Shaun wants to…

For Halloween me and E decided to be Axl and Slash. We had a ton of ideas before this one, and actually she came up with it, but other options we came up with were:

• Al and Peg Bundy
• The Burger King and Wendy of Wendy’s
• The Gatekeeper and Keymaster from Ghostbusters
• Will and Grace (I mentioned this in passing and we shot it down immediately)
• Each Other

I think we came up with more but I can’t remember them. We were using E’s red hair as the basis for our costumes if you couldn’t tell by the list. We did a lot of brainstorming and I’m very happy with what we decided. Here are some pics.

E and I decided to carve some pumpkins. It wasn’t my idea of course and no I wasn’t excited just a week ago to go paint pottery somewhere just because it was something different to do. We headed over to Pemberton Farms to pick out our soon to be carved masterpieces. The selection was a bit limited with most pumpkins being covered in some kind of crap but they placed them so the non crap covered side was showing. It was the equivalent of picking out a car but the car was parked in such a way that the dents and scratches weren’t showing. Anyway, we grabbed 2 which totaled 26 pounds of pumpkin and cost about 8 bucks a piece. We cut them open and saved the seeds for roasting, which we did the next day after buying some salt as I didn’t own any and always stole my old roommates for those 2 times when I actually needed it. All was grand with the pumpkin carving and here’s how they turned out. Mine is on the left, E’s on the right.

This morning was one of those mornings where the only happiness I had was when my eyes were closed and I was sleeping. A large contributor to that was the fact that I had a splitting headache, and still do 4 hours later. I thought it was from lack of coffee but even after having my usual grande caramel macchiato from “da bucks” it’s still there. The scene in my bed this morning is something like that of Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s day off.

thanks to ytmnd for the gif, for the full version with audio go here

The morning went something like this:

6:00 AM: Alarm didn’t go off since it was on mute. (I use my old LG V phone for my alarm clock)
8:34 AM: I woke up expecting it to be 6AM, but it was not. I had planned on running this morning, looks like I got out of that easily! Oh god my head hurts, work won’t need me until 10, I’ll sleep a little more.
9:21 AM: I woke up and the headache was worse.
10:14 AM: Ok I need to get out of bed and to work or email in sick. What should I do? Fall asleep? Ok good call.
10:34 AM: Ok I’m getting out of bed and going to work.
10:47 AM: Oh Starbucks coffee, please make this headache go away. Um I just got an 11AM meeting request and I’m a good 25min away from work, nice.
11:18 AM: Made it to the meeting late but hey, I made it. I answered some questions, saved the day and went back to my cube with my headache still with me making me wish I stayed home.

So it appears I can use the wordpress admin from my phone, very impressed. I guess I shouldn’t be since this thing can do just about everything else (except MMS of course). You never know with technology though. Now that I know this works it will make my 30 posts in 30 days easier I think. Holla!

#2 of 30

I see that my friend Silverwoman has created a new post on her blog with the title 30 Posts in 30 days. Well even though she didn’t exactly challenge me I’m going to jump aboard her ship and try to do this as well, starting today. So here you go folks, post 1 of 30. I’m guessing I do about 5 and then stop. My usual deterer is feeling like I have nothing that is post worthy so I’ll try to curb that thought by just posting stupid crap, even if it’s something as simple as “My Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is delicious today”. Hey that’s not bad, I might use that. I might also have to resort to either copying and pasting or manifying Silverwoman’s post of the day. I’ll play dirty, I don’t mind. 30 posts or BUST!

Here’s to having 30 posts in 30 days! Thanks Silverwoman!

(I’d link to her blog but it’s invitation only, she’s private)

I own a Microsoft Xbox. I have Microsoft Windows on my PC. You would think getting the 2 to talk to each other nicely would be easy but I went through many a night of encoding, decoding, configuring and going to bed defeated before finally getting this craptastic process to work.

Here’s a quick summary of what I went through. First off, having a not so legit copy of Windows XP was certainly not a good place to start. This meant I couldn’t use the Zune Software or Windows Media Player 11 to share anything to my Xbox. I tried installing Tversity using this guide but couldn’t get it to work. I’m guessing that the Spring Xbox Dashboard update broke something with it. This was annoying so I decided I’d try using the legit 64bit version of XP I got from a Microsoft conference a while back. At the time when I got it I don’t think service pack 2 was out yet so it ran like shit as well a lot of vendors not having 64 bit drivers for it. All in all it was still an annoying experience having to install 64bit versions of some programs but not others but it did run a lot better. Having a legit copy of windows would now let me share movies to my Xbox with Zune or Windows Media Player 11. No wait a second, there’s no 64 bit version of the Zune software so it’d have to be with WMP. What? You can’t share mpeg4 files through WMP but you can with Zune? Well that’s great. Way to go billion dollar company. It is pretty amazing that the company that makes the 64bit version of the OS doesn’t also make all their programs 64bit compatible. Not to mention that the 64bit version wasn’t making encoding to WMV format any easier. Clearly this 64 bit version of windows didn’t help me at all.

I went back to my 32bit, non-genuine version of windows with the hopes that I could at least encode a movie that would play on my Xbox. I eventually got SUPER to produce a file that played on my Xbox. To transfer the file to my xbox I used a 128meg USB flash drive I had. After a good week of dicking around with all this crap I finally got it working. Instead of using SUPER now I just made a batch file that uses ffmpeg directly and I bought a 4gig USB flash drive yesterday to handle those longer movies and so I could encode things to very high quality.

Copy the following to a batch file, changing the path to your ffmpeg, then drag and drop any video to it and it will produce an mpeg4 file that works with your xbox. I made it so the command will start with low priority so that you can still use your computer while it encodes too.

START "I'M IN UR PUTER, ENCODIN' UR MOOVEEZ" /LOW "C:Program FileseRightSoftSUPERffmpeg" -i %1 -vcodec mpeg4 -b 2048 -r 24 -acodec aac -ab 96 "c:%~n1.mp4"