Buying a DVD player

Posted by rae in hardware
at 8:42 pm on Wednesday, 30 July 2003

Well, we’re in the market for a DVD player. My Mom wants ours and we’re going to buy ourselves a new one in the process. Features I’m looking for include:

If anyone has brands they recommend for or against, please post a comment! Thanks.

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David likes Wil

Posted by rae in friends
at 7:55 pm on Tuesday, 29 July 2003

David Barker** recently wrote about Wil Wheaton and his recent foray into audio blogs. It’s a cool service — you get to phone in and dictate up to two minutes of audio (Wil gets to go over that limit .. for some promotional reason, I’m sure) and it’s automatically posted to a blog for you. Excellent idea.

It’s an interesting bit of syncronicity that I had downloaded a bunch of Wil’s audblogs (maybe all of them, I’m not sure) onto my iPod just before leaving for Wasaga last week. It was a kick in the pants when the last one was Wil dictating that he had just reached a huge turning point in his life and wanted to remember the moment, even though he couldn’t say exactly what it was that happened. D’oh! Talk about frustration! Geez.

When I got back and checked, the only thing he had mentioned was his role in a new (very dark take on) Peter Pan movie. I don’t think that was it. Anyone else know? Ah well.

** I can’t just call him David, or even “David B” because there’s also David Brake who even shares a whole bunch of the letters in the last name!

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Waaaa-saaaaaa-gaaaaaa

Posted by rae in family
at 7:39 pm on Tuesday, 29 July 2003

sand
3 gorgeous women in front of the cottage

Side note:
Just before leaving Toronto, I had copied my Mac OS 9 folder from my G4 onto the iMac. When I tried to boot my iMac, it was looking for a partition named “Home”, which just happens to be the name of the partition on which the Mac OS 9 folder lives on my G4. Weeeeird.
Okay, I’ve put up all of our Wasaga pics from last week.

There would have been more, but the iMac I brought up refused to boot, so I had nowhere to dump pictures from the camera!

Overall, the weather was better than expected. When we left there were forecasts of rain until Wednesday (we were there Saturday to Saturday), however we only experienced rain at night and once it was spitting in the early afternoon and went away. It was funny, because we could see Collingwood across the bay, and could see it was raining heavily. There was a clear line in the sky, with rain clouds to the south and clear blue sky to the north. We were under the blue sky part, and enjoyed a sunny day at the beach. This kind of thing seems to happen often. It’s like there’s a no-rain-allowed barrier around Allenwood (where we were, just a few minutes north of Wasaga).

Although we had plenty of sun, it was a bit cool. Luisa and I definitely have different “comfort zones”, with mine being both cooler and drier than hers. Wasaga was at the lower limits of my comfort zone, and completely outside Luisa’s. I would go swimming in the lake while Luisa sat on the beach with a sweater and a blanket. Fortunately the kids seem to be closer to my comfort zone than Luisa’s, since they were swimming as well. Must be that Mediterranean blood.

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Time spent driving is wasted time

Posted by rae in Reid
at 5:25 pm on Monday, 28 July 2003

I was just reading a posting of Harald’s and thought I would spit out my opinion about driving.

I know some people who really enjoy driving. Jeff K has gone on immense car trips in the past for instance, and I think Iain enjoys puttering about (at high speed through stop signs of course). The only time I come anywhere near enjoying a drive is when I can put the cruise control on, with lots of room behind and in front of me.

When I drive, I tend to drive somewhat fast. Upon some self-reflection, I believe the reason I do this is that I feel that time spent driving is time wasted. I used to take the subway to work, and while riding the subway I could read a book. For that reason, I didn’t feel like I was completely wasting my time. If seating permitted, I could even sit with a laptop and type something. That was prett rare though (both for having a laptop and having seating, let alone both at the same time).

These days I tend to load up the iPod with some form of talk show or another (usually Sean King’s Your Mac Life or CBC’s Quirks and Quarks), reverting to music when that runs out. I think at some point I might try to get a car CD player that can play mp3 CDs. Even better, a DVD player that plays mp3 DVDs! Listening to an mp3 player while driving isn’t too easy; I tried buying an iRock, but that didn’t help.

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Live Action Ping-Pong, Matrix-style

Posted by rae in the Net
at 12:12 pm on Sunday, 27 July 2003

This link may not wrk too well for Mac users. But I’ve gotten mail from people who *have* made it work okay on a Mac. It’s a movie of what looks to be a Japanese TV show where two guys play ping-pong with Marix-like bullet-time effects.. in real time, with an audience. No computer or video effects are used, it’s a live performance, and really has to be seen to be believed. Incredible imagination was all it took.

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Back from Wasaga (2003 ed.)

Posted by rae in family
at 12:02 pm on Sunday, 27 July 2003

We’re back now. Much laundry to be washed and man is it humid. Weather was a lot better than expected. Only rained once, and was able to swim almost every day. I’ll be uploading pics as usual later on.

Btw, I have added links to browse my blog by MT “categories” on the left there. I have not yet looked into the styles, so you will get the bleak and in my opionion badly-designed and hard-to-read default Movable Type style for now.

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Slides galore

Posted by rae in family
at 2:04 pm on Friday, 18 July 2003

My Dad was a big one for taking pictures. However, he *always* used film for slides. At the time I thought it was silly not to get prints. His reply was that slides are higher quality and they last longer. Well, seems like he was right.


Me at Expo 1967

I tried out an Epson “Perfection 1660 Pro” scanner, using the slide adapter it comes with, and the results were pretty good! I basically grabbed some random slides I had in the basement and tried scanning them. These are the results.


Me again at Expo 1967

I went to Expo ‘67 in Montreal with my family, and although my Dad mostly took pictures of the buildings there (he was an architect, after all), there are actually a few pictures of people. When Luisa and I go through my Dad’s slides, I usually end up tossing a bunch of shots of buildings that I don’t recognize. I mentioned this to Iain, and when I told him I threw out a bunch of shots of Le Courbousier’s chapel in Ronchamp, I think he wanted to throttle me!


Penguins at Expo ‘67 — note reversed text on sign

Ya, I seem to have scanned them all backwards. Sorry about that. On the other hand, I look forward to scanning more slides over the next long while (there are literally hundres, if not thousands of slides to go through). Many of the slides are shots my parents took in Europe while on a backpacking tour in the late 1950’s. I’ll let you know when they’re up. They will show up under “family” on pics.tnir.org.

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Italian for beginners

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 8:44 am on Wednesday, 16 July 2003

Luisa and I watched Italian for Beginners last night, which is a Danish film with English subtitles. Three things put me off the film right at the beginning: it was shot on video, it was shot hand-held, and the sound didn’t sound professionally recorded — it was almost as if *I* could have shot this film. I was complaining to Luisa about the movement of the camera, and how the scenes didn’t seem to be edited very well for the first half hour.

But then, somehow, it all started working. I’m not sure if it was the professionalisn of the actors that shone through, or if it was the power of the script — probably a combination of the two. By the end of the movie I was totally captivated, and loved the movie completely.

Two thumbs up — but be prepared for a bit of a jittery ride at first. :-)

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Kaarel’s 40th last night

Posted by rae in friends
at 11:54 am on Tuesday, 15 July 2003

Last night a bunch of us went to the Mandarin restaurant at Yonge & Eglinton to celebrate Kaarel’s 40th birthday.

Strangely enogh I don’t have much in the way of pictures of Kaarel, but I do have lots of shots of Ruth and Debbie! :-)

Oh well!

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Auto-backup of bookmarks

Posted by rae in software
at 10:58 am on Tuesday, 15 July 2003

I’ve been using a new feature of Apple’s iSync recently, and it is very, very cool. They’ve added the ability to synchronize your bookmarks for Safari, and I’ve set up my home and work machines to automatically synchronize every hour. This mean that when I get home, by the time I get on my Mac (after supper some time), all my bookmarks form work are there! This is soooo nice, and something I’ve been wishing for for a long time.

The negative thing is that this is tied in to the .Mac service, which is pretty expensive for what it does. I’m going to see if there’s some way to configure the setup to use your own server instead. Here’s hoping..

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