Hawty McBloggy posted a video earlier today a YouTube video that actually lets you see 3D from a regular 2D video in a nice Reach Montage. You cross your eyes to get both images of the video to line up together, and then let your eyes naturally focus on the mixed image. The result: a surprisingly good 3D image. Now I’m just wondering how long it took this guy to record all the right angles, especially with the moving camera parts of the montage.
Remember to watch in HD. It’s easier to get the cross-eyes down with the higher resolution.

So I was watching Inside Gaming today and they always have “the best video ever” at the end of their episodes. In their latest, they have a clip of someone who animated the Scout and Soldier from TF2 to “dance”. The video they used is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY476OfuCgg. There’s a newer version that adds some value to it. This guy definitely has talent. If you like TF2, I suggest you subscribe like I did.

I finally nuked Windows on my desktop and reinstalled. I was having so many issues trying to install hardware and getting software to run, that I just had enough. I was hoping to hold out to the end of the summer. Look how well that turned out. I was having read error with my OS RAID, but those have seemed to disappear with the reinstall. My webcam and new TV Tuner work properly now too.

You heard me right, new TV Tuner. I got the ASUS PHC3-150 which is working quite nicely, when I can get my wire for an antenna to get reception. Seems like the only channel that is somewhat tolerant of me not having a digital over the air antenna is NBC. But I’m picking up nice HDTV, which will work great when I get back to school and can actually record shows on TV.

I also got a new graphics card: the NVIDIA GeForce 460 GTX. I have to say that with benchmarks that I’ve done, it’s performing at least two times better than my old 9600 GSO, but I have some more stress tests to do later. Also bought bigger and quieter fans for my case. I’m still surprised on how much dust those things can accumulate.

I’ve managed, twice now as of today, to get membership discounts at Giant (the local grocery chain) without being a member. The cashiers have simply asked for my phone number and I’ve gotten the membership discount. Just a little odd, but worth noting.

Last thing before I’m out cold, I saw Despicable Me two weekends ago, and I enjoyed it very much. I wasn’t really sure what to expect before seeing it, but for all you families out there, this one is a must see. I have about 4 more movies to see this summer as well.

That’s all for now. Time for sleep.

Wow, who would have thought that I’d be back for another video blog, and in Virginia either. Wait, you did? Oh, well I’m back.

Lots to talk about in this video of things I’ve done here in Falls Church, VA. One thing I did forget to mention was the awesome fireworks that went on for the 4th of July in Washington, DC. It was too bad I didn’t bring my camera.

Thanks to driver issues, the sound quality took a downgrade for this video and I won’t be able to fix it until the end of the summer when I nuke my OS and reinstall. In the meantime, enjoy.

First of all, I’ve been a Grade 8 referee for 8 years. I’d say I know a thing or two about the laws of football (that’s soccer for my American friends). Now, is it just me, or are some of the referees in the World Cup really crappy? There have been goals missed, intentional fouls let go, and yellow cards pulled for the most ridiculous things. Some of the calls missed or made I’m sure I could have made better calls for as a Grade 8.

I also had the chance to see The Last Airbender with my roommate for the summer. I haven’t seen the animated series, therefore I don’t have anything to compare it to, but I thought it was pretty good. Definitely looks like there will be sequels, just like everything else these days. At this point, I’m probably going to do a movie a week for the rest of the summer.

My computer is starting to crap on itself and it’s saying that my OS raid is failing, so I’ll be backing that up this week and after getting back to school, I’ll be nuking Windows and reinstalling. Also, my webcam got messed up from a Windows Update but now it somehow works? I don’t know what Windows is doing there. Video blog to come soon though.

That’s it for this week.

Now don’t take this as a claim on all drivers in and around Philadelphia: this is just a personal account of what happened to me while I was there. So I leave Northern Virginia around 4:30 to head up to Philadelphia, and of course I hit DC rush hour pockets. 4 hours later, I’m just past Philadelphia and it’s dark outside. I’m nearly to the hotel I’m staying at and there are a few more highway exchanges to take before I get there. On one of the on-ramps to the second to last highway, I come around the loop and someone is in the right lane. I turn on my turn signal to get into the right lane from the exit lane, and a truck speeds up and pulls in front of me to exit instead of slowing down, letting me on and filling in behind me like everyone else in every other state does. I’ll also add that there was no one else around on the highway.

The next day, I think on the same highway, I was driving on the right lane. There was a car coming on the on-ramp and there was in the left lane, so I couldn’t turn over. I was ahead of the guy on the on-ramp and kept my speed. Now all on-ramps are supposed to yield to traffic on the highway: not this guy. He speeds up, pulls next to me, doesn’t slow down, starts to turn into me, so I brake in response. As he speeds past me, he decides to give me a disgusted look and flip the bird. Sounds like some people need to learn the rules of the road before getting a license.

This was all before doing all the tourist stuff. After that, it took us 30 minutes to get on I-676 because of no signs or signs misleading us to the wrong place to get on the freeway. The freeway was literally less than a 5 minute drive from where we were and it took 30 minutes to finally get on and get out of the city. So some of the street signs weren’t that great either.

Maybe I got a bad crop of drivers where I was going, but Philadelphia, you need a new motto. Comments appreciated.

At work this week, I actually got to do work instead of waiting around. For those that don’t know, I’m in the DC area in Virginia doing some computer programming for a summer internship. I’m supposed to be done in several weeks too, so I have just a short time to get some stuff done, but now I have something to do.

On a non-job related note, for the first month I was here, the weather was beautiful and cool in the 70s. This week, however, the heat kicked in with temperatures getting into the high 90s and 100s. Summer is definitely here now, and I’ve had to take my workouts inside.

When shopping at Giant (local grocery chain), I was buying meat for dinners of the week and I went to the self checkout. It took 10 minutes for the person in front of me to buy a small tub of butter, and no, I’m not exaggerating on the time. Just a FYI, you don’t put the barcode between the two pieces of glass where the scanner can’t read it.

In the news, the BP oil spill still ranks on the top in all the news networks, US lost to Ghana, and England got creamed by Germany.

That’s for my first wound-up. Comment on if you like it or not, or suggest things for me to talk about in the wound-ups.

Right now I’m living in Falls Church, Virginia for a summer internship housed up in Skyline Towers. The staff here is really great and the room is very sizable compared to the floor plan I looked at online before putting down the initial payment. My roommate just got in this weekend, and he’s a pretty cool dude from Arizona State. Only weird thing about the apartment is some random switches that go to certain outlets in the walls, but other than that, love it.

So I have already been here for a little more than a week, and I had not defragmented my computer in quite some time, so I started it to run overnight. This was the night before Memorial Day. I went into my bedroom to go to sleep and about 10 minutes later, I hear this beeping noise. At first I thought it might have been the neighbors, cause they had been playing music for the last few nights. No worries I thought, until I realized which direction it was coming from: the opposite direction of my neighbors. I go out to the living room of my apartment, and the lights from my computer aren’t on. By this time the beeping had stopped and I still didn’t know where it came from. Turns out it was my battery backup that was beeping, signaling it was dead. The fact that it died while my computer was defragmenting was an unsettling fact as well. I tried to turn the UPS back on, to no avail since my other power strip was till active: didn’t work, so I plugged my UPS into the socket my power strip was in and it started working. Next was to turn on my computer and assess the damage. Luckily it booted just fine, so I turned it off and went to bed to address it in the morning.

So after my mattress decided to spring a leak in the middle of the night, I booted up my computer and logged in, but I got a lot of program memory access errors. Many of my startup programs failed to load, and I couldn’t get other programs to run, not even Internet Exploder. So at this point, I’m thinking that there must have been some files that got corrupted in the degragmentation that caused these programs not to start. My first thought was to back everything up, reinstall some programs to recover program data, like firefox bookmarks and such, and nuke the system. So I download a couple of installers from my Netbook, since I couldn’t open a web browser to download anything on my desktop, and put them onto a memory stick to transfer. When I went to install the programs, I got an error that basically said it couldn’t load the windows installer. At this point, I’m starting to think that I’m pretty much at a loss and will have to make an image backup of my OS drive. So I try a System Restore while trying to find a solution to the Windows installer problem. Just like everything else, System Restore did not work. Panicking at this point, I find something that I have used before: sfc /scannow. For those who don’t know what that is, “SFC” stands for System File Checker and it checks the integrity of core Windows System files, similar to how Startup Repair from an Installation CD checks startup files required to boot. Luckily, SFC found errors, rebooted and fixed the problem.

Now here’s the kicker of the story. I purposefully talked a little bit about my apartment above for this reason. After I got my computer fixed, I went around to see what other outlets might have died. Turns out that only the top ones of the three closest outlets were dead. So I find another outlet to plug in my power strip to get it working and figured I’d submit a maintenance request later. This was Memorial Day. So yesterday, Tuesday, I was walking around and saw a switch on the wall that my computer desk was set up against. I know it didn’t lead to any lights in the apartment, like the ones in the bedrooms: and then it hit me. I turned the switch on and plugged my phone charger into the top socket of one of the plugs: it started charging. I turned the switch off: it stopped charging. I managed to almost kill my computer by turning off a switch I thought was to the hallway light. I probably turned that one off and turned the actual hall light switch off and didn’t even realize it. So now I have an aptly named “Kill Switch” in my apartment, and I’m never using those outlets for anything essential while I’m here.