ryanligon.net

Japan Trip Planning version 0.1

2009-07-11T08:00:00.001-07:00

I had just ordered more SD cards and batteries for the cameras for the trip. I figured it'd be a good time just testing taking some video. This is with the Sanyo VPC-HD2 in SHQ HD mode in very bad light. I need to click it back down to just HQ mode. It takes up too much space and uses too much battery in 'super' HQ mode. This ~ 3 minute video came in at 215mb in SHQ HD mode. The other camera mentioned is a Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS.

Ike Flooding in Maplewood

2008-09-16T04:19:00.000-07:00

Our little, normally dry, creek that runs through Maplewood flooded on Sunday with when what was left of Ike had rolled through St Louis. We turned out not to really notice at our house. Only after Katie had tried to go out during the day did she find that most of the routes away from the house were blocked with water.

We took these around 11:30-ish and by the time we were on the way back from looking around the water had already gone down drastically.

A quick video:

Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code

And the pictures:

iRacing.com

2008-06-07T17:03:00.001-07:00

It's been a long time coming, but iRacing.com is finally launching soon. It's been a long trip through testing, but I really do think it's going to be the future of sim racing. There has been a few tries at filling the void left behind when Papyrus shut it's doors, but nothing quite compares to this. Now that the veil has been lifted, look for more iRacing information here on the site. In the mean time check out the official site iRacing.com and over to youtube for InsideSimRacing's preview video.

I-55 Raceway Opening Night '08

2008-03-30T11:50:00.000-07:00

Went down to Pevley, MO Saturday night for their opener. My spaz camera work getting snipits of modified hot laps, pro 4 heat race then the starts of the latemodel, modified and sportsman features.

YouTube link of video

It's a SandStorm

2008-01-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

One week ago today I was sitting in the dealership picking up my new FJ Cruiser. It's a 2008 4wd automatic with locking rear differential, the convenience package, rubber mats and the 17" aluminum wheels.

It would have been pretty difficult for me to decide on it had it not been for the internet. Edmunds.com was a great starting point to compare and price everything out. Their inside line pages had a great long term test of the FJ that was a really good read. The Toyota website, in addition to all the car things you expect to see on a website also have the FJ Cruiser Bulletin. It has a lot of flash showing off the engineering, off road abilities and the real community of FJ owners. That's what finally lead me to the fjcruiserforums.com. It was invaluable in purchasing my FJ. They have tons of information all at your fingertips via the search feature. There was a great excel spreadsheet that helped in pricing the truck. Lots of comments on the extra features. Comments and pictures on what other people were adding in modifications to the truck with different roof racks, rock rails and various extras. One of the best is the A-TRAC switch install. A-TRAC is only on the two more expensive upgrade packages each cost around $1,200. But as it turns out everything is there on any FJ with a rear locker, except the switch. So for a ~ 60$ switch you can have A-TRAC enabled. All-in-all the site helped me pick just what I needed because I can add the accessories later, that might not even been stock, when I want them. I am one very happy 1 week old FJ owner.

Matt and Betsy's Wedding pictures

2007-11-12T16:11:00.000-08:00

Here's the pictures from Matt and Betsy's wedding. They're combined pictures from ours and Ryan and Jen's camera. Some turned out blurry but they're the best ones we had so we left them in. There's also a few from the Oakhurst crew from the next day at the end of the set.

Sunday hike and drive

2007-11-11T19:06:00.000-08:00

It turned out to be a great day for a hike; 70 and sunny. There were a few clouds, but not to many. Ended up doing about 5 miles total.
The video:

The pictures:

PCH

2007-11-02T17:26:00.000-07:00

Here's pictures from our last two days of our California trip. More to come.

Greetings from San Francisco

2007-10-24T07:41:00.001-07:00

We made it safe and sound and took a walk down the beach at Crissy Field to the Golden Gate bridge. Here's just a quick hello to everyone not here.

Test Driving

2007-10-19T19:11:00.001-07:00

So a new gadget made it's way home this week. A Sanyo Xacti HD2. It's a neat little camera/camcorder that records video straight to mpeg4. So here's a testing Veoh vs YouTube vs Blip.tv.

The video at veoh.com

The view at YouTube

Edit: [10/21/07] Looks like Blip.tv won out. Veoh took 12+ hours for the 20mb mpeg4 video to show up on their site. YouTube is the easy option, but I wanted better quality. Blip.tv looks like it does the trick. Plus at Blip.tv you can download the original source video if you don't like the flash version.

360 Elited

2007-06-03T09:16:00.000-07:00

Check it out. I got a 360. You can see my gamertag over on the right now. I've been trying out a bunch of the casual games. Haven't bought any yet though. The only games I have purchased so far are Gears of War and Forza 2 and have only played them both a little bit so far. Just wanted to update with a post since I added the gamertag box.

New Videos Page

2006-12-27T13:53:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to show the new way I'm sharing the videos I've made for the P2R league I'm racing GTR2 in. You can get to it two different ways.

Here from the P2R site.

or Here straight from this site.

Both are the same as he's just wrapping my page from here into the P2R site. I've added google video for all the races. So hopefully that makes sure everyone that wants to see it can. Also if they don't need the higher resolution, they're not hitting the bandwidth so much. But if you want to watch it in the high resolution, by all means do. So far my host hasn't complained. So, so-far-so-good.

Enjoy!

Silver Surfer on the Silver Screen

2006-12-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

So this is what The Silver Surfer is going to look like in the new Fantastic Four movie.

Now compare to the comic version.

Where are his bad ass glowing solid eyes? They gave him pupils in the movie. Jeez. How is he supposed to be a stoic galactic super hero with pupils. And are those eyelashes?

Silver Surfer and Spidey are tied as my favorite super heroes. So when I was talking with Matt a few months ago and he mentioned they might have a Silver Surfer movie, my reply was "I hope not." Really two reasons. His back story. That's the one part about SS I didn't like a whole lot, but the way they do the superhero movies they tell their whole back story first. But we can kinda knock that gripe out because they're actually introducing SS like they did in the comics as part of a Fantastic Four story. Cool move. Then reason dos for not wanting to see a movie of SS is the graphics. Well I haven't seen him in motion yet, but just from the still they messed with his face too much. I'll hold out complete condemnation till I see more of it.

Donnington P2R Race Recap

2006-12-22T06:36:00.000-08:00

Hey I finally finished another race video. This time we were at Donnington in the rain. It's available in large and small.

Large 144mb 720x452
Small 42mb 360x228

Enjoy!

Here's an extra vid of my early demise in the race.
Oops! Sorry!

Place2Race video recaps

2006-11-19T16:52:00.000-08:00

I've been racing GTR2 over at Place2Race lately. I've done text recaps before, but this time I thought I'd try making a video highlight instead. I've done it for the first two races so far, check them out.

Anderstorp Race 1 high-res 180mb
Brno Race 2 high-res 180mb
Brno Race 2 low-res 57mb

Enjoy!

Don't Copy That Floppy

2006-11-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

I was listening to the Games For Windows podcast and they mentioned the old "Don't Copy That Floppy" campaign. In case you missed this motivational gem, here it is.

World Champs!!

2006-10-30T10:06:00.000-08:00

Sunday was the victory parade. Here are all the pictures I took. I just dumped them all to picasa so there are some blurry ones but you can at least see them all.

World Series Parade

Fatality!

2006-10-20T00:59:00.000-07:00

In honor of the Cards beating the Mets!! Every fatality from the first 4 Mortal Kombat games.

Go Cards! Beat the Mets!

2006-10-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

Right now the Cardinals are down 4 to 6 in New York against the Mets in the National League Championship Series. The Cards lost the first game last night too. I'm just happy their this far. It's been a rocky season or at least up and down. Backing into the playoffs with a big losing streak didn't make anyone happy. But luckily we played the Padres in the Division Series and we seem to have their number in the playoffs. Then once we get to this point it's anything goes.

Oh and why did they have to show the Cards losing in the World Series on the last episode of Lost. It was bad enough the whole thing got immortalized in the movie Fever Pitch.

Google buys YouTube for 1.65 billion in stock

2006-10-09T15:44:00.000-07:00

Wow. I didn't really find the sense of it when I read the rumors last week. Even now, at that price it still doesn't make much sense.

They can put ad sense throughout the whole site and make a good quarter of that money back probably. But what about google video? They have a selection of pay to watch shows, including South Park and NBA games. So are they going to go all google video style or keep them separate? Who knows.

It's starting to look like 1998 all over again. Hopefully nothing bursts this time around.

image stolen from news.com

Podcast, Netcast, Whatevercast

2006-10-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

The internet is pretty cool. Everything is out there. Now tv is out there.

I don't watch a lot of tv. Perhaps I do, but I don't think I do at least. I do watch a lot of sports, but outside of that, not much. But I did like the old TechTV before it was bought by G4. Then all the old TechTV shows were canceled it really left a big void in tech programming.

Lucky for me most of the people who where on TechTV now have new shows on the internet. So with iTunes I just subscribe to their feeds and watched them whenever I want. It's like Tivo's watch it when you want is built into the delivery method. It's great. Now I really do wish there was a good alternative to iTunes to get all my feeds. But right now there just doesn't seem to be anything that does it as well. I really don't understand why Microsoft doesn't build in rss feed subscriptions to Media Player. It's not going away so why not support it?

Here's a list of the video podcasts I subscibe to. I'll let you in on the audio only shows in the future.

Diggnation - Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose wax poetic about the news of the week from digg.com This was the first show I started watching on the web.
The 1UP Show - A great show with great style. It's the 1UP.com staff talking about the news of the week in games, plus a little extra touchy feely moments from the cast.
Cranky Geeks - John C. Dvorak and guests pretty much moan and groan about the tech news of the week. Pretty funny and just goes to show it's not all young whipper-snappers into tech news.
dl.tv - Patrick Norton and Robert Heron do another tech news of the week show. Patrick used to be on the TechTV show the Screen Savers and it's cool to see him on screen again.
On The Spot - Gamespot.com's weekly gaming news show. This one is very cool because it's got a nice formal setup. They'll have game developers bring in games to demo them on the show before they're released. They do a lot of specials for the trade shows and other events.

Now I know I have a lot of tech shows that seem to cover the same subjects, but they all come out on different days of the week so they end up not overlapping very much. Diggnation is a Revision3 production. Rev3 has just relaunched their site with more shows and hopefully more frequent updates. Gamespot.com also has a few other shows. Button Mashing is a gaming game show. So far it's been down right goofy and not really up to snuff with On The Spot. Their tournament broadcasts are very good though. They've aired Battlefield 2, Counter-Strike Source and some other different games. Good stuff, check it out.

One more thing about the 360

2006-10-07T18:27:00.000-07:00

XNA

XNA is Microsoft's new development suite thingy. It's in C# and kind of uses a really object oriented module direction to game development. I don't know C# but I assume not much is different from C++. I haven't looked into it yet. You can get the C# Express compiler and XNA works into it all for free.

What makes it interesting is with a service fee, $99 a year, you can put the games you write on your 360. You can only trade your games that you make with other people that have the service. But it is a step into console development and that's a very cool thing.

South Park meets World of Warcraft!

2006-10-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

Edit: -- Ooops! Looks like google video took down the episode. You'll have to tivo it.

Edit #2: I found a version of it Gametrailers.com

Very cool episode. They definately had help from Blizzard on this one though. There are quite a few extra animations that aren't in the game. But it was very cool to see the lip syncing and the extra hand jestures. Really makes you wish it was more like that in the game.

By the way, my WoW account is presently inactive. But if anyone wants to send me a pre-paid time card it would be greatly appreciated.

Hot for 360

2006-10-04T15:29:00.001-07:00

I've never bought a console system anywhere near launch. I'm usually on board about a year after launch. By then you know generally if it's going to make it and there are a good 6 solid titles out. Granted me waiting to buy a Dreamcast or NeoGeo Pocket Color gives you an idea of if I think a system is going to last or not. That's another story.

My unofficial one year rule puts me in line to start oogling over the Xbox 360 right about now. I was very interested at the launch but at the time $400 seemed super steep for a new console purchase. Then Sony announced the PS3 launch price and it instantly felt like a "deal" to buy a 360. But that's only one part of it. The 360's Xbox Live system is really what an online experience should be. The stat tracking, the achievement points and the communication built it are really well thought out.

My other checklist to buy a system is the games. For the 360 it's, Gears of War, Lost Planet, Mass Effect, BioShock, Prey, NBA 2k7 and a couple old Xbox games I missed. Those probably include the Halo games and Fable. Three of those listed there aren't actually out yet, but are coming soon. BioShock is also coming to PC, and Prey is already out on PC, but I'm willing to bet it's going to be an easier experience just putting it the console instead of finding the right balance of settings to get it run on my laptop. I'd put Oblivion in that list too, but I already have it for PC.

Then to top it off the HD-DVD, that's an addon, makes it nice. The fact that it's optional makes it nice on the wallet. But there are rumors around that there's going to be a HD-DVD built-in bundle sometime in the future. I'm still wondering if they're going to do a pricedrop on the 360 to make it that much more attractive this holiday. The problem there is they're never going to announce a pricedrop early because it would halt sales till the price drop. Ah well. So maybe sometime after this semester is over when I'd have time to play I might be able to tell you folks more about the 360.

From the Edge of ...

2006-10-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

If you look at my xfire profile over there on the right you can see I've re-installed Oblivion again. I had kept my old game saves so I just picked up where I left off. I hadn't gotten very far at all the first time around. I got it at launch but didn't play it that much. I think I was tired of getting my ass kicked.

I made a Agent class character. You can see him off to the right there. The problem is that the agent has a lot of non-combat skills in the main group. The problem with that is that in Oblivion you level per every 10 skill points you gain in your main group. So I level up but my combat skills lag behind. With the game's quests mostly deal with combat I keep getting my ass kicked. I mean I die a lot. Maybe it's because I'm only level 5 and I'm just trying quests too hard for me. I don't know. Let me know in the comments if I just suck.

I think I'm probably playing on normal difficulty. But maybe I should just crank that down to easy. Computer Gaming World(October #267) had a GreenSpeak article by Jeff Green about how most people actually play on easy. The title is "Gaming for Dummies." It's mostly a rant to the hardcore gamer telling them not to complain about games being easy or about people that play on easy. But I'm one of those guys that would think that normal was the way to go. I knew I was never good enough to go into hard mode, but felt switching to easy was a copout. Matt was always telling me I should just turn the difficulty down to enjoy the game and if I really like it I can go back and play it again. I would ignore him saying that was cheap, but maybe I'm getting old and need the easy mode now?

I think part of my problem with the game originally also had a lot to do with the elderscrolls.com forums. I'd give you a dollar if you can find anymore than 2 non-negative posts on the front page of the Oblivion section. It just seems, at least around release, that it's just full of people bashing the new changes from Morrowind. I had started reading the forum a few weeks before release to kinda get excited for it. But then after release it was all negative and I bought into it and disliked the game because of it. In hindsight though I think my unhappiness with the game is due to the class structure and the level up mechanic. Although I haven't spent a ton of time on the character, I bemoan having to make a new one, but that's probably be what I'll do. Make either a full fighter or a agent type character that has combat skills in the main skill group.