the weBLog
Thursday, October 02, 2003
Today in Review
Today, I woke up to my mom's calling of my name; I had slept through 30 minutes if two alarms going off. Curse going to bed at 3:00 am! At work I was in a zombie state most of the morning. Time seemed to fly by, which was nice, and fortunately breakfast was pretty slow.
Erica and April noticed how out of it I was and invited me on a trip to Best Buy during break. I ended up getting U2's Best of 1990-2000, a CD that I have yet to encode into mp3, but I figure it can wait until the three movies are done. It was good to get out of the Bellevue Club. Lunch was fairly busy, but we managed without too many hiccups.
I came home and crashed, from about 5 to 9. Had dinner - halibut and potatoes, finished up some laundry (I have four shirts for work, and since I tend to go thorugh one a day, I end up doing laundry at least once a week.) I played a little bit of CounterStrike on a server without too many people. As always, I owned after I got a colt, went 1-3 beforehand and ended up 7-4 after I got the colt and before I got bored.
During the CS game, I was getting major packet loss and intermittent connectin problems, so I checked my newly-purchased-from-a-friend cantenna sticking out the window in my brother's room aimed at my neihbors. It wasn't quite on target, which explains the connection problems. I reaimed the cantanna and things are working fine again. By the way, this is the method in which I am getting broadband internet access. I plan on talking to the neihbors about it at some point, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Speaking of which, I recently put a Senao/Engenius 200mW 802.11b PCMCIA card into my WET-11. The swap was remarkably simple, and the difference is quite dramatic. The connection is now much stronger and orientation doesn't see to matter as much. Thats what more than twice the power and better recieve sensitivity does.
Today, I woke up to my mom's calling of my name; I had slept through 30 minutes if two alarms going off. Curse going to bed at 3:00 am! At work I was in a zombie state most of the morning. Time seemed to fly by, which was nice, and fortunately breakfast was pretty slow.
Erica and April noticed how out of it I was and invited me on a trip to Best Buy during break. I ended up getting U2's Best of 1990-2000, a CD that I have yet to encode into mp3, but I figure it can wait until the three movies are done. It was good to get out of the Bellevue Club. Lunch was fairly busy, but we managed without too many hiccups.
I came home and crashed, from about 5 to 9. Had dinner - halibut and potatoes, finished up some laundry (I have four shirts for work, and since I tend to go thorugh one a day, I end up doing laundry at least once a week.) I played a little bit of CounterStrike on a server without too many people. As always, I owned after I got a colt, went 1-3 beforehand and ended up 7-4 after I got the colt and before I got bored.
During the CS game, I was getting major packet loss and intermittent connectin problems, so I checked my newly-purchased-from-a-friend cantenna sticking out the window in my brother's room aimed at my neihbors. It wasn't quite on target, which explains the connection problems. I reaimed the cantanna and things are working fine again. By the way, this is the method in which I am getting broadband internet access. I plan on talking to the neihbors about it at some point, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Speaking of which, I recently put a Senao/Engenius 200mW 802.11b PCMCIA card into my WET-11. The swap was remarkably simple, and the difference is quite dramatic. The connection is now much stronger and orientation doesn't see to matter as much. Thats what more than twice the power and better recieve sensitivity does.
DivX fun
I picked up a second job at Blockbuster recently, which changed the economics of creating a large movie collection on my hard drive. Now I get five free rentals a week, and it suddenly seems quite possible to amass quite a collection of movies for future playback in a few short months. Since it has been a while since I tinkered with DVD ripping, I decided to read up and find out what, if anything was new.
A good-looking upcoming codec is Theora, an enhanced version of ON2's open source VP3 project. However, Theora is still in the Alpha-stage and as such it may change before beta, making movies encoded unplayable in the future. There is, of course, DivX - but recentl, DivX started charging for all of their products, and it is a proprietary format. However, it is a proven technology, and so I decided to give it a shot on three movies - Starship Troopers, Gattaca, and Enemy of the State. All three movies are ripped and currently encoding, ETA 3-5 hours in single pass DivX 5.02 at 780kpbs. The 1000 frame test runs I ran to check audio sync and video quality appeared to have excellent video and audio quality.
Who knows, I may post movies on silverfir.net for good fun. I may even take requests. This could be good.
I picked up a second job at Blockbuster recently, which changed the economics of creating a large movie collection on my hard drive. Now I get five free rentals a week, and it suddenly seems quite possible to amass quite a collection of movies for future playback in a few short months. Since it has been a while since I tinkered with DVD ripping, I decided to read up and find out what, if anything was new.
A good-looking upcoming codec is Theora, an enhanced version of ON2's open source VP3 project. However, Theora is still in the Alpha-stage and as such it may change before beta, making movies encoded unplayable in the future. There is, of course, DivX - but recentl, DivX started charging for all of their products, and it is a proprietary format. However, it is a proven technology, and so I decided to give it a shot on three movies - Starship Troopers, Gattaca, and Enemy of the State. All three movies are ripped and currently encoding, ETA 3-5 hours in single pass DivX 5.02 at 780kpbs. The 1000 frame test runs I ran to check audio sync and video quality appeared to have excellent video and audio quality.
Who knows, I may post movies on silverfir.net for good fun. I may even take requests. This could be good.
Last night's adventure
While playing around with the web server I administer, silverfir.net, I accedently disabled the interenet connection at my friend's house where silverfir.net is located. Of course, this meant that I could no longer access anything remotely to try to fix it. Fortunately they have a wireless router. So at 11:00 last night I drove down to their house, forced association to their router, fixed the settings I had changed to break the thing in the first place, and left. I managed to do this all in about 20 minutes. I apologize to any neighbors who saw me lurking around outside my friend's hosue late at night with just a computer in my hands.
While playing around with the web server I administer, silverfir.net, I accedently disabled the interenet connection at my friend's house where silverfir.net is located. Of course, this meant that I could no longer access anything remotely to try to fix it. Fortunately they have a wireless router. So at 11:00 last night I drove down to their house, forced association to their router, fixed the settings I had changed to break the thing in the first place, and left. I managed to do this all in about 20 minutes. I apologize to any neighbors who saw me lurking around outside my friend's hosue late at night with just a computer in my hands.
I decided to start a blog, since I don't seem to be able to stay dedicated to writing in a journal. Perhaps the fact that my blog can be read by anyone in the world will motivate me to stay consistent.
A quick introduction to Arcanius:
I picked up the name "Arcanius" when I was twelve and was beginning dabble in computer networking. A game I was playing at the time, Master of Magic, had a world names "Arcanus." I added the "i" and thought it sounded cool. I have maintained the name ever since.
To learn anything else about me, you will just have to stay tuned.
A quick introduction to Arcanius:
I picked up the name "Arcanius" when I was twelve and was beginning dabble in computer networking. A game I was playing at the time, Master of Magic, had a world names "Arcanus." I added the "i" and thought it sounded cool. I have maintained the name ever since.
To learn anything else about me, you will just have to stay tuned.
