I’ve wiped out my twitter account… their servers were just so damn slow with all the demand on them.. the gtalk deal never came back up in pidgin so I couldn’t really update.. and I think I updated like once from my phone.
The final straw was that it slowed down my webpage.. my page wouldn’t load for a second because twitter.com was being slow getting their javascript inserty.. thing.
so screw that.. it’s gone..
Huge day for the 2nd Amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled (finally) on exactly what the 2nd Amendment means with regard to personal ownership of fire arms. It is very clear. This is history right here folks.
I’ll attach the PDF to this.. but it’s also found here.
So since I’m moving in to Shannon’s here soon I’m taking over the spare bedroom as my office. The room was tan (like beige) and red (like maroon) and had a puppy dog border in the middle. Instinctively Shannon knew that the colors in the room wouldn’t do.
So she charged me to go out and find a new color, which I did… Rainstorm from Sherwin Williams. It’s like a Midnight Blue which is my Crayola color favorite.
So we took the wallpaper trim off on Monday and starting taping… finished taping on Tuesday and did the primer, and then on Wednesday painted the first and second coats. Today we started to take off the tape to see our work.. and it needs some touching up.. but other than that, it’s done.
Sound like it was fun? No.. overall it was a hellish experience sent from Lucifer himself to destroy the soul and hope of all mankind. I hate painting. It sucks. There is nothing good about it. Well, there is one thing almost good about it.. when it’s done… then it looks pretty ok, except for the parts that are fucked up and need repainting… so.. even the good is still mostly a hot poker in the ass… fire and brimstone.
Truly damper on my will to live.
Fuck that.
Shannon and I are now open water SCUBA certified. That means we can technically dive anywhere unsupervised…. and we could probably do it too :).. but we’ve put a cap on ourselves to keep it a max of 30ft until we go with a dive master to deeper waters.
Right now I’m interested in doing quite a few of the specialties and then up to Advanced Open Water… any higher than that doesn’t really interest me right now. Shannon is on board for everything except Night Diving 
Anyway, we had a great time over the weekend. 5 dives total. The first 4 were all skill dives. Well #4 was supposed to be pretty easy… that was the first hoops test while supervised… by that time we were really comfortable. But the visibility dropped to like 2ft (from 5ft) and I lost Shannon.. she went up.. Olly found me and then I completed the course… I think Shannon did too.
On #3 was the mask removal and replacement… after I took it off I got a jet of water up my nose, started choking, and just about couldn’t complete it.. but I got through it and stayed under… got my mask back on… cleared it.. coughed a bunch of times (underwater with a regulator.. ya :)) and all was well. When we went up I had to blow tons of snot out.. but that was all the damage.
The last one was a dive all by ourselves… no supervision at all… in 5 ft visibility water at about 20ft. Pretty cool stuff. That was actually the most fun dive because we worked so well together. We swam through hoops again .. this time way more gracefully… and then navigated back to shore all under water… all by ourselves.
Anyway.. we had fun there and like all the instructors (Terry, Warren, Jason, Warren, and Olly) told us, if we can dive at Beaver Lake, we can dive anywhere.. it’ll be better.
So I used multipass DivX encoding with DVDx … I had the first pass set to multi 1st pass 2000kbps bitrate and then the 2nd pass set to multi 2nd pass 2000kbps… the resulting file size was about 2gig for the movie I was ripping, but it wouldn’t play in windows media player nor in the DivX player… said it wasn’t valid… so.. that sucks. I tried this twice and no go.
So I did the 2 pass thing again, but this time with 780 kbps bit rate which is the default… I’ll see if that does it… if not I’ll try quality 1 pass at 2000 bitrate
Jon wanted me to blog some shit so I thought I would do it to it.
I haven’t twitted some tweets in awhile because twitter is like overloaded or something. I can’t connect to their gtalk interface so that sucks as longing in to a website to update shit bothers me o so completely.
I got all the parts for my cool car setup. Matt helped me install the backup camera and hard wired the Valentine one… ok he actually did it all. The only thing I’m missing is the hard wiring of the multimedia thing… which he will also likely do all of. Right now I just have it sitting on my passenger seat.
Setting up the multimedia thing took some work. I copied all my mp3s on to the box, but it doesn’t support id3 tags so I made a directory structure under “music” with the arist name, then the album name under that, then XX - Title.mp3 … to do this I used the excellent program mp3tag which is free and works wonderfully. You can rename files based on id3 tags, lookup tags for songs on Amazon or other Internet places, and of course change all the id3 tags.. it’s the shit and a half. So I went through ALL my music … sorted (by hand) all that stuff and then used the mp3tag program to fix the file names… pretty damn awesome.
Then I moved on to movies. That player will play VOB files straight off DVDs, however there is a caveat… most DVDs are encrypted with Macrovision making them unplayable… so you have to deMacrovision the VOB files.
But… you know.. if you are going to have to process shit anyway, why not use something that will decode and transcode in one step like the wonderful DVDx Ultra Edition. You need the ultra edition to decode the VOB files. With that I can rip DVDs and save them to DivX files in one step.. takes a long time, but as I’m not in the large scale pirating industry, I can do one a night and be happy with myself.
The settings for DVDx took a little while to figure out. You definitely want to sync the audio and video.. you definitely want to tell it no zooming.. use full frames… don’t chop up the AVi.. set the file size to infinite… I’m doing NTSC and resolutions of 720×480 (American DVDs). And then there’s the DivX tuning. You want to do multipass (multipass 1st pass and then second pass at multipass nth pass) at probably like a bitrate of 2000 kbps. I just redid this at home… and upon checking it I’m reminded you probably want to set the force 24hz thing (or something like that) or else the movie might stop encoding half way through and popup a box, but then continue going after you hit ok.. lamesauce… but acceptable.. it tells you how to fix it.
Jon made a DVD for Belize 2003… as he didn’t Macrovision it I was able to copy that straight over and it works great with DVD controls and everything. Pretty slick. However… if you are going to go, go all out and rip it properly with DiVX.
Scott at work told me about H264 and that if I was going to start ripping movies and put them on a uPNP drive to serve them up to my PS3 that I’d probably want to use that format… and that’s probably true… but then I can’t use them in the car… of course I could do both.. or rip to h264 and then, if I want, recode to divx later… that might be an option.
Other than that I’ve been working on more camera stuff at the office… we are about to install a new 8 IP camera system in Eldon Missouri. We are just waiting on a hard drive to be shipped back and then it’s go time. There will be a lot of work, but it’ll be the biggest camera install yet. We use Arecont IP cameras and Luxriot… cctvgadgets.com is the place to get the cameras and then bluecherry.net for the Luxriot licenses… great bang for the buck on all that.
Besides techie stuff, Shannon and I are going great. We had our 6 month anniversary last month and continue to get closer together. We haven’t spent a whole day apart since December. I will likely be moving in to her place very soon.. probably just after Matt and Kat get married … probably around August. It’s great to be in a relationship with someone not too much like me, but where we can make each other better through our differences and love for each other.. it’s something very very special.