Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Getting Satellite TV in my home office Friday!

Today, I found out that my early Christmas present will be an extra DirecTV receiver in my room and I am happy. Even though I plan to move out in 2 years, it gives me a lot of ideas about recording – I can record the video at 680x480 MPEG1 in real time onto my hard drive and compress the video I want in DivX for storage on my hard drive. It would require a TV tuner card – but having digital TV on my computer would be really great. My dad’s getting a two new receivers and one is for my room. We already have all the regular channels plus HBO, Cinimax, Showtime, or The Movie Channel. I’m getting satellite channels in my room, and it’s in ultra-high resolution so it’s a big deal too me. It’s better than streaming video! I am so excited. I get to record all Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes in medium resolution. Problem is it has to be MPEG1 or AVI because my computer can’t encode video in MPEG2 or DIVx in real time. I can watch Modern Marvels on the History Channel, or Fox New Channel. I could end up recording 4 hours of video per day in AVI, and compressing them too smaller files at night when I am sleeping. This is going kick some serious butt!

I found some interesting pictures of next generation renders for consoles. One shows the best image of a Madden football game I’ve ever seen. This could be one that is using the Xenon power.

Anyways, at school - I had no class today. Joyce was gone so I was wondering it had anything with the fact that we’re on the last chapter in the book and the test is due at the during Christmas Vacation. Cisco is damn difficult. Subnetting gives me the willies.

I found out what Jon Bon Jovi sounds like. I heard of him at school on Tuesday so I downloaded MP3 versions of his songs. Wow! He’s pretty good. I downloaded his song “It’s my Life” off Kazaa, and it’s worth the download! His music is epic. I have 5 of them now. Before this I just know that his Winamp skin was really cool. It’s like a big speaker moving with the sound waves. It’s one of the top skins at Winamp.com. I read his BIO on MTV.com, and it says he dropped out of school to play in bands until he got a job as a janitor for his cousin’s recording studio, and became popular in the 80s. Now, he is known through out the world and only does singles.

I am probably going to have to study for two tests tomorrow since Joyce wasn’t in today. I was going to fail the class like a man. The truth is I am not doing very well.

I installed Suse 9.0 on my custom PC just for the heck of it. I have Linux, but I don’t use it as often as Bill’s OS. It’s a fair OS and has less security holes than WinXP. I like that Bubble Trouble game on their. GIMP is nice too, but I leave the graphic effects to Paint Shop Pro 9. I have played around with the paint brush tool, and I sometimes use it for drawing with my mouse. That’s pretty fun. I use the Windows version of The Gimp 2.0.4 – one of the latest versions. It’s a great program understanding that it is free!

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