Contributors

Hey, Ted.

I’m looking under the Christmas tree at all the gifts there, and none of those boxes and awkward packages belong to me.
Even the dog has more presents under the tree than I do.

I’ve looked through everything I brought with me from moving to this house, and noticed that my old digital camera (1.3 megapixel, generic camera, and required a USB cable to move pictures back and forth) isn’t among the stuff that came with me. I was getting into digital photography, learning as I go along about what makes a good shot or not.

That’s a shot I took with my old camera.
I can only imagine how much better it’d have been with a new camera, especially one of those nice HP cameras with an LCD display on the back instead of trying to get the offset to line up on a classic piece of glass viewfinder.
We’re selling an HP camera at work (I forget the model), but it’s just not in the budget for me to get, sadly. It even supports SD cards, which makes it even better for extended shooting sessions, AND for short movie making, too.

The camera in my phone is only VGA quality, which means it’s not even a single megapixel for resolution. The shots this camera takes aren’t that good, with, or without decent lighting.

I won’t be able to have one of them by Christmas of this year, but that’s okay.
I just like being remembered for gifts and stuff, is all.
Please, PayPerPost, Please pimp my Christmas Tree!

This post is sponsored by HP.

@post@

Everyone seems to have this pressing need to make a [tag]reality television[/tag] show, be it cooking reality TV, competing on an island reality TV, or even [tag]business reality TV[/tag].

With this, I must say that Ted Murphy, and the guys at [tag]PayPerPost[/tag] decided to jump aboard with their own business reality TV show, and call it [tag]RockStartup[/tag]. It goes into what it takes to actually start up a business like what they run over in Central Florida, and shows that it’s not all about raising the money. You can see just how exhausted Ted is in the first episode (and how clumsy, it seems, with all that falling).

Looking at the site again (now that I’ve already watched the first two episodes), I’ve got this to say:
Ted, you look positively stoned in the picture they’re using for the header on the site. Did you fall over on your face after they took that shot?

It looks like Marty was clickin’ on the ones and twos there with that layout — it looks sharp, and like something I’d want to use on Unchain.US, whenever I get off my arse and design it. (I just want larger video windows for viewing episodes online.)

So, when’s the next episode, guys?

I was signing up earlier today to do some mystery shopping in my area, and on these applications, I noticed a couple of the companies were asking if I had any sort of hidden camera equipment. I’ve never looked for any, so I wasn’t entirely sure where to look. The last time I had thought about hidden cameras was back earlier this decade, when everyone was blocking those X-10 spy camera ads.

Coincidentally, my sponsors at Brick House Security happen to have an array of spy camera equipment, including a camera that looks like an old-school pager. This pager is compact, and easy to get away with — it makes you look important, like a doctor who is on-call, without blowing your cover, which is very important for mystery shopping.

Business owners would appreciate a camera that looks like a smoke detector. Trying to catch your employees goofing off, and know they won’t in front of a camera they see? This is the ultimate in ‘gotcha’ for them.

They also have a really cute Portable Video Recorder that doubles as a Media Player, making it great for shops that require you to take pictures of things in the store, or for travel-based mystery shops. Just dump a couple of episodes of Eureka Seven to a few SD cards, carry a spare SD card for taking your own video, and go-go-go.

(Also, you all now know what I want for Christmas. Get me that media player. :))

Seeing the Nintendo Wii launch this past week made me want to play some older Nintendo games again.

When I was a kid, my uncle had left us his NES, with two or three milk crates FULL of games for safe keeping while he traveled with his wife to Germany. Between me and Mom (Dad never wanted to touch the thing), we spent all day playing things like Duck Hunt (Mom’s favorite), Super Mario Bros., and The Adventures of Lolo.

Moving forward, my love of puzzle games grew, as well as light gun shooters to a lesser extent.
Tetris became my gaming crack while I was in middle and high school, and I fell in love with it as well as many offshoots and variants. When I had my own Nintendo 64, Tetrisphere was perhaps one of my absolute all time favorite games.

Then, I got on the Internet, and what I knew about Tetris was blown away by one thing:
Tetrinet.

Imagine a frantic six-way competition, fighting with cascading blocks.
Add in specials that can be targeted at a specific person to give them a disadvantage, or an advantage.

For a while, I was in deep love with Tetrinet.

It was a simple to play, easy to learn online playable game that works well even on Dial-up, which is what I was on a long time ago.

I still love Tetris, and its offspring, but it’s not so competetive there now.

So few people remember my old friend. ;(

@rev@
A few days ago, I ran across a (currently) free service, named tVadio.

What it is, essentially, is a form of On Demand videos, ranging from international television shows, to sports clips, to viral videos. I spent a couple of days just toying around with the application, to see how it handles.

The application takes a bit of time to load on my system:
OS: Windows 2000 Professional, Service Pack 4 (5.0 - 2195), Installed on: Sunday, September 24 2006
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (Thoroughbred) 1.99 GHz with 64 KB of L1 Cache, 256 KB of L2 Cache.
RAM Usage: 505/1024MB (49.32%), Swap File: 545/2463MB.
Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X on Monitor: Plug and Play | Resolution: 1280×960x32bpp 70Hz
Sound Card: Vinyl AC’97 Audio (WAVE)

When it loads, you’re greeted by the interface:

It’s fairly simple to navigate, though the number of channels available in tVadio at this time is fairly limited. Give them time.

Now, the application, while it’s easy to use… is actually a little “too easy”.
As a power user or administrator, I would love to be able to turn off the white and red title bar that stands out against the blue of a standard Windows install. It’s actually a bit irritating. Also, when watching a video, I don’t like being shut out of the media player’s options menu (accessed with a right-click on a video in normal cases), as sometimes, I’d like to kick a video up to 200% of its size, for when I want to watch videos, and chat at the same time. The smaller size is fine when I have too much on screen, but I just want to access WMP’s menu to kick it up a size, without having to go full size.

Part of me wonders if tVadio would even work if I hadn’t installed Windows Media Player 9 recently.

I do have to give them some credit, though: They remembered to give a button to allow for Always on Top, for the video window.

I find myself generally watching Sumo TV, which is a viral video channel. The repeat ratio is fairly low, though I *am* getting sick of “Stealth Disco”. However, the fact that I get these viral videos without having to peruse “j00t00b”, and dig through masses of Naruto / other anime uploads is pretty nice.

I think, honestly, that my feelings on tVadio are… mixed. I like, and yet, I hate the simplicity.

@post@
So, Ted had us guessing on the PayPerPost forums on some of the big news they were holding back.
He pops in to tell us to have a look at the PayPerPost blog, as the answer to one of the clues was sitting right there for us.

The answer was in the confessional video for Tamale tonight. I had speculated that there would have been digital cameras involved in part of the news that we were guessing at, and this proves me right.

I can only hope that I can get one of those new cameras — all I have is the camera in my phone. While that’s fine for a random picture, it’s not all that hot. It’s only a VGA resolution cameraphone, which aggravates me. I miss my old digital camera, where I could do macro shots, and everything.

I wonder if that camera that she got earlier happens to take SD cards.

Either way, I’m happy for Tamale, who seems a whole lot happier in this confessional than she did in her first.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZppI7IHE_iA[/video]

@post@

So, as many of you are aware, I’ve been dealing with the word of mouth marketing company known as PayPerPost.

What I love the most about PayPerPost as of late is that they helped me with my mortgage. I currently pay way too much each month to keep a roof over my head, and I’ve been really short on my bills each month. In come my blog marketing heroes at PayPerPost to line my pockets.

For last month’s bills, I was in desperate need of money to pay my bills. The puzzle I won with PayPerPost in October ended up covering part of my needs adequately at the beginning of the month (and the rest was by my friends), which seriously took a lot of stress off me then.

Now all I need is more pay, so I can pay my bills without struggling so much.
But, until then, PayPerPost actually helps, by giving me money to eat when I’m at work, or put gas in my car, or…