A Peculiar Blog

I a recent post I talked about a neighbor that carpeted his driveway as a way to deal with the ice that still covered it after he'd removed the snow. Well, it seems that I got to laughing so much about the whole mess that I forgot to include the punchline.

After all that work laying down two rows of carpeting all the way down the driveway it turns out that he could have saved the effort and just waited another day or two like the rest of us. He finished up all that and got in the car and that's when he found out that with all his "brains", he had forgotten to do some simple battery maintenance and the thing was as flat as they get.

Not only did it not start, it didn't even turn over. Not even a click from the solenoid or the most feeble glow from any of the dashboard lights.

I know it's not nice to laugh at others' misfortune and I don't mean it in an unkind way. It's just one of those things that struck me funny in an ironic sort of way. It's also not something I'm going to be telling him about.

Technorati Tags: battery, cold weather, irony, dead battery, plan ahead, humor

I know, I was just writing about a good possibility for a laptop not long ago but this HP Pavilion Laptop is one of those that I find hard to resist just because of it's hardware capabilities.

What are they?

There's loads of features like:

Intel Core i5-430M dual core processor

It runs at 2.26GHz and something called "Turbo Boost Technology" (does that make anyone else think of Knight Rider?) that jacks the clock speed up to 2.53 GHz

It comes with 4gb of RAM and can be expanded to 8gb of RAM.
320gb hard drive
Intel HD Graphics with up to 1696 Megs of video memory

It's just too powerful not to want it.

Given the obvious horsepower in terms of hardware I would even be willing to try out Windows 7 home premium since that's the OS that it comes with. Yeah, I know that the Home premium doesn't have the fabled "XP Mode" but if nothing else I could always set up a virtual machine on it running XP Pro and / or some flavor of Linux.

It's also cool that it's actually on sale as well. With a list price of $1036 that gets cut down to $699.95 after rebate, it gets even more attractive.

Of course, my main use for a powerhouse like that would be obvious... video editing, *Finally* being able to run programs like After Effects, Particle Illusion, DAZ 3D, and others that simply ask entirely too much of my current (and now obsolete) Athlon Sempron 2400+.

For video projects that use software I've already got the advantage is in cutting rendering times down drastically. With my current setup I have seen a seven minute video take as long as nine hours to render. With that workhorse, that same project could easily get done in a quarter of that time. That's worth it all by itself!!!

Technorati Tags: video, rendering, 3d modeling, animation, laptop, particle illusion, after effects

Last week we had a fairly severe winter storm. It started out with freezing rain and sleet which lasted for about eight hours or so in my area. After this it changed over to snow and that snow proceeded to fall for no less than twelve to fifteen hours. (I'm not exactly sure because it was snowing when I went to sleep and had stopped when I got up.)

The next morning everything looked beautiful the way things generally do after a snowstorm ('course it's only beautiful until you have to drive in it. Then it's just a mess.) That's when I looked down the street and saw a neighbor digging out his driveway so that he could get out when the roads were clear enough. What I saw however wasn't just your normal case of dude doing his thing with a shovel.

You see this guy, whom I'll call "Brains", had another one of his "brilliant" ideas. He had cleared the snow and was faced with the inch or so thick layer of ice that had formed underneath it before the snow fell. He had carpeted it.

Seriously, instead of doing a normal thing and spreading ice melt all over the thing like most people do, he had laid down throw rugs, carpet remnants and all sorts of similar things in two rows lined up with the tires on his car parked in the carport. In a way I can see what he was doing. He'd made a carpeted pathway for his tires all the way to the street which means that he'd be able to use the driveway without getting stuck or ending up spinning his tires and going nowhere.

In a way I suppose it's ingenious but still. That's also an awful lot of work and not everybody has enough carpet samples and throw rugs to get the job done.

I think I'll stick with using road salt.

Technorati Tags: winter storm, icy driveway, traction, dry path

I know that everybody talks to themselves. Not only that but most of us do it not because we're nuts but because we're just thinking out loud. It's a common enough way for people to work things out and solve problems or refine ideas. It's just that generally speaking, most of us do it alone and don't go telling people about it and if I was ever *really* going to suddenly be speaking to myself face to face like in some of my recent videos I hope that I'd have just signed up for a guarantee issue life insurance policy because something like that happening for real could shock the daylights right out of you.

I was doing something like that, brainstorming new ideas for what I was going to do in my vlog, Equals Pi when it occurred to me that it had been a while since I'd done a cooking video and that I really wanted to do another one. It didn't take too long for me to stop short and realize that I had been nagging myself!

A few seconds later, I had the idea to use this as another "talking to my self" video like the one that I'd done with the "genius". Something that I originally did because I wanted to use a video editing trick called "cloning" in something besides a test video that nobody would ever see.

Since then the whole idea has taken on a life of it's own.

Technorati Tags: exercise, equals pi, personality, talking to yourself, funny, thinking out loud, humor, comedy, multiple, vlog, insistent cook, exersise bike

Ok, I don't suppose that anybody ever made a profit from talking to themselves, though I could be wrong, who knows?

Anyway. I recently mentioned a series of videos that I have been doing that is basically a "what if" scenario in which the concept of talking to yourself becomes quite literal. It's a fun idea and I think there's going to be a LOT more of these videos (and in the future they are going to be separate from the vlogs as opposed to being part of them.)

This is the first of these videos that I did. The sketch itself was short but has launched something that is turning out to be far bigger than I originally thought.

Technorati Tags: idea, fred voice, brilliant idea, fred, vlog, great idea, equals pi, thinking out loud, thinking, fred impersonation, bad idea, fred parody