TimsBlog

I posted the over at flickr of course.

The Last Shots 

Some where between the Canon camera making my cock hard and the “Yes yes No No” the Vodka must have hit me. I came here tonight and was like what the fuck was I posting. hehe The title and the pic threw me. I can understand posting those lyrics. I was listening to the song that night. I had that song pounding in my head the last time I did Extasy. (Only did X a few times) Anyways the guy I rode up to PA with to see the Chemical Brothers show with was playing Beth Orton constantly. So when this song got played live I damn near wet my pants, exspecialy when the bass hits.

BEGIN RANT

That reminds me. I asked someone last weekend if they had listen to so and so’s “new album” . The responds was “ah no I don’t listen to albums.” The sarcasm was aimed at the fact that I don’t call them CD’s. Should I call them collective mp3 releases? Or Record which is short for recording. Listen up you pompous people the definition of ALBUM: is a packaged collection of related things. Like when you call a book of photos a photo album. Just wait till all your record uh I mean CD stores shuts down and you get laughed at for calling it a CD by someone younger that has never bought a song or album at a store. Instead all they know is itunes. I’ll even be as bold as say that CD are going out of style like cassete tapes. You’ll jack you ipod into your car and home system. Its not earth friendly anyways to burn 100’s of CD a year. (not that I hug trees or care) I just find it strange that tech can bring eco friendly living instead of world dominating machines that kill humans.
END RANT

Sunday morning I’m waking up
Can’t even focus on a coffee cup
Don’t even know who’s bed I’m in
Where do I start
Where do I begin [X2]

Where do I start
Where do I begin [X4]

Sunday morning I’m waking up
Can’t even focus on a coffee cup
Don’t even know who’s bed I’m in
Where do I start
Where do I begin

Where do I start
Where do I begin

ITS ALL DEROGATIVE …deal

Or welcome to my breakdown. Either way its a bad bad Alice Copper nod. I woke up this morning to find out my Canon ixus55 or sd450 was broke. Did I smash another LCD screen? No Did I drop it? No. what I got was an E18 (error). After a google search I found out this is a common I mean way too common problem with all the compact canons. It means the retractable lens is stuck (open or shut )

It powers up says E18 then powers down.

Well good thing I sent my canon warranty card in right? Wrong thats the big problem (besides the poor lens mechanism) Everyone has the same story. Contact canon, then send it to canon, then canon says its not under warranty and they will fix it for $150( or ship it back to you broke for another $20) Of course that fixed for $150 means they send you a refurbished one. This is a $250 to $275 camera for fuck sake. Lots of talk about a joint lawsuit on this issue. Most of the compact line canon offers has a retractable lens.

Totally blows. I mean its an excellent camera for the quality of the pics and the size. Both are just more than you could ask for. The size might be the down fall here. Since I keep it in my pocket (LCD inward) I think the retracted lens was getting banged and “knocked” off track. So having a nice camera that fits in your pocket might not be a good thing after all.

What to do, what to do. Replace it with a new one or go for the SLR I should and wanted to buy. I’m buying the SLR.

I’ve had experience with film SLR cameras so the control overload would not be an issue. I mean once you know where all the controls are on the SLR its like having a big point and shoot camera. I personally only shoot with 2 lens for maybe 3 different types of shots. Shooting with a 24mm to 35mm and a 50mm. I don’t use telephoto lens so I can’t be that lens whore you see a lot. My understanding is there is a Lens Focal Length Conversion of 1.6x which means I need to buy a 15mm lens to get a 24mm. And so on.

So I’m going to do double the research on this camera to avoid the E18 error surprise. Heres what I’m considering and most likely will buy.

Canon EOS 30D

20mm lens (32mm)

35mm lens (56mm)

I heard about this “free” 411 or directory assistance number a while ago but just shrugged it off as another 10-10-220 type deal. I never doubted it wasn’t free I just assumed it was for cell phones and used the web to access whitepages.com or something.

Turns out if you use 1-800-Free411 it gives you directory assistance for free. Well free but you have to listen to 12 seconds of advertisement. Really a good deal considering I grew up dialing the local weather line to get the time and temp and had to listen to banking ads about home equity loans and what not.

Last years Robot chicken was funny as hell. The Kill Bill parady “Kill Bunny” where Jesus goes out to seek revenge on yes you guessed it Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Watch Kill Bunny at youtube

Watch the Easter Bunny Hates You. Its a riot. Its a guy in an Easter bunny outfit beating the crap out of people.

On a lighter side. Heres some peeps art.

Big fuck you G to the assholes that think its cool to tag their photos “peeps” when they upload a pic of a bunch of “people” I can’t think of much that would need the tag peeps besides the Easter candy. So next time your uploading your bar pics wear your throwing up meaningless made up gang sighs jsut tag it “whitebread” instead. Now when I go looking for pictures of white bread i’ll bitch about that too.

Ok I was tired of burning DVD’s just so I could watch my Tv shows and Movies in the bedroom before I slept. Its about 36 cents a disc now. Thats almost $11 a month!. Bad very Bad. Lets go over the alternative options.

Option One buy a laptop. Its the 21^st century right might as well. Well I covered that one in a post a few days ago. I’m only willing to spend $1000 to $1200. The selection in that range for a small ultra portable wide screen (yeah I’m picky) is a battle between battery and computing power. Ba terries lasting on the low end around 2 hours! Weak When you get into the 3.5 to 4 hour range the computing power lacks a bit. Scratch that one for now.

Option Two would be to set up a WIFI network to stream it to the bedroom to a computer. I have basically another PC with all the old parts from when I upgrade to my current PC in January. Actually could build 2 PC from spare parts if I split my RAM into 512 per machine. This would leave me with a hulking Pc box in the bedroom just to watch movies. Not to mention the router would be about $100 for WIFI unless I bought a hardwire one for $30. Then I’d have to run wire in the antic about 35 feet to the bedroom. Uh no and no.

The final solution! No not the plan the Nazi had, but a combination of option one and two. I built yet another hack in the box media center. This time I didn’t go the micro motherboard route I used a full size motherboard. I shoved it into a Teac CD player cia 1991 and ta da! I have a medica Pc that is no bigger than my DVD player and it cost NOTHING!

I did the honorable thing and researched all the linux operating systems to get the best OS for the box. I like mythTv and the other brands of linux distros. I just didn’t need all that extra stuff they do. They are mainly a tivo “do it yourself box”. Made and geared for storing/ripping TV/cable/bittorrent to the box for later viewing. All I wanted was a nice layout for a TV and a media player software. I gave myself a huge headache learning about installing linux and even installed a few distro’s.

I ended up shoving XP with an ATI All in Wonder TV tuner card I don’t watch TV on it with the tnnner but the remote and media player is nice. I use my USB drive to transfer up to 1Gb of shows onto the box which gives me about 80 to 90 minutes of shows to watch. Takes about 2 minutes to transfer.

Did I mention option 3 was Free?

Stats:

Teac CD Player case cia 1991

AMD 2400 CPU

Gigabyte G-N400 Pro2 Motherboard

1 GB pc2700 Ram

Maxtor 80 GB SATA Hard Drive

ATI All in Wonder Video Card (not pictured)

300 Watt Power Supply

For the rest of the photos goto my flickr Set

Started in flim pre WWII and made his break in post WWII. Then atempted suicide somewhere in the 60’s. More on Akira Kurosawas Here
I have not watch any of his movies for about 4 years. I’m going to start watching some of his movies I have not seen yet. Starting with Kagemusha.

I was talking a few weeks ago about Mark Mothersbaugh. For those of you how have no idea who Devo was here you go.

Watch the Video Here

I get a hint of something great only to be pissed off at the short lived life of Test Icicles. They released an album on March 10th, but broke up on February 24th. Man they have a fucking great name. They trash out and drop cheap sounding drum machine bass drops. Heavy 80’s post punk influence. I guess we all have this one album and thats going to be it. I read somewhere that the band was born out of boredom so I guess it ended out of boredom.

The official statement from the band: “The band have just come off a European tour and are exhausted from the constant pressures of touring, subsequently they have canceled their show at the NME Awards and US tour.” No one said the road was easy boys, pussies.

You can listen to the bands songs at their website test-icicles.com

I meant to do this all last week and got side tracked. I wanted to add a list of TV Shows I’m watching and the link to the torrents in the sidebar. I also thought hell I’ll list the podcasts I’m listening/watching also.

Adding a bunch of links can be a bitch. I did my research on opml and how it is coded. Much like html in the sense its not hard. Opml (outline processor markup language) is an XML format for outlines. Its mainly used to share lists of RSS feeds. It makes importing the links to wordpress a little easier. At least in the beginning. I’ll add and delete one at a time after the initial importing of the links.