Here is Where I Carry on about my Daily Life, and usually some stuff about Technology!
Someone said that my little puzzle-piece scavenger hunt was setting the bar too high when I proposed to Lauren.
Well, as far as I’m concerned this guy wins in that category.
That is freaky crazy amazing, and a retarded amount of work to go along with it.
But also very very cool.
A while back Lauren put a camera on her list of things she would like when we had the money, and a couple of weeks ago we decided to go ahead and get it.
So, we have taken some pictures of random things and stuck them on my website.
http://www.bencatlin.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=1454
We have some pictures of the final transformers afghan, some of us driving over the University Ave. overpass looking out over where the I-35W bridge was (I used to take that on and off-ramp every day when we lived on Como Ave., and if you came to visit at all when we lived there, you used it as well right after going over that bridge).
Finally, we round out with some pictures of friends and of the Simpson kids.
We need to pick up a bigger memory card, since these pictures maxed out the one that came with it, but other than that I’m very happy with this camera as a Point-and-Shoot ultra-compact. It is the Canon SD 850 IS. And, we’ve barely scratched the surface in the features and settings on this thing. It will probably take us a little while to figure it all out to get the most out of it in terms of our usage patterns.
excitedVery, very excited about Mario Kart for the Wii.
I’m wondering if the remote as a steering-wheel mechanic will enhance or detract from my general 3D Mario Kart Badassery.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=169996
There is a nice little preview to get your mouth watering if it wasn’t already from E3 this year when they announced it.
This was easily my favorite E3 announcement, and I barely paid any attention to anything else.
God Bless Nintendo in this thy month of Metroid.
Now, if I can only get Lauren to let me play Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. She has vetoed it thus far because she (rightly) criticizes the inability to save and quit playing at any time.
I actually found myself crying out “When LORD, WHEN!” many times when playing Metroid Prime 2 and wanting to just quit and save.
It literally took over an hour once just to make my way back to a save station from where I was, so we could leave.
Maybe 3 will improve this somehow. At any rate, it being the first really good looking FPS for the Wii, I think it will be nigh-impossible to pass it up.
Now that MythTV works (but alas, it still doesn’t output to my TV, and the HDTV signal is choppy as hell on the P3 1GHz machine), I am thinking beyond it to move my home to the next level.
For a while now I’ve talked about home automation, integrated with the computer network, available from the TV or computer. Something I thought MythTV could be extended to do.
Well, some other people have decided to not extend MythTV, but to build an over-arching program that controls MythTV, Asterisks PBX, some home automation stuff, and a bunch of other neat stuff.
It is called Linux MCE
(More details in this great video discussed here if you are interested)
I’m slowly building parts to work towards this, and here are the details on how.
( Parts list from a computer standpoint )
And there you have it, my next really big multi-year project. I’m just glad I know I can make the mythTV part work going into it.
scaredMy neighborhood is a weird mix. I really like that most of the time. But one of the things I don’t like is that pretty regularly someone at one of the houses / apartments south of us is regularly screaming at someone else (not every night, but it is pretty regular on the weekends)
Usually this doesn’t both us too much, but in the spring / summer / fall when it is nice out and we are sleeping with the windows open (I’m going as green as I can baby!) it is really annoying and usually wakes us up around 1 in the morning.
Well last night was no exception. At at about 1 to 2 am-ish someone started fighting / yelling ouside the apartment next door. Just when I got about annoyed enough to get up and call the cops the yelling stopped.
So then around 3:30-3:45am-ish I heard some people yelling and carrying on, but it was different. A guy was wailing, sobbing, and screaming about someone not being dead. Then I overhear someone sounding like they are on the phone giving the address of the apartment. That is when I got out of bed to see the cops turning off Lake St. and onto my street. About 4 or 5 squad cars come barreling down the street, one stops in front of the apartment building, two in front of my house, and another in front of a house south of the apartment.
Then the cops run out of the cars, break the glass to the window in the door to get in. Then the fire department comes with a truck, followed shortly after by the ambulance.
I don’t know what was going on, but it looked like the cops carried some kids out in blankets, and they were there (with their lights on outside my house) for quite a while. Eventually I fell back asleep because no one was yelling and the firetruck and ambulance left.
Then around 6am a couple of women start wailing, screaming things like “She wouldn’t kill herself, someone did this to her!” And I saw that there was a stretcher with no one on it being put into a station-wagon type of medical vehicle. A few cops were still around and one of them started talking to one of the women screaming to try to calm her down a little. I eventually fell back asleep again, and now the street looks pretty normal. No visible police tape, nothing weird at all.
First nice night outside in a long time, I sleep with my windows open to save some money, and my whole block goes crazy and it looks like one of my neighbors died.
Pretty freaky / crazy night. I tried to get up and find the camera to take a picture of the block, cuz the scene was pretty intense for a while. But then I thought the better of it, and left everything well enough alone.
