I’m currently in the process of getting everything re-installed now that I’m on Windows 7, so I figured this was a great opportunity to hook-up the negative scanner! I’m glad to report it is working perfectly in Windows 7, woo hoo!

This is a photo from my 2nd Halloween, so I was a few months shy of being 1.5 years old. I’ll make sure to post an update after we get some pictures of Luke tonight for his 2nd Halloween.

I’m still amazed at how cool these pictures come out with a high quality scanner with scratch removal. And on top of that I can correct red-eye on a picture that is almost 30 years old. Thank goodness my parents saved negatives. I love them.

And now, much to my sister’s displeasure:

My daily posts on the propositions and the election must have worn me out. It’s been eight days since my last post! I probably could get away with blaming it on the baby, but I’ll give him a pass this time. I will list the contents of this post here, and it’s a doozy!

1) Baby Update
2) Picture Scanning
3) Little Big Planet
4) DVD Sales

Baby Update

The boy is 8 months old now! He was supposed to have his scheduled check-up this past week, but we ended up taking him a little early because of a weird cough. Turns out he has an ear infection! Overall we’re pretty happy it took this long for him to get his first real “illness.” According to my own mother, I had about an ear infection every month when I was a baby, and by 9 months I had tubes in my ears. Luke is doing much better than I did. We got some antibiotics, baby motrin, and saline drops, and we go back this coming week to see how he’s doing.

He was supposed to get his shots, but we’ll have to wait on that until he’s better (so maybe this week). They did weigh and measure him though, and he comes in at 29 1/4″ and 21lbs 13oz. He’s still in the 90th percentile for length, but he’s dropped down to the 80th percentile for weight. I had a feeling he was slowing down a little, but the length surprised me. He added 2″ in just over two months! He’s getting a lot more active, so I wonder how much that affects his weight, because he’s noticeably “leaner” than he used to be. We aren’t crawling yet, but we rollover and sit up like crazy. I think he would prefer to start walking first, but we’ll see what comes first. Right now he’s on the floor pulling the dog bed towards him.

And now what you really want…pictures!

Picture Scanning

Something I really enjoy is researching family history and preserving family memories. A few years back I put all our VHS home movies onto DVD (which I’m no longer happy with and want to redo), but another project I have is digitizing all of our family photos. I’ve scanned some negatives dating back to the 1930′s, but now I’m working on 35mm negatives from when I was a kid. To do that I use a special machine by Plustek called the OpticFilm 7500i SE. You load the negatives on a plastic tray, and then it scans them. I’ve upgraded to this model because it can take out dust and scratches on the negatives and give you a better scan. I finally had some prints done of my first test scans to see how they came out, and I was very pleased.

I went over to my parents and found the original prints to compare. Basically you have two options for digitizing family photos. Either you scan the negative, or you scan the original prints. The only major problem with scanning the negative is that over the last 30 or so years some of them can get scratched and deteriorate. The major drawback of scanning the original prints is that you lose a lot of detail, and 30 year old prints deteriorate also.

The top photo is a scan of the original print, and the bottom is a scan of the negative.

The color in the negative scan is slightly different, but the level of detail is just night and day. It feels like moving from regular TV to high-def! I’m about 6 months old in this picture, so you can compare me to Luke.

This print actually survived very well, but there are some from the day I was born that look terrible. Some of the paper that was used in the 70′s and 80′s turns yellow and gray and just ruins pictures. Thank goodness my parents kept all the negatives! Eventually when I’m done I can have all the photos preserved and easily shared between family members.

Little Big Planet

I’ve only posted about this game once or twice, but it’s my newest addiction. Little Big Planet is a really simple game. You can run side to side, jump, and grab on to certain materials. That’s all. There is a story mode where you can beat the game, and all the while you collect “prizes.” The really cool part though is that the prizes you collect are actually tools that allow you to make your own levels. You can makes ramps, creatures, scary pits, etc. with the in-game level maker. After you make a level, you can then let other people play your level! You can even play online with up to three other friends.

I already beat the game, but now I’m trying to beat every level without dying and collecting every single prize. I’ve published one level where you have to jump up a series of steps without dying, and so far almost 60 other people have played it. It’s a lot of fun!

DVD Sales Update

This weekend I finally sold my last DVD. Total I sold about 105 dvds, and grossed around $325-350. My original intent was to use that money to buy Blu-Rays of the movies I really like, but so far I haven’t bought any. I’ve come to realize that there are very few movies worth watching multiple times, so I’m not going to bother buying movies I don’t absolutely love.

In case you were wondering, the last DVD to sell was Die Hard 1. I sold 97 dvds in the first month, and then it took 3.5 months to sell the last 8.

Thanks for reading my gynormous post!

Today I started sketching out some notes for a real novel. My first attempt was about Moltar. Aliens invade the bodies of a family to infiltrate and destroy the world. I got a few notes down, but it seemed like a really bad Disney movie. Then I started sketching notes on another idea I had. In about 20 minutes I had a full front and back page covered!  Let me backtrack for a moment.

One of the things I haven’t looked forward to about trying to write a novel is research. As I’ve considered novel ideas I’ve gravitated towards highly fantasy ideas, and areas where I can just create characters, settings, and plots out of thin air. As I started to think about this new idea though, I quickly realized that wouldn’t be possible. The problem is my brain might know a lot, but it’s nowhere near enough to fill an entire novel. A necessary evil when trying to write a story is learning new things to populate that story.

That brings me back to today. As I took notes and started brainstorming, there were certain aspects that I clearly would have to research. Not just to make the story better, but to make it at all. If you want to write a story about a dragon, you obviously need to know about dragons. If not, your plot and characters will suffer. If you don’t know that dragons breathe fire, your story about dragons is going to be missing key elements, like fire. Same goes for the story I’m thinking about writing. I wish I knew everything, but my knowledge is limited, and without a little research the story would be limited. Thank goodness for wikipedia. After a few hours reading not only did I have a better understanding of certain technical aspects of the story, but the researching alone gave me new ideas.

I want to spend another week or two brainstorming and creating a huge foundation to build upon. After that it’s simply a matter of time. Anyone can write a story, but not everyone is willing to put in the time. Here’s hoping I find the time and motivation.

GO DODGERS!!!

We’re having a last minute Wii party tonight! Come by around 5:30 pm for some wii, a light snack, and stuff to drink. If you want dinner I recommend bringing some leftover turkey or hitting up your favorite fast food restaurant on the way over. I will have the Wii ready to go for tennis whacking and bowling ball throwing goodness. See ya then.

The last week and a half I have been consumed with finding a better multimedia solution for us here at home. The previous setup consisted of an HDTV, an HD Tivo-like machine, and a DVD player capable of playing some Divx files. There were certain limitations and annoyances though that spurred me on to find a better setup. The HD recording box we have is cool, but it can only record one thing at a time. The DVD player was nice because it could play downloaded television shows encoded in Divx, but it could only play files that stuck to a specific standard, so it was a crapshoot. Add on to that I would have to run upstairs, make sure I had a blank dvd, burn it, and run back downstairs just to find out if it would play in the dvd player or not. All of those reasons made me start looking for a better solution.

At first I threw around the idea of making a media center type PC. Basically you make a computer, hook it up to your tv, and you can use it to watch stuff. A very flexible solution, but also very costly and technical. Instead of building something I decided to go for an inbetween solution called a media server. I ended up buying the Snazio Net Dvd Cinema HD player. This is a networked box that sits below my tv and plugs into my home network. I’m then able to browse files on my computer upstairs and playback videos, images, and mp3s straight over the network (no more running up and down stairs burning dvds). It also is much better at playing files than the old divx dvd player. Not only can it play a much wider range of files, but it can also play HD files (no more crap shooting).

In addition to this I bought a couple HDTV tuner cards and a large hard drive. I went with the Vbox DTA-150 because my brother is using one and I read some good reviews. With both of those cards in the PC upstairs I can record two additional HD programs (for a total of 3). Not only does that mean we don’t have to choose between shows, but I can also record shows I was previously downloading like Smallville (goodbye low quality divx rips, hello HD captures). Recording HD takes up a lot of hard drive space though, so I added another drive to accomodate. If you’re getting lost in the techie aspects of this post, this means I can record on the computer upstairs and watch on the TV downstairs. I’ll most likely be purchasing BeyondTV to do my recording and scheduling of programs. My brother really likes it, and it’s worked the best out of all the programs I’ve tried.

This solution ended up costing about $500, but that’s a far cry from the $1200 media pc I had priced out. A big thank you to Angelo, Andrew, and the.Rumor for their help. It feels good to tackle a problem and come up with a solution. The next problem I will surmount is that of world peace. Please give me a few days for a resolution to this problem.

And while I’m endangering the focus of this post, there is a new song by New Found Glory in the radio to the right. Enjoy.

We got back last night from our short trip up the coast. We spent our first two nights in San Luis Obispo at the San Luis Creek Lodge. It’s a fairly new place that feels fresh and up-to-date. In San Luis Obispo we spent time walking around the downtown area, went to the farmers market and had a turkey leg, and drove to Morro Bay. A recurring theme on our trip was the wildlife we kept seeing, and this guy below was hanging out in Morro Bay. He even jumped up near a dock to let us take some good pictures.

I love these "smokestacks" in Morro Bay because they always look like a painting. They don’t look real for some reason, like they’re computer generated and my eyes are playing tricks on me.

After San Luis Obispo we headed up the coast and stopped in Cayucos on our way to Cambria, where we stayed at Moonstone Landing. I had never been to Cambria, but it reminded me very much of Poipu Beach on Kauai where we went on our honeymoon (but much closer and cheaper). While it’s not a Hawaii replacement (you can only spend a day or two in Cambria until you’re bored), it’s a very similar setup where a small street is the only thing between your hotel and a beautiful beach.

Cambria is just south of Hearst Castle, and even though we didn’t go there, we enjoyed the view of the coast and a nice drive. Something totally unexpected we found was a place along the beach that was literally crawling with Elephant Seals. Apparently male Elephant Seals have been coming to this specific spot since the early 1990′s to molt (get rid of their gross old skin). In a stretch of about 200 yards I would say there were at least 100 seals (there were two other spots similar to this one below).

It was great because they were barking and play fighting the whole time. There was also a really small pup that was getting chased by some big fat dude. That was hilarious. Another interesting site in Cambria was something called Nit Wit Ridge. It’s like Hearst Castle, but not really. Some guy did lots of funny/odd stuff to his house, and here is the result. Much like the hundreds of antique shops in these small towns, I’m not sure if it is art or crap.

Overall it was a very nice and relaxing few days. On a side note, I thoroughly enjoyed the Nikon d50 on the trip. It was great being able to snap pictures at will and have a lot of control over the pictures I was taking. My brother got me a nifty case to put it in that makes it much easier to carry around.

We leave Wednesday morning at 5 am for a Boston/NY trip with my parents and Denise/Paul. I’ll be sure to take a lot of pictures, but The Blarg will be update free for a week and a half. In the meantime, head on over to the Milkinator’s new site for some blogger goodness.

Usually at the market I can get my rockstars for $1.50 a piece, but this last weekend we went to Sam’s Club. If you buy a whole box they are only $1.12 a piece! Oh wow what a deal. I was so happy.

That’s 24 cans of morning goodness!

When I setup the arcade I made sure that my MAME (an arcade emulator) collection was fully up to date as of that version of mame. Well that was a year and a half ago, and I’ve never updated it. Over the last couple days I’ve been working on updating that list and backing up all the information/settings on the arcade. It would be a shame if that went down and I lost all my settings. There is a cool program called ClrMame which will scan your roms and check for bad and missing ones. It will even take updates and rebuild roms you already have with the new updates.

Today I woke up at 5:20 am. Myself and a couple guys from work got breakfast at Carrows and had a little mini-bible study. It was cool, but holy cow that is early. The wife was still in bed when I left! They want to do it every week, but I dunno. It’s only 5th period and I’m dead tired.

Thank goodness it’s a three day weekend.