christopher's lives (v5.3)

Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 5:07 am

Explorer Destroyer – Ready to get serious about switching users from IE to Firefox?

Explorer Destroyer – Switch to Firefox, Make money from Adsense Referral

seems a little overboard, but, i am all for their cause… especially because, as they point out, the stakes are high…
(i would like it better if there was also a choice for Opera, Safari, etc….)

a few quotes from the humorous site:

Get this tool for switching people from IE to Firefox. For each person you switch, Google gives you $1, Microsoft loses marketshare, and an angel gets its wings.

Three settings: Gentle, Semi-serious, and Dead-serious

When you install the script on your site, you can decide how much force you want to use to convince your users to switch away from the dark side:

Level 1: Gentle Encouragement Rating: $$
Visitors using IE see a message encouraging them to download Firefox (with a download link) running across the top of the page.
Level 2: Semi-serious Rating: $$$$
Visitors using IE get a friendly splash page encouraging them to download Firefox. There’s a download link, and a link to continue on to your site.
Level 3: Dead serious Rating: $$$$$$
You’ve never considered blocking IE users from viewing your site, even though you hate IE with a passion that burns hotter than Hades. Now you have a practical excuse to do what you’ve always dreamed of. IE users will see a friendly message stating that they need to download and install Firefox to view your site. This script will do the most good and make you the most money. Can you handle it? (At least try it for a day to see how good it feels.)

i dunno’…
maybe i’ll try the gentle encouragement…
i, like so many others, am not terribly fond of “this site best viewed by” logos and absolutely cannot stand sites that give me a page telling me to use a different browser…
on the other hand, i know my choices and make an informed decision and most people using internet explorer don’t even know there is a choice, so, this is more of an awareness campaign…

hmm…

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 9:34 pm

Google Video – Super Mario Bros., Live

Mario – Live – Google Video
[via waxy]

a good chuckle or two (or three)

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 9:30 pm

Coens in the ‘querque!

KOAT.com – Entertainment – Coen Brothers Hold Casting Call In New Mexico
oh man, as much as i love the coens…  i have been a fan for years (i guess it all started with Fargo nearly ten years ago) and here lately it has been crazy…  i got on a kick a month or two ago where i was watching “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” like every other day, i watched “The Ladykillers” a half dozen times or so, i am going way back to “Blood Simple” any day now (i started it and then got pulled away to go play disc golf!) and my life just has not been the same since i watched “Intolerable Cruelty” three times in one weekend… (“Heinz The Baron Kraus von Espy!”)
i LOVE the Coens and have sworn that any movie time i get the next few months will be pure Coen – i have my entire collection dragged out right here by the couch…

so, to hear i could actually be witness to or even be on set for the filming of “No Country For Old Men” could not have struck at a better time… the article mentions that “Filming will take place in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Las Vegas starting in late May.”…

i don’t get starstruck about much, but, this would do it :P

Sunday, April 9th, 2006 at 7:39 pm

march pics/vids (with a twist) and stories

soooo, where do i start?

how about with the link…

March 2006 Pics and Vids

it’s an interesting month for it this time around…
firstly, again i have a separate folder for the dozen or so autostitch pics i made and a folder with half a dozen or so webcam grabs, then a couple hundred pics/vids besides…

firstly, i want to mention that some of the pics are another great example of the church coming out (on very short notice) to help a member in need… cheryl had a pipe burst in her house and we all got calls asking us to help evacuate her stuff out… there are quite a few pics from that…
elder Dick Gentry and Senior Pastor Robert Hall

then, there is pics from the resets… they sent a guy out to supervise them this time… Tyler Trbovich… aka “Turbo”…
i am going to try to keep this story short…
when i first met him, the first thing i said was that i knew him from somewhere, but, could not figure out where… it must have been something having to do with work… then, as a couple days went by and we talked a bit, come to find out he lived in the dallas area for quite awhile, just like me… (he has even played the disc golf course at veteran’s park in arlington, lucky guy!) well, to keep it short, we were doing a set in farmington, having dinner at the ihop and i mentioned in passing having worked at six flags over texas… he said he had, too… i start feeling an “AHA!” coming on… so, i asked when… he gave the times, during which i worked there, too – and we’re talking like 12 years ago… he said he was security, i said i was a caricaturist, he said he hung out at the caricature booths and started naming names of the artists, as did i… and then, suddenly it came back in a flood, i could remember him leaning against the post watching us draw and everything…
i am almost certain i have even seen drawings that had him in them and i need to get around to going through my stack… if i get to it and find any, i will scan them and post a follow up to this… and, i even swear i remember a photo with him in it… i think it had both him and melissa (the “caricature groupie”) in it.. i can see it so clearly in my mind…

it is a small, small world indeed…
so, anyway, there are pics of him in this set as well…

moving right along – march had A LOT of disc golf played, and i ended up with 64 pics and vids just from that, so, i put them all in their own folder… but, i also had another reason to put them in their own folder…
i have been loving JAlbum for months and the BluPlusPlus skin, but, there was still a feature of it i had not tried yet, and that is audio commentary, which they call voice annotation… so, chris and i sat down and did commentary for all 27 videos and a few pics…
me and chris making the disc golf folder audio commentary
it was a lot of fun and very cool, BUT, i have to make it very clear that it was an experiment…
and it did not turn out exactly perfect…
for one, there is A LOT of skipping… see, we used the windows voice recorder (meh, i was in a hurry and just wanted to try it all out) and it limits recordings to 60 seconds unless you click the timeline bar thingy… but, what we did not realize when we were recording was that when you click it, it makes the recording stutter… some of the recordings came out really stuttery, but, we decided to use them anyway… also, sometimes we were asleep at the switch and it ran out while we were still talking, so, you will get a couple that just cut off in the middle of a sentence…
on the technical/implementation side, there are also some issues… a major one is that the sound file plays before the video starts playing… very bad… my advice for getting the best experience is to pause the sound file and wait for the vid to load… on that note, the vid does not loop… so, again, the best experience is to probably just keep hitting play on the vid to keep it looping… i originally created this album with the vids converted to avi format and they not only looped, but they played full screen on my secondary monitor… however, they also randomly crashed both firefox and i.e., so, i re-created the album with the original quicktime format vids…

before i go any further let me say it nice and loud:
IF YOU ARE ON DIAL-UP YOU SHOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY AVOID THE DISC GOLF FOLDER!!!!!
the vids are already pretty big and the sound files are pretty big, too, and they both stream, so, if you aren’t on a high-speed connection, you will probably get exasperated pretty quickly…
(btw, things being how they are in this album, i have also disabled the slideshow mode…)

ok, a couple more technical notes about it… we originally had sound issues… the file was rolling, but, there was no sound… this happened to me on firefox and those who use internet explorer (*spits*)… however, all i had to do was change my speaker settings from 5.1 to stereo and it works just fine… but, everyone can do me a favor… if you go and view this album and have no sound, please leave a comment here on the post and let me know what browser you use and any other info that might be useful… i may or may not do this audio commentary thing again in the future and would like to know what i am up against… as it is, it came out really rough… not to mention that, as far as content goes, you’ve got two guys on a couch making jokes to each other that probably no one else will get and the albums may or may not even be worth checking out for every one else just to listen to these two bozos amusing themselves…

hey, it was all just something to try out… we had fun :P
if you want to view some “real” disc golf videos, try this google search

and, before i leave the subject, there are plenty more disc golf pics and vids already taken (some with chris’s cam, which has much better video and has sound!) and many more to come, i’m sure… between me, gabe, chris, scott (and nathan!) and the rest, we’ve been getting in two or three after-work games during the week at vista hills and then big games saturdays at ladera (i was there EIGHT hours yesterday! and two shifts of opponents!) and more and more people keep agreeing to meet up with us, so, this whole thing is snowballing and i cannot let all this happen with my camera sitting at home :)

alright, anyway, that is about it, i think… badly written post, but, the album has actually been there for a couple of days and i needed to get this post out of the way before the week started, so, that was the quick version :P
i had mentioned wanting to have a continually updated photo album, rather than having a new one every month and i still have not decided if i wantr to do that or not yet, but, i am considering uploading pics to my flickr photostream throughout the month, so, if you haven’t yet, and you are interested, you might go subscribe to the rss feed for it… if you have no idea what “subscribe to an rss feed” means, shame on you :P
the link to my photostream is up at the top of my sidebar under “my stuff”…

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