| Three things that Bioware and Hasbro have in common... |
[Apr. 1st, 2012|01:49 am] |
Another origin could be stacked in a cartoon or pop band which triggers memories of how confidently she said her team. And there's a 3-point shooters worked opposite sides of the words chair and man. Today we got him in the league standings having set a school record for assists.
I cleaned it out, holding back Garrus and Nightmare Moon for the first day it hasn't bothered me. Eye doc said it, the crowd went wild. Video from GodChild's draft night and devour my ankles. I could get.
( And it goes on like this... )
And that's how Pinkie Pie got her cutie mark! Happy April Foal's day, everypony! |
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| In which I muse about XVID support in Vegas 4. |
[Jan. 15th, 2012|12:47 am] |
I'm mainly recording my observations here for the benefit of others who Google the same problem:
Today, after several straight days of wrestling with codecs, I learned this: Although the K-Lite codec pack contains ffdshow and support for all sorts of wacky formats, the XVID support included in ffdshow (and/or other K-Lite codecs) apparently doesn't work right in Sonic Foundry Sony Vegas. (Despite working in pretty much everything else.)
So I downloaded the stand-alone XVID codec from its official site. Very interestingly, that gave me the ability to write AVI files with XVID compression in Vegas, but didn't give me the slightly-more-important ability to read them!
( It gets more technical from here. Long story short, I fixed it. )
...And all this just because I wanna make more "YouTube Poop". |
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| Worms to bake and rabbits to herd. |
[Jan. 7th, 2012|03:15 am] |
Every time I think of something interesting to post here, I'm in the middle of working on something else and always forget it within a half-hour. I think I lost a few doozies that way.
Building a computer downstairs for a client. Spending way too much time on that due to juggling hard drives, and having to add parts to the case (I even got creative with scissors and part of a milk jug.) to mount a beeper since the new MB didn't have one built-in. (How do MB manufacturers even forget a thing like that?)
A 500 megabyte MP3 file is surprisingly hard to work with, especially in programs that have to decompress the whole thing to memory to do anything with it! So, I wrote my own program to split it into 10 smaller pieces. It's not just a matter of splitting the file; because of a few quirks of MP3 compression, I had to be slightly more clever than that. Now I'm considering releasing the code (it's tiny and in Perl) but I wonder if it's useful enough for that sort of thing. (Besides, I think FFMPEG can do the same thing with the right command-line parameters. Maybe I should write about my adventures with FFMPEG in a future article. If I remember!)
Afterwards, I could edit the audio without a problem. I added volume correction where necessary, and saved the individual audio sections as separate files (over 100 in total)... Long story short, the 512MB storage on my portable MP3 player is now nearly full. Turns out it also has a 99-file limit, and won't play anything beyond that. I might need to find a workaround for that.
My computer still only "mostly works". Intel's warranty doesn't cover motherboards sold on eBay, not even if they're sold "new" or "nearly new". Fair enough, I say; it's the price one pays for buying on eBay. Everything's a gamble for a great deal, and I've won more than I've lost. Eventually I'll want to replace this MB... One of these days.
...Maybe when my recent investment in silver becomes worth what I paid again. |
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| It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing! |
[Dec. 22nd, 2011|02:08 am] |
Remember that old image that used a tree swing as a metaphor for various stages of software development? "How the customer described it", "How the project manager understood it", "How it was documented" et cetera?
I found a site that allows others to make their own version of it, and then [I made this]... |
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| Pet peeve of the day. |
[Nov. 30th, 2011|12:29 am] |
An address book, two daily planners, a couple of short-lived pens, a really cheap wallet-sized talking clock/calculator, a book-sized calculator that never worked right, a not-very-pretty wall calendar, a large pile of general-purpose greeting cards and postcards, page after page of return address labels (one of which had the name misspelled), postage-sized decorative stamps that aren't actually postage, a "membership card" with an expensive-looking 3D hologram of a deer in a field, and somewhere around $2.15 in small change.
What my family has received so far this year from charities asking for money.
What exactly are you trying to tell us, National Diabetes Association, Foundation for the Blind, American Lung Association, various cancer institutes and March of Dimes? That our money means so little to you that you're willing to waste it on stationary and cheap Chinese crap for everyone on your sucker mailing list, rather than use it for whatever your charity is purportedly for; and meanwhile having the gall to ask for more money at the exact same time? "Enjoy this free gift! We need your help!"
(March of Dimes is especially blatant: "Enjoy this free dime! We need it back!")
Keep your crappy gifts. We don't need your kind of waste in our economy. |
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| Who plays games on smart phones? |
[Oct. 7th, 2011|04:07 am] |
See, I've got a decision to make:
If I program games in "Standard Edition" Java:
- They can be played on any desktop computer... as long as Java is installed.
- That means you may need to download and install Java first. That might deter some people. (Especially if you need admin access to install Java.)
If I program games in "Mobile Edition" Java:
- They can be played on any Java-enabled smart phone.
- That includes iPhones and similar portable devices, but does not include desktops and laptop computers.
If I program games in both editions at once... That's just gonna take forever, and probably kinda suck.
Are smart phones becoming common enough now that this is even a decision? |
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| I own silver! Wa-hey! |
[Sep. 28th, 2011|04:15 am] |
Yup, I just invested in some silver. A trusted internet friend (and possible future mayor) managed to persuade me to consider precious metals as an inflation-proof alternative to CDs and bank stuff in general.
The bad news is, I may have hesitated slightly too long, due to both illiquidity and my tendency to look before I look before I look before I look before I leap. See if you can spot the opportunity I missed:
(Do everyone's browsers support PNG transparency now? Good! That's a direct download of a live chart you're looking at, with my annotations overlaid on top of it with a cool HTML trick that I'm rather surprised LJ supports!) |
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| Well, crap. |
[Sep. 9th, 2011|01:38 am] |
Computer just power-cycled again, for the first time since I put the new video card in. It worked great for about a month, but this thing happening once a month is still unacceptable!
I am really annoyed right now. |
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| Total Roll Caaallllll!!! |
[Aug. 24th, 2011|03:10 am] |
TOTAL ROLL CALL MEME:
1. All the characters I've made up over the years, so many characters... I'm trying to remember as many of them as I possibly can, every single one. And I'm going to list them all, with a brief description of each one.
2. You may ask questions about any of these characters. (But keep in mind that some characters may be so old and/or minor that I won't remember much and won't bother coming up with an answer if I don't have one already.)
3. You may simply "poke" a character, in which case I will reply with a random fact or snippet about that character. (Assuming I can think of anything, which isn't guaranteed. Also, just to keep things sane, I may need to limit how many times some characters can be poked.)
4. If any characters get a disproportionate amount of attention, I might give them their own entries (for questions and such), to keep this one from getting too cluttered.
5. A certain amount of interaction with the characters is allowed here, but keep in mind that this entry is not for RP, and too much of it may make a mess.
6. Those of you who've made up a lot of your own characters, you are welcome to try this yourself!
See my huge list on dA! |
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| And now, something about capitalism. |
[Aug. 14th, 2011|04:14 pm] |
Where there are no jobs, there's no income. Where there's no income, there's no commerce, and therefore, no economy. (Yeah, I know I'm oversimplifying. Shut up.)
Fix unemployment and you (mostly) fix the economy. More people earning income means more people who can afford to shop, which benefits local businesses. It also means more revenue from income tax without having to hike rates; it's win-win for the government.
So, how do we create a system that encourages creation of new jobs? (As opposed to our current system which has, let's face it, apparently been doing the opposite?)
( Here are my ideas... ) |
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| The GeForce isn't with me. |
[Aug. 7th, 2011|03:03 am] |
I've just replaced my video card, believing the previous card to be a possible cause of the power-cycling problem I've complained about in the recent past.
Old card: NVidia GeForce 6600 GT
New card: MSI ATI Radeon HD 4350
( Details... )
Anyway, I'm mainly just posting this to keep track of when I put in the new card. And if I still have a problem with my computer shutting off whenever I run a program that uses any kind of acceleration features (whether it be a game, a screensaver, or anything in Flash, or my favorite music program), then I'll just complain some more later. |
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| Democracy in its purest form, folks. |
[Jul. 29th, 2011|04:49 pm] |
Imagine five people walking on some train tracks. Two of them walk on the left rail, preferring the city scenery on that side. Two walk on the right rail, and enjoy a view of a field. The last walks in the center of the track, simply to best enjoy the company of the other four.
They hear a train coming, so they decide to vote on what to do. "Should we do something?" one of them asks. Unanimously, they agree.
"Should we all take a few steps to the left?" asks one on the left side. The other on the left agrees, the other three vote no.
"I'd rather move to the right," states one on the right side. The other on the right agrees, the other three vote no.
"Let's just run for it," says the guy in the center. None of the others like that idea. "Outrun a train? Are you crazy?"
"It will buy us some time so we can decide what else to do!" says the guy in the center. The others all concede that he has a point, and agree to start running down the tracks. The train is catching up, though, and they're all scared.
"We've got to get off these tracks!" one of them shouts. Naturally, the others quickly agree. Their lives are in danger and they're all getting angry at the delay.
"We should jump off to the left!" demands one on the left side, furious and determined to win the argument at any cost because it would save their lives. "It's closer and if we get hurt, we can seek medical attention in the city!" The other on the left promptly agrees.
"No, we gotta jump to the right!" yells one on the right side, also furious and determined to win, for exactly the same reasons. "It's a much softer landing! And it's prettier!" The other on the right agrees, but the rest don't.
"Keep running, keep running!" shouts the guy in the center. "Until you all agree on something!"
...
Oh, and one of these guys thinks I owe him money, but I disagree.
Do they jump in time? Or do they get splattered? What happens next? Who's the biggest idiot of the group? Vote!
...And see if it changes anything! |
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| Dang you, Bolivians! And Jennifer Lopez! |
[Jul. 20th, 2011|04:13 am] |
I'm kinda miffed right now.
The story begins several years ago, with my download of a program that happened to include a set of Commodore 64 music. It had one song that I liked so much, I wanted to get the individual music file and add it to my small collection of C64 music. The music was stored in an oddball format that wasn't worth the time to hack, but did contain filenames, so I just searched online for the specific filename instead.
I found a music file, and it was the right song, but a different C64 arrangement by a different author. So I searched again and found another one...
I ended up collecting 20 different versions of the same song, all written for the Commodore 64 by different artists over a span of several years. A few of them sucked, to be honest, but most of them were quite lovely in their own different ways.
I knew the song only as "lambada.sid", and, as far as I knew, it wasn't based on a "real" song. What I assumed was that the first one made was so popular (understandably) that other programmers made their own versions, some of which, in turn, had versions based on them and so on. Simple enough.
So I got this plan: Create my own version of the song, based on all the C64 versions, using real instruments and original lyrics. I wrote some of the best lyrics I've ever written. I was even planning on using backup vocalists for the very first time, and planned parts for them.
And then I sat on the idea for a few years, periodically revisiting and refining it. (And also wondering how the heck someone like me was ever supposed to find backup singers. I can't buy those on eBay, y'know! ...Or maybe I can, but I'm probably better off not going that route!)
I was planning. Planning and preparing, getting ready for the day when I would make that song my own.
( What went wrong? And what does Jennifer Lopez have to do with it? ) |
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| The profit in imperfectionism. |
[Jun. 24th, 2011|02:28 am] |
The number one reason why the sloppy programmers at Microsoft and Adobe and Ustream and everywhere else piss me off:
They have jobs.
I can't even get attention. |
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stevenroy's journal
