Alright so the bruhaha over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas having sex in it, which has to be unlocked, has hit new lows. This article talks about the 85 year old grandma who is suing over the sex, since she bought the game for her 14 year old grandson.
The game has violence, decapitation, cop killing, whores, theft, blatant denial of anyone’s rights other than your own, but oh grandma, that’s ok for little JR to play, but throw some people having sex in and you’ve gone too far!
This country is so screwed up it is not even funny. No, I don’t think 14 year olds should play games with hard core sex in it. Nor do I think they should play games with hard core violence.
South Park - The Movie illustrated this insanity perfectly. The MPAA wanted to give them a NC-17 rating due to Sadaam holding a penis (which they had to change to a dildo, cuz that’s ok I guess) and Bill Gate’s name being chanted in a “must die” scene, but the massive killing of Canadians with blacks on the front lines, well that’s something that is just ok for the kiddoes with a parent along. Oh and you can leave in Gates getting a bullet to the head. That’s cool. (it was my fav part of the movie, but I an an adult)
Ya know, if this country would pull it’s collective underwear out of it’s collective crack, we might start thinking a little clearer on these issues, don’t you think?
So my rear brakes have been howling after they heat up and only after a dead stop. This happened 2 years ago and Ford just adjusted a few things. Started again, so took it into Meineke this time.
$635. Ouch. But rotored discs, new calipers, new pads. Seems they had been rubbing and melting a little bit.
Considering this is the first major work in the 8 years of the car, not too bad, I guess. Puts other things on hold though!
This is just the conduit. Fiber should be run through in the next couple of weeks, then there is splicing, and then install. By “November” was one unofficial estimate.
A crew of about 20 guys from Michael’s Communications are digging trenches around the edge of my yard. I wonder what they do with the grass. There really isn’t any
I told them to knock on the door if they needed water.
They didn’t have any info, other than “It was Verizon for telephone or something” heh
Just got home to find a Verizon notice on my door about Fiber Optic broadband coming soon, crews around the corner and paint marks on my lawn all the way around the corner and down the street (they have to drill horizontally underneath)
Space Mountain, closed at Disneyland for 2+ years is set to reopen Friday. Matt and I did rode it tonight, as DL does “soft” openings to work the bugs out of the queue process, etc.
I won’t post spoilers, but let me say this:
WOW!
Very nice job, folks. Here is what I will say:
The line was 95 mins but moved much faster than that.
The trains now hold 12 people, vs. 8
They had 6 trains running
They DO have the slide loading working, so they can load people who need assistance into a train that is out of load flow and then slide it onto the track. What a time saver.
The new effects ROCK
The new track/trains are SMOOTH and DEAD SILENT. It is erie. You don’t know you are on a coaster really. Awesome.
I think I had seen bits and pieces of this Kubrick work but not fully through. At least I could not recall.
What intrigued me is how much the movie’s dialog has worked into American culture, such as “love you long time” or “Texas? Only Steers and Queers come from Texas”
This is one of those movies that, like or hate war, it is a must see to understand what our boys come home as, the hell they go through training to be killers, to actually become killers. No matter the cause, the justice of the cause or the support of others, that they have become different than most of us and what we need to know how to understand them. It is only human.
Violence begets violence, love begets love, tolerance bridges the two. Keep moving forward with a good heart, lift those around you up and wish for a better tomorrow so that our men and women don’t have to become killers for us.
Akira Kurosawa. What else can I say? What I enjoy about subtitled movies is that they require me to pay attention. I can’t tune out, or the entire thing is lost on me.
I loved how the characters played against each other, how small the set was for such a large piece on society as a whole.
It made me wonder if it is ok to use bad people when on the path to a better place. The movie made me think about decisions, consequences and helping others.
I’ve liked Paul Giamatti since I saw him in American Splendor, even though his career spans back to the early 90s.
I had a hard time getting past Thomas Hayden Church’s role in Wings.
The movie made me a little uneasy, but I think that is why I liked it. Tolerance, stupidity, love, deceit, joy, wine, cruelty - All aspects of being human whether we like it or not.
The movie reminded me that we have to make the best of where we’re at and keep aiming towards a better place.
I also learned I really don’t want to be a wine geek.
Alright, this was a dumb movie, but Liv, yowsa. I could tell where they thought this would be a really funny movie, but it just seemed to not live up to their plans. Great cast though!
Just spoke with a contractor around the corner on Jay Street. They are indeed drilling for Verizon’s Fiber to the Home internet service.
He said they are drilling north on 185th towards baseline this week, and Jay should be drilled in the next couple of months. No word about 178th that I am on - The street has not been marked either.
Check out this counter. Every 100,000th song they are giving away a mini, and for the 500,000,000th song they are giving away 10 iPods, 10,000 songs, a concert trip, etc.
Well after watching some 4:3 DVDs i realized the geometry was off. Oops, I used the Full mode dimensions, not the HD dimensions. So more tape, more string, and it is re-reconverged. I also reset white level, black level, saturation, hue and sharpness, just from user mode. It looks fantastic now.
My 480P mode has the same settings but is very, very over saturated in the reds, so at some point I’ll figure out how to fix that in service mode. It must have happened after the last calibration.
Considering this will be a secondary TV, it looks great. If I can get the 480P fixed up for the old DVD player (once the 941 moves to the DLP) I’ll be set.
Original Post:
For those not in the know, I’ve had a 56″ Toshiba TW56X81 HDTV for about 5 years now. About 4 years ago I reset it to factory defaults in designer mode (by accident) and it has never been perfect since.
I’ve never bothered to get any HDTV source for it as I know it is mis-configured and even worse, this set has different internal settings for every source input (s-video, progressive component, 1080i, etc)
So I’ve been looking at these new Samsung 1080P DLP sets coming out any month now on the net and in the process learned about the Samsung HD-941 DVD player. This player is last years model but has one advantage over the newer models - there is an easy hack to enable 1080i upscaling of the 480i DVD content over component outputs. It also has HDMI which my new set will use, but I thought hmm, I could actually play around with my existing TV.
So I bought the thing for $250 (you can find it online at closeout for around $130) and hooked it up to the component in that my Toshiba SD-9100 was using.
First off the signal was red and horrible. Once I told the player to use 480P, everything snapped into place and a few cursory looks at discs showed it very comparable to my much older Toshiba and faster, too.
I should note the 941 has the Faroudja DCDi chip for smooth upscaling (at least on HDMI) so this was a plus - the 950 does not.
So I enter the hack to get the 941 to turn on 1080i for component (HDCP, the protection crap hollywood is cramming down our throats, is not supposed to let HD signals come over analog connections. come on people, it is STILL 480i signal on a normal DVD, sheesh) Once I the hack (press angle, 4, 3, 2, 7, angle) the TV showed “HDCP off” and I could then use DVI Select to choose 1080i!
Of course the image was horrible because the 56pt convergence for 1080i mode had never been touched since the reset 4 years ago. So I went to Fred Meyers and bought some masonry string, some white masking tape and a metric ruler, downloaded a full mode grid from keohi and went to work. 3 hours later i have pretty good looking 1080i signal from a DVD player. Of course the grayscale and colors are off, but I don’t have the tools nor time to really fix that. It is “good enough” until the real HDTV shows up
This makes me want to play with other 1080i sources though.
The only issue I had was the player went into “jaggies” mode for some reason and I had to power cycle it to fix it. There is a firmware upgrade that fixes a blacker than black issue with HDMI, but I have not tried to get it or even see if I have it already. I don’t have a burner on my PC so I am not sure I can eve make the CD-ROM that would replace the firmware.
