As Bob's World Turns

bgivnin @ 2009-10-24T14:43:00

2009-10-24T11:43:11Z

To say that I'm ready to fly home is the understatement of the year. T-minus 14 hours and counting...

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2009-10-18T02:54:38Z

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Originally uploaded by bgivnin

Waiting for Kevin Smith!

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2009-10-17T23:16:29Z

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Originally uploaded by bgivnin

This rainbow showed up after it DUMPED some serious rain in Burien.

bgivnin @ 2009-09-25T23:32:00

2009-09-26T06:35:01Z

Saw Surrogates tonight. It was "meh" at best. Great concept, but poor execution in some crucial parts.

Sunset at Alki Beach

2009-09-26T01:53:52Z

Sunset at Alki Beach
Originally uploaded by bgivnin

Gorgeous.

Toys

2009-09-19T16:54:06Z

I was briefly considering getting the new Zune HD, but my Zune 80, for my needs, is way better, so I'll stick with it until it dies.

I was also briefly considering getting the new PSP Go, but they made way too many changes that I'm not a fan of to spend $250 on it. I'll stick with my PSP-1000, TYVM.

bgivnin @ 2009-09-05T15:11:00

2009-09-05T22:11:13Z

I'm going Guitar Center to see what "crazy" deals they have for this "huge" sale they're having this weekend. Should be interesting.

Real Men of Genius -- Mr. T-Shirt Launcher Inventor

2009-09-05T02:17:45Z

So Friggin' Awesome.

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2009-09-03T14:03:12Z

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Originally uploaded by bgivnin

My cat decided that my job this morning was to keep her company. I
obliged.

The more you know

2009-08-24T21:30:43Z

There is a food color additive called “carmine” that is a red color. It is used in many products such as Dannon Strawberry Yogurt, Ocean Spray Pink-Grapefruit Juice, and others. Guess how they get it?

“it is made from the desiccated bodies of female insects harvested in Peru. The bug feeds on red cactus berries and color from the berries accumulated in the females and their un-hatched larvae. The insects are collected, dried, and ground into pigment. It takes about 70,000 of them to produce one pound of carmine, which is used to make processed foods look pink, red or purple.”

Layne Staley Tribute show

2009-08-23T08:28:03Z

It was really good! It's on the interwebs if you want to see it. Under a cut cuz some people want it that way.

Funniest. Commercial. Ever.

2009-08-22T21:13:32Z

It is. I don't care what you say.

Pretty much the best commercial ever! - watch more funny videos

Taken

2009-08-21T05:52:32Z

I just finished watching Taken. What a fantastic action/adventure/thriller movie. Holy crap. HIGHLY recommended if you're into that sorta thing.

Date my avatar

2009-08-19T03:05:18Z

Totally ganked from fixerbard:

bgivnin @ 2009-08-15T19:01:00

2009-08-16T02:01:25Z

I just got back from Best Buy with a new Linksys WRT54G2 router. Here's hoping this fixes all my Internet problems!

bgivnin @ 2009-08-15T15:18:00

2009-08-15T22:20:36Z

My router is shot! 2 hours troubleshooting and 2 calls to Comcast later, my router's toast. It won't accept hard ports or any wireless signals, but when my PC is plugged directly into my cable modem, it works great! Time to go to Best Buy and upgrade!

iPhone apps

2009-08-15T17:32:06Z

It's really interesting reading forums and listening to people talk about the price point of iPhone apps. The perceived difference of an iPhone app's price versus a DS, PSP, Wii, PS3 or 360 game's price is amazing and I'm guilty of this as well. I was just having an IM conversation with a friend when this came up.

For example, I have no problems running out to Best Buy and purchasing a $60 game for the PC or any console I have. I *think* I'm getting a better deal on a better console because I'm spending a lot of money on it. Some have been worth it (Dead Space, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Max Payne and many more) and some haven't (a majority of Wii titles, basically, plus some PC games thrown in for good measure). However, that $60 price gives me the ILLUSION that I'm spending a lot of money and I'm getting something back in return.

On the other hand, there are iPhone apps... games specifically. No game is over $10 at this time and the cheapest you can get is 99 cents. Since I got my iPhone last year, I've purchased two games: One was 99 cents (Hidden Expedition: Everest) and one was $3.99 (Power Pros Touch baseball). Last night, I was going to buy DOOM Resurrection for $2.99, but didn't because I was worried it was going to be a POS. It's on sale this weekend for QuakeCon - it's normally $10.

So, let me see: I have no problems running out and spending $60 on Gears of War 2 (I haven't yet, but I've been considering it because some friends at work play co-op and it sounds really fun), but fuck spending $3 on an iPhone game.

W T F. That's less than a Mocha at just about ANY coffee shop and will give me way more entertainment for hours, plus replay value, because it's fucking DOOM.

I have no idea where I'm going with this... I just think it's interesting that my perceived value of an iPhone game is that it'll be crap, even though it's only $3, but my perceived value of a $60 console game is much more lenient, when it could be even shittier than the iPhone game.

Oh, and now that I think about it, I enjoy the hell out of both iPhone games I have. Go figure.

Time to buy DOOM on the iPhone.

bgivnin @ 2009-08-09T14:51:00

2009-08-09T21:51:08Z

GI Joe rocked. F- the critics.

Iron Man 2 leaked ComicCon footage

2009-08-09T18:03:40Z

Looks awesome! I hope we get a cleaner version soon. Jon Favreau posted a message to Twitter yesterday that he's working on it.

http://gizmodo.com/5333347/iron-man-2-comic-con-leaked-footage-sets-my-pants-on-fire

Camcorders

2009-08-09T17:18:13Z

I really want a flash camcorder, but I can't decide how much I want to spend on one or which one to get. I'll probably get one around Black Friday,so I can have it for Christmas, but I want to start researching and saving now.

There are the cheapy $130 "webbie" camcorders, which can hold anywhere from 4gb to 32gb of video (in HD, of course), but they're more meant for "off the cuff" recording at parties and stuff, but not really for keeping real memories, like weddings, birthdays and the like. Depending on which way I go, I might get both a real camcorder and a "webbie" so I'm covered on all occasions.

Sony has a webbie, but it uses their proprietary Memory Stick Pro Duo memory and that's crap, plus the battery isn't removable. It's $150:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16830179222

Creative has one that a friend at work has that I got to use last night that seems pretty cool. The only problem is there's no external memory, but it's only $130:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16830106003&Tpk=vado%20hd

Flip made these popular, but I've heard that Creative and Sony made them better. Similar to the Creative, there's no external memory slot, so the 4gb is all I have to work with:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16830246015

There was another brand that uses SDHC cards, but I've never heard of the brand (Aiptek) and that scares me a bit, but it uses SDHC cards and that means my Mac could read the cards natively without having to buy a USB adapter:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16830234004

If I was to get a real HD camcorder, I'm seriously looking at the Canon HF200. It's the same as the HF20, except $200 less and I'd have to use my own memory sticks. There was one review where the reviewer couldn't get his memory card to work, so it might be worth spending the extra money (a whole frickin' lot of extra money, too) to get 32gb of onboard memory.

Here's hoping that these prices drop around Black Friday.

Does anyone have any experience with web or flash camcorders? Care to comment? Want one? Care to comment on what you're looking at?

bgivnin @ 2009-08-08T10:41:00

2009-08-08T17:56:32Z

I decided to take a chance and try Windows DVD Maker to see how Haunted would turn out, since I still can't burn jack with Sony DVD Architect. IT RULES! I know... shocking.

Okay, first off, it's not done burning yet, so my experience thus far is only with the program; not the final product.

When you launch Windows DVD Maker, it asks you to load in your files. I had 3 mpeg files I wanted to burn, so I put those in the program. I already had my Dual Layer DVD in and it said I could burn 270 minutes of video (it must compress the shit out of it) and I only had 100 minutes worth in, so I put in the rest of the video files I need to burn (5 total) and hit the Next button. It compiled a Menu background of the show, which is badass, plus has the name of the DVD in the top left corner. Cool. There's a Play button (I'm assuming it'll play the first video file on the disc) and a Scenes button which goes to a sub-menu where I can choose the episode I want to watch. I can edit all those words, so I cancelled the encoding and changed Scenes to Episodes.

Once done with my text changes (there are a ton of other changes you can make as well, like changing the background, the menu style and more), there's a Preview button which generates the menu and lets you check out what the DVD will (hopefully) look like when it's done being created. When in the Scenes sub-menu, there's an Up arrow that takes you back to the main menu.

In the Scenes sub-menu, the menu background is animated and all of the thumbnails animate with their individual content.

In theory (since I'm still working on burning a disc), this is EXACTLY what I want. No frills, just burning my media to a DVD in the easiest possible way. I feel like shit too, because I've spent more money than I care to talk about on Nero 9 and Sony DVD Architect 4.5 and yet the free Windows DVD Maker program does exactly what I want for free. Oh well, you live, you learn, right?

Time to start burning the DVD. I'll update later with how this experiment turned out.

bgivnin @ 2009-08-07T23:19:00

2009-08-08T06:29:19Z

I finally got all the episodes of Haunted and I started the daunting task of burning them all to DVD. The first two discs went absolutely perfect, but the next disc has been giving me nothing but issues in Sony DVD Architect 4.5d. Every time I try and save the project, it crashes. If I try to just prepare the project to a folder or burn a DVD straight off, it crashes with an "unspecified error". There's nothing on the Support page about this and I have the latest version of the software. I already uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled and tried again with no avail... I'm stumped. I sent in a Support request, but I highly doubt they'll be of any help.

It's days like this where I want to reinstall Vista and start from scratch, but there's no guarantees that'll help either. On top of that, Windows 7 will be out in 2 months and I'll be upgrading to that anyway and starting with a clean slate. Until then, though, I guess I just have to deal with this crap.

At least I've got the episodes on my PC (and I'm backing them up on my external drive just in case) so I can watch them whenever I want. My bigger problem is I can't seem to burn ANYTHING to disc and that's frustrating. Nero is also causing me problems and Nero never responded to my support request, so they can eat it.

Curious enough, I tried preparing one movie file to a disc and it worked fine, so maybe the error is that the software is reporting a wrong disc size amount and crapping out. After this one project is done I'll try another Haunted disc with only 2 episodes and see if that helps at all.

bgivnin @ 2009-08-05T19:38:00

2009-08-06T02:40:07Z

It looks like SciFi (sorry, I won't call it their new branding) didn't air the first 3 episodes (Pilot, Grievous Angels or Fidelity) of Haunted, so I'll have to find them elsewhere. Bummer.

bgivnin @ 2009-08-05T17:49:00

2009-08-06T00:50:48Z

Haha! Yes! TiVo recorded all the episodes of Haunted, so now I spend the night copying them to my PC and putting them on DVD! Woot!

Haunted

2009-08-05T14:34:29Z

Set your Tivo's, HTPC's or VCR's... SciFi is replaying Haunted today, the short lived supernatural drama from UPN that follows private detective Frank Taylor (Matthew Fox, of LOST fame), who is given a unique insight into cases after a near-death accident leaves him with the ability to communicate with spirits from beyond the grave.

I watched one episode in Vegas back in January and loved it, but it wasn't until now that I could Tivo the whole series. 7 episodes aired before the show was pulled and there are no plans for a DVD release, so I'm recording them all. I'll show 'em. :P