I got to see Star Trek the movie on Thursday. It was awesome. Even if you aren’t a Star Trek fan I believe you will enjoy this movie. JJ took a lot of the nerdiness out of the show and put a lot more action in. It felt like watching Transformers or the Matrix. It was a good balance I think. A lot of people were expecting him to screw it up by either being to nerdy or not being nerdy enough. I think he found a good balance that will satisfy all the long time Star Trek fans such as myself as well as a lot of the newer non-trekkies who are more interested in actions films in general. I would highly recommend it. I’m hoping to go see it again in sometime soon in one of the larger theaters such as the Cine Capri at Harkins.

In other news, I’ve been wanting to get back into ham radio, scanners, and war driving. I unboxed some of my old radios and re-programmed them with a few frequencies i still remember. I would like to get my main ham radio (the radio on the far left of the pic) and my portable (the Kenwood in the middle) programed with the new updated ham frequencies. My scanners (the two radios on the right) have a few channels in them. I haven’t touched police frequencies in a long long time. The handheld scanner has Edmond in it only. I actually keep this scanner at my desk so i can find out whats going on when i hear sirens around my apartment. Once i get a list of all the frequencies i need to input I’ll publish the list on here. Probably in a new tab at the top. It should be interesting.

Another thing i wanted to talk about was Champions Online. I’ve been reading a lot about this game and it looks amazing. I’ve watched a few videosof the game play and it looks like a lot of fun. The main thing I’m looking forward to in this game is the character customizations. Cryptic is the same company that did City of Heroes/Villains. And if you remember anything about that game, its probably the character customization process. From what I’ve read, the character creations process is City of Heroes on steroids. I can’t wait. Jon and his friend are both doing elemental animals as their first characters. His friend is calling his character Fire Mare and Jon is doing Static Panda. I need to come up with a catchy character to play soon.

Time for something new. I couldn’t think of a catchy title… so its just Random Links for Clicking. Basically, if you’re bored here are some interesting finds for for the week:

• Uncrate – Interesting blog with random products you might want to buy
• GeekPad – Very funny and interesting tech blog
• Cyber Warfare and the Army
• The 10 Most PUzzling Ancient Artifacts
• StarCraft 2 Beta opened on Wednesday
• Cute Overload – Very cute animals that will make you smile
• Learn Morse Code- I still need to do this. Though the General and Extra licenses no longer require CW to pass
• WoW Player gets power, gets corrupted, gets banned – Interesting read about a player who obtained Martin Fury
• Stupid girl run over by her own SUV during “Ghost ride” stunt – Natural Selection at its finest
• $330,000 photo of Air Force one – Honestly, i think a monkey with a disposable camera could have taken a better photo…
• The Hunt for Gollum- Still haven’t watched this in its entirety yet. Looks amazing though. Fan created prequel to the films. (Fan fiction, not cannon)

I’ve had an HDTV for a while now. (2 or 3 years… can’t remember) I love it and don’t think i could/would ever go back to SD. Its a lot like the dial-up to broadband switch that most of us went through. Within the last couple of years I decided to subscribed to Cox’s digital cable so that i could receive their HD service. The service has slowly expanded from 10 or so channels to pretty much all of the major networks. (To numerous to count) Now i can receive all my favorite networks such as Discovery, Sci-Fi, Cartoon Network (Adult Swim), TNT, HGTV, Etc in HD. Or so i thought.

While for the most part the service is good, there are several things that annoy the crap out of me. The first is what i like to call STRETCH-O-VISION.

As you can see the stretched version makes the video/picture look like complete crap. Whoever decided that this was an acceptable practice is seriously messed up in the head. It should be fairly easy to explain to customers that the reason not all of their shows are shown in 16:9 is because some of the shows were created before 16:9 widescreen format was standardized. Any rational person will be able to understand this. The fact that network television companies use stretch-o-vision tells me that they think their viewers are complete idiots who are incapable of understanding the problem.

The other thing networks do that annoys the crap out of me is showing a 16:9 HD show in letterbox SD at 4:3. Don’t know what that techno-jargin means? Allow me to show you:

As you can see they’ve taken a perfectly good HD show (In this case Star Trek Enterprise) and simply broadcast the same letterbox 4:3 signal to both their HD channel and their SD channel. So now i get to watch a 16:9 HD show in 4:3 SD letterbox. WHY?!!?!? Can they not afford to broadcast the show in HD? Or even at 16:9? I would be perfectly happy to see it at 16:9 even if it was not HD. I’m sure they same screwed up technology that brought us Stretch-o-vision could blow up a 4:3 letterbox signal to 16:9. All they have to do is zoom in.

I just don’t understand why these networks felt the need to even purchase an HD channel from the cable or satellite providers if they weren’t ready to broadcast in HD. Sci-fi channel for example has maybe one or two shows in HD. The rest are SD in stretch-o-vision or this screwed up letterbox 4:30 format.

So i was going through some of my old files from High School and stumbled upon something that made me laugh. The assignment was for a british literature assignment my senior year. I have no memory of actually writing this. Reading it now makes me giggle.

Bicycle Bob as called by many
Has nothing, not even a penny
He rides on his bike with nothing to do
But beg for money and steal some food
When he’s not riding he’s sitting
Doing nothing but listening
He had a walkman for playing a tape
But he needed some money, so he sold it for dope
Getting high was fun, he thought
But getting busted by the cops was not
All the hastel for one little smoke
Was not enough to stop Bob from a smoke

And one day while he was high
He was hit by a car, sent flying into the sky
And that was the last we saw of Bicycle Bob
He did nothing important
Nor accomplish anything important
And when he was gone, no one remembered
The homeless man named Bicycle Bob 

Apparently today was stupid driver day.  Starting this morning when i left for work and ending this evening when i got back from my quick trip to Target, i encountered driver after driver doing the most incomprehensible stupid things. At my parking garage this morning, i encountered a lady driving around the garage looking for a parking spot in reverse. (Not just backing up to get to a spot… i mean full blown OMG ITS BACKWARDS DAY YAY driving) Then i encountered a moron who apparently didn’t know how to read the Enter and Exit signs on the parking garage gates. He couldn’t understand why the gate arm wasn’t lifting for him. Apparently no one told him he was in the Exit lane instead of the entrance lane. These were just a few of my encounters with stupid drivers today. I can only hope that tomorrow brings better driving.

In other news, I finally transferred my 55 priest from my recruit a friend classic wow only account to my main WotLK account. At the beginning of the year Jon and I established a friend link from his account to a new classic wow account i bought. (Classic wow is like $20 bucks at Walmart) This allowed us triple xp when playing together. Lucky for me, Jon was bored enough to dual-box my priest and his hunter from 0 – 55 in like two weeks. After that he leveled up like 5 or 6 more characters from 0 – 60 for me. The link finally broke about 2 months ago and i just never had the time or need to transfer the priest to my regular WoW account to finish leveling him from 60 – 80. I still don’t know when I’ll have time to do it  but I’ve always wanted an Undead Priest. I’m going to try and level him on the weekends and on boring week nights when I have nothing to do.

That’s all for now.

Btw, i’ve been giving thought to exploring my job in more detail on this blog. I’ll have to find out if posting pics and details about the NBAs equipment and setup is legal or not. (I doubt its illegal. Its there for all to see on TV anyways.. lol) I’ll have more info later.

I find that i have way to many online profiles. I have a MySpace (never use it), Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Linkdin, this blog and site, and many many more. I don’t have time to keep up with them all. I wish there was some easy way to consolidate all of these profiles to have the same info. Then again, do i really want every knowing everything i do everywhere? Do i even want to post everything i do everywhere? I doubt it. I just wish that when i took a picture of something, i could email or upload it to one place. As of now i have to take that picture and put it on Flickr, Facebook, and here. Three freaking copies of the same photo just because i want everyone to see it. REDICIOUS.

I have no idea what to put on this thing. I find reading blogs fun. Especially the ones where people have all sorts of random shit from tech, geeky, music, movies, politics, religion etc. I actually wrote two or three political and religious based posts but removed them due to the fact that i don’t like talking about controversial topics on public blogs that have my name attached to them. I don’t mind making random comments here and there, but detailed rants and posts dealing with controversial topics tend to cause problems. Especially at the work place.

In other news, I randomly just found a bag of Penera potato chips that expire in exactly 25 days. Yay me! And here i thought i had nothing edible in the house. Since I have no other way of ending posts… i guess i’ll leave you with this:

Pardon my WoW terms. Basically I’ve been in the mood to buy a house lately. Why? Basically I’m tired of throwing away money at my apartment complex. Don’t get me wrong, i love this place. Its so much nicer than my old place. I just can’t see a reason to keep renting and giving my hard earned money away. Plus Obama is giving away free money to first time home buyers. I can’t pass up $8,000 bucks.

Thus I’ve been home shopping. I’m looking for homes in the price range of 130 – 150k. I’m hoping to get something in the 135 – 140 range so i can use a few extra bucks to upgrade my furniture and appliances. Looking in Edmond and NW OKC, i see all kinds of houses for sale. New ones and Old ones. My mother says i should look at semi-new (less than 10 years old) homes that were well kept and upgraded. I’m leaning more towards the brand new never owned option. So far 3 bedroom 2 bath seems like the best investment. (Even though i doubt I’d use the third bedroom for anything) I really want hard wood floors and a nice kitchen. Everything else is pretty much negotiable.

That said, i think i need so professional help. I’ve been looking online all week and I’m pretty over whelmed by all the options. I’ve been looking at website after website and everything is starting to run together in my head. I also don’t know specifically where in Edmond or NW OKC i want to live. Right now i’m happy with my location. I don’t know if I’m ready to move out to west Edmond in the newer developing neighborhoods. I like the looks, its just a bit of a drive to central Edmond where i do most/all of my shopping. I’m hoping to find a good realtor that will show me around and give me some good options. Suggestions are welcome!

For the last few days I’ve been obsessing over an iPhone. Normally i don’t like apple products. But for some reason I’ve convinced myself that i really want… no no need one of these trendy phones. Currently i have the AT&T Tilt made by HTC. It does everything i need it to do. Its just so… old? I think my main complaint about the phone is that the touch screen isn’t very responsive. For example, when i open the phone application to dial a telephone number by hand (very rare, but it happens) it takes a few presses on each button for it to respond. The other complaint is that texting is slow. I recently upgraded to 6.5 and it changed the way text messages are shown. I love it but it seems very slow. Sometimes I’ll start typing and then look up at the screen to see the phone only on the second or third word. Very annoying.

To try and convince myself to keep the tilt, I’ve been reading a lot of online forums and watching YouTube videos of people proclaiming the superiority of the Tilt to the iPhone. I think the best thing for me to do at this moment is to sit down and wait until June when Apple makes its big announcements concerning the iPhone OS 3.0. There are also rumors of a new iPhone hardware as well. I guess we shall see.

So I’ve been sitting here for like a week trying to think of a first post. I don’t know how to start out this thing. Basically i wanted to have a place where i could post things i find interesting, write about things i want to write about, show off some cool tech stuff that i find interesting, and just about everything else you can imagine seeing in a regular blog. But how do i start? Where do i begin? Stuff happens all around me all the time. I’ll hear something on the radio and think “Wow that’s so stupid.” and then wish i had an outlet to write about how stupid said thing was. Well now i do. Not sure how long this will last. I’ve had blogs in the past. Some of which lasted for days and others that lasted several years. We’ll just take it a day at a time for now.