Nothing too profound to say today, just a few random things I wanted to mention.

While I wait for book edits I’m busy formatting it for printing. There are two major print on demand book publishers, and I’m trying to decide which one to use. One is called Lulu. Something neat they offer is that you can get a real ISBN number for your book and have it available for distribution. It becomes available on online bookstores like Amazon, and brick and mortar stores can order. They won’t automatically, but it can be special ordered, and some people have had success convincing a brick and mortar to order some of their books to sell. The other major printer is called CreateSpace which is owned by Amazon. When you publish here your book is basically only available via Amazon. The other big difference is cost. From the way things look right now, it would basically cost about $20 after shipping from Lulu, but only $10 at Amazon (and it’s eligible for super saver shipping). I’m hoping you’ll all want to buy and read my book no matter what, but any opinions on price? Is a $20 paperback just way too expensive? (In terms of quality they’re somewhere in between the paperbacks you see at the market for cheap, and a good hardcover.)

I’d like to make another recommendation that you should all go listen to Anarbor. They’re so awesome. I still listen to their album over and over on repeat, and for only $6 it’s a total steal.

Nothing too political on my mind, but one thing I’ve observed. If a commercial has two people of different ethnic backgrounds, and one of them is either getting made fun of or doing something stupid, it tends to follow a pattern: the white person is always the loser. Now this isn’t scientific or absolute, but I can think of two examples. Right now there is an AT&T commercial with a guy sitting in front of a window and he thinks he’s watching an HDTV, and he’s a total idiot. His friend telling him what he’s doing is a very with it and together Asian guy. I can’t picture them showing the same commercial with the roles switched. A second example are the Washinton Mutual commercials that featured the black spokesperson and the old white stuffy bankers. The black guy was intelligent and well spoken, and the bankers were the butt of the joke.

I can’t even picture them making a commercial where an ethnic minority is the butt of the joke and a white person is the intelligent one. Same goes for gender. Usually it’s the husband in a commercial that does something stupid and it’s the wife that has to correct him and be the voice of reason. Any other examples you can think of?

To be clear, I don’t particularly care. I try to watch as few commercials as possible, but I think this is an interesting commentary on race and gender in our society. Maybe this is something Obama will address?

I want to post, but I don’t have anything specific to talk about. Ever since the last election I really haven’t cared about politics that much. I still have opinions, and I still love talk radio, but I just don’t care enough to post on here and try to convince anyone. Maybe I need some big issue/topic to come around that really lights a fire beneath me, but that hasn’t happened yet.

I’m working on my novel idea, and it’s an amazingly big project. Granted I’ve never written a 100k+ word story, so this is brand new territory for me. I started with a central theme which I could tell you in one sentence, but that has to turn into numerous characters and a lot more detail to be a full story. It’s been a slow process with lots of changes, but it’s gradually taking shape. I’ve done a lot of reading about port security and nuclear weapons, but that’s all I can tell you right now. Typing about it makes me want to go work on it, so I should finish this up.

MRI is moving to San Diego! Congratulations!

I played Wario Ware the other day at a friends house. It was actually pretty fun, but not for $50. If it comes down in price I’d get it.

Heroes on Monday was downright SICK! I believe that’s the new cool word for, well, “cool.” It’s so SICK, I bet it would even be cool in regular non-hdtv.

Ok, I’m outta here.

There are yard sales and garage sales, but it seems the "ebay sale" has not become a part of our lingo yet. If it does, it will come to mean what a yard sale or garage sale does, except all done on ebay. I’m not one of those people that is constantly selling on ebay, but instead I sell a bunch of stuff all at once very rarely. Since now is one of those times, I thought I’d share my listing with you and the stories attached to each item.

1) 90 Used Tennis Balls in Great Condition

You may wonder why we have this many tennis balls to begin with. Originally we bought them on ebay for Stacie’s classroom to put on her chair legs so they would slide around nice and quietly. Literally a day or two after we got them, someone went through all the classrooms and put sliders on the feet of everyone’s chair. That’s nice of them, but now we had a box of tennis balls and no use for them.

2) Winegard Squareshooter HDTV Antenna SS-2000 Amplified

Originally when we moved into the townhouse I didn’t realize there was an antenna in the attic, so I got this guy and had it put up outside. About 6 months ago though they started to redo the roofs, and our antenna was "illegally" mounted. I knew it would have to come down, but "how" I wasn’t sure. I was hoping the roof guys would just take it off for me. One day though the next door neighbors were having their satellite dish moved, so I paid the guy $20 to just take ours off (because by then I’d put a new antenna in the attic).

3) Nintendo GameCube Console Indigo w/Controller/Component

I know, selling videogames can be quite shocking! The reason I’m selling it though is because I have a ton of AMEX reward points, and one of the best ways to renew them is for giftcards to Toys R Us. I did that today, and plan on using the money to buy a Nintendo Wii. The nice thing about the Wii is that it plays gamecube games, so everything in that listing I will no longer need. The only downside of this plan is that Toys R Us is the only place I can get the system, and who knows when they’ll have them in stock.

4) Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP Classic NES w/Case

What Nathan, two videogame sales in one post? Yup. I decided to sell this system and get Stacie a pink DS Lite. The DS can play old game boy games, so that makes this system unneeded. I’m hoping it fetches a premium for being a "limited edition" version. The DS can also talk to the WIi…for what reason I’m not sure, but it could come in handy.

5) Firefly PC Remote Snapstream Media Beyond TV USB

The least exciting of the listings, but oh well. Part of my HD recording solution was to buy Beyond TV to schedule and record my shows. For whatever reason they had to bundle this remote with it. Because I use the Snazio box downstairs to watch the shows Beyond TV records, I don’t need this remote. Not very exciting, but there it is.

This all reminds me of great ebay buying and selling of the past. Hopefully other people will be motivated to start this new trend of having an Ebay Sale.

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.

Hope everybody had a great weekend. Aside from seeing the Dodgers get swept, our weekend was pretty good. Just a couple words on the Dodgers to tide me over until the winter. The Mets are clearly a better team. From the bats in their lineup to the arms in their bullpen, they had us beat. The Dodgers should not resign Nomar next year, because James Loney is ready. The money saved from signing Nomar needs to be applied to a true home run bat either at third or the outfield. Drew is not a true homerun threat, and we really need someone that can hit 40 homeruns, not 20.

Most of my weekend was spent researching media players, which are little electronic devices you connect to your tv and they can playback media files like videos and mp3s. Unfortunately there are not very many options available, and of the ones there are, they all have problems. On Sunday I borrowed my Dad’s old Pentium 3-500 and I have it hooked up to the tv downstairs. It’s not powerful enough to playback HD quality video, but it will give me an idea if this is the route I want to go. This is called a HTPC (Home Theatre Personal Computer). You can hook up a remote, watch downloaded video files, record HDTV, play DVDs, and even upgrade it to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray in the future.

Today we have a student free day, which means us teachers are not free. We could be, but we’ve elected to go to work and get paid instead of stay at home and not get paid. Have a great Monday.

Dodgers are going for number 12 tonight. Go Blue!

I read this morning about all the photo editing scandals that have been going on. There are several in the news right now, but here is one of my favorites. Gives you even more reason to take what the MSM says with a grain of salt.

I read some great articles on how the minimum wage is total garbage and hurts people (yay unemployment!).

• The Minimum Wage Vision
• Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly

They’re by a guy named Walter E. Williams, and they’re genious. It’s a much more complex subject than "but they’re poor, give them more money." Do yourself a favor and get informed.

I’m still scanning old photos. I actually started over because I didn’t like something I was doing, but I’ve corrected that. I’ve blown through about 150 negatives so far. It’s hard because some are great, and some are pictures of nothing exciting. The problem is you don’t really know what you’ve got until you scan, and once you’ve done that, you might as well save them. A lot of these people I don’t even know, but I think it would be fun to give them dvds of what I’ve done. For example, I have a lot of photos of my 1st cousin once removed’s dad. It would be cool to surprise him with a bunch of photos he’s probably never seen.

A friend got a new HDTV and I’ve made it my personal mission to make sure people who own HDTVs know what they’re really watching (just because you tell it to stretch a picture and it fills the whole screen, that does not mean it’s HD). They have Adelphia/TimeWarner running off a coax cable, and apparently they send unecrypted local channels in HD via QAM. I tried looking for something in HD the other night, but I didn’t know where to look. There is the SD feed, a digital feed of the SD feed, and then the digital feed that carries HD. That’s three of the same channel strewn about over 100 channels. I have some actual channel numbers to try now, so hopefully we can find the good stuff.

If you talk to Paddy make sure to ask him if he got the package from the courier. It was sent via the London Express. The association is not pleased.

AKA a Super Bowl Party. I don’t really care about football, but I’ve got the HDTV and surround sound, so might as well use them. There also is rarely a good excuse to eat big and juicy hot dogs on steriods, aka sausages. I’m open to suggestions…I personally like a good hot link sausage with some spice, but we could have a couple different kinds. Let me know if you’d like to come so I know how much food to buy.

When: Sunday, February 4th
Time: 2 pm (game is at 3).
Place: My House
Who: People

If you want a sausage, you have to comment. And if you think you’re going to come anyways, post a comment.

Update: Here is the menu! Thanks for offering to bring stuff, but we just went to the store and grabbed some stuff. We have strawberries, carrots and celery, chips and dip, baked beans, bratwurst and sauerkraut, hot italian sausage, regular oscar meyer wieners, mountain dew, cherry 7-up, and diet coke. I think Stacie is going to bake some pre-made cookie dough.

So for the past month I’ve been an extremely good saver of money. For the first time in a long time my credit card bill is barely over $100, and that’s primarily from buying gas. Recently however there has been a temptation: World of Warcraft! Kurtis and Kevin have both been playing it, and it sounds like too much fun to pass up.

The problem though is that $50 is a big expense, so where is the money going to come from? I’ve got a wedding ring, honeymoon, and HDTV to save up for…how could I possibly afford it? By taking a fast from fast food. Everytime I would usually eat fast food, or have the urge to buy a snack, I will resist and eat at home. For the next two weeks or so I will document my fast food resistance savings. When it adds up to $50 we have success!

11/30
Ate leftover pizza instead of McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets. $2.16
Passed on buying a soda at CSULB (oooh it was tempting). $1.25
12/1
Skipped my usual pre-staff meeting Sobe. $2.00
Made Mac and Cheese at home instead of Mambo Grill. $6.00
Got a High Schooler to buy me dinner (go Andie!). $1.50
12/2
Ate pizza rolls at home instead of Jack in the Box. $5.00
12/3
Pizza rolls and fishsticks instead of Taco Bell. $3.45
12/5
Ate top ramen at home instead of fast food. $5.00
12/6
Ate leftover pizza instead of Subway. $5.00
12/7
Ate leftover pizza again instead of fast food. $5.00
Mac ‘n Cheese instead of Chicken Nuggets. $2.16
12/12
Parents bought me lunch after church! $5.00
Had a PoT PiE at home instead of Jack in the Box. $5.00
___________
Total Saved: $48.52