The Blarg

Found a very addicting flash game. Don’t let it fool you. It get’s hard, and it’s a lot of fun. My first time through easy I got super far, but it is really easy. I would try it once on easy to get an idea, but then move up to medium.

Go play Desktop Tower Defense 1.5 and post your best scores on Medium! When you finish (die), submit your name, and for “group” put theblarg. Then we can see how we match up. My first attempt I scored 1085 on medium, but I tried the group “blarg” and other people had already used it.

This morning on the Today Show they revealed the foods of 2007! Wait, hold on, the foods of 2007? As if there was brand new food this past year that people had never seen before. I love their first choice: french fries! How the heck do you come to the conclusion that french fries were somehow more spectacular and popular in 2007 than in years before?

Best new technology, new “words,” these things I understand. But foods of the year? I don’t think so.

Do you ever burn things to dvd or cd as a means of archiving or backing up? Maybe important documents or pictures that you want to save for years to come? Well, unfortunately dvds and cds aren’t always perfect.

Today I was looking for some good dual-layer dvd media, and stumbled upon a cool application called Nero Discspeed. The application can attempt to read any burned disc, and give you a report about how easy it is to read. If you have a good burner and quality media, the application should be able to read it easily. However, if you have bad media or a problem burn, it will report those errors to you.

So what do you do with those pesky discs that DO have errors? A very good program is called IsoBuster. Something I really like is that you can tell it attempt to read “error spots” more than one time. Windows might try once or twice and give up, but IsoBuster will try over and over to get one to work. But hopefully if you check your burns, you’ll never need to recover ever again.

Vacation is terrible for the blog, but great for my sanity! One week or so of vacation is over, and only one left. It’s really tough being a teacher.

We’ve started working on turning the 2nd bedroom into the baby room. My dad came over and helped me move the arcade downstairs. I ran network cable to the second bedroom so I’ll have a wired network connection once I move the computer desk. As we plan where to put a crib and changing table and bassinet, we’ve come to realize that having children makes you run out of room really fast. Originally I’d hoped we could stay in this house through two children, but we’ll have to see how that goes now.

I started recording the Amazing Race two months ago, and now that the writer’s strike is still continuing, I’m glad we did. We’ve watched 5 episodes so far, so by the time vacation is over we’ll be all caught up. If there is a lack of new shows we can always watch some movies instead, or heck, even talk to each other!

The book isn’t getting as much attention this break as I’d hoped. I’m waking up in the morning, putting on a pot of coffee, and getting to work. I hit 70,000 words the other night, so it always feels good to hit a milestone. I’m predicting somewhere in the low hundred thousands, so the end is at least in sight. I can’t believe I thought this project would take a couple months, but if I’d known it would take a whole year, I probably wouldn’t have started to begin with.

Hope everyone is enjoying vacation, or if you have to go back to work, enjoy the weekend! Ah frick, I have to call in for jury duty on Sunday night. Please, please, please judicial system, don’t screw with my vacation. In case I have to go, can I take a laptop with me to work on the book?

I’m not sure if I posted about it, but a while back we watched the movie Disturbia and noticed that one of the scenes was shot at the All-American in Downey. We watched something in the last two weeks that was also filmed there, but I can’t remember what it was. Stacie thinks it was Knocked Up. Then today I watched this video by Rise Against, and yep, it’s at All-American. I emailed the store to see if they have a list of everything filmed there. Crazy.

Merry Christmas yo!

Jumping on the bandwagon of personality tests. Looking forward to my sister’s psychoanalysis!

I also went ahead and did the multiple intelligences test. Apparently I love the music!

I love listening to Medved and Hewitt right now and listening to people duke it out over Huckabee and Romney. Now that Huckabee is up front he’s being scrutinized. It looks like Romney and Huck are back in a battle for Iowa. But clearly this race can go anywhere.

Something that boggles my mind though are the head-to-head matchups between Democrats and Republicans. McCain is one of the most competitive Republicans, and Obama has big leads against everyone except Giuliani.

There are only a couple weeks until voting starts in Iowa, but this race can go anywhere!

Christmas is almost upon us, and I’m perfectly OK with not getting anything for Christmas. I’m a grown man (I think). But I know people like to get people stuff, so I’ll put my wish list out there. I’d also like to say that I enjoy getting people stuff, if it’s one of those really good gifts that the person could use. Buying you a fruit roll-up just because I couldn’t think of anything you really needed is lame.

The baby will most certainly be getting a lot of Christmas presents and other things as showers happen, but there are a couple things that I want for the baby that are on the pricier side.

1) A Canon HV20

I loved the home movies my parents took when I was a child, and I want to proudly say that my child’s entire life will be chronicled in high-definition. This is the best HD Cam out there, and I’ve been researching for months. I kind of hope they’ll come out with a slightly newer and super version in the next two months, but I’m not keeping my hopes up.

2) Main computer upgrade

I’m still running an old Pentium 4 2.8e that is almost 4 years old, and in this new day and age of multi-core processors, it can’t handle editing high-def video very well. Along with the new HD camera I also want to update the computer. I’ve got plenty of hard-drive space, but a dual or quad core cpu will be a vast improvement when it comes to editing HD in real-time and encoding.

The problem of course is that they’re both expensive! At first I thought about asking for Best Buy gift cards, but I can get the HV20 for practically $200 less online. I’ll probably buy the cpu parts from Newegg, but their gift cards are only available to Visa Verified customers. Lame. But regardless, now you know what I want for Christmas.