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September 3rd, 2009

10:25 pm - TF2 You know, I find it interesting that people are freaking out about how recent actions taken by Valve against people who decided to 'game the system' to get unlockables faster. I've seen some posts where people claim that they didn't know that it was against the rules/EULA or that they shouldn't have been called 'Cheaters' and such and that they are going to boycott/uninstall the game. These people have no ground to stand on. When did they think that using a utility to 'beat the system' to get the unlockables in the game wouldn't be considered a cheat? It's not like this hasn't happened before more than once. Meanwhile, I'll go enjoy my Halo. ^ ^ Current Mood: amused

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August 17th, 2009

08:15 pm - ... damn it So last night I got my camera out to take a quick picture of my desk and discovered something. The auto-focus on my 18~55mm kit lens isn't working. The lens itself appears to work fine except for the auto-focus. When trying to have the camera auto-focus nothing happens. No clicking, no grinding or vibration. Nothing. It acts like it's in manual mode (though it won't take an exposure because it doesn't think it is in focus yet, but will just fine if I switch to manual). I tested with my 55~200mm zoom lense and that lens will focus just fine. It's most likely a problem with the motor or with the signal contacts around the mounting ring. I checked them and the contacts don't look dirty or anything so whatever it is is something internal. This is rather sudden and quite irritating. I volunteered to do some photo shooting tomorrow at the company picnic which I can still do with manual focus (or just use the 55~200). I did some research and talked with a couple friends and I think I've decided what I'm going to do. The kit lens is a really cheap lens (less than $120 new, so really not that worth repairing unles it is a dirt cheap repair) and I've always kinda wanted a better multi-purpose lens. After doing some reading I think I'm going to end up getting Nikon's 18~105mm DX lens. Based on reviews and testing of the lens combined with the price comparison to other similar lenses (it is about $340 instead which will make it my most expensive lens). The other options were either get the same cheap lens, another similar lens that didn't have the VR, one that was twice as much, or one that was twice as much as the one that was twice as much. Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robits, Pt. 1

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August 4th, 2009

11:37 pm - Acknowledgment While doing some ADR recording for Vital Force I found out from Jen that our 48hour film video is now on IMDb and that even though they are still trying to get things with the credits fixed (a number of people for some reason didn't get added in as credits properly including Jen who was the director). The uber cool thing though is that I now have an entry for myself on IMDb. :D Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: "Weird Al" Yankovic - CNR

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July 29th, 2009

08:09 pm - Awesome TF2 remix Current Mood: melted

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June 26th, 2009

08:42 pm - Seattle 48 Hour Film Project I helped participate in the 48 Hour Film Project in Seattle this year (last weekend) with some friends I knew from Project London. I helped doing some boom op as well as provide some of the sound effects for the post production. We won't find out until the 9th if we've won any awards. The idea behind the 48 hour film project is at the start of the project all teams are given a character with a brief background, line of dialog, and a prop that must be used in the production. Each team also draws a random genre to work in. Once you are given the information, you have 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit your film. For this year all the teams were given: Character: Kristy or Kyle Brown, Illustrator Prop: a tie Line of Dialogue: "Wrong. Guess again." And our team drew the genre Horror/Suspense (which was awesome luck considering the location Jen our director/team lead managed to secure for us). Echoes from Adventure Star Pictures on Vimeo. Current Mood: amused

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June 18th, 2009

08:24 pm - The following is a tale of chance luck, woes, and triumph A number of weeks ago I purchased an old Biamp Columbia series 32+/488 mixer board. A friend of mine from work had been talking with a guy he knows down at the bar he helps out at and found the guy was trying to get rid of the board for a pittance of $250. That's $250 for a 32 channel 8 bus, 8 aux mixer board. It's older, but it looked in really good shape. I didn't really have an actual use for it, but for $250 I couldn't really pass it up. It took a long time for the guy to get something to transport the board with, but I finally was able to pick it up and brought it to the new apartment. It barely fit in the back of the car. I was expecting it to be about on par with the size of the Mackie 32ch 8bus board we used at school but it is actually about a foot wider and weighs about 115lb. But nonetheless, it was mine and goobersotp came over and helped me get the board out of the car and into the apartment. When I first brought the board home I started off by just setting it on top of my PA speakers (for lack of anything better to put it on). I went out the next day and picked up a pair of saw horses to set the board and things we're going pretty good. I spent the next week or so testing out the inputs, channel faders and repairing a couple loose BNC lamp connectors and re-soldering the RCA jacks on the one stereo input channel. While doing my various testing of the inputs I was making use of the tape outputs to run into my old receiver which was hooked up to the PA speakers since the receiver only had RCA inputs and all the outputs on the board are on XLR connectors except the tape outputs. Finally I decided to go ahead and test the main outputs on the board. As I mentioned, all the outputs on the board are on XLR connectors which is all well and good, but I don't have many XLR-> 1/4" adapters so in order to test the main outputs I figured I would just test the outputs by running the outputs into one of the mic inputs on my small Mackie board and just leave the gain turned all the way down. It was just going to be for doing some quick testing. I hooked up the Biamp to the Mackie while I had my iphone playing some music on the sterep input of the board. The first channel wasn't putting out any sound but I was not really surprised by this as the board was $250, pretty old, and it wouldn't surprise me if there was some major issues with it. I went ahead and plugged the cable into another output to test the next, this too was not putting out any sound. I ended up testing 4 of the 5 balanced main outputs (Main L/R/M, Aux L/R). A couple of them were getting sound out, but still sounded a bit odd. It was about this time that I smelled smoke. ( and made a mad dash for the power switch on the power supply ) Overall, this was a pretty crappy experience. New 32 channel 8bus/aux mixers run $3,000~$6,000. Granted the Biamp is pretty old (the dates on the PCB's were 1990) but it's in startlingly good condition. For as crappy as the experience was, I'd say I've learned quite a bit about troubleshooting and repairing (relatively) simple circuits. I also learned that just because you haven't turned on the phantom power on a mixer in over 6 months, check it anyways before plugging anything in. As near as I can tell it must have gotten accidentally switched on when I had to move the board out a while back. Current Location: Lynnwood, WA Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: Upstanding Youth - Paint By Numbers

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May 19th, 2009

07:26 pm - Jumping on the bandwagon. Ganked from codexrau 1) Who are you? 2) Would you consider me a good acquaintance? Would you like to know me better? 3) When and how did we meet? 4) Would you buy me a drink? What kind? 5) Give me a nickname and explain why. 6) Describe me in three words or less 7) What was your first impression of me? 8) Do you still think the same? 9) What reminds you of me? What do I remind you of? 10) If you could give me anything, what would it be? 11) How well do you know me? 12) Would you like to know all this if I were to fill out this questionnaire about you? 13) Would you meet up with me? Current Music: Johnny Cash - Hurt

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May 1st, 2009

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March 1st, 2009

06:33 pm - Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow... So I've finally gotten around to doing some cleaning in my room. I've managed to get most of the floor done and I went through and got rid of a ton of stuff out of my closet. Oh... and I finally finished unpacking from FC... Current Mood: amused

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February 25th, 2009

09:55 pm - Amp Modification Project So with having problems with my old receiver, and having just gotten a pair of PA speakers I picked up a 100watt PA amp over the weekend off Craigslist. It's an old Radio Shack MPA-200 and it actually sounds pretty good. It has 2 sets of Banana Plug/Binding posts so you can swap between sets of speakers, or run all 4 at once. One of the things I wanted to do was to replace one of the sets of binding posts with 1/4" TS jacks so I can use the speaker cables I had made up a while back out of the amp without having to concoct any kind of adapter. The second thing I wanted to do was to replace the power cable. The one it has was non-detachable and ungrounded. I planned to replace it with a jack to use a standard power cord (like what PCs use). ( Photos of the process behind the cut ) So once it was all said and done I plugged it in to do a smoke test and it passed. Then I hooked up the PA speakers and tested it and it worked just fine. Current Mood: accomplished

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January 31st, 2009

06:29 pm - Pain in the ass. Well, I went down to Circuit City over in Lynnwood to see if their discount structure has changed yet. I was looking at a camera lense (a Nikon 24~120mm f3.5~5.6 with VR) until I found that their 30% off took it down to be on-par with what you could order it for online. I did end up picking up an amp installation kit thing (for the cables). I've been wanting to replace the amp I have for my sub in my car for a while now (The current amp I had was maybe 200watt peak pushing a sub that was rated for somewhere around 400~450 RMS, 800~900 peak). I also found a pretty cheap 800watt amp that I ended up picking up (it's a Sony, so not my first choice of brand but it's better than what I had). ( And more photo thumbnails and rambling ) Current Music: Zombie Nation - Kernfraft 400 (Sport Chant Stadium Remix)

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January 27th, 2009

11:47 pm - FC Photos Just finished sorting through all my photos from FC. Here they are: Masquerade (188) FNL (201) Parade (163) Critter Olympics (326) Wandering Photos (85) Dance - Friday (25) Dance - Saturday (105) Dance - Sunday (96) Laser Imaging (after parade/group photo shoot, 28) Hawaiian Dance (83) I'm still doing some final tweaking so some photos may end up being moved to a different part within the FC gallery (mostly to clean up the Critter Olympics gallery and move some stuff to the Wandering Photos). When I have a chance I'll also probably go through the stuff from the parade to lighten them up a little bit. And now to watch my DSL connection melt... Current Mood: amused

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January 20th, 2009

06:55 pm - Spawned from Skype conversations. We were chatting on Skype tonight and we got to talking about crap that our respective towns/areas have. I think I won the conversation when I pointed this out on Google Maps: As you can see on the left, we have Monroe High School where I graduated from. On the right we have part of Twin Rivers Correctional Facility. See for yourself! Current Music: Ghoti Hook - Walking On Sunshine

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December 17th, 2008

12:04 pm - Brilliant Current Mood: amused

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December 16th, 2008

09:26 pm - It's about time. Finally somebody explains what the hell they're saying. New favorite word: Fisticuffs Current Mood: amused

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December 3rd, 2008

01:13 pm - I don't think Craigslist was meant for this... http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/wan/943689788.html Current Mood: amused

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October 25th, 2008

06:43 pm - Keeping watch So after the raccoon incident the other day I decided to try out ZoneMinder and setting up a surveillance camera. I started out with an ancient capture card I had and one camera. I've since replaced the capture card with a 4 input card and have 3 cameras hooked up to it. Since doing so I've managed to capture some animals wandering around. I caught a Deer today using the new card, last week I caught the raccoon (though using the old card I was only capturing at 384x288). http://zm.foxwire.org/events/5/745/Deer-r1-s1.mpg http://zm.foxwire.org/events/4/496/Squirrel-r1-s1.mpg http://zm.foxwire.org/events/4/66/Raccoon-r1-s1.mpg I've also gotten some cats on video (mostly ours). I'm hoping the Raccoon will come back. It hasn't come around (or at least hasn't tripped the motion detection) since the first video I got). I've moved the camera to a better position to capture video over the water thing (see the Squirrel video). On Friday Troy got to drive his clown car to work and we ended up at lunch at the same time so I got to ride in the clown car! :D It's a classic Austin Mini (not one of the new BMW MINIs. I don't recall what year it is, but I can fit into it and talking with him it gets like 40+mpg which is pretty awesome. At some point I wanna try driving it. Oh god... I just realized I unconsciously used the proper OEM capitalization for the BMW MINI... BMW's pretty anal about that. Kinda like how HUMMER has to be in all caps too... Current Mood: amused

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October 24th, 2008

12:39 pm - WANT http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/63943 It's made out of freaking LEGOS

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October 12th, 2008

12:43 am - Fuzzy intruder I was just getting ready to go to sleep and when I got up from my chair I heard something outside my window (which was open a ways). I looked out the window and saw this guy messing around in the water feature thing we have outside my window. I grabbed my camera and took some pictures. It didn't seem to really care about the flash on the camera (I don't have a window screen in the window at the moment, I broke it when I put in my window A/C for the summer, I just took it out recently and haven't replaced it).

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October 2nd, 2008

09:14 pm - Music of win. If you have iTunes (not sure if it's on Zune) go and get the album "It's Casual" from The Blue Collars. It's made of copious amounts of Ska flavored win. Good luck finding it anywhere else though (if you do find it somewhere else where you can get a physical CD of it let me know). Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: The Blue Collars - Mazel Tov Cocktail

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