the desision has been made... (maybe)

Since November the search for a new mower has been ongoing as you know if you have been reading this blog, being bored by this blog, being put to sleep by this blog... The thing is why it has taken so long to get a mower.. It's going to be electric, and if there were any doubts about that they were erased quickly with the neighbors.. They have either a new gas powered mower, or used or second hand or it could be brand new.. The big negative towards having a gas mower is.. Well besides being gas powered it is a huge negative having to keep a gas can on hand, and oil, and having to keep the filters clean and the oil at the ready.. We had the Lawn boy mower one year, or two.. the Lawn Boy was a great mower, our neighbor across the street had one and he mowed his lawn and the smell of the exhaust was distinguishable from any other mower.. But the big negative of having anything gas powered is they should be stored in the garage or.. A shed.. We never had a solid good place to stored our mower ever before about seven years ago.. Without a good storage place snow and rain can get into the mower, making it hard to start if at all.. There was a time when my dad swore by gas powered  lawn mowers, then he swore at them, and then he got his first electric lawn mower, but it would eventually break down for whatever the cause.. He would then get a series of gas mowers before getting a few different electric mowers.. By the time I was able to help mowing it would be alternating gas for a few years, then electric then gas.. By the time he was getting to where he couldn't mow the grass at all he had gotten an electric lawn mower that would last quite a few years, and it was still stored outside it was a very good mower.. I would use it until it stopped.. Then got one again nearly ten years ago.. Black and Decker was that brand on both of those and the last one and every one (electric) would not have a grass catcher or it would be really expensive.. Then this years mower giving in made me look again and see that grass catchers are more the norm than the exception and so that is what we will get.. 

What was the mower deal next door?  Well I thought very slightly about getting a gas mower except... I was out listening to them mow.. The mower would stop and start, just like most people with mowers that bag the grass, but upon returning to mow, the pull start was a few tries to get it to go.. My arms have both popped out of the socket, my shoulder socket on both arms and the elbow as well on my left arm was dislocated, and still locks up to this day some fourteen years later.. Yes I pull started with both arms it's no big deal.. Then they ran the weed eater thing and the constant pull start sound like a lot of painful pull starts..  Yup we have electric and everybody might think "what a wuss" But I might be that but I get starts almost 100% of the time.. So take that..

Badge Henry

Club handshake

The movie set this past weekend .. :

Three Kings, I could swear I saw this via dvd disc but I couldn't remember any of it.. Not that means I didn't see it that way, I just can't remember and truth is it was a good movie so I had to have not seen it.. It's a take on a true story.. Supposedly, but you know Hollywood, embellish the story wherever and whenever you can...

They say any movie with Christopher Walken in it is a good movie for that fact.. Suicide Kings is an ok movie.  I kept watching even beyond when I usually give up on it and by the time the shit hit the fan it was really that good of a movie.. I was glad I kept watching the movie..

Clearly the winner of the weekend was the classic movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.. With the incredible Audrey Hepburn as the leading role Holly Golightly, a bit of a farce but a fun movie and well directed.. Fun to watch for everything about it..

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Well the election season has started, and just like every election season you get to see the candidates for the next year plus.. The sad part is they will get to talk about their opponent about what bad person they are, but ask them about what they are running on and you get a load of crap.. Truth is if there was a republican that candidate that promised to make a fair tax system for all and a few other issues I would vote for him, but that isn't what the republicans are about.. They are about making it difficult to like them for anything.. They want to bomb Iran and to me that could mean introducing Russia into a war, because i have said the day is coming when we are going to bite off more than we can chew as far as a war effort goes.. And Russia's Putin would love nothing more than to go to war against us.. No matter the cost.. 

In the last election it was more of a coin toss as to which candidate would be the best.. Ifelt like Obama was the lesser of the two evils, not by much but my feeling was that had Romney been in office he would have gotten us into several wars easily.. But the feeling is that I think the senate would have been in the democrats with the last election. They couldn't have allowed that to fall to the republicans..  I don't think..

I was looking at some Facebook sites recently and those who are staunch republicans seem like they drink the Obama i evil koolaid.. A guy I knew from when I was in a band I never would have guessed he turned out the way he has politically, but then I thought he is just a bandwagoner type of person, which is to say he likely hears a bad thing from either on the radio or wherever and he jumps on, the president isn't trustworthy or whatever.. Truth is I don't believe the president is looking out for our best interest 100%.. Might be about 60-75 % but I feel like if the republican was in the white house it might be 20% for everyone and 80% (or more) for the rich.. (that might sound like a joke where 20 plus 80 equals a hundred but the likelihood i that the 20% might be a little low..  And just like the last election I have no idea who the better candidate is.. Hillary Clinton might be really better than the republican but again it might be the lesser of he evils.. Sadly there is no clear cut winner, but it might be a case where having a woman in the white house might be better than an old rich turd republican.. Another election that is the "most important ever".. And people will enter the voting booth with their favorite coin to decided who they will vote for.. I think the election will be as tight as the Gore/GW Bush election.. Hold your chads...


Badge Henry

At a movie

This weekends movies, the trifecta as it were... First off there was Silver Linings Playbook.. :

With Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence it is as good as everyone says it is but fairly predictable.. I liked it because I really like J-Law as it were...

You're not You..  This movie I had on my to watch list since the start of the year if not sooner and put it off until last night.. There wasn't a reason for waiting except things kept getting in the way.. As far as the real reason, I don't care for Hillery Swank, or I should say I DIDN'T care for her until this movie.. She really did an excellent job playing someone with ALS.. ALS is what they call Lou Gehrigs disease..  Excerpt from NIH:

"ALS causes weakness with a wide range of disabilities.. Eventually, all muscles under voluntary control are affected, and individuals lose their strength and the ability to move their arms, legs, and body. When muscles in the diaphragm and chest wall fail, people lose the ability to breathe without ventilatory support. Most people with ALS die from respiratory failure, usually within 3 to 5 years from the onset of symptoms. However, about 10 percent of those with ALS survive for 10 or more years."

This was the hard part of the movie, I really hadn't read that much about ALS, and so it was hard to see this be acted out, and acted out in great detail.. Emmy Rossum plays the girl who helps her out, playing a fairly nasty screw up and for whatever the reason they bond...  As her condition worsens  her ability to talk starts to deteriorate to the point where it is hard to understand her.. And the end when she is gasping for air she chose not to be on the ventilator..  That was extremely hard to watch..

Perfect Sisters was the third movie.. And as sad as the material was on You're Not You, it was as equally sad for Perfect Sisters.. The way the writeup for this movie makes it sound like the sisters murdered their mother for the fun of it.. That is not the case.. But the way it evolved the girls started to go down this dark path brought on by their mother's drinking problem, and the men she chooses to ..be with.. And so in the end after the girls exhaust all means to get help they resort to putting their mother out of their misery..  Quite an interesting farce except that it is a true story..

Badge Henry

Thas video production ideas..

Ok, I just thought I'd say.. The videos were fun to do.. The birthday party was done on the forth of April (a week ago) but getting it sequenced up and edited was tricky because.. Well the windows live movie maker was not designed to work very well with my MOD files.. And so it was a three times to get it done type of thing.. After my second try I decided to wait until after doing the Easter video.. Now the Easter video didn't seem like I got that much of anything really.. But it turns out I got a way lot more video.. So upon starting it, I ran into the same issue as with the birthday party.. And I knew it was going to be worse because it was going to be longer and larger..  So I thought how am I going to get the video to be doable.. First thought was convert but there is no program that gets my video to look remotely very good.. I went through conversion programs converting and they made the videos unwatchable.. So what to do??  I then decided to do with the Easter video what I have done with the videos from my YouTube site, which is put them in folders of relative situations.. That basically meant scenes that included the water fight, the bubbles, the hanging in the yard and also the final bit when the twins were running through the house.. Did each folder individually and then put them together.. When all was said and done the video was 45 minutes in length.. That was the disc version.. The YouTube version was 21 minutes.. Which is the better version?  I don't know if the longer version is better, it is just.. longer..  What does the longer version have that the shorter version doesn't?? Well the longer version has more of the water fight although only about a minute.. There was a fifth folder that was Ryans that I all but left off the YouTube version which might have been about five minutes.. There was more of the bubbles section..  And more of the Easter egg hunt section..  So when it came time to upload the video to YouTube our slow internet upload speed killed the idea of uploading the bigger YouTube file version, it was the 21 minute version but was set to be a bigger file.. The settings I use most on widows live movie maker are the for dvd setting and for e-mail.. The dvd setting is to make discs, and the email is to send it to YouTube.. The dvd setting meant the video would take over 8 hours to upload, assuming everything stays good for such a thing .. Good luck with that.. So I figure while I would rather have the larger file I figure you get the gist, if you want to see it in better file form watch the disc version...

On to the birthday party.. The third try would be the one that failed me as well..  I decided to try a different way of doing the video, I put the whole thing on without a  single edit and clicked to have the video converted to dvd with the movie maker program.. After doing that the video was now one single video of about 45 minutes.. That was great except for one thing.. I would have to watch the entire video and clip it as I went,... it was going to be harder than I anted so abandoning that idea I went to the regular way I usually do the videos. Yes it acted up on me but I think the reason it went bad the first few times was I was trying something new and might have been too much for the program to take.. I got it edited and set to go and got it done. The dvd version was around twenty minutes but the YouTube version was 8.. I like doing the videos this way, having the longer version for disc and an edited version for YouTube.. It's more concise this way.. The videos still have the majority of the concept without a ton of filler..   That's my idea anyway..

One more thing, during the troubles I was having I decided to try to download another program, and try it.. It is the NCH video suite.. It's free and I thought I'd give it a try.. But as with any new program it means trying to figure it out, and I didn't want to.. So maybe in another day or two I will try it.. Try to learn it.. It seems like the windows live version a bit but.. not.. So I'll see if it might be better..

Badge Henry

That tv channel..

I like being right every now and then.. And recently (yesterday actually) I read an entry on the Roku forum and I expanded on it my  wisdom on it.. Such as it is.. So here is the entry original :

SlingTV capped at 2 Million users

 "Was reading the interweb news today and came across an article that says that per their agreement with broadcasters, Sling TV has a max user cap of 2 Million users. Once that is reached/exceeded the broadcasters have the right to pull their programming. I hadn't heard any of this till today. Any thoughts????"

 My response : "From the article : "They want it to be a complementary product and not a competing product that cannibalizes their core business," Ms. Ranganathan said. "They don't want it to become too popular." Well doesn't that just strip your gears... My feelings are that it sounds like they think of streaming players as a novelty, and not the true future of the way people will want their programing delivered.. I've also heard via an article in Time (the one with Cuba story in it) where streaming will eventually be just like cable tv is, where you buy tiers and get shafted with the old model of paying for that next tier because it has that channel you just need, and they know that because that is the business model.. Hopefully people will not allow this to happen.. AGAIN.." 

and a response by someone who was trying to watch the semifinals Saturday night on the sling (app) channel via Roku : 

"I am a sling subscriber and if they don't fix the issues with the errors while watching the final four saturday night they won't have to worry about 2 million users.
I dropped directv due to the offer of live sports and the 1st time they have a big event we get errors. Overall the service has not been that bad but when you have those kinds of issues with big games on you want attract alot of subscribers. I know eventually the price will go up with slingtv but I figure the savings on the standard package will be worth it for now. Hopefully when Monday night football starts we want have the issues like they did on Saturday."

Another reply :  

"You hit the nail right smack on the head stutch...that is exactly where i think we're headed if people don't wise-up to Dish NOW,
before it's too late,because what we buy into today is most likely what we'll be forced to pay for in the future...ie;More Bundles and tiers of service...and Nothing will have changed except the method of delivery...just the way the cable/sat cabal wants it."

Followed by the best response to this point : 

" You couldn't be more correct...Just like subscribing to cable..."no difference there"...then you'll pay...and pay...and pay...and then you'll pay some more...for channels you never watch nor wanted...and there's no difference there either...and now they've got you where they want you...trapped like a Rat...in a bundle...AGAIN...no difference there either...it's just the way the cable/sat cabal wants it...and you and some others around here eat it up like it's the best thing since sliced bread...Fools...Well...if bundles and tiers of service is what you want,then go for it...y'all obviously haven't learned your lesson...And Never Will....It's totally beyond me why you people would ever argue for bundles and tiers of service (and that IS what you're arguing for whether you know it or not) when us cord cutters/cord never's are trying to get away,and stay away from,the cable/sat cabal...that's why we bought a Roku and/or other media players...and now you're anxious to bring that monstrous cable/sat cabal to the internet??...are you people crazy or something...wanting "entertainment" sooo badly that you'll enslave yourselves and your finances to the cable/sat cabal once again??...see...you and a whole bunch others around here still have Not learned your lesson...and You Never Will...go figure.. ...bah bah bah... " 

To my final reply on this entry : 

"Right on it.. The tiers.. I was reading a post elsewhere about Sling tv here and someone said when they add this channel or that, they would try Sling out.. And as you have stated in your reply, another bundle, another tier.. And the truth is NOW is when people who are getting sling can make it be what they want. To me the perfect tier of channels would be exactly what you want without paying for even a single channel you don't ever intend to watch because you never have.. So if they have the perfect delivery of channels then that would be ten, eleven, seven or even just two channels that you pay for.. No twenty for two (but you're getting 18 more channels).. That's the thinking by cable/satellite and people dive head first into the shallow end thinking it's a good deal.. IT'S NOT.. To me the Roku has always been about choice.. Not really giving up on a certain way to think of getting your entertainment but rather getting what you want when you want it.. VOD.. Someone else was saying when they can get Encore they will be happy.. Check what Encore delivers and then get the channel that closely resembles that.. VUDU or Amazon or whatever.. Don't over encourage channels like HBO to deliver the goods, that might backfire on you.."

To the final reply :  "Christ, people. It's entertainment. If you don't like it, or don't trust it, don't buy it. Is it that hard? No one is focing you to buy it."  

My reply to that would be that is true.. You make the choice with what you pay for.. True that.. But the truth is sling can get out of hand, the quote "well once they add this or that channel then I will get it" well that is walking into the trap that is that next tier, you pay for it and you have lists that include that one channel and leaves the rest of that tier in the ignore these file.. You pay for them, but never watch much at all. But it has that channel you wanted, can't live without it.. Well that is the trap that i and others are talking about avoiding.. Sling has that potential to be the service everyone is after.. Going ala carte is what everyone wants.. dish initially tried that back in the early days of being a company.. We will give you what you want*...  * sorry no we can't.. The reason is quite simple, they are tied to these channels, and so the reason some of the tiers are full of shit channels (think paid commercials and barf like that) is because it brings the price of those channels down.. People on the roku only want what they want..They don't want filler.. Netflix is the only channel we pay for.. Would we get sling tv??  Right now the answer is no.. Could that ever change..  Depends on many things..  I don't want fifty channels that we might watch ten or twelve.. That is just not a good trade.. More isn't what most Roku users are after, they want concise channels..   This isn't supposed to be cable tv light..  Anyway that's my opinion.. Such as it is.. 

Badge Henry

 

New youtube video site

This was originally a Facebook entry.. Yeah it got away from me so I post it here and delete it there.. I'm doing a lot of that lately.. Going concise.. Here's the entry..

Re uploading a chunk of my videos here on my secondary  (now is my primary) YouTube site.. For reasons I already explained about, I deleted all but one video at the primary site and that will be deleted eventually.. Getting into trouble for uploading tv shows from Canada and Australia and the BBC and ITV from England.. truth is they were up for two years and some were up for quite a lot longer, but when you get a cease and desist letter or ten you get the idea to not only take all those videos down, but take everything down for fear of the channel being shut down (which could happen any day now).. I'm hoping I nipped it in the bud as it were and  hopefully they won't shut that channel down.. This channel will eventually include just about every video from the primary site.. Except that the videos were re-- um.. well reissue might be the word to use.. Not improved but in certain terms the videos were .. had to be changed because of copyright infringement issues, mostly from the tv shows but also music that was on the videos..  Here is the hole N the rock that was in some six or seven videos at the old site, here it is one video.. Edited and primed, it is better maybe but really it's the way I was planning to do the videos eventually because back in the early days I had no clue about the "live windows movie maker" program on the computer.. So I edited the videos to make quite a lot fewer videos.. I had around 500, maybe more, and now at the new site I will have not even half that..

The new version of the hole N the rock set of videos yielded this little masterpiece.. And I am still a few videos from having them all up.. I had gotten 172 or so videos downloaded, of the 500 give or take.. There were videos that were set to the "some of the best of stutch13@youtube dot com" and so I was trying to tell which made the grade and which didn't..A lot of videos were consolidated, there were quite a few that were with Ian in them, rather than just send them as they were I set it into one video.. I was happy with the final video and set it here.. I should have all the videos re uploaded by the end of April..  So what is the new video site called??  You click the video and find out for your self.. You know how it's done.. It is kind of a lame name but.. There it is.. It was never supposed to be my primary site and I didn't want to start a forth Google account just for the youtube of it..

Badge Henry