New Camera and Photo Gallery

Hello.

Great news!  I a new camera!  It’s a Canon 5D mk II which is a full frame DSLR from Canon that also does beautiful 1080p video with 23.97 and 29.97 frames per second.  Yeah, it’s bitchin’ camaro.

This first photo is one of my little doggy Ginger.  As you might well guess, we have taken a ton of photos of our dogs.  It’s a sickness really, but they are often so cute and goofy that we really cant avoid it.

Also featured in this photo is the room that we have been working on.  You can clearly see the beautiful wood floor and the brand new doors and trim work.  The door on the left is a closet that previously did not have a door, so we added a pocket door.  It rocks.  We had the floor finished by Greg’s Hardwood Floors in White Bear Lake.  I think he did a great job and I would recommend him to anyone.

We also went out for a photo-walk with the new camera yesterday.  We started in downtown Minneapolis at the Foshay Tower.  If you are unfamiliar with the Foshay Tower I would recommend you look it up.  It is one of the most interesting looking buildings in downtown and it stood as the tallest skyscraper in the Midwest for 40 years before the IDS was built.  On the top floor is an observation deck that you can go out on for $8 and you get a fantastic view of the city.  The picture to the right here is of the Wells Fargo Center which is my favorite building when it is lit up at night.  The observation desk is totally worth the $8 price tag if you have never done it before.

After traipsing through downtown taking photos we went to Saint Anthony Main and took photos around the Stone Arch Bridge.

I have started a photo gallery for my photos which is presently located at http://photogallery.schalicto.com , comments are open, I’d love to hear what you think of the photos.  I am looking forward to taking more photos around the cities, if you have a suggestion of where I should take some photos please let me know.  There are tons of beautiful places in the Twin Cities but I can never think of any when I want to.  Or if you would like to join us for a photo walk that would be fun too!

That’s all for now!

Cheers,

Josh

HTPC Windows 7 MC Reinstall

I recently upgraded my Home Theater PC from The Windows 7 Release Candidate to the final release version.  These are the applications that I put in that install…

• Coreavc
• DVRMSToolbox
• Chrome
• HappyFish
• HDHomerun Software
• Hulu Desktop
• Matroska Splitter
• MCE Addin for DTB
• Mkvtoolnix
• AnyDVD
• ShowAnalyzer
• TotalMedia Theater
• uTorrent
• VLC
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• FFDshow

Up until now I have had an auxiliary monitors plugged into the workstation that sits off to the side of the computer in case we wanted to use it as a desktop, but over the past couple months we have not used it as such so I disconnected the auxiliary monitor and went though the entire install on my HDTV.  The installation went smoothly, however after rebooting the second or third time the computer would not post!  I unplugged the HDTV and plugged in my auxiliary monitor and it posted fine!  So I let the computer load on just the monitor and then I shut it down again and plugged in both monitors and it loaded fine.  So I shut it down again and plugged in just the HDTV again, and it loaded fine!!!!

So I installed all of my applications and got Media Center running but the DTB Addin kept crashing!  So I uninstalled DVRMSToolbox and the Addin and when I tried to reinstall it the installer throws an error 2869.  After some research on babgvant.com I found that I need to do a manual uninstall, so I went thought the huge process of unregistering dll files and removing things from the registry and deleted a bunch of files and restarted the computer.  But the installer still didn’t work… after loads of cussing and posting on babgvant.com it’s still not work… no amount of cussing seems to be working.

Without DVRMSToolbox working ShowAnalyzer is useless.   My dreams just keep shattering.

And the computer has frozen on 3 different occasions for no good reason.

And audio doesn’t seem to be working on Media Center with certain MKV files.

And the remote control isn’t working in TotalMedia Theater.

I’m so frusterated right now.  I think I’m going to nuke the whole thing and start over tomorrow, but it takes so much effing time to reinstall and configure the channels and everything!!!!

I’m done ranting now.

UPDATE: It seems that DTB is not required to use the Addin and ShowAnalyzer is skipping commercials with no trouble.  Huh…. who’da thought?

Where it came from…

I originally started this blog as a cathartic way to get things off my mind and fall asleep at night, as you have noticed I haven’t been blogging as much and as a result I have gradually been finding it harder to fall asleep.  I guess I’ll start blogging about my life again.

I really wanted to talk about String Burn LIVE!  If you have not heard me talk about it, SBL is a live video video show that streams online every Saturday morning at 10am Central time.  I’m doing the show, with my long-time production partner Dan Reifenberger, from the sun room off the back of my house and the blood sweat and tears of our “spare time”.  I was lucky to get a great co-host to sit next to me, and that’s fellow yo-yoer Kirby Kirchgasler.  I chose Saturday mornings because, what else are you doing Saturday mornings?  I figure that most people are sleeping or just lounging at that time and if they had something to watch they would tune in… I hope that works out.  Our other options were to do it M-F at about that time in the morning, but I figure that would negate most working people, and during the school year it would rule out students as well. Or we could have done it late at night, but there are problems there too.

When I was telling Dan about this idea he had just procured a program for is Mac called Boinx TV that does live multi camera switching and with a weird but functional hack to send it to UStream, and just like that the show was born.

I was looking for a name for the show and I asked my friend Robyn what it should be called and she came back with about a dozen suggestions like Recoil, Rebound, Spun, and Rope Burn, I saw that last one and said that’s it “String Burn LIVE!” and the name was born.

Is anyone still reading this?  I hope not, I’m just rambling.  rambling rambling rambling. apostrophe. rambling.

We have had some teases of opportunities for real studio space, and one of them might actually pan out.  The most important thing that we are looking for is bandwidth because the better looking the show is on the live stream the more viable it makes us look.  respect.

Our set is sparse, we don’t even have a logo yet and we have had some people bitch about those points, but you know what?  It’s our thing.  It’s our thing to build.  You can avoid our thing if you want, of you can help contribute to our thing, or you can build your own thing, but if you’re trying to tear our thing down then you need stfu.  We have had some good legit constructive criticism though, my friend James pointed me to Kevin Pollaks Chat Show as a source for inspiration for our set, black background.  It’s funny watching Kevin Pollaks Chat Show because he’s doing a very similar thing to what I am trying to do, except with some cash, a studio, staff, and a pipe to the intervision that must be a mile wide.  The funny thing, it’s funny watching that because he keeps making jokes about how they “are not ready yet”, well, I would die a happy man if SBL were at the same level that his show is at.

More rambling.

A logo for the show is coming very soon, I think you’re going to like it.

I dunno, that’s about it for now.  But I’ve got a lot more to talk about in the future.  You don’t have to read it, but I’ve gotta write it to get it off my mind.

Short reviews of other Oscar films

Hello.

Revolutionary Road

I hated this film. It is dark and devoid of hope and is completely unlikable. I’m sure that is what Director Sam Mendes was going for and I respect it, but I don’t like it. The film touches on a lot of the same themes as American Beauty (also directed by Mendes) but where American Beauty was poetic and engaging Revolutionary Road was dark and depressing. Both Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio delivered fantastic performances but I don’t recommend this film.

Doubt

First off Doubt is a fantastic looking movie. The cinematographer was Roger Deakins. Something that I have noticed about cinematographers are either average (get the job done) or excellent and Roger Deakins is the best of the excellent. It isn’t like directors and actors who have performances that vary from film to film, if someone tells you that Roger Deakins shot the film you know it looks amazing. Blah blah blah. Doubt brings three great performances from Phil Hoffman, Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. My only complaint about the movie is that it gets a little ‘stage play’ talky in the third act. The film was directed by John Patrick Shanley who also wrote the original play and screenplay.

Waltz with Bashir

This is an animated film that was Israel’s submission for best Foreign Film. It deals with a massacre that occurred at the Sabra and Shantila POW camp during the Lebanon war in 1982. More specifically it deals with Ari, a former Israeli solider who has blocked all memory of the event at Sabra and Shantila and how he reconnects with other soldiers that were there so he can try and remember his involvement with the event and come to terms with it. The film looks just stunning and the vector animation that drives the film really adds to the movement and momentum that live action just could not have delivered. If the academy was smart (which we already know they are not) they would have nominated the song ‘Beirut’ from the film for best song.

The Wrestler

This film was amazing. It knew what it had to do and it delivered on it in spades. This is by far the most straightforward film by Director Darren Aronofsky and it shows his impressive talent and vision with the film medium. Both the film and the director deserved nominations (which they did not get) for this film. Based on his performance in this roll and who he is up against Mickey Rourke earned this nomination and deserves the award.

-Josh

the Oscars as Marketing

I talk a lot about the Academy Awards so I’m suprised that I had never considered this before, but I was listening to the /filmcast that featured Stephen Tobolowsky and he brought up the interesting concept that the Oscars are nothing more than a marketing tool for films that are currently in the theater. Based on his theory The Dark Knight didn’t get nominated for best picture because it already made a bucket of money but the Curious Case of Benjamin Button is still in theaters and still has money to be made…

Maybe this is happening more and more over time, but there has been a lot of discussion about how the films nominated this year are amoung the lowest grossing films ever to be nominated.

-Josh

More problems with Windows Live Writer

I don’t know why I have never run into this problem before, but I was getting an error that said

"Invalid Server Response – The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid".

And so I googled around and found this site that listed several fixes and none of them worked.  The fix ended up being setting up the link to my xmlrpc.php as ‘schalicto.com/xmlrpc.php’ instead of ‘www.schalicto.com/xmlrpc.php’ .  Lame, but fixed.

Josh