One thing that frustrates me more than anything else is when things that should just work just don’t work.  Over the weekend I finally got around to trying to copy movies off of my digital camcorder.  I could not find the drivers CD—my guess is I threw it away mistaking it for the CD that came with my digital still camera.  But I figured that was no big deal, I could just go on the Sony website and download the drivers.  Wrong!  It only lists one “driver” for my camera, and that is an update to “Picture Package” software.  I don’t even think I want that; I can use Adobe Premier or even Windows Movie Maker to rip the video.  If I wanted to order the CD that came with the camera, Sony wants me to pay seventy dollars for it.  Further evidence that Sony doesn’t understand what money is.  Surprisingly, there is no ability to just download a driver so that my computer recognizes my camera.  I have tried both USB and Firewire, to little success.  There is a “USB Stream” mode, where you stream the video to the computer via USB 2.0.  This is sort of like ripping a CD by running the speaker output back into the microphone input.  I want to get the file that is stored on my tape (after all, this is a digital camcorder, the video is stored digitally on the tape).  Even if I wanted to compromise, USB Stream mode doesn’t even work for me.

So back on topic, from what I have read on the internet, using Firewire should just work, and I should only need the drivers CD to do USB Stream mode.  But when I hook the camera up to my computer, nothing happens.  Device manager doesn’t list anything under the IEEE 1394 (Firewire) connection.  There are a few more things I can try, like installing the drivers for a similar camera.  And I found out my computer at work has a Firewire port, so I can see if that computer recognizes the camera.  But I don’t have any other Firewire devices to check if the port on my computer is the problem.  This is really frustrating.

If you’ve not heard about Nintendo’s press event from a few weeks ago, they unveiled lots of details on one of the features of the Wii:  the Mii channel.  Check out this video if you want to see an example of what I’m talking about.  Stephanie was much more excited about this feature than I was, but it does seem kind of neat.  You’ll be able to store your Mii avatars in your Wiimote, and use them in some games (noticeably the launch title, Wii Sports).

Someone has gone out and put together a Flash application to simulate the Mii channel, based on the footage of the menus that have been seen so far (source article).  So Stephanie and I played around with it tonight.  You can see Kiip over on the right, and Stephanii just to your left.  Pretty cool huh?  Make your own Mii and post a link, we’ll see how close we can get.  It’s not quite as robust as the real one I’m sure (for example, it’s really tricky to position hair anywhere but the default location, and you almost indefinitely have to lower all the facial features).  But still fun to play around with.

FYI:  These were the reference photos we were kinda going off of: Kip, Stephanie.  You be the judge.

I know, I know, it has been way too long since I last posted anything on the site.  I’m sorry to all those who are just waiting to hear what is happening in my life lately.  Well, here’s the scoop...

Kip and I are officially an uncle and aunt respectfully!!  My older sister, Emily, gave birth to a bright-eyed baby girl on August 2nd!! Riley Paige was welcomed into the world by a very loving and happy family to meet her.  Though I haven’t seen her yet in person, and I can’t wait to do so at Thanksgiving, there are pictures of her online for those of you curious to see what she looks like.  She definitely looks like Emily as far as her hair goes (Emily was born with a full head of dark black hair, who’d have thought that she would be a total blonde).  Riley does have Dustin’s very distinct forehead though.  I think she is just so precious and I love her to pieces already!!!

I’m now officially the Nursery Coordinator at church.  I find it ironic that the only married lady without children in the church should be in charge of the ministry that takes care of all the babies in the church.  My duties (go ahead, laugh, I know you want to) include: organizing the schedule of who works in the nursery when, making sure there are enough snacks and diapers and whatnot in supply, and creating a working list of nursery policies to be followed while working in the nursery.  That last one I actually took on myself simply because to my knowledge there wasn’t one, and we weren’t exactly following the recommended policies to the full extent to which they covered.  The first job was the schedule, which I know you are thinking sounds really easy.  Well, it isn’t as easy as one might think.  You have to take into account who teaches Sunday school, who is scheduled to play the piano and organ during the church services, who teaches AWANA on Wednesdays, who has a preferred time slot that they like to work, who doesn’t want to serve a whole lot, and who loves to serve and wishes they were always in there.  I have to also make sure that people are getting into the services regularly to hear some good preaching.  It was kind of complicated to begin with, but I got the hang of it.  So I think as far as that goes I’m doing ok.  I do know that I have the full support of my husband, the pastor is behind the changes I’ve made (though he doesn’t want me to offend people with creating too many changes suddenly as people are often resistant to change), and the police officer and his family that attend our church.

Another big development at church is this years Christmas play.  I have been asked to direct the acting portion of the performance.  I am very excited about this, but also extremely nervous, as I have never actually directed before.  Those of you who know me already know that I am extremely dramatic, so it isn’t that much of a stretch to see me teaching other people how to be dramatic.  But still, it is a little different when you are acting in the performance as well.  That’s right, ladies and gentlemen.  I’m also acting in the play.  The lady I had cast as Mom, decided that she had too much to do this fall, which I respect as she is a school teacher with tests and papers to grade.  So the task fell to me to portray Mom in this year’s performance of “A Peanut Butter Christmas”.  We will be performing on December 17th, in the evening service, if you are interested in coming and watching.

I guess that gets everybody caught up on my life.  If you didn’t want to know all the cool things happening, well, then why did you read my post??  If you did want to know all the cool things happening, now you know, and knowing is half the battle!! :)

Stephanie and I went to see Jackass: Number Two over the weekend.  We were the only people in the theater, which I can’t remember ever happening before.  I guess there aren’t that many people who want to see Jackass at 10:40 on a Saturday morning (our movie theater has $4.00 movies before noon on Saturday, so that’s about the only time we go to movies).  So anyway, the movie was... about what you would expect.  If you liked Jackass, you’ll probably get a kick out of the movie.  I am not sure what compels normal, sane people to watch this movie.  The whole movie you’re saying “Idiots!” at the screen.  Oh and they upped the amount of nudity from the last movie.  Unfortunately, this is probably a bad thing for most of you, since it was all of the male variety.  If you haven’t heard about some of the things in the movie, let me run down a few of them.  There’s the part where Steve-O shoves a huge fish hook through his cheek and then goes swimming with hammerhead sharks.  And another part where he attaches a leech to his eyeball.  Come to think of it, most of the more disgusting things I’m describing involved Steve-O...  There is the “fart helmet”, which is kind of like an astronaut helmet attached to a tube, and I’ll leave it to your imagination how the other end of the tube is used.  But when it is used, he starts throwing up in this helmet, which is one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.  For a minute I was afraid I was going to throw up just from seeing and hearing this—I can’t remember any other movie ever having that effect on me.  There’s also an anaconda pit, where Johnny Knoxville and one of the other guys get repeatedly bitten by anacondas, by the end their arms are covered in blood.  On a lighter note, there was the medicine ball dodge ball—in a small, dark room, with something like seven guys and five medicine balls.  And there are lots of people getting attacked by bulls.

Well I left out a lot, and I’m not going to attempt to assign a numeric rating to this movie.  That would be pointless anyway—I think you already know if you’ll like it just from reading the title.

Today at work, I did absolutely nothing productive.  Now some of you might think, “Yeah, right.  It just feels like you did nothing productive.”  But, truly, I did absolutely nothing at work today.  Everything I touched turned into waste that I threw out at the end of the day.  So to pass the time of this interminably long day, I came up with an idea for the post that I am now making.  (And yes, I do realize that a similar question was posed on “The Office” in Season 2.)

If you were going to be stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life, and were allowed to take five movies with you, what would those movies be?  Ground rules being that any mode of movie is allowed be it VHS, DVD, reel-to-reel, etc, and compilations or multi-disc movies count as a single movie.

My personal TOP 5 (“High Fidelity” geeks are enjoying this) are as follows:

5:  Sahara
Matthew McConaughey...need I really say more?  However, I will humor you.  This movie is excellent in my opinion.  The relationship between McConaughey and Zahn (Al in the movie) is hilarious, and neither of them is bad to look at for two hours over and over again.

4:  Anne of Green Gables Box Set
Ok so there really isn’t a box set, but it is a movie divided into three parts (the last one being absolutely fictitious and not from the books), and I want all of them.  It’s my list, so I make the rules.  It is a wonderful story, and has sentimental value between Kip and myself.

3:  Legally Blonde
We all know that deep down inside, we all wish we were blonde.  The movie is so funny, and cute, and corny, and great that it has to be on everyone’s’ list.

2:  Pride and Prejudice  (The A&E version only, any other version is a sheer abomination.)
This movie is by far one of my favorites.  I love the book, and this is the most accurate adaptation I have ever seen.  The acting is phenomenal, the clothes are classic and accurate, and the actors themselves really fit the parts (can you say Colin Firth is Mr. Darcy).  The music is excellent as well.

And at the top of my list...

1:  Kip and Stephanie’s Honeymoon Video from Hawaii
If I’m going to be stranded on an island for the rest of my life without my husband there in person, I at least want to be able to see the two of us together while we were both very happy, in a beautiful location.  I would miss him too terribly to not have some part of him there with me.  I’m sure all of you are thinking that is the dumbest, corniest pick yet, but I don’t care.  I love Kip!!

Now it is your turn.  Post your lists if you dare allow the rest of the world (or at least our readers) know exactly what kind of person you really are.

Today I am going to review web browsers for Windows Mobile (formerly known as Pocket PC, formerly known as Windows CE).

Minimo
Mozilla’s attempt at a mobile web browser is in version 0.016, so I think it is more of a proof of concept than an actual, usable web browser.  The website claims that “Minimo has been focused on code-size and runtime footprint reduction, small screen usablity, and porting to small consumer devices.”  Well I think it fails, fails, and fails, respectively.  The install file is larger than the Opera install file (8MB vs. 6MB).  It takes a good 30-45 seconds to launch.  The browser takes forever to load pages.  Scalability to my 240-pixel-wide screen is handled poorly: fonts are left much too large, and God forbid there be an image on the page.  And worst of all, it will invariably crash after viewing about four or five pages.  I stopped using it after the second time it crashed and took down not just Minimo, but my whole OS (with no Control-Alt-Delete, I was forced to let the battery die in order to use it again).  On the plus side, it is the only browser that works with Google Maps (although it uses some kind of proxy site—it’s not actually connecting to Google Maps).

I give Minimo a rating of 0.016 out of 10.  Maybe in a few years it will be a usable piece of software.

Opera Mobile
Opera is the web browser known for running on lots of different devices (Wii and NDS included), so it’s no surprise that they have put together a nice little browser for Windows Mobile.  It is much faster than Minimo, although I can’t say that it’s faster than Internet Explorer (unlike its full-size cousin).  I have mixed feelings about this browser.  There is a weird thing where zooming to 100% causes the browser to go into a completely different rendering mode.  On the text-only version of my site, for example, putting the size to 90% shouldn’t change much, but it actually causes the margins and borders to be rendered completely differently.  It seems the default (100%) zoom level is going through some special optimization, while 90% just resizes the text and renders everything else as-is.  This makes 90% zoom-level better for sites that are designed with a mobile device in mind, and 100% is better for the rest of the web.

Other than that, I have a strong suspicion that images are cached in their full-sized form, rather than caching the resized version (which would generally have made the program faster).  In general Opera seems to do a slightly better job than Internet Explorer on most pages, but it is slower and has some rendering issues.  The real question is this:  will I pay $24 for it after the 30-day trial period is over?  Probably not at first, but if I miss it strongly enough after a while I might.

Pocket IE
Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile is actually pretty good at what it does.  It has some rendering problems, just like any Internet Explorer, but I’ll take those over the stability problems of Minimo any day.  The best thing about Pocket IE is that it is much faster than the other options.  I guess working in the same building as the people who designed the OS will help you stay a little bit ahead of the game.  However, the browser does have some real problems dealing with long pages (Wikipedia is almost unusable on Pocket IE).  In the past I have avoid this by using Google’s mobile proxy, which basically strips sites down to just text.  Overall though I haven’t had too many problems.

So to conclude all this, the ideal would be to have both Opera and IE available, as they have different strengths.  But I’m not sure if Opera is enough better than IE to justify spending any money on it.  And if you value your life at all, stay away from Minimo, at least until the most significant digit of the version comes before the decimal.

Disclaimer: these tests were all conducted on a Dell Axim, running Windows Mobile 2003.

I’m on MySpace now.  I only created a profile because it told me I had to be logged in to read someone’s blog (but I don’t think that’s true anymore).  I was originally going to try to make it look nice, but then I lost interest and made it really tacky instead (much easier to do).  I even put up an extremely low-quality image to give it a finishing touch, which has been faithfully reproduced to your right (highest JPEG compression level Photoshop would allow!).

So.. let me know if you want to be my friend.. or whatever it is you do on MySpace.  So far I’m only getting friend requests from porn sites, so it will be a nice change.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how MySpace got so popular in the first place.  It’s like GeoCities was nine years ago, except now there are more ads, more idiots, and more people trying to sell you Cialis and consolidate your debts.  And some of the things you can choose to show in your profile make no sense, even if you think of it as a dating site—I mean, income??  Who would possibly list their income on their web page?  And it keeps telling me I need to list my school.  Maybe this is unusual, but I don’t go to a school anymore.

In conclusion, you’re welcome to visit my MySpace space.  Just don’t expect me to be there.

Due to recent increases in spam comments, you will now get a “captcha” confirmation page if you submit a comment that has any links in it.  So if you’re blind or otherwise using a screen reader: sorry, you cannot post links on my comments page at this time.  I thought about doing a challenge-response thing (where there would be a question like “enter the name of that red fruit that starts with A”), but I decided this would be easier (for me anyway). Update: Now the title and alt attributes of the image are a question whose answer is the word given.  Not that I know of any blind people using my site, but if there are now they can leave comments too.

I came up with a list of about 50 words (mostly names of fruits, animals, musical instruments, video game characters, and songs), put them in Photoshop and screwed around with the Liquefy tool, and added some random lines through them.  I think they are all still quite legible.

I’ve tested it a good bit, but as always, let me know if you have any problems submitting comments.

Stephanie and I decided to carve a pumpkin on Sunday, but the new Über Target up the street only had white pumpkins left.  Rather than look for an orange pumpkin, I suggested we take the white pumpkin and turn it into a ghost, because I’m lazy like that.  We then put it on a little table we had and put some white sheets over it, so it looks sort of like a ghost.  The outline of the head we stole from Strong Sad, but we gave him a more menacing face and a goofy looking mouth.

In other news, the Red Cross comes to my company about four times a year for blood drives.  They will be here today.. on Halloween.  To suck our blood!  That’s funny isn’t it?  I think that’s a little funny.  Or at least a little ironic.  What would be awesome is if the Red Cross workers were dressed up as vampires.