Mac OS Fail

by   •   General
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

THE INTERNET IN MY APARTMENT IS BROKEN AGAIN.

AARGH.

Fortunately, I work at a place where I can come and go freely with a 25 mbps Internet connection, so I went to the Badger Herald office so I didn’t have to sit in my apartment Internetless or have to go to a library and have people staring at me for typing too loudly.

My desktop computer at the office has three hard drives, one that holds Windows 7 and one that is used as a network storage device. The third hard drive is empty, so I decided to install a Mac operating system on it because one of my co-workers who is planning on joining me in leading multimedia refuses to use any editing software other than Final Cut Pro.

Even though Sony Vegas Pro 10 is almost just as good.

If you ever decide to try this as well, keep this advice in mind:

Popping in a Mac OS installation disk and booting from the CD/DVD drive will not work. It will try to read the disk for a while, fail, then continue on booting from the hard drive.

If you managed to get on Google and started searching for solutions, don’t use the solutions that require you to boot from .dmg or .pkg files. You need to already have a Mac in order to read those files.

If you end up downloading files and burning them to your own DVDs and trying to install Mac OS clones, don’t. Your optical drive will most likely fail because the files are too large and the installation will die when there’s 10 minutes remaining.

If you are intelligent enough to realize that burning these files to a USB drive instead will eliminate that problem, also don’t. I spent ten minutes clicking around on PowerISO and searching Google to find out how to make a USB drive act like a CD and found nothing.

At that point, I got frustrated, quit, and went to Taco Bell.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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Exams and Lucid Dreaming

by   •   Daily Post
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I took my philosophy exam today, and now I’m done with exams until final exam week. Even better, instead of having all my exams on the week of final exams, I have two exams on their regular final exam days and two exams the week before on the last day of classes.

The exam I took was surprisingly easy compared to the amount of reading that we had to do. We had two sets of essay questions with two prompts in each one, and we had to pick one essay from each set to answer. There were two decently-sized books that we had to read, but I think I could’ve done perfectly fine without even looking at the books and just writing based off the material we covered during lecture and discussion sections.

So if you happen to be a philosophy instructor, you should probably make your exam questions inclusive of out-of-class material as well as lecture and discussion material, or else your students might not actually read the books you recommend (what a surprise).

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #86: If you could script tonight’s dream, what would would the plot be? There is a concept called lucid dreaming, where people are able to have some control over their dreams. Have you ever had a lucid dream? Would you want one?

If I could script tonight’s dream, I would probably script it so nothing happens and I get a full night of comfortable rest.

Normally, I would probably say that I would script it so I would be reviewing my notes for an exam, because dreams generally act as a way for your body to prepare for theoretical things that could happen in the world. If I keep on practicing taking the exam and studying the material, I would have a stronger grasp on the material for when the real exam comes around. However, I have no high-priority academic stuff to worry about right now, and there’s nothing else that I need urgent practice for, so I would probably benefit most from a night of good sleep.

I generally don’t have any lucid dreams, but I would like to train myself to have lucid dreams. I’m curious what is contained in my subconscious mind, and I think that with a combination of lucid dreaming and interpreting other uncontrollable things that happen in my dreams, I can find out what I am actually thinking subconsciously, and discover what my hidden worries may be, if I have any.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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Regaining Lost Trust

by   •   Daily Post
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

It feels nice to have nearly a full day off (except for going to two classes).

I’ve done pretty much nothing productive all day (which probably isn’t a good thing, because I have an exam in my philosophy course tomorrow).

I’m gonna go eat some peanut butter sandwiches now and take a nap.

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #85: How do you recover lost trust? In a person? In an idea? If someone lets you down or betrays you, how do you learn to forgive? And can you possibly learn to trust them again? Why or why not?

Being an extremely cynical person, I generally don’t really trust anyone in the first place, so I don’t place myself into situations where I could potentially be betrayed or lose trust in someone else. If someone were to betray me, it would be nearly impossible to recover that trust because I believe strongly in the subconscious mind’s influence on the conscious body’s actions, and if the subconscious mind is there with the desire to perform betraying acts, then it will most likely overpower the conscious mind again in the future.

I have lost trust in ideas before when I have thought up of a plan and, after thinking about it some more and playing it out in my mind, realized that it had some sort of flaw or would leave open a vulnerability. Fortunately, I don’t treat ideas like humans, and I can comfortably go back to ideas to try and find out what the problem with the idea is. I usually think of solutions for the areas in which the idea is lacking and attempt to make it a better and more reliable idea.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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Mass Election Chaos

by   •   General
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Today was a day of MASS CHAOS BECAUSE THE STATE OF WISCONSIN HAD ELECTIONS and I happen to work as the web director for a newspaper that’s starting to focus on improving its website and taking advantage of the Internet.

After I got back from my classes, most of my evening and my entire night was spent sitting in front of my computer at the office refreshing pages and reading emails to put out live coverage of the election on BadgerHerald.com.

Yes, that’s right. The statistics don’t update themselves. There is literally a person there manually put­ting in all the numbers and updating the page over and over again as the information becomes available.

We made a special page for the election, and if you want to check that out, you can find it at http://badgerherald.com/elections. It’s probably going to be dormant by the time you read this and click on the link, but it’s probably worth visiting anyway seeing as I spent a handful of hours constantly updating those pages. Also, depending on when you look at it, the Supreme Court results still might not be finalized, as it was still extremely close when I left the office (meaning, there were almost 1.5 million votes total and the difference between the two candidates was about 600 votes).

As a result of all this, I’m extremely tired and my eyeballs hurt from staring into a pair of monitors for a majority of my time at the office. … Not that I’m not already spending too much time staring at monitors and screens in the first place, but it’s a lot more straining when you’re trying to work as quickly as possible and your eyes are flying across the breadth of the monitors.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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1080p 60fps Blu-ray

by   •   Daily Shoot
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

(If you think this story I’m about to tell is extremely vague, then that’s good, because I intended it to be like that in order to protect the identities of the people involved in the story.)

Yesterday, someone sent me a video to work with. After I received the video and opened it up, I noticed that it was recorded at a 16:9 ratio but was rendered at a 4:3 ratio and 480p quality, sized at about 23 megabytes. (For those who don’t know, 16:9 ratio is widescreen and 4:3 ratio is the old TV ratio. If you render a 16:9 clip at 4:3, it creates black bars at the top and bottom.)

I just used the video that I received, but told her for future reference that she should render her videos in widescreen high-definition in the future to make them better-quality. I told her the one she sent now was fine, but she insisted on rerendering her video.

She asked me for specific instructions, but she uses Final Cut Pro and I use Sony Vegas Pro so I couldn’t really help her out that much. Instead, I went on Google and searched for how to render in high definition on Final Cut Pro. I emailed her a link to a screenshot showing the rendering settings.

Instead of using this screenshot intuitively to find out how to render in high definition, she used it literally and rendered her video at the same settings as shown in the screenshot – 1080p, 60 frames per second, Blu-ray quality. Her 2.5 minute clip ended up becoming almost half a gigabyte.

#Fail

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

#DS505

Make a photograph from an unusual point of view.

From the Eyes of a Fridge

From the Eyes of a Fridge: This is what my refrigerator door would see if it had eyes.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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Downloading Skills

by   •   Daily Post
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Someone asked me today if I was going to participate in BEDA (Blog Every Day in April).

Really?

Have you not yet noticed that I’m already blogging every day of the year 2011 as a part of WordPress’ Post a Day?

-.-

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #84: If you could master any skill instantly, what would it be? In the movie The Matrix people could download any skill for use inside the virtual world. Is there any skill you think would be impossible to download? Why?

If I could master any skill instantly, I would pick the skill of memory. That way, I would have complete control over my memory, and be able to remember and forget things at will. This would help me succeed in pretty much anything academic, because I would only have to read through the course material once and be able to remember all the specific details. This would obviously not only help me succeed in exams, but would also help me remember important information to apply it to my life later on.

I noted that I want to master memory in general and have the ability to forget rather than mastering the ability to remember everything, because I recall seeing in some sort of documentary once that people who remember everything due to a mental abnormality (I think they’re called savants) actually suffer from their condition because they remember so much. So, I still want to be able to forget irrelevant things that I don’t need, such as the color of shirt my co-worker was wearing three weeks ago.

I don’t think that there would be any skills that are impossible to download. Assuming that downloading a skill means providing your brain with enough information about that skill to perform well in it, there isn’t anything that you can do that cannot theoretically be forced into your brain. Skills generally take knowledge, talent, and practice. The knowledge can be stored as memories, the talent can be stored as talent itself that each person has, and practice can be stored as the reinforcing of particular actions in your brain (meaning your brain would gain the experience that practice would give it).

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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