I have to say it

The Eames' are overrated! There I said it.

They're overrated, overrated overrated!

THERE IS NO EAMES ERA. It's called the 50s, not the damn Eames era.

They didn't invent 50s design, but they did put a lot of work in on "everythingIdoisart".

I tried to watch a video about the Eames' once. It made me nauseous. Bent plywood, feathers in a box, and some fiberglass work stolen from Eero Saarinen. Worthless.

Check out someone who broke some ground. Gerrit Rietveld, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Alvar Aalto, or Richard Neutra.

Sometimes

Sometimes you just run into something interesting.

http://suttonhoo.blogspot.com/

While googleing Niles, IL. The tagline is either "Where People Count" or "Niles; It's All Here"

Illustrator

A very cool illustrator; Esther

Video conversion

I recently inherited a T-Mobile Shadow (aka HTC Phoebus). It's a pretty sharp little device. I haven't had any of the problems people complain about on the interwebs. It's a little quirky, but I like it.

Windows mobile 6 is an interesting animal, settings are all over the place. I'm actually slightly amazed I have it working, MS Exchange Syncing and everything.

Putting video on it has been pretty easy, I spent some time tweaking but it looks pretty good right now. I used Handbrake to turn some avi files into m4v files.

Turns out the frogs that code Handbrake are real jerks. Every other video processor allows you to select multiple files to encode. An entire directory perhaps. Not Handbrake. Oh no. Those frenchies don't want you to. Check this out:

Turns out a freedom loving individual out there has an answer: the Handbrakebatchencoder. I feel like I'm in Sweden or something. There are very long words in Sweden.
Check it out: http://handbrakebatchencode.codeplex.com/

This is why those quiche eaters are jerks. Check out how they treat their users in their own forums: http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=7945

That's why I like Media Portal. The forums are a gentrified place of refined discussion. A place where developers don't eat crepes and mock their users.

Ok, back on topic.

1. Download and install Handbrake regular, the GUI edition (this and #2 are here)
2. Download Handbrake Command Line Interface edition. Unzip it to here: "C:\Program Files\HandBrakeCLI\HandBrakeCLI.exe"
3. Download and unzip the Handbrakebatchencoder, set aside
4. Get Handbrake to show it's query. Go to Tools>Options>Advanced and "Enable Query Editor"
5. Trial and error your way to getting video the way you want it. Dial it in.

Now you're ready for a batch encode. Open up the batchencoder .exe. Make sure your paths are going to the right place and paste in the query from Handbrake GUI, making sure you're putting it in there right. There's an example preloaded to get you started.

Here's the query I'm running.

-t 1 -c 1 -f mp4 -w 320 -l 240 -e ffmpeg -b 140 -r 15 -a 1 -E faac -6 dpl2 -R 48 -B 160 -D 0.0 -v 1

Details
320 x 240
MP4
No Filters
MPEG-4
15 Frames Per Second
140k Average Bit Rate
128 Bit Rate Audio

The video looks good. You can try a higher video bit rate if you'd like, it might make it look a little better but might glitch. The 200 Mhz processor in the Shadow isn't a blockbuster these days.

Chicago RedEye (it's a newspaper)

This is my favorite article from my favorite RedEye writer, entitled Hotdogocalypse.

Legos

Here's a great Lego blog: http://microbricks.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html

The micro ones are cool.

Comskip update

So, after a whole lot of run around trying to get Comskip to stop crashing my HTPC, I figured it out. For an unknown reason it was crashing my ATI H.264 codec. Who knows why. So I switched it over to Divx and all is well.

Unfortunatly it took a couple unnecessary trial and errors to figure out. To aid future debugging:

When things go wrong try these before uninstalling and reinstalling Media Portal:

1. Uninstall and reinstall Divx
2. Uninstall and reinstall video drivers
3. Change video/audio codecs in MediaPortal
4. Make sure there is still enough disk space to record video
5. Swap out hard drives to the other bootable disk and try it any fixes on that drive first!

Dear mp3 player manufactures

Yes, I'm looking at you Apple. What's the deal? Why are mp3 players still so piddley? I can install 8GB in my four year old phone!

People must buy more new music if they can only put a couple tiny tunes on their player.

Almost $200 for 8GB. Really?

How about 2TB for $159.99!

Sure, sure solid state is more expensive than a spinning drive. But you can buy 64GB of SSD for under $145!

So long FTP

I got an email from Blogger the other week. When I read it, I thought, "Oh man! I'm that 0.5%!" Looks like my furniture blog will be shifting over to Google branded web space.

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Regards,

Rick Klau

Blogger Product Manager

Google

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View, CA 94043

I BEAT DOOM 3

That's right! I beat Doom 3!!!!

It only took 4.68 years by my count. I own Doom 3. Doom 3 no longer owns me.

Sure, I haven't been playing it continuously. But I played every inch of the game. Got every weapon, opened every locker, took out (almost) every monster.

Over the course of 1,707 days, three Xboxes, and countless hours of joyful/terrified game-play I have finally triumphed!

And now for a list of games I beat between starting and finishing Doom 3:

Call of Duty 3
Darkwatch
Dawn of War II
Eat Lead
Far Cry 2
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Halo
Halo 2
Halo 3
Hit Man 2
MechAssault
Medal of Honor Rising Sun
Portal
Tiger Woods 2005

Media Portal

For a few years I've been running Media Portal on a home theater pc. I make occasional changes and tweaks, but it's been pretty stable for the past 6-8 months. The most recent addition is pretty interesting and really easy. I started running Comskip.

What Comskip does is runs in the background after a TV program is completely recorded. Comskip analyzes the program and automatically edits out ads on playback. It just worked, pretty exciting!

First Post

Hello World!

I'm going to use this page as a landing site for all of my websites and interests.