The money just keeps rolling in from PayPerPost. Things are even better than I expected. I now have enough for the basic system and there is still a week to go. Of course, you don’t get paid until 30 days after you post, so the money I’m getting now is for posts made a month ago. Thanks to my foresight I am on track to meet my goal!
The US Wii website has a lot of new videos of people playing the Wii for the first time. It’s great stuff if you haven’t seen the system in action yet.
I haven’t had a chance to call around and see if any local retailers have playable Wii demos set up. This just happens to be an incredibly busy week for me with a lot of unforeseen deadlines to meet, so I won’t be able to check until Thursday or Friday. I have heard reports that some Gamestop locations around the country have set up Wii displays. I’ll have to go during the day when all the kids are still in school. Early reports say that Excite Truck may not be as much fun as it looks. We’ll just have to see about that.
At Church yesterday I heard some people talking about the Wii. It seems a lot of people still don’t even know that Nintendo is releasing a new system! Unbelievable! With the Release of the Wii in the US just two days after the far-more expensive PS3, Nintendo will soon be all over the news. Once the Wii launches no news story about the PS3 will fail to mention the also brand new Wii. Let’s hope the gameplay from the new Wiimotes is as revolutionary as the system’s original codename implies.
I can’t remember how old I was when I got my first telescope, but I remember how much I enjoyed it. It was a small red telescope that was mostly plastic. It was the spyglass style that you always see in the pirate movies. It didn’t have great magnification, but it was a fun toy, and it worked. I have only ever owned three telescopes in my life. The first was the red toy spyglass. The second one was a gift from my grandparents, and it was a lot nicer.
Shortly after receiving a telescope with a tripod and everything for Christmas my Grandfather and I took it out to the mountains that are home to the Palomar observatory. We didn’t drive all the way up to the observatory, but we stopped on the side of the road about halfway up. There we set up the telescope and did our best to find interesting things I’d never seen except in books or on TV. I was able to spot Venus and could even see that it had phases like the Moon. Those are memories I will cherish forever.
The third one I bought while I was a missionary in Germany. I don’t know what it was that drew me to it. It was another spyglass, but it looked nicer that my first one. It had an all-metal case and much greater magnification, too. We were riding our bikes around the rural area between Mühldorf and Altötting trying to find a bike path since we missed the train. The road was extremely narrow and dangerous to ride a bicycle on. We eventually got somewhat lost, and would have wasting a good amount of time had it not been for my spyglass. I was able to spot the important roadsigns from over a kilometer away and avoid traveling in the wrong direction. I became so known for my spyglass that the Sisters in our district gave me a little Kermit the Frog figure holding a yellow spyglass. They had drawn on my hairstyle and written my name on the base of the plastic toy stand.
Telescopes and binoculars make great gifts (Free UPS shipping on orders of $29.99 or more). People don’t often think of them until they could really use them and then forget about the after the time of need has passed. Do your friends and family a favor and get them a telescope and help them create memories, too.
I’ve seen it happen so many times, and I always feel bad when it does. Have you ever had a picture of a person where the background is in focus and the person is all blurry? There is a solution, and it’s called focal lock. It’s something that anyone who ever takes a picture with a camera should know about and how to do properly. It’s not a hard thing, but there are still many many people who don’t know about it. I hope the suffering in the world might be lessened by this post.
You know things are starting to get interesting when your wife tells you not to look at the order history at Amazon.com and when the UPS man starts ringing your doorbell when you aren’t expecting any packages. Today was the first time this year that a mystery package arrived at our door. I hope the box used for shipping is just being reused. It says it was sent by AG Lock and Hardware. The sticker on the box says it contains forty 1/6 bend PVC pipe fixtures. That doesn’t much sound like a Christmas gift. Maybe Krissy is taking a plumbing correspondence course I don’t know about.
How would you like to get paid for stuffing your face with pizza? The Postie Patrol is one way PayPerPost.com rewards its users. They pick a random active user and stop by their place. They give them a choice of tasks to complete for money. The person picks one and craziness ensues. You will see that they have a huge truck in the video. This truck is affectionately nicknamed the Blue Monster. The one in the video that challenges the postie is the founder of PayPer Post, ambulance Ted Murphy. Check it out!
What do you suppose is the hardest thing to reproduce on the big screen or in a TV show? Is it space scenes? I doubt it. They look pretty good to me for the most part except for the sound and the fact that you can’t really see a laser unless it is hitting something (think laser pointers… all you see is a dot). Is it water? Well, it’s challenging, but it usually looks believable. No, I’d have to say that, based solely on the observation of the final product, it would have to be: the personal computer.
You would think that it wouldn’t be too hard to make a computer look and act like a computer on screen. I don’t know about you, but when I bring up a webpage my computer doesn’t make any high-pitched jittery noises. Almost every show I see has the computer make a weird chirping noise every time the screen’s contents change. I think the sound guy just gets jealous or something that he has nothing to do when the computer screen is the only thing in the frame. He looks at it and thinks, “I could make this part so much cooler with this super high-speed cricket noise every time the screen’s contents change!”
My number two complaint is computer technology that doesn’t exists. The worst offender for this sort of thing is the classic blowing up and “enhancement” of a digital image. It gets blown up, the pixels get huge, and then someone says “let me enhance it” or something similar, and the picture magically becomes so clear that what was a giant 4 inch by 4 inch single colored block turns into a license plate with letters that are an eighth of an inch high and perfectly legible. It just creates this detail data out of nowhere. It makes no sense. It happens at least once in almost every crime show.
When will Hollywood realize that everyone uses computers every day and we can see that the computers in their shows don’t act anything like the computers on our desks. It really makes it hard to stay focused and suspend my disbelief when the computers are such horrible actors.
I’ve heard it from many places, and it makes sense. The US government gives away free money for all sorts of things that a lot of people don’t know about. There are a lot of websites out there that charge a fee to search for federal grants and loans. There is one resource that help people find federal grants and loans that doesn’t charge a thing, and that is FederalGrantsWire.com. Give them a try before you start any new project that requires money. You might be surprised when you qualify to have your project funded partially or in full by Uncle Sam!
The final hardware piece of the Dell Latitude c600 puzzle arrived in the mail today. I had started to get the basic parts set up with only 64 MB of RAM, but it just wasn’t enough to do much. Firefox took up so much memory that after 15 minutes of browsing the system was stuck paging memory continuously in and out of the swap partition. This made the whole system utterly unusable and usually resulted in one or more processes crashing with out of memory errors. Today that all changed.
I opened up the mailbox to find a bunch of junk mail and one conspicuously poorly-packed package from the New England area. The homemade envelope was made out of what felt like brown grocery bag paper taped together at the ends. There was a tear in the paper and the green circuit board and some black chips were visible and exposed. I had read a negative comment from one individual who had bought RAM from the same seller I had on eBay. I guess his RAM worked, but he was upset at the packing materials used. There was a no DOA guarantee, so that was good enough for me. I popped open the back of the laptop and installed the new RAM sticks. It booted (which is a good sign) and everything seems to work perfectly!
I left the seller some glowing feedback and am now on my way to learning more about Arch Linux (the more I learn the more I like) and to tweaking this laptop. Browsing the web on this 700 MHz Pentium 3 feels just as fast as it did on the 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 Celeron (Dell Inspiron 1000) that Krissy is now using. This c600 has better support for hibernating, suspending, and sleeping which makes it more portable. It runs cooler, too. It tops out at 55 degrees C under normal circumstances, and I’ve seen it hit 58 degrees C when recompiling Xorg (but only briefly, and when one of the vents was obstructed by my knee). The Pentium 4 Celeron would run at between 52 and 55 degrees C under no load and would sometimes get up around 80 degrees C under heavy load. That makes for quite a toasty lap, let me tell you!
That’s two great deals now that I’ve gotten on eBay in the past two weeks!
Some companies and websites are very secretive about everything they do. Other companies have learned how to keep their users happy, and that’s through communication. PayPerPost has forums where users help each other out. You can discuss your favorite posts and ask questions about how things are run. Sometimes there are big announcements there and hints of things to come before they go live on the main site. I had a question about how some of the rules for posting work and I got three or four replies within just a few hours of posting. I love hanging out on the forums there because the people are nice and helpful and it gives me an insight into the company. Check out the PayPerPost Forums for yourself to see what I mean.
I’ve heard it from many places, and it makes sense. The US government gives away free money for all sorts of things that a lot of people don’t know about. There are a lot of websites out there that charge a fee to search for federal grants and loans. There is one resource that help people 