I don’t understand it, but I have such a hard time posting anything on facebook. I will see someones status and think of something clever/witty/unsightful to type but I just can’t seem to bring myself to post it. I find myself constantly typing out a reply, rereading it, changing things around, getting it just right and then just deleting it and moving on. Sometimes its because I only kind of know the people and don’t know if they will appreciate my contributions, or maybe I’ll come across as weird for commenting on whatever. The same works for status updates. I just have a hard time doing it, makes no sense to me.

My mind is usually filled with useless information that I find fascinating and that I just wait for the right conversation to come along so I can get my thoughts out there.  Most of the time that situation never comes up so I’m stuck with these thoughts in my head for months or sometimes year.  I need to post more stuff here so I figured I would just write about things that I find and hopefully that will clear some of the useless thoughts from creeping into my head.  More than likely though I will just wonder if anyone is reading my blog and if so hope that they find it as interesting as I do.

Lately I have been fascinated with aerodynamics.  A little while ago I read that there is actually an aerodynamic top speed to vehicles.  That means that no matter how big and powerful an engine you put in any type of vehicle there is a certain point at which it won’t be physically possible to go any faster.  At some point the vehicle just will not be able to move the air out of the way and if you have enough power, no matter how fast you are going, you will just spin the tires rather than go faster.  A good example of this is the Bugatti Veyron (My new favourite car):

The ‘standard’ version of this car has 1000hp and a top speed of 407kmh (253mph).  1000HP!  I know that there are cars out there that have that many horsepower but those are usually super tuned to the point of exploding and or limited to race tracks.  On what is probably the best TV show ever made, Top Gear, they managed to get a Veyron up to 408kmh (254mph).  That was on a closed track that is so flat and straight that you couldn’t see the end of it because of the curvature of the earth.  Now a few years later Bugatti made a Veyron Super Sport, which has 1200hp, yet it has a top speed of only 415kmh (258 mph), Top Gear got it up to 417kmh (259) and then the Bugatti test driver got it up to 431 kmh (267mph).  Not sure what the Bugatti test driver got with the regular Veyron.  At that extreme speed they needed to add an extra 200hp just to get it to go another 8kmh faster.  That is insane!  Now if you took the whole engine/powertrain out of that car and put it in another car of equal weight but had a straight front with no aerodynamics at all that car wouldn’t go anywhere near that fast no matter how long of a track you had.  If most people are like me they don’t/didn’t consider the air density to actually stop a car from accelerating.  Yeah I realized that it has a factor in how fast you accelerate, but I used to think  that given enough of a straight away you could get the same speed.

That’s all for now.  Hopefully I will keep updating more often as things pop into my head, but I’ve said that before and it never really seems to work.

Personally I don’t really care much for all this HD stuff.  Yeah the picture looks clearer and new movies look nicer when in HD, but really does it matter that much.  When DVDs first started coming out I was blown away by the picture quality.  I thought it was so great how clear it was and that you could pause the movie and it would still look crystal clear and that was just on a regular old tube TV.  Recently my old non-widescreen, non-hd projection TV died on me.  I really wanted to get a nice big LCD/Plasma tv but finances wouldn’t really allow it.  I did manage to get another projection TV used and for a good price, only this one is in widescreen and has 480 resolution, and from what I have seen that is good enough and better in some cases.

What really started to sully my thinking about HD was watching Terminator 3 on Blueray  No it wasn’t the fact that it was T3, which I actually enjoyed as a movie, it was the fact that when they were making that movie they weren’t making it for viewing in HD.  Yes while watching the movie it was incredibly clear helped by the fact that my friend who is for lack of a better term and HD whore has apparently one of the best TVs you can get for a reasonable price.  The whole time watching the movie though I couldn’t help but think that the movie just didn’t look like a movie.  To me it looked like how when you were watching a TV show and they go to Disneyland, how the picture just looked weird compared to the regular show, it just took me out of the whole thing.  Now I downloaded (heaven forbid) Avatar in HD and that looks amazing but that is because that movie was made for HD.  When I do eventually get and HD TV and from the looks of it a Blueray player you can guarantee I won’t be out there buying Ghostbusters on Blueray because there is absolutely no reason for that movie to be upgraded to 1080 or whatever, at that point it just starts looking like a home movie.  My friend (the HD whore) made the argument that now you can see movies how they were meant to be seen with HD.  I call bullshit on this.  The people making the movies are making them to be seen on the big screen with their limited resolution and motion blurring.  You take a movies like the Bourne franchise.  With all the quick camera work and “fight cam” stuff they did in those you can’t tell me that  with the quick movement and fast cuts they weren’t taking into account that when presented on the big screen it would look a lot more intense with blurring and the like.  I also watched a little of Beowulf on one of the HD channels that I get and it looked like crap.  Now that was partly how the movie was animated but it probably had to do with the filmmakers expecting some of the quality to degrade when it is watched in the theatre/home.  Now all that is changing with HD becoming more prevalent and with digital cameras but for movies made before these times DVD is probably better quality than is needed to get the best possible viewing experience.

Now to continue on the rant there is the whole video game aspect.  Remember (some of you probably won’t) when the thing that made video games look nice was what system you had, not what TV you had.  I do and it was a great time.  Now you have games that are capable of playing in certain resolutions but apparently if you don’t have the right TV then according to some people you aren’t getting the total experience.  There is even a group of people out there who are actually sitting there counting lines of pixels to see what resolution the game is being shown in.  Now if that isn’t sad enough there are people out there that are getting pissed off if a game is only running at 640p rather than the 720p that it should be in order to be a true HD game.  Really….REALLY…. come on people if someone hadn’t sat there and counted the lines would you have known.  Especially in video games where it really depends on the developer how good a game looks.  Whatever happened to just looking at a game to see if it looks good.  Now you have to look on the back of the box to see what resolution it runs in, and even then sometimes you need to look online to see if that is the true resolution or if whatever system you are playing the game on up converts it to play at the resolution.  It kind of makes me sad to see this.  People were/still are bitching that the Wii isn’t in HD.  When it came out I didn’t really care because I didn’t have an HD TV and I still don’t have one but I can now tell you that even if I did have an HD TV I still wouldn’t care because if it looks nice (and yes I believe that games that aren’t in HD can still looks nice) and is fun to play then it is a good game.

They just finally settled on 1080p being the standard so that us non early adapters can finally buy a new TV and not feel ripped off when the better one comes out next month.  Oh wait now they are coming out with 3D TVs.  I am all for the 3D TV but that is a whole other rant.

This is a very trivial thing but I can’t stand it when I look at peoples Ipods and it looks something like this:

AC/DC

acdc

Basement Jaxx

Beatsie Boys

Beastie Boys

the Beastie Boys

…and so on

It really doesn’t take that much to change the names of the artists in itunes so that you don’t have three or four different folders for the same artist.  I personally want all my Nine Inch Nails music to be easily found under Nine Inch Nails.  No search through different iterations of the name to find out which album is under which spelling of the band name.  It makes everything look so much better and it shows that you took that little extra time and effort.

Mind you sometimes I have to wonder why I do this.  I am in the process of fixing my itunes library (My computer crashed so I lost everything.  Luckily I found a way to copy the 40gigs of music from my ipod back to my computer and accidentally made itunes save the music again with the original titles.)  Right now I am going through KMFDM and they have around 40 cd’s (including singles not including some rare and unreleased tracks I managed to find) and it is a bit daunting to make sure all the tracks are in the right album folder and that they are all labeled as KMFDM as the artist,  but I’m going to truck along and in the end my Ipod play list will be nice and neat.

I’m probably the only one who actually cares about this.   I’ve only seen a few other peoples Ipods but none of them were all that neat (I’m looking at you Paul and Jason).

I was recently reminded the other day that I have a blog.  I haven’t posted anything here in a long time and when I realised that I also realised that I really don’t have anything new really to say.  Unless I can think of some sort of theme that keeps my interest longer than a week then maybe I will have fodder for this but with the way my brain works it’ll be a miracle if my attention is kept just writing this entry.

I would kind of like to keep writing more here but seeing that in the last few months roughly 2 people have even bothered to see if it’s been updated it is kind of discouraging.  Granted if I wrote more I would have more people stumbling across this blog accidentally artificially boosting my numbers but that all comes back to finding things to write about.

I guess we’ll see how things go now that my interest has been peaked slightly again.  Who knows there might be another post by the end of the day.

So, it’s finally becoming a reality.  NTT Communications has unveiled their latest exploit and it is a smelly cell phone.  That’s right they have developed smell-o-talking.  Not quit as impressive as smell-o-vision but you can guarantee that now that they have developed the smelly cell phone, they are just mere years away from smell-o-vision.  Of course it’s a Japanese company that developed this, those wacky Japanese, what will they not think of doing.  I think that they developed this cell phone because most Japanese people don’t have dogs (because of limited space) so they just needed something to blame their farts on.

“It wasn’t me, it was my cell phone!”

Hi Alfred.

    The other night I watched most of the AFI top 100 movies (10th anniversary).  I’ve decided to take it upon myself to watch all the movies on the list.  Between downloading, watching the few movies that I own that are on the list, and borrowing movies from others, I think I should be able to watch most of them.  The biggest problem will be finding some of  older movies, although seeing as they are apparently the best American movies the ones I won’t be able to find online, the video store should have them in stock.

I’m going to start at 100 and work my way up.  I’ve already downloaded Ben-Hur, now I just need to sit down and watch all 3 and a half hours.  I’ll try to post about most, if not all, of the movie that I watch.

New Post!!

    I was looking around the net the other day and noticed that someone had taken the casing off of their flash drive and put it inside a lego block.  I thought that this was a really cool idea and thought, hey, I have a flash drive, maybe I could do the same.  I took off the casing and right away noticed that it was way to big to fit into a normal sized lego brick.  I thought about what else would make a cool casing when it hit me.  I have a wack load of Hot Wheels, maybe I could cut one of those up and put the flash drive in there.  I borrowed my brothers Dremel, and went to work.  After about 2 hours of cutting, grinding, and melting this is what I came up with