A Peculiar Blog

I've always thought that GPS systems in vehicles was a very two sided thing. On the one hand you have the convenience of having reliable navigational aids available on demand. There's no need for futzing around with often difficult to manage paper maps, they can locate your position to within a very close margin of error and most units these days can also provide some very sophisticated route planning along with step by step directions to make finding an unfamiliar location almost painless.

On the other hand the obvious downside is that they can also easily be made to keep records of your travels, routes, destinations, stops along with date and time stamps for everything. All it takes is a system such as OnStar to either misuse or allow that data to leak and you lose any hope of privacy concerning when and where you travel. In fact, OnStar type systems also have the ability to remotely monitor audio from withing your car and even disable the vehicle so that it won't start.

Now enter the government. It seems that federal fuel taxes are expected to be phased out by 2020, leaving an obvious gap in revenue. According to one article that I read, one option that is now under consideration is the idea of using a "by the mile" road tax to replace the current fuel tax system.

I can't help thinking that the government, who can't even seem to dredge up the sensibility to use discount faucets or cheap coffeepots and bathroom fixtures instead of spending two and three times (or LOTS more!) as retail value (can you say $14,000 toilet seat?) and has shown a growing tendency to track and monitor citizens (remember warrantless wiretaps and NSA email snooping?) will almost certainly use the GPS records that it ostensibly will use for calculating road tax bills and add it to it's growing thirst for "Total Information Awareness".

If you think that this sounds a bit extreme just think about the rate at which our privacy is slowly but surely being etched away and it won't sound so extreme. Big Brother is indeed watching you and not only that but he's becoming more of a voyeur by the second. It wouldn't be surprising at all to find out someday that new electronics (computers, TV's, cellphones, basically anything involving communications) are required to come equipped to permit government snooping and tracking of your activities with said device.

"Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to kill me." --Anonymous

Technorati Tags: gps tracking, travel records, surveillance, travel habits, road use tax, nsa, illegal surveillance, privacy, gasoline tax, domestic spying, email snoopng, warrantless wiretapping, federal fuel tax, gps, government snooping, illegal wiretapping, onstar

As some readers may know (especially if you read my other blog "I am not a hamster", not long ago I got a copy of CrazyTalk 5 standard edition. I've found it to be a great tool for making some interesting videos, more of which will be coming in the near future. It's an absolutely great tool for doing facial animation. That is, animating any face that you can feed it a picture of.

Recently I got an email from Reallusion that an upgrade to CrazyTalk 6 Pro is now possible. The downside is that the new version has much higher system requirements. While (for once!) the shortfall in my system isn't the video card, the new software want's a dual core cpu at 2.6 ghz or faster and all the RAM you can hand it, preferably 3gb or more.

So what I'm putting on my wishlist is not just the new version of the program but also a high end system that's capable of running it. Oh yeah, I did try the demo and it technically *does* run on my AMD Sempron 2400+ w/2gb Ram, but it does so at an agonizing crawl, taking minutes to do things that should only take a second to do.... and that's if I shut down every non-essential process before starting it.

In any event, that's not going to stop me from getting the most out of the version that I've got now. There are definitely some hopefully good, hopefully humorous videos planned for CrazyTalk 5 standard. As for the new version and a new machine to run it on, I've not given up on that just yet.

Technorati Tags: upgrade, crazytalk 5, facial animation, animation software, stuff I want, wishlist, new computer, crazytalk 6

You may recall that back in 2007 the Bush administration had plans to use spy satellites to look in on Americans from above using ultra high resolution cameras. And just to prove that the Obama administration is at least a few diet pills short of a weight loss plan, this program WAS included in The Obama administration's 2010 budget request.

Fortunately for the rest of us and our privacy, the program apparently never got off the ground and now the new head of Homeland Security has decided to cut those plans entirely.

I'd like to say that's the last we'll hear about such things but I seriously doubt that's true.

Technorati Tags: domestic spying, bush administration, obama administration, spy satellites, satellite surveillance

One of the things that I sincerely dislike about "advancing in years" is what's been happening to my vision in the last thirty years or so. You see, once upon a time my vision was easily corrected with a fairly mild and rather common lens prescription. That was then.

Over the years I have steadily become more and more nearsighted and I required stronger and stronger prescriptions to correct it to something close to 20/20. I think it was about six or seven years ago that I crossed the point where normal single vision glasses just were not enough any more and I started wearing bifocals.

It was an interesting change because for years I had heard about how people had such a hard time adjusting to them. Not so with me. Inside a week it was like I had been wearing them for years. I didn't even notice the line where the two lenses met anymore.

The nearsighted condition continued to worsen and the prescriptions got stronger and stronger. Up until two years ago I'd be getting a new prescription every year or so. Then the economy (both local and national) started changing and suddenly there was almost always something that was just ever so much more immediately important than getting back to the eye doctor again and of course, I don't know about you, but I've never heard of an eye doctor having a sale on examinations and glasses at ultra-deep discount fire sale prices. It'd be great if they would but I know that's just not gonna happen.

In the last six months or so I've noticed something I hadn't expecting. I have reached the point where the upper (distance focus) portion of my glasses is *almost* useless when it comes to things like reading a digital clock from across the room or being able to read any text that crawled across the tv screen.

It didn't take long for me to start using the close vision part of the bifocal to see things clearly as far as twenty feet away. Now things have progressed far enough that even that trick isn't working so good anymore. For example I've got a 17 inch monitor that sits about 18 inches in front of me and anymore I have trouble reading text on it more than half the time.

Obviously it's way past time for that new lens prescription but since I know for a fact that it's not going to happen for an undetermined amount of time I started looking at alternative fixes. I've already increased the type size windows uses as far as I'm willing to, reducing screen resolution is flatly out of the question. One idea I had involved a 23 inch Widescreen Monitor that I saw recently. Plop that sucker on my desk were my 17 inch unit is now and I'm pretty sure that would make for things being larger enough to get by for quite a while longer.

Yeah, I know, it's probably true that if it were possible to get the monitor then the eye exam and glasses would be a heck of a lot easier but you see, I really *WANT* that huge monitor and I'll fish around for any excuse to get it. ;-)

Technorati Tags: single vistion, nearsghtedness, glasses, new lenses, bifocals

It's been another one of those stormy couple of weeks around here. I'm not just talking about a lot of rain either. There's been some pretty serious severe thunderstorms pass through this area in the last two and a half to three weeks or so. For a while I was seeing monstrously large storm cells almost every time I had a look at the weather radar on intellicast.com.

Those storms not only dumped enough rain to make the ground soggy and mushy to walk on, quite a few of them have packed some considerable winds as well and anybody that didn't pull stuff out of the yard and into storage could wake up to find their favorite patio furniture covers having been blown into the next county. Then again, the patio furniture itself could have gone flying itself. It does seem to be over (for now anyways, wait till the first cold front hits this 90+ degree air here!).

Technorati Tags: storms, high winds, thunderstorms, severe thunderstorms

Y'know, I've wondered about Obama since I first heard of him making noises about running for president and now I'm more and more convinced that at the very least he's definitely a diet pill or six short of a weight loss program.. either that or his mother dropped him on his head, repeatedly, when he was young. It's also no question that he obviously thinks we're all idiots willing to believe his re-writing of history.

I'm talking about his recent speech at Cairo University. I just read about it on the Bobo Files and I don't have to go farther than the first three paragraphs to find something that bleeds away what little shred of respect I might have had for Obama.

Let me make this absolutely clear, I HATE people revising history to suit their own agenda.

Obama did just that in his speech. He managed to attribute things to the muslim world that they frankly had zilch to do with. Here's what the BoBo Files had to say about it:

Everything that he attributed to muslim culture actually is credited to other ancient cultures - medicine and tracking the spread of disease - that is ancient Greece. Hippocrates was one of the first to document what we now know as bacterial spread of disease. Algebra is attributed to ancient Greeks - and lastly - Arches - really? This great architectural accomplishment is attributed to ancient Romans. I guess Obama has never seen the aquaducts.

Like I said, I have had doubts about this man since I first heard of him and now those doubts are giving way to certainty, electing him to the highest office in the land was a mistake. I only hope now that it's one that we'll correct in the next election so that he'll be stopped before he does something irreversibly disastrous.

Then there is the question of his citizenship. The man has gone to unheard of extremes to keep his birth certificate out of the public eye. Why is that? Maybe he has something to hide? For more about this, check out this Online petition - Sign The Petition Against the Legitimacy of Obama's Citizenship.

In any case, we need that man OUT of office A.S.A.P.

Technorati Tags: not qualified, revisionist history, citizenship, speech, presidential suck up, muslims, obama

I've been playing more and more with video editing and learning how to do assorted special effects. I've even been trying to work on a script for a movie that uses as much of this stuff as I can just to show off a bit. One thing that's started to become an *issue* however is storage space.

You see, anybody that does any amount of work with video can tell you that it eats hard drive space like candy. I've got a 250gb drive and what with one project or another I recently had it to within 15gb of being completely full! I cured the problem this time by going back and deleting old projects and various interim video clips that aren't needed anymore but that's really only a temporary measure.

What I really need to do is get my ever growing collection of "stock footage", clips and pictures that I keep available to use in my videos, moved off of the hard drive. I've currently got several gigs of stuff and I'm adding to it all the time. Then there are finished projects that I'd like to keep so that I can refer to them in the future which means moving the entire project folder with all video clips, pictures and project files.

Moving all this to CD-ROM disks is out of the question, only 700mb per disk isn't nearly enough and for a growing number of them, even a single layer DVD isn't enough. The best answer is dual layer DVD's. The problem is that they've been notoriously hard to find. I've been to many a sale page looking for 'em.

Then recently I found a goldmine. A 2 Pack of 25 Memorex 8x Double Layer DVD+R disks and I'm thinking seriously that I ought to double-order that sucker while it's still available. Memorex has always been a great name in recordable media so quality isn't an issue.

Another reason why I'd actually like to get a hundred or more of these disks is that there's been plenty of times when I'd get a collection of video ready to burn to DVD only to find out that in order to do things the way I want to do them, I'd have to have a dual layer disk. This has caused me to have to trash my plans and what I wanted to do in order to fit something on a single layer disk. Besides, when it comes to using them for pure data storage, 8.5gb disks make important backups a breeze.

Now if only they'd make dual layer disks in a re-writeable version! (hey, I can dream can't I?)

Technorati Tags: video projects, longer movies, disk space, larger backups, video

What with one thing after another, it's been either really busy around here or I've been all but incapacitated because of tooth pain that leads to an instant migraine that leaves me sitting in the dark with heavy duty shades on to keep exposure to light down to an absolute minimum. Thankfully, at least this round of it seems to be winding down and I'm actually getting caught up on stuff.

Of course, now that I'm looking at some free time, I'm thinking that it's time for something I don't do nearly as much as I once did ... break out a game and do something that's way more enjoyable and unproductive like blasting zombies, aliens or whatever unsuspecting evil critter might be about.

The downside (you knew there had to be one right?) is that A, I don't actually have that many games to begin with and B, I've played the one's I have half to death (figuratively speaking). This means it's time to start hitting search engines and sale pages to see what I can come up with. It needed to be something that isn't asking for more CPU speed or graphics than my system can provide. More and more stuff these days is written with the idea that the user is going to have the hottest machine on the market and the absolute latest graphics card. Something that I find unrealistic in the extreme because that stuff can get expensive fast.

Thankfully it turned out that only a few minutes of looking around gave me an idea. A few years ago the Unreal series of games game out. As usual it required what at the time was state of the art gaming machine, 3d graphics card and so on. Well, they say time heals all wounds and in this case at least, it's true. My machine may not be state of the art, but it's worlds ahead of what was the average gaming machine back then. This means that the "Unreal Anthology" that I just found is now on the top of my "need to get this" list.

Because of the system requirements issue, I never actually played it back then when it and it's sequels were new. Although I did once have a copy of Wheel of Time which, though it's a totally different game, uses the Unreal game engine and I found it to have some amazing detail and playability was very good. The great thing about this anthology pack is that it appears to have not only Unreal, but all of the sequels / spinoffs as well. Not only am I looking forward to playing it, I'm also looking forward to getting into the editor and building my own maps.

Technorati Tags: gaming, unreal, unreal anthology, games, unreal tournament, unreal engine, wheel of time

If you have applied the "Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1" update, you may be surprised (and justifiably pissed) to find out that this update included a new extension being very quietly added to Firefox without your knowledge.

It's called the "Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant (ClickOnce) Firefox Extension" and according to Annoyances.org, it gives Firefox a vulnerability that has plagued IE from the start. An alleged "Feature" that allows websites to install software on your computer without your knowledge or consent.

As if there weren't enough problems with "drive by downloads"!

To add insult to injury, the boys in Redmond disabled the "uninstall" button on the extension and have apparently tried to make it very difficult to remove without screwing up your system. Fortunately, the folks at Annoyances.org have put together a very easy to follow set of instructions that guide you step by step through the process of removing the offending plugin. Click here for instructions to remove that extension.

Technorati Tags: evil plugin, unwanted plugin, drive by download, dot net update, uninstall plugin, annoyance, microsoft, firefox plugin

Something I've talked about in the past is the fact that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the writing on the wall. Microsoft & co. have made it clear that they're moving on, first with Vista and now with Seven. As much as I don't like the fact, sooner or later the XP Pro that I prefer to stick with instead of those increasingly nasty new versions of windows is going to end up far enough out of date that it not only won't run anything new but probably will reach a point where, like windows 95, it's no longer even a good idea to allow it on the net.

I originally had planned to set up my laptop with a vista / ubuntu dual boot and use that as a learning ground to become familiar enough with ubuntu so that when the time came I could just make the switch to linux on my desktop machines. However the laptop's hard drive failed and after spending time browsing sale pages I find that replacing it just isn't going to happen as soon as I'd like.

So, In the meantime, I've decided to take something of an old fashioned approach to learning the ins and outs of linux in general and Ubuntu in particular, a paperback book titled "A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux". It's a method that isn't used so much anymore these days what with e-books and video tutorials and such but it's still one that honestly works pretty good for me. As for having an e-book version, that might work ok for some but I prefer having a physical bound book... it's easier to put bookmarks in and use sticky notes and highlighters to make notes in it.

The main thing is that because I can see the end of windows operating systems coming (and trust me, Microsoft's days as the "Big dog" are all but over.), I'm planning to be ready and make the switch to linux as far ahead of time as I can. For once in my life I'm going to be in the leading pack on something like this instead of playing the "scramble to catch-up" game.

Technorati Tags: laptop hard drive, Sticky Notes, E Books, Dual Boot, Practical Guide, Reading A Book, Windows Operating Systems, Video Tutorials, Microsoft, Desktop Machines, laptop, Spending Time, Book, Paperback Book, Linux