life holed up in the house.
Since then I’ve made it a point since then to get outside at least once a day. Maybe I’ll go out and walk and/or drive around a bit, but I always do something.
Some people claim they get outside every day, but all it entails is getting in the car, going to work, leaving work and going back home.
That doesn’t count. I call that a “work bubble”. You only go from A to B then back to A again.
Others only go out a night. Maybe they’ll go to a bar, club or some other building.
That doesn’t count either. You’re going from one building (your house) to another building (the bar/club/whatever) then back again. Furthermore, you don’t see anything other than other cars and street lights. Doesn’t count.
Going outside means purposely doing it just for the sake of doing it and not because you have to.
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Today I picked out two parks on Google Earth, plugged ‘em in the GPS and headed out in the hopes I’d get some good photos. The first one was labeled as “Bayshore Meadows” and the other “Phillipe”.
Bayshore Meadows sucked. It was only one of those local-type things with a baseball field and not much else.
Phillipe was better, but not that much better. It was very well laid out, but not enough to capture any good photos. I did take one photo of a power tower out in the water. Maybe I’ll post that later. Other than that there wasn’t much else. I will say this would be a good place to fire up the BBQ and relax.
But hey, at least I got outside.
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6/4/2007
One of my “trademark” editing techniques when doing screencasts is panning and zooming. This is a very simple 2-D editing technique that I figured out how to do a few months ago and have been doing it ever since. What it involves is ridiculously simple, that being to pan and/or zoom on a specific part of the video, hold that position, then zoom/pan back. I do it all the time. The reason I do it is because with screencasting it is sometimes required to focus on a particular window, piece of text or whatever it is you have to place focus on.
Even though the software I use works very well, I have heard time and time again that Adobe Premiere is the way to go. Tons of pros use it and swear by it.
So I downloaded it and tried it out.
I absolutely could not figure out how to do a video zoom-and-hold in Premiere. For those familiar with Premiere, I’m not talking about a video transition. Rather, I’m specifically referring to zooming on an existing “piece” in the sequence. I figured I could do this easily by setting an “in” and “out” point, do my zoom in/out and be done with it.
I scoped the internet for tutorials on how to do this ridiculously simple thing.
The result? Nothing.
So I scoped thru every single friggin’ menu in Premiere. Zoom-and-hold is simple. There has GOT to be a way to do this… I said to myself.
But alas, I couldn’t find a way.
I’ll keep Premiere installed to see if I can figure out how to do this.. but hmph.. why is this stupidly easy 2-D editing technique simply not there in Premiere?
If I do in fact find out how to do this, I’ll post a how-to here. Otherwise I’ll go back to the other software I’ve been using.
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6/5/2007
As part of my job I routinely upload videos to the internet on YouTube and Revver.
As almost anyone knows, uploading takes a lot longer to do than downloading. This is because the service providers purposely throttle the upload speed.
When you upload a lot of video, you spend a lot of time waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting..
And waiting some more.
Did I mention waiting?
Verizon recently started offering FiOS service, however I can’t get it because I live in an apartment. But my address was qualified to get the “Power Plan” DSL package which is 3.0Mbps down and 768Kbps up compared to my “Starter Plan” which is 768Kbps down and 128Kbps up.
Being that internet access is at the core of what I do for a living, I decided to go for it.
My DSL cost per month goes from $19.99 to $29.99.
About fifteen minutes after I placed a call to make the order, my new faster internet was online and working.
It’s awesome. :-)
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6/6/2007
Title of this entry is a lyric from a song about living life wild and free.
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Buick updates
Over the past few months I’ve been trading e-mails back and forth with a few people about acquiring a 1975 Buick Century Custom Series pace car. It all started back when I wrote originally that if the car should exist out there somewhere, I’d be interested in it.
Since that post I’ve received several e-mails. Some were from car owners, others from car sellers.
I don’t know if I’ve written this here before, but never in my life have I had such a difficult time locating a particular make and model of car. In all seriousness, this whole process - while fun - has been absolutely ridiculous.
I might, repeat, might be acquiring one.
Don’t know if I’ll get it or not. If I do, then… whew.. it’ll take a lot of work to bring her back to pace car glory.
This car honestly isn’t worth anything except to those that know what it is. If I get it, cool. If not, I’m sure there are more out there. That I’m sure of.
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6/7/2007
Note: The photos below are of the car in its present condition - and it’s not here in Florida yet. She’s in Arizona until I can get her shipped out here.
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The over-seventeen year search is over. I found Pop’s pace car.
Considering this car is as old as I am (I’m 32 by the way), this car is in decent shape considering how old she is.
As you can tell from the photos below, she needs some work. There’s bits of rust here and there (particularly on the truck lid and rear bumper), the engine has a crapload of miles on it, BUT…
This is the car I was looking for.
She has no placards and it may not be 100% original (the radio has been changed out), but the Hurst Hatches are in good shape and everything is fixable.
The owner, God bless him, took care of this car to the best of his ability. This car may be old and tired, but drive-able.
The restoration of this ride to pace car glory is going to take time mainly due to the fact of limited funds, however..
I got her. As soon as she arrives in FL, she’ll be garaged and kept warm and safe. :-)
. . .
Update 07/19/2007: Buick is here.
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6/8/2007
Pop made what he calls a “Lazy Man’s Lasagna” today with stoplight peppers (because they’re red, yellow and green).
Mighty tasty.
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Even though it will be a few weeks or possibly a bit longer before the Buick arrives, this whole experience has been nothing short of surreal. That’s because sometimes when you search for something for a good chunk of your life and then actually get that something, it puts you aback.
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And now some random thoughts of the moment.
Ahem..
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I have a thing for girls that dress in corporate garb. The plain gray dresses that sway, the gold necklaces, those “shiny” white shirts.. things like that. It’s hot when done correctly.
I also like girls who wear white capris, however some girls can wear this and look good while others can’t.
I can’t stand girls who wear jeans with knee-holes, as in the kind that are purposely cut. They look stupid. It was dumb in the 80’s and it’s dumb now.
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I have learned the secret to losing weight. It’s called a treadmill. Hop on one and walk for one to two miles a day (15-20 minutes in the morning and 15-20 minutes in the eve), and the pounds will come off. You don’t need to walk fast, but enough to break a good sweat each time you do it. Furthermore, you can go right on eating what you always have and you will still lose weight as long as you stick to the regimen.
Speaking of losing weight, dieting does nothing but give you temporary weight loss only. Permanent weight loss requires exercise (such as daily treadmill’ing).
Speaking of losing weight again, you will actually gain weight by exercising before you lose it. This is because you will initially eat more, but then level out later.
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Had I known sandals were the most comfortable shoe ever made ever, I would have started wearing them years ago.
I also like the fact that I hardly wear socks anymore.
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Today while driving back from Riverview (that’s a town) I encountered a slowdown of traffic on the northbound side of I-75. Being that I have GPS, I simply took the nearest exit, programmed a route home to avoid the highway and got home completely skirting the heavy traffic on the interstate.
I sometimes wonder if there would be even a tenth of the traffic there is now if everyone had GPS and knew how to use it.
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It is routinely so cold in my apartment that I end up shivering. Most of the time I turn the A/C down, but sometimes I leave it that way so I can bundle up on purpose when I sleep, and feel the cold rush of air when I get out of the shower.
I do this because I’m used to it from my thirty years of New England living where it’s common to bundle up on cold nights and feel cold floors when stepping out of the shower.
…
Sometimes when I’m on Highway 41 I think of the song Ramblin’ Man by The Allman Brothers Band.
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6/9/2007
feed me
Waaaaay back in 2004 when I started blogging, no one was really sure whether feeds would really work or not.
I personally didn’t like them because it was almost impossible to generate any web traffic stats from them. And I’m a total stats whore.
For the majority of menga dot net’s life, it’s had a feed. But I purposely made it “excerpt only” to force people to come to the site if they wanted to read full articles.
Well, screw that.
I’ve just “converted” the feed over to FeedBurner. FB has stats. Not great stats, but good enough for me.
If you’re already a subscriber to my feed, don’t worry, I’ve programmed my site to automatically switch you over from the old feed because darn it, I’m just that nice of a guy, right? Right.
Never let it be said that knowing your way around an .htaccess file didn’t have its perks. :-)
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from the road
The driver’s side turn signal lamp went out on my truck today, so I ponied up and bought a new set.
Yes, set.
Some people are content to change one bulb at a time. I don’t do that. If one side blows out, both get replaced.
…
february 2009 will be a sad month.. or will it?
In case you weren’t aware, the Federal Communications Commission, a.k.a. the FCC, has decided that February 19 2009 will be the absolute last day for analog television broadcast transmissions. All television broadcasting will be digital from that day forward.
Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to get free tv over the antenna. But you’ll have to buy a stupid converter box.
So the question is.. what happens when these freq’s “go dark”?
The answer is that tech companies are hot hot hot on getting their hands on them to deploy wireless tech instead of video signals. Only the biggest corporations will get the best frequencies. This is because the freq’s will be auctioned off, so only those with the deepest pockets will get the longest-range freq’s.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone.
I’ve been scoping ’round the ‘net to see if this will impact AM and FM radio at all, and from what I gather, it won’t.
To me this is easy to understand. I don’t think there’s any chance in the world someone in government would be fool enough to propose making all radio digital.
Can you imagine someone.. anyone trying to make a universal solution to convert ALL car stereo systems to receive digital signals?
I don’t think you’d find anyone at a vintage car show with those on their cars.. or anyone else for that matter.
AM and FM, thankfully, will continue to be broadcast as is.. unless anyone knows any different(?)
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6/9/2007
Above: Yet another one of those interesting Florida weather things where it appears that doom and destruction is right over you, yet nothing happens save for a few drops of rain.
Above: This is the first time I’ve seen a power tower smack dab in the middle of the water.
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