My main machine will be down until Tuesday, at least, so... not sure when I'll make videos next, hopefully over the next weekend, though.

1. Assessment and upgrade of a second hand laptop, min. $50... (low price for a friend)

2. DEO contract, at least two months, pending now (waiting on batches of source data to arrive), max. 20 hours / week (so that I could do 2x in parallel each week)

3. working on a book....

More later.

Prices in $BDS.

Will try to update properly tomorrow.

Today started with stress (this system crashed, BSOD!),
then... real tears (long story) and I NEVER cry, even when people die and I am sad,
and then... prayer,
and then... walking and errands...
and... I bought a new case for this system! (not transfered yet, unboxing vid is forthcoming someday),
and .... much more stuff...

First consulting gig confirmed!

and ... more!

But, now, it's midnight, so, nap time!

Q:

From < href="http://www.youtube.com/user/LuminousAtelier">LuminousAtelier on YouTube</a>:

"How do you get that text to show through out the video like that? I have been wondering that for a while I might do that with my videos..."

Non-answer reply:

Basically, it is complicated.

I will answer it properly with a tutorial video, give me 10 days to make it, that will be the video-of-the-week for next week.

Okay, so, there's a small but growing community of "livestream gamers", i.e. people who play games whilst other people watch. Some do commentary. It's like the live version of LPers on youtube.
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Okay, in terms of projects, I have two main projects going on now:

1. Improving my health-style

2. Actualizing a physical space to work (which I nickname a Studio)
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This year is moving too fast. Or, rather, I am moving too slow.

At first, I tried to move faster by raw effort.

That was silly. The key is to move smarter, more effectively.

To help me do this, I'll be making brief updates here as to my grand progress on the quest for world domination and self liberation.

Well, it is the end of another week... this week, I had hoped to make a little video to answer people who asked questions about how to do video capture of consoles, but, I don't think I can make a video which does it justice.
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Me and my Martian brethren (using the generic term, not a gender bias) will gladly rule the Earth, even if humanity somehow survives their Zombie-like self-destruction sequences!

I've been doing and thinking a lot. Most of my thinking, I do when I am in bed, asleep to the common world, so, in effect, I've been doing a lot (since sleep is mandatory anyhow, and I make it into a multi-task).
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Apparently, this came out over half a year ago, but I only just found out about it.

Link.

Well, my New Years' Gift from my Windows-based Intel-powered box of shht was to have the HDD crash, and me needing to re-install windows XP. Twice.

With my brilliant skills, I traced the problem to heat: the HDD is now on "life support" to keep it cool enough until I can replace it with a less temperature-sensitive one, or something.

This, of course, lead to a youtube rant, but, since I haven't re-installed everything yet, I haven't transcoded and uploaded it yet. Just a reminded to myself: Test 9 Jan 2010 Part B-1.avi.

Okay, and, Happy New Year to everyone, hope it is going less frustrating than mine.

The Python language reference shows that the Python grammar is rather small:

link to the full grammar for python, but on the other hand, what does English grammar look like?
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Yeah, so, I've been working on doing a few technical tutorials. However, that work sorta takes a back seat, because I've also been working on paid projects.

Anyhow, something that is useful for both, is making "standalone" programs. If a student or client can download a program and run it on their system, it is much better than making them, say, install XAMPP, just to get a simple demo "on their screen".
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So, my set of almost-useless technical information was expanded today.

APE is a compression format based on "Monkey's Audio". It is Lossless (like FLAC, and such), so it should be higher quality than, say, MP3 files, but it needs a special codec. You can find out more on the website: Monkey's Audio.

ECM is a way of compressing CD images (or "ISOs"). For various reasons, such files are usually stores as a set of files: one .cue file, and at least one .bin file. So, if you have a .BIN.ECM file, then you need to decompress it from ECM so that you can mount it or whatever.

ECM is done by friendly but command-line utilities, which you can find out about on the project page here: http://www.neillcorlett.com/ecm/.

And on that note, that is all.

Yeah, so, I think that current society is over-specialized. Maybe I'll write an essay about it, later. However, the solution is to become a specialist in a variety of areas, including what I haven't mastered yet, in practice: financial intelligence.

We'll see if I can put that theory into practice, moving forwards.

Although I had a slightly updated version of the Madara(Famicom, Fan-translated for English/NES) FAQ sitting on my HDD for a while, I hadn't wanted to upload it until I finished the game... but since none of the savefiles I have is anywhere near where I stopped the FAQ, and I don't have much time to play anymore, I just tidied it up a bit and put it out there.

Well, that's one project on hold for a while... that game has a great story with epic dramatic scenes (esp. for a Famicom/NES game), and I think that it is a shame the team didn't do more work... I can only imaging what they would do with resources similar to what were used for Final Fantasy 6, for example (a SNES game with dramatic cut scenes as well).

The story is, very implausible, using some sort of weird "Japanese" logic, I mean that not as a racial slur, but, because anime and manga sometimes have totally impossible things, yet, people just go like "yeah, this is awesome"... somehow, when English stuff tries it, it is messed up, but Japanese pull it off, making a self-consistent world.

Also, both my Divx and XVid codecs seem to be going haywire...

I was thinking recently that I really haven't watched that much anime, but then I started updating myanimelist, and I'm past 90 shows already (although some, like Code Geauss, are really just separate seasons). Anyhow, I was thinking of doing a Top 5 List, but I had a bit of a problem.

Take "Golgo 13;The Professional". An anime movie classic, but it was made before I was born, or something, so it shows its age a bit... would I recommend it today? Sure, but, top 5? Considering how much taste is more towards flashy stuff, as well, I might recommend Queen Bee first. And, actually, I'm only watch The Professional in mature company with warm tea, or pizza and soft drinks... maybe hard drinks as well... you know, grown-up stuff, that is.

Queen Bee is more accessible. You can fool people into thinking it's a love story (but it really is not, by any means), just like they tried to do with Equilibrium (which is, well, a sad story with lots of action to obscure the main point about censorship and the NC-17 rating cabal).

Anyhow, I'll prob. end up doing a top 20 list soon.

Also, what to do with something like Storm Riders? That's a live-action movie with a TON of special effects. It is based on a comic book series, and apparently, they wanted to fit the whole freaking comic into one movie, so, it is difficult to watch without my brain overloading on plot details, esp. as all the subtitles I've found for it are a bit... off.

Well, that's all for now.

I'll post more about it later, but the last 5-10 minutes are golden.