I did some work for DemandStudios for a bit, didn’t get accepted past the approval process. However just looking through some of the articles I found that some of them were very very miscategorized.
My assumption for this happening is that their algorithm isn’t totally precise. yay algorithms.
What does this green person have to do with mortgage!?
I wonder sometimes if the creators of these ads even look at the images they’re inserting. Maybe it’s an eye catching thing, well then shite they just got a free ad on my site’s front page.
“But it’s HD!” is your first rebuttal. I say: “I don’t care.” Sure I make movies and put them on YouTube in HD and all but that’s a different form of content (professional vs. amateur) and standard definition online actually does suck, a lot. Anyway, my reasons:
1. It costs more. Blu-ray is like the button on YouTube players that says either HQ or HD, the button that makes it higher quality basically, the difference between that and Blu-ray is that it costs to press that button. Let’s start with the basics to play this media, you need a Blu-ray (I’m already getting tired of typing that word). You need a TV and a Blu-ray player, but wait blu ray runs at 1920×1080 resolution, so there would be no point in having a standard definition TV, ok let’s buy an HD TV. Gee this sound is terrible on these stock speakers, because now they can put more audio information on the disk, let’s buy a better sound system. You see the train of thought here. Essentially I don’t want to buy all that stuff.
2. Most titles that are in Blu-ray aren’t worth it. Transformers 2 Revenge of the Fallen? c’mon. Terminator Salvation? ug. Until there are more and more movies that come out that I would actually consider buying I really don’t want a Blu-ray player. I’m going to hate the day they make holographic movies and the first commercially available title is something written by the Scary Movie people.
3. I don’t actually need the immense screen clarity it gives. Like hearing the white noise scratching on an MP3 file, seeing film grain in my opinion adds to the movie viewing experience. Seeing everything as if it was real-life would just be freaky and I don’t need to see more blood than there already is in District 9 (which I feel is the first actually good movie I’ve mentioned this entire post).
In short until HD TVs are a little cheaper, and Blu-ray burners are a lot cheaper like DVD burner cheaper, and then cheaper titles I might consider buying into one. Until then I am very happy with watching my standard def movies on a standard def television computer screen.
Sitting in my high school’s library now, looking around it’s slightly surprising to me that Apple only has an 8% market share. I see two MacBooks, two MacBook Pros, and 5 various models of the iPod.* Many of you may or may not know in the end of October 2008 I bought the $1600 MacBook, and even dual booted Windows XP on it. While yes I admit the prices on their hardware is pretty ridiculous, and I could have gotten a much more powerful components, a much larger screen for the same price or even less, and the glass screen is a good warning mirror in case anyone sneaks up on me, what I got for the price I paid seems a little more fair now.
Having had it for almost three months, I can sufficiently say that I am rather satisfied. Windows runs games and such perfectly on the 70gb partition I made for it, and although the trackpad isn’t very compatible that is easily fixed with a good notebook mouse.
Yesterday, some friends and I pitched in $25 in order to split 4/5 licenses of iWork ’09. Originally I was skeptical about the software, I watched the Apple keynote revealing the revised Office suite and wasn’t too impressed. However actually trying it out on my own computer has been an experience. Initially I had used Open Office write, which while works, can be difficult sometimes, I got it so I wouldn’t have to pay more re-purchase MS Office and I considered it to out rank the suite overall. Now having tried iWork extensively, the ranks of Word Processors go from worst to best: MS Office, Open Office, iWork. For anyone who has a Mac already and is tired of using a clunky interface on such a beautiful machine, I recommend that you switch over, again you can split up the licenses as you wish.
The other software that comes on the Mac side, iLife ’08 in particular is also impressive, I have already used Garageband multiple times to create soundtracks for my videos, and I feel that they have come out with a level of professionality that a copyrighted song could not have given. iMovie is really a joy to use for short simple videos, responding to challenges on YouTube has never been easier, before my process would be slowed down over the course of about two hours per challenge.
My verdict: if you’re a fun loving student like me who games and does whatever whenever, then get a mac, you won’t regret it. If you’re just looking to get a good portable computer though just for browsing and word processing, get an HP Mini, I’ve tried them out from friends and in stores and they’re second to none in portability.
*I don’t care Zunes are still better, just wait until Songbird supports more mp3 players.
Few of you may know or not know that I am working on a new website, I have the server bought and I’m filling it with content as I write this. Part of this new website is (like The Six Sides) a WordPress powered Blog. The big difference is that I’ve designed this one mostly from scratch, so that the menus and such match the rest of the site, in coding and laying this all out mostly through the CSS file I came across something which I suddenly didn’t like as much in the WordPress framework.*
It’s how the CSS file is layed out, in the past my CSS files and others I’ve seen often combine one element ( element { blah } ) into one statement, sometimes to avoid rewriting it over and over again you can list two elements with the same attribute ( element { attribute } ). Now with the CSS file that the amazing folk at WordPress.org have made: It’s all divided up and elements are split across “Typography and Colors” and “Structure” … GAH!
While I can see where they’re coming from, it’s a form that can induce redundancies, I didn’t even know that almost every element was split twice until further examination, and as a result I ended up stating conflicting attributes. Example:
body{ blah: #2039fa; margin: 30px 0 20px 345px;},
Then several dozen lines down I come across:
body{ margin: 12px 100px -90px 0;}
Which is practically the opposite of what I stated in the first “body” statement! Fortunetly I’ve been able to work around it and the WordPress team still have done a phenomenal job making such a powerful blogging tool. It’s just the CSS file is really annoying to edit linearly and I suddenly fear the day I will have to do it to this blog.
