But the title of this blog post doesn’t really mean anything. I was listening to iTunes and had it on Random and Octopuses Garden came up on iTunes. For some reason it inspired me to open up MarsEdit and write a click little blurb.

I have been working on converting all of my families home video tapes to a digital format. I must say it has been a rather intensive process. A bit more expensive then I imagined.

The first expense was the Elgato Video Capture device. Scored that for $84 off Amazon with the free 2 day shipping ala Amazon Prime. Another expense was actually getting a VCR. My girlfriends mom had one to lend me. It works pretty well. It has some tracking issues so I ordered another VCR off ebay and now have two VCR’s on my desk.

I remember being a kid and thinking VCR’s could possibly be the coolest thing ever. Now they are just large annoying black boxes on my desk. I picked up the other VCR for $30 from eBay. The lady that was selling lied to me on its condition. But it works as expected.

Also I needed a place to save all of this video as most videos come up after compression to be 2-3GB of data. Then a DVD version ends up being another 4GB or so. Then I make 2 different formats m4v and Divx AVI. Not really sure how my family is taking this. But oh well I am happy to have digital copies of all the tapes. But this all takes up space so I now have 2 1TB Firewire 800 HDD. I have 2.5TB of data hooked up to my laptop for all of these home movies.

Good times. Well I better get back to work. Just thought I would blog some random thoughts.

I slept in until 11am or so just as she was getting home from her errands. She had some doughnuts. We chilled out for a bit and then she went to take a nap. I watched the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. I had it on the TiVo. It was kinda crazy that it took up 22.7GB for 4hrs and 30 minutes. But overall it was okay. Not my cup of tea for an ultimate TV viewing experience.

But anyways that night was going to go meet up with my friend Preston and his lovely lady Mindee. We went to the Cheesecake factory in Southcenter. That place was a total hell hole. Driving around the parking lot with all of those idiots is rather nutty. Manners go out the window. Tempers rise. Good times.

So we get to the cheesecake factory and the wait on the Sunday was about 90 minutes. This seemed to shock and surprise people. But people are idiots and it made me laugh at their stupidity. One group came in wanting a table for 17. I think the hostess told them to piss off. But after much waiting we got a table and ordered some drinks and had a good time shooting the breeze and catching up.

I got a little drunkard and had a good time. They did make me the wrong entree. But that was quickly fixed and they ended up comping my dinner. I felt kinda bad about it and the manager asked if I wanted anything else. I said some mashed spuds sound pretty good instead of soup or salad. He was more then happy to hook that up.  So a few minutes later I had a bowl of mashed potatoes. My girlfriend then asked me “Can I have some” not to be one to say no to a simple request I said “sure” or probably more like “sbhure” in the drunken state. She dips her fork into the hot potato mash. Part of my arm happens to be on the table. Some hot potato falls off and this is what happened.

Tristan: “Ouch, That is really hot. It’s burning”
Girlfriend Laughs
Tristan: “It’s Burning! It’s Hot”
Girlfriend Laughs

At this point I was like she isn’t going to take it off so I grabbed my napkin and took care of business. Typing it out makes it seem like it was incredibly rude sounding. But it was rather comical after all was said and done. Everyone at the table had a good laugh.  Here is a badly painted diagram to show how it went down.

But the meal was delicious. Cheesecake was awesome. I hadn’t had cheesecake at the cheesecake factory in a very long while. That night went home and passed out from exhaustion and began Monday and then got incredibly busy and now we are here over a week later finally getting this post out.

Thanks again to Preston and Mindee for a fun evening out. Double dates have been incredibly enjoyable with old friends.

This prompted me to write up a long detailed e-mail on good backup tips and some free tools and general good advice about saving data. I didn’t get a thank you. I didn’t get one response.

E-Mail is my thing. I love e-mail I find it 100x easier to solve problems with an e-mail then a phone call. I am always on e-mail. You send me an e-mail it gets forwarded to my Mobile Me account which instantly puts it on my iPhone and boom I know you sent something and i will get back to you ASAP. To make things easier for my family I setup a Google Group so that you can just send an e-mail to 1 address and everyone gets it. But people seem afraid to use it.

Here are the current stats on the group.

185 Tristan
118 Mom
49 Aunt
31 Grandpa
31 Uncle
27 Cousin
20 Family Friend
20 Alex
15 Family Friend Old Account
14 Grandma

This has been up for over 2 years and doesn’t seem like it’s getting that much use. Getting people involved in the discussion on things like planning birthday’s is near impossible. My girlfriend her family seems to have e-mail and planning family events in the digital realm down. I don’t get why it’s so hard to reply to an e-mail or click a link and fill out a form.

I finally got my grandma hooked up with a Jitterbug cell phone. That is the oddest phone I have ever seen. Only cell phone I had ever used that has a dialtone when you flip it open. And that everything on the phone is either “Yes” or “No” Do you want to call Tristan?

My family has a ton of videotape so I got the means necessary to work on converting them to the digital format.  My desk is kinda loaded at the moment. Two Apple laptops got some VCR’s going here and just piles of technology at the beck and call to get all this done. Here is an picture of my desk at the moment.

Sent out an e-mail for that no response not a person in the world seems to care. I tested out the technology with my High School Senior Slideshow. I wasn’t in it but it was the only video tape I had around the house.

You can view that at the following link North Kitsap High School Graduating Class of 2001 But I would be careful. It’s 46 minutes of a slideshow of people you probably have no clue about. It was really just a visual test to see how well it worked. I also changed the audio to be a bit better quality.

But I hope to get on this project there are tons of funny. (Well I would find funny) videos that we recorded over our childhood years. That I would like to convert to a digital format. I don’t think I would want to convert them to DVD. Since would be easier to grab a video file and make a DVD if you so choose.

But anyways I guess I just wanted to rant that my family doesn’t use technology in a way that seems to be the most productive. Or seem to care about any of the efforts that I put forth into helping them. But what do I know. It’s late I am going to bed thanks for reading.

Some Tech Specs : We captured this on December 14th 2009 at various locations around my hometown of Kitsap County, WA. I used a Flip Ultra HD camera for all of the video and we went to various locations and I would capture my sister dancing from 15-30 seconds depending on the location. The video was inspired by the “Where the Hell is Matt” video which you can see here.

The music is Praan and you can grab it off iTunes at the following location : http://bit.ly/91XPu4

I edited the movie on my MacBook Pro using iMovie 2009. Which made it incredibly easy to do. I captured about 58 minutes of video in various locations and had to cut it down to 4 minutes and 29 seconds to match the other video. If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them leave them in a comment below. I am not sure if we will do this again next year but who knows what the future holds.

So back in Februrary of 2009 I my girlfriends cousin sent out an e-mail to everyone asking if we would be interested in going to Ross Lake in the North Cascades. Me being the Tristan I thought hey why not and my girlfriend said I was going. So that was the end of that.

I didn’t give much thought about it since I haven’t been on a real vacation since before High School. I did some trips out to Indiana when I was dating a girl online back in 2000 but nothing really exciting. I put in a request for some time off work and at that point we were good to go.

A little 411 on Ross Lake Resort.

• It is a man made lake due to Ross Damn.
• It’s glacier fed and very cold.
• There is no Internet or Cell Service.
• I was going with all of Raleigh’s family.
• You have to be boated or trucked in or hiked.
• You are required to bring all of your own food and drink. (Except Water)
• They have power.
• You stay in Cabins.

So when the time came and being a bit under experienced in Vacation Lore. It caused me a good deal of stress making sure everything was ready on my end not knowing what I needed or anything like that. When I get stressed out about something the girlfriend usually gets mad at me. So the few days prior there was a great deal of tension in the Pipo Pad. Had to make her understand I had no clue what needed to be done and she had to realize I needed some help and life was good again.

The options for getting to Ross Lake are taking a ferry. Which leaves at 8:00am and 3:00pm. So we were shooting for Sunday June 21st 3:00pm ferry leaving the dock.

We left fairly early in the morning and ran into a few snags. The brake light went out on my girlfriends car so we had to pull over and get that replaced. Then we were back on track for our Northern journey.

On the way up since we had women in the car we had to stop at some Outlet mall. I will still never understand the concept of why going to a store and looking at things is a good experience. I much prefer loading up my web browser going to Amazon finding what I need and since I have Amazon Prime 2 day Free Shipping or I can overnight it for $3.00.

Looking at that seems a great deal friendlier and easier to cope with then.  The average visit to a Costco.

So being a bit of a hypocrite I walk over to the Samsonite Outlet store and pickup a leather Passport Holder. I am not sure how long we spent at the shopping establishments but it seemed to long.

So then we hit up a grocery store and tried a KFC Clone and we were on our way. We had 50 miles to drive in 90 minutes. We figured this would be cutting it close but we could make it.

It started to rain and I began to think. I probably should have figured I would need a coat. I didn’t have one so we kinda made a screech into this mini mart place on the side of the road in the North Cascades. They didn’t have any alternatives like a ponch or anything like that. But the nice asian lady offered me a garbage bag for the trip. We bought some $9 bug spray because we felt bad for taking advantage of this poor woman.

Time: 2:28

We still have a ways to go and we get stuck behind this old man driving 35 in the 50. This continued for way to long and when we got to a town with a left turn lane this genius decided to drive in that lane confusing the hell out of everyone else and then he pulls back in front of us.

Time: 2:48

We think we see a sign for the ferry to ross lake and it turns out to be some community for Ross Lake that Seattle City Power setup for the people that work and manage the states hydro electric power.

Time: 2:55

We drive further on the road and finally find the turn off and this turns out into a very high tense situation. There is no boat we see her family’s car. It appears that they have gone and we are kinda SOL.

But all is not lost we have two options at this point. Drive a few miles up the road and hike the “1 mile” down to the lake. Or drive back into town and grab a Hotel for the night.

Well being the city folk that we have become we figure “1 mile” not a big deal we can hike that no problem. Probably take 25 minutes at the max. Well we didn’t account for all the stuff we had to pack in.

So we drive up the road and start to unload the car. I had my Large Laptop Timbuk2 bag and a large duffle bag with clothes. The girlfriend and I also had a large cooler packed with food.

The girlfriend also had her bags that we were expecting to have hauled on the ferry and tossed on a truck. As this was not the case anymore we were hiking all of this in. Raleigh’s mom was also with us and she had a nice rolling suitcase that well was a great idea but wouldn’t do so well hiking down the trail.

Here is a basic outline of the trail.

The sign and all the adverts on the website claimed this to be “1 mile downhill”. After this hike I don’t believe that was a mile for one second.  I used to walk 2.3 miles to work and from work everyday. I think I have a pretty good mental grasp on what a mile is. That wasn’t no mile. I would say 2 miles.

Which still wouldn’t be that bad but I had two heavy bags and had to carry half of a cooler. My girlfriend was carrying the other side of the cooler so we kinda had a push me pull you type system going on. It kinda looked like this.

Everything was loaded up to the max and the trail was not smooth. To start off the trail I had my iPhone with headphones going. The music of choice was the Engadget Podcast. I figured listening to talk of the new Palm Pre would distract my mind enough from carrying all this heavy shit down the mountain. None of us had it easy. Raleigh’s mom had the least amount of bulk. The saddest part of the whole trip down was we couldn’t take all of our beer.

I drank a beer as fast as I could at the top of the trail to make it slightly easier. So with a very mild buzz and Engadge Podcast. With this rather daunting trail carrying all of this crap we began our journey down the mountain. This stopped after 15-20 paces or so.

Raleigh’s mom had this wheeled luggage well I can say wasn’t designed for going down a trail. So I sat down on a rock and waited for thier return with a modified carrying set. We began our trip again. The first look was nice it was downhill and looked promsing until we turned a corner and there was this rather large uphill. At this point I was a cranky son of a bitch. Carrying all this shit down a mountain and now up a mountain.

We got to a clearing and I dropped gear and went and found a spot to take care of nature.

Loaded up my arms and we started down the trail again. We ran into some women who were hiking that kinda gave us this “What the fuck is wrong with you look” they were probably pondering why these people coming down a trail with multiple coolers and so much crap.

This happened a few times along the way. So we eventually reach a spot where we can see a road. The directions we had printed out said “When you see a road take a right and you will see a phone” turns out that phone wasn’t for another 1/2 mile or so.

By this point I was a rather short fuse and pretty much everything was pissing me off. I was at the point where rocks were annoying me. So I recall blurting out obsenities about dinosaurs and how if I ever saw one I would kill it.

It seemed to provide some comic relief but I just wasn’t happy. So when we got to the phone it all went fairly well after that we called for a boat and they picked us up and took us across the lake to our cabin.

The girlfriends Aunt’s were shocked to see us and the neighbors we had were also shocked.

So the ross lake adventure will be continued shortly in part 2. Comments are welcomed.

Oh yeah not crazy. See him or her? Back to Saturday!

experience.  Raleigh surprised me on May 12th 2009 with tickets to the Flight of the Conchords concert at the Paramount. I must say an epic show. I love Flight of the Conchords I got Raleigh hooked a bit as well. It all happened about a year ago actually.

We were down in Portland for Memorial Day and we stayed in a Holiday Inn. They had an HDTV in there and HBO. I must say one of my pet peeves is people that have an HDTV and don’t have it setup properly. But I can also understand that they have to pump analog to all these TV’s in a Hotel so most cable systems decode the digital signal and multiplex down their own systems so you can view all channels. So end result most Hotels with HDTV’s don’t have the HD setup properly. Also drives me nuts when going to someones house with an HDTV and they have their cable or satellite box hooked up via RCA. But anyways that was a tangent that has nothign to do with this. Well we had HBO in the room and they were rerunning some episodes of Flight of the Conchords.

It happened to be the episode featuring the awesome song of Business Time.

After that I bought their CD’s and Season one on DVD. It also spawned me to get HBO. Also for Entourage. After that HBO is like a bit of an obsession for me. I really only have it for their TV shows and don’t really watch the movies. But anyways the concert was awesome. One thing that was interesting was that they had someone doing Sign Language in the front. I must say I bet that ladies arms were tired. I wish I could have made out the motions for curse words. Also I can’t imagine doing sign language for a song is easy.

I must say that the concert was epic and thank you so much Raleigh for the awesome gift. In the meantime pretty much went along as normal. Nothing out of the ordinary and then the 20th came around.

I went to work on my Birthday and must say it was what you would expect for work on your Birthday. I went fairly low key didn’t tell anyone except for the people at work on my Facebook Friends List.

Raleigh picked me up from work and we went to Red Mill scored a Creamsicle Shake. I have been wanting one of those for probably a year now. I must say it was awesome and delicious. After that we went home and we were planning on going to see a movie but tiredness overwhelmed us so we popped on the AppleTV and rented a movie.  Raleigh got me some awesome video games. She picked up the Metal Gear Solid collection. Nice to replace all my old games. Metal Gear Solid 1, 2 and 3. Also picked up God of War for the PSP which is a totally awesome and radical game.  I must say seeing a game designed back in 1998. I remember getting it as a Christmas Present from my Dad. But now playing it on a HDTV 11 years later I must say I thought these graphics were crazy awesome. Comparing it to Metal Gear Solid 4 it’s like night and day. Time to play with some nostolgia.

This weekend we are heading to Portland so I call that Birthday Extension 2009 Memorial Day Awesome Fun Time. Pictures will be posted as things happen.

I check out the hits on the site and people still come here which is encouraging. I am sometimes shocked I still have people that read this when I never post pictures of myself and I don’t really pimp out my site anymore. Since I finished school and joined the workforce back in 2006 it’s like life has gotten busy. But I am not really any busier then I was back then. It’s just that I work on a computer all day. When I get home I don’t want to touch the computer. Finding time at work to blog is close to impossible these days. So consider yourself lucky.

So it’s May. My birthday is in May. I found out yesterday that my 15 year old step niece gave birth to a baby boy. So now I am a Step Great Uncle. My step sister is married to a guy that is a year younger then me. He is now a grandfather at 24. I am 25 now and I look back at my life. I rewind a decade and look at life. All I can think about is that I was a dumbass compared to now. I hope that kid does okay. I am sure when I am 35 I will look at 25 and think “Man, I was a dumbass at 25″. I think people need to think about that more often. I also think that logic should be applied if you ever think about getting a tattoo. 10 years from now I will probably think this was a stupid idea.

But Birthday’s are never my thing. My girlfriend keeps asking me. “So what do you want for your Birthday?” I have no idea what I want since she told me no DVD’s or Video Games. Well that is all that I really want. I am still wondering where the new wallet I was promised for Christmas is. I ponder just buying it myself but I feel like that’s not the point.

I am the type of person that found out at an early age that you are hardly ever given anything and hand outs should not be expected. You gotta bust your ass for everything. I wanted a Playstation 3 I saved pennies and went out and bought the thing. I remember chopping wood as a child for the neighbors to get $20 to buy a Seattle Mariners hat. I chopped wood over an entire weekend for 6hrs a day for $20. They got a sweet deal and my 9 year old ass thought I was making a ton of cash. When I was 19 I looked back at that moment and thought I was a complete dumbass for getting so little money.

So I have no idea what I want for my birthday. If you would like to pick up a DVD or a Blu Ray you can get that info from my Amazon Wishlist Page. Just search for Tristan Pipo. There are not many. Though some girl on Facebook from the Philippines said I was her cousin. I said no but she has a cousin named Tristan Pipo who lives in San Diego. I recall seeing this info before back in 1996 looking on ICQ people search and there was another Tristan Pipo from San Diego, CA. I hope to one day meet this fellow. But until then I sit casually and lurk as my new facebook friend updates with pictures.

I look at the blog and I really need to get working on the fonts it is pretty hard to read. I will see about working on that sometime. Need to bust out the MacBook Pro and hack it up with some CSS action.

So I have been reading about this whole Swine Flu thing. Seems like another plot to install fear into people and keep them controlled. 13 cases in Washington State at time of this posting. 13,000 people on average die of the Flu every year. So far 1 person in the USA that was from Mexico and 2 years old with no immune system has died. Not like you had much of a life at 2 years old but thanks for fueling the stupid panic machine. Seems like everyone is recovering from the illness here in America. So I am confident that everything will be fine and all the idiots and hypochondriacs will be put in there place eventually.

On that note thanks for reading. I will work on being in touch. =) You can always follow me on twitter. twitter.com/tristanpipo

So I thought I would give a quick update on what is going on around the Tristan circle of life. Last week I ordered a Tivo. This thing has been a pain in the ass. It took a week to get here. But there have been 2 major causes of frustration.

1. The Cable Card Experience.

So in order for the TivoHD to work you need to get a CableCard from the Cable Company. In the Seattle area we have Comcast. Usually for most of my issues I either hop on the Comcast Chat or get on Twitter and send a note to @ComcastCares. So my first try was with the Chat. I got one guy saying that I could just drive to the local Comcast Office and pickup the cable card. Slide it into the Tivo and drive home and call Comcast. Sounds good to me.

Some time passes…..

Tivo is actually coming now so I hop on Comcast Chat again and get a new person they tell me I need to schedule a tech to come out and install the card for a fee of $25. Previous guy told me I could do it myself.

The process of installing a cable card is basically moving one flap down and sliding in a PCMCIA card into the device. Didn’t seem $25 worthy to me. But I do recall charging people at Best Buy $160 for Hard Drive and OS Install.

Now that I had a conflicting argument from two different people. I hopped on twitter and sent a note to @ComcastCares I got the following reply.

So I have two people saying the same thing. So I decide to shoot an e-mail off to Comcast Cares. we_can_help@comcast.com I get a prompt reply from a Detreon Roberts. He says they need to schedule a tech to come out. So I accept that answer for the time being.

So I get home that night and make a phone call to Comcast. I get to speak to an incredibly seductive sounding woman named Jen or Jenn. I didn’t ask for the spelling but I wanted info about my Cable Card. She said that I can just go down to the Comcast Office and pick it up. I tell her about all of my experiences thus far. She says “They don’t know what they are talking about. I setup a CableCard for a guy today took 3 mins over the phone” So I e-mailed Detreon back and he says. “You should really get an installer out” So on Saturday the girlfriend of awesomeness decided to partake on the adventure of the Comcast store and we got the CableCard. Came home and installed it and it took about 3 minutes and we were golden.

So I guess I would like to thank the first Chat Person and Jen from Comcast in Washington for being the most helpful. Everyone else needs to think about what they are doing.

2. Upgrading the Hard Drive in the Tivo.

So this was a fun process that I did when the girlfriend was out tending to her late kitty cat Indy. So I was home alone which was probably a good thing because I was incredibly frustrated by a few sources. So I was cranky and just wasn’t a pleasant person.

So the scenario is that the Tivo HD comes with a 160GB HDD which gives you about 20hrs of HD recording. This was not enough for me so I bought a 1TB external eSATA drive hoping I could just plug it in and be good to go. This was not the case as Tivo doesn’t like this idea so I had to hack the box to get it working. So I take the TIVO apart and pull the hard drive. I come to find out that it would just be easier to install the external drive into the TIVO. So I have to take apart this external drive which I didn’t want to do but kinda have to.

At this point I haven’t even powered up the Tivo. So I take apart the external drive and then go to my Computer. I have this Pentium 4 3.6ghz machine I use to just screw around with when I am not using my Mac’s. Luckily I had this thing around otherwise I would have been screwed. So I open up the computer and need to free 2 SATA ports. Currently I have all 4 being used so I boot up the machine and find the HDD that I am not using and power it back off and unplug the two drives. Come to find out that I had these in a RAID 0 configuration so the computer won’t boot. So decide to say screw it all I can just reinstall Windows 7 Beta and just use one drive and setup the other drives later.

So I had to install Windows 7 again to just do what I needed to do. After that process completes I go download the TIVO hacking software called WinMFS.

I then shutoff the computer hookup the 160GB tivo drive and the 1TB HDD. Boot up the machine and followed the instructions located here.

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/04/17/how-to-upgrade-your-tivo-hd-with-winmfs/

I am always baffled when people ask me questions on how to do things with their computer. Since I can find every answer by googling. See here is how you can do it to.

http://tinyurl.com/d9obnl

So I followed that process and swapped out the 160GB HDD with the 1TB and the unit would power on and then crash. So I said WTF! I spent over an hour reimaging my PC with Windows 7 and the process didn’t work. So I swapped the 160GB drive back in and powered it on. This worked great. So I went through the setup process and then took the whole thing apart again to reimage the 1TB HDD with the above instructions. This process worked but took a great deal longer I was getting a bit more positive messages.

As a note if you are going to use WinMFS with Windows 7. Be sure you click “Run as Administrator” or this whole process will never work. So now with all of that completed I have 141hrs of HD recording and something like 1500 hrs of Standard Def recording.

So I got home at 8pm last Thursday and I didn’t finish with the Tivo Hacking until 1:30am. I was rather cranky by the end of the experience. The girlfriend doesn’t even appreciate the Tivo yet. Hopefully she will and I will get some good appreciatin back.

So that has been my Tivo experience. I must say after all of that work I am now an expert in the process of expanding the storage of the Series 3 Tivo’s.

I am sure there are more important things in the world to focus on. Anyone have any ideas?

Wishful thinking..

Thanks for taking the time to read this amazingly awesome blog post. I have been getting reports that if you come to tristanpipo.com and then refresh the page that you get an error. But if you just visit the page this doesn’t happen. So my advice is don’t click refresh. This is due to the nature of calls that the website makes if a few people do it at the same time it can push me over the amount of connections I am limited to at any given second and clicking refresh will resolve the issue. With that said On with my life.

So since my last post was in the beginning of March. So you need to be caught up. Two Thursday’s ago my foot started to hurt. It was just a slight pain not a big deal. But the pain started to get more intense. Like to the point where I had to throw up the pain was so intense. I could hardly walk and this was annoying me so I was cursing a great deal and keeping Raleigh up.  So on Friday I was late for work because I had to go to the doctor. They told me it was some tendentious action and take some Aleve and my foot would be all good. It took almost 24hrs for the pain to go away but it did.

That weekend I really don’t recall what happened. I don’t remember it being very exciting. I have noticed that as I grow older it seems that most of life gets over run with sameness. I get up same time. Walk out the door at the same time. Catch the same bus. Sit in the same seat. Get off at the same stop. Go to the same job. Fix different things. Come home and do the same thing but with slight variations.

I guess this is the human condition since we don’t need to be constantly hunting or finding drinking water. I can see why some people go nuts. But I also see that we have the methods to keep people that are nuts still around. For example you have some guy who isn’t all that bright. Chances were higher that a Puma would find his stupid ass in the woods and idiot wouldn’t be around to breed anymore. Most idiots don’t get attacked by Puma’s anymore. Since they can get all their resources for living without having to deal with Puma’s. Seems like a good idea to me is to have a city surivial force of Puma’s and other various vicious animals around just to get that fear going. If moron A can’t make it to the bus stop without a Tiger attacking him odds are he won’t be breeding.

But I always have ideas like that. I mostly get told “Why do you waste time thinking of such things” or “You are such a dork” or “You are so weird” most of the people that get past this initial shock value of being around the Tristan of the Pipo find me to be an overall good guy. Took my current girlfriend a long time to realize this and pretty much everyone I have ever known.

So anyways week went on and I felt very productive. Friday came around and I didn’t really do a whole heap on Friday. Went home and chilled. Saturday was an interesting day. The Nick and J-Monster came over from Kitsap. I got to meet Justin’s new girlfriend. I will not butcher her name by typing it but she was cool in my book. She is very social and that is the type of person I dig because you don’t have to say much and you can be interested and make their day. So went and hitup SushiLand on Queen Anne Hill. I have seen one of these in Portland, OR as well. I am sure the Junniper will chime in and have many awesome things to say about me.

What has been interesting about Junniper and her blog and my interaction with her.  We exchange the occasional e-mail. Most of the time it’s like “Hey look how Portland messed up” or something I find about garfield. I have spoken to her on the phone once. Caught me off guard when I was hanging out with the KGB Mafia Man. She was at the SeaTac airport. I think she was trying to stalk me. What is also rather funny is how the times I am in Portland she is out of town. I can picture being 89 one day and getting on my floating wheelchair disc and going down to Portland and being like “Ah Ha! We finally meet!” Then that being it I go back to my Evil Mountian of Power in Seattle.

But that was a random tangent. I really have nothing to say just kinda doing a brain dump so there are probably tons of spelling and grammar errors. It’s never been my style to really fix them either. If you would like to make an attempt at being me in a funny manner. You could shoot me an e-mail and your parody post. I would be happy to give it a post.

So Saturday some friends and I went to Sushiland and then went and saw Watchmen in IMAX. What is awesome is that a standard movie ticket at a theater costs $10. The IMAX films cost $11. Plus you don’t have to deal with stupid public fuckers and them using cell phones. The most annoying movie theater people that need to be locked in portable toilets filled with bottle rockets and kicked off a building are the ones that keep their Bluetooth Headsets on. So you get that blinking blue light. They look like annoying ass cyborgs that ruin the movie. I wish someone would kick them in the skull when they walk in with those things.

After that we went to some bar called Pesos for like 15 minutes and then left and went home and passed out.

Sunday I went to my Grandpa’s birthday brunch came home and was tired.

I have no ending for this post so I place a few random periods…   .. ..

After that went and checked out Slumdog Millionare. Which is a freaking great movie. I enjoyed it so much when the credits started rolling I brought out the Amazon app for my iPhone and ordered it on Blu Ray. Then the girlfriend said “You are such a nerd”. At that point I couldn’t disagree so after that we went home. When I got home I decided that I must have the soundtrack for this film. So I bought the soundtrack on iTunes and then burned it on a CD. I wanted to make a couple copies of the CD for my sister and a backup to keep in my spindle. But for some reason I was having difficulty making the CD into an ISO. WinISO, Nero, Toast Titanium just couldn’t seem to do it. So I gave up on the project and just performed this task via CD swapping. While this was happening I was playing some Team Fortress Classic and noticed it was 3am so I went to bed.

Wakeup at 8am because Saturday we went off to Kitsap County to celebrate my mom’s birthday. Recently my mom quit playing World of Warcraft. It’s been rather interesting to say the least. She has been playing online games since 2001 I would say. She got me Ultima Online for Christmas of 2000. I played it for a month and then asked if she wanted to play. Well that set it off so that my mom and my stepdad played games nonstop. Then one day my step dad decided to stop playing my mom didn’t. So now that she doesn’t have that outlet it seems like she has been trying to find a new one. Which can be daunting after 8 years of playing online games. I played Ultima Online for one month. Finished that and then in 2004 I was in the Beta for World of Warcraft which I played from April 2004 until May 2005. Then I played again in May of 2006. Since then I haven’t really been addicted to any other games. You can find me here and there on the XBOX 360 playing a game for an hour when I have nothing else to do. But I always get a tad freaked out playing video games I don’t want to find myself addicted again.

So got on the ferry and stopped by the Casino’s Resort in Suquamish. Stopped by the Spa and picked up a Gift Card for a 75 minute massage for my mom. Since trying to find out what my mom wants for a Christmas or Birthday present is probably one of the most difficult things alive. I usually find myself being met with.

• “Oh I don’t know, You know me. Figure it out”
• “Well you can’t really get me what I want. So perhaps a gift card”

If life was perfect everyone would have an Amazon wishlist and life would be grand.  So after that we swung by Central Market and had a mini lunch since Raleigh and I were starving. Then she wanted to go to Wal-Mart to pickup some items for various reasons. Then we went and hung out with my sister a bit.

Then went to Puerto Vallarta for lunch. It was all well and good. I had a large margarita and got a bit tipsy and made for an overall good lunch. I sometimes get the feeling my family doesn’t really get Raleigh. Or maybe they worry that she kidnapped me to Seattle. Who knows really. Only person who makes an effort to come see us is my sister Rachel. Rest of my family is kinda like “meh Seattle is far away”.  I am tending to see Raleigh’s point we make all the effort to go see them on Birthday’s and other occasions why doesn’t anyone come to our place to hang out.

So we make it a bit of an early day and head home. So that brings us to Sunday. Sunday was a bit of a chill about day and then we went to a Game Night with Raleigh’s family. This is always a bit interesting since they are a rather extraverted group. When I can be but generally I prefer to sit and observe. Sometimes I relate it to TV watching like when watching the Discovery channel and showing something I have never seen before. But every family has their odd behavior. They are into different things then I am. Doesn’ t make it bad or good just different.

Played some games had some food overall great experience. Went home and watched some Big Love. Was sad to see only 3 episodes left. I watched Flight of the Conchords and then passed out.

Monday comes around and another work week begins. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. I know most of my posts turn into 1000 word essays and I thank you for the screen time. Hopefully you will be glad that this post is just around 900 words.

1. When I was a sophmore in High School me and my best friend got in trouble for spamming the Traffic Education Teacher. Cops were involved and everything.
2. When I was  a child I had a goal to dig to China in my parents side yard. They kept refilling the hole every few months. I learned everything was an uphill battle.
3. I tend to be very incredibly anal.
4. I enjoy doing dishes when I am not being told to do them.
5. I am constantly afraid of getting addicted to something. So I try to moderate everything.
6. I try to keep my DVD’s in alphabetical order.
7. I get a kick of doing things that keep peoples perception of me off balance.
8. I don’t keep many friends just a select group of close ones.
9. I really can’t stand myspace and prefer facebook.
10. I enjoy Thai Food way to much.
11. I drink maybe 2-3 beers a month.
12. I have never tried any drugs or smoked anything.
13. I dug my parents first pond when I was 12 for $20. I didn’t realize that 6hrs of work for $20 was getting shit pay.
14. I really enjoy the MacOS but got tired of pushing it on people.
15. I have this constant feeling that I never successful at anything but I like the fact that it drives me to try harder constantly.
16. Almost every girl I have ever dated I have met online.
17. I listen to podcasts all the time. I hardly ever listen to music.
18. I once gave two underage girls a ride home because they asked me to. I was freaked out the entire time that I would get called a pedophile for just driving someone somewhere.
19. I try as hard as I can to be a great guy.
20. I am fairly quite and don’t say things unless need be. Which usually leads to people thinking I don’t care about them because I tend not to ask questions about people.
21. I tip way to much because I feel bad. I never tip at coffee shops though. I feel $4 for coffee is enough of a tip. But I will tip $20 on a $30 haircut.
22. I used to have this dream about how I was trapped in a Winnie the Pooh Scuba suit. I sometimes still have it and freak out every time.
23. I sometimes get frustrated by people who don’t check their e-mail as often as I do.
24. I really enjoy Amazon Prime.
25. I hardly talk on the phone and try to use most of my communication via e-mail and SMS.
26. When I was 4 years old my family took a trip to Canada and I fell out of a Van in a pancake house parking lot and had to get my head wrapped up like a mummy.
27. I really dislike having to answer peoples questions that could be resolved if they just performed a quick google search.
28. I am never sure how long to hug someone that I am not dating.
29. I have a huge collection of socks that I never wear.
30. I feel pretty good about not having any negative feelings about anyone.
31. Whenever an HBO show comes on and does the little “Awwwww” I always do it to.
32. I get stuck on sayings every now and then. “Delta”, “Pinner” and always feel stupid when people don’t get it.
33. My current girlfriend has played enough Abba to make me never want to hear them ever again for any reason.
34. I was really happy to break it off with an ex via SMS. Made me feel pretty good about getting revenge on the opposite sex for all the crap they have done to me over the years. I feel bad about someone having to face that though and would like to apologize.
35. I update twitter frequently but I always get the feeling nobody cares except when it updates on Facebook and people comment on it.
36. Growing up my house was the most popular place to be on the street. We had Swings, Tree House, The Digging Spot, We built forts on the rockery. Sometimes I miss being the popular kid.
37. I chopped wood for 8hrs a day for 3 days in a row for the neighbors to buy a $10 marines hat when I was 11.
38. I can’t mow the lawn because it will swell me up due to allergies.
39. I am allergic to most pets. Cats at the highly allergic end. I am allergic to most dogs as well. But I like dogs.
40. I caught Mono in the 8th grade and missed 2.5 months of school. I almost failed the 8th grade.
41. I failed Spanish II on purpose because I really didn’t want to take that class.
42. My favorite soda is sprite.
43. People who text in movie theaters are probably some of the most annoying human beings alive.
44. I always enjoy being around people. I am not much of a fan of being alone except when I am feeling burnt out.
45. I have never really traveled that much.
46. I always put the peanut butter and the jelly on the same side of the bread then add the dry side on top of the middle. I developed this habit to annoy the crap out of my ex girlfriend. It doesn’t seem to annoy anybody now.
47. I save everything. Every chat, e-mail everything.
48. I am really good at playing Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo.
49. The sexiest part of a woman tends to be their legs.
50. I am honestly shocked I came up with this many things. That I wanted to write something cliche about how I am shocked I came up with this many.

Hope you enjoyed reading this. Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. If you come up with 50 things let me know in the comments and post a link to your 50 things.

We got the Race for a new Game Machine. A book about the story about the processor in the XBOX 360 and the Playstation 3. Read just a few chapters and must say the book has been great so far.

We also have the Die Hard Collection on Blu Ray. Makes for a great visual experience. I really only care about Die Hard 1 and 4. The other 2 I could care less about. But it was cheaper to buy all 4 then buy two as singles.

Then on the bottom in silver we got a new 320GB Laptop SATA drive to toss in the Playstation 3 to replace the 80GB one that the system came with.

I must say I have been loving Amazon Prime. That is probably greater then my Costco membership. It blows away my Barnes and Noble card I think I maybe use that thing 2-3x a year and mainly for Starbucks discounts. When I switch my grocery shopping over to Amazon Prime I will have become fully intergrated with the internet. Mwa ha ha.

I wish I could have some cool power right now like shooting a lightning bolt out of my hands and a cape like the count from Sesame Street with a huge popped collar. That would be the ultimate badass of badass.

I must say Arrested Development was introduced to me by my girlfriend when she got the DVD’s from the library. I got to watch 4 episodes or so before it ended up having to go back. I wanted to see more so I could have waited for her to get the DVD’s again but I didn’t have time for rational solutions. So I did some research and found that I could get each season for $20. I didn’t like this idea it just wasn’t geeky enough. So I found that you could hack an AppleTV with Boxee and watch Arrested Development via Hulu. I had been wanting an AppleTV for a while now so I decided to go that route since it was geeky and seemed cooler at the time.

Instead of spending $60 and getting DVD’s and being happy I decided to spend $300 on an AppleTV. Got a USB thumbdrive I had around the apartment and loaded the AppleTV Patchstick on there and installed Boxee and I could have Hulu on my TV. It has been shown that the AppleTV has been a great investment since it plays all my media now. I used to have this task delegated to the Playstation 3. But it wouldn’t play my DRM stuff from iTunes now the AppleTV does it all and I am happy. Plus the HD rentals on AppleTV make it worth my while.

But the moral of the story was I got to watch Arrested Development and every other TV show or internet video I wanted on the magic AppleTV box.

Which inspired my ringtone.

Here!

Link is in iPhone format so you will need iTunes to play it.

I am rather interested to see the debate tonight. Makes me so happy to see that we could have a vice president that can’t even name a newspaper that she reads.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/hamburger-harrys-seattle

The first review is from someone named Terrell.

“If you like ground beef, grease and sports on big screen televisions, this is your place!”

The rest of the review is about how he was not happy with his burger because he doesn’t like that type of thing so he gives the place 2 out of 5 stars. Now on Yelp you can rate a review in 3 ways. “Useful, Funny or Cool” Where is the button that this is a bad review if you don’t like this type of food why the hell are you reviewing it to begin with. Why did you even go in there if it’s not your style. I wish I could vote the review off the page and have it no longer count.

There are other sites like digg.com where you can review news articles and comments. You can either digg it up or mark it down. If it’s dugg down enough it disappears and is gone. You can do this with peoples comments so you don’t have to read idiocy if you don’t want to. Yelp doesn’t have this feature so even people who write “This place sucks!” and that is all and give it 1 star you can’t do anything but say if the review is “Useful, Funny or Cool”

What this makes me think about is that when I go check a place out and it has 3 stars that I need to parse through every review to see why the person is reviewing it and what their other reviews are to see even if I want to trust them. Well fuck that shit I don’t have time I just want to know where a good burger is that isn’t being judged my some vegetarian who hates the place because they don’t have their soy full of shit burgers with their private agenda. You are eating at a burger joint. Cow was murdered for the purpose of being grilled and put inbetween bread with cheese on top of it. That is the whole damn point. But you are marking a place down for doing so.

I really don’t get it. I can see where such a thing would be a good place to get seen and get new customers but I just don’t agree with the system on yelp and it could be improved in so many ways. I bring up this argument to most people and they are just like “Meh whatever you say Tristan” There are other review sites out there but I have yet to put my finger on why Yelp took off. People thought I was crazy for thinking myspace was a big steaming pile of shit. I usually try to check out the review on Yelp and then Urbanspoon, Yellowpages and then Citysearch that wastes a great deal of time where I would rather just go to the place and try it myself. But I have a girlfriend who doesn’t follow that same idea.

I really like it when a Vegetarian or a Vegan reviews a Steakhouse. Gives it a 1 star for not having anything other then a side salad. I really hope they shutup real soon. You don’t see me going to a vegetarian restaurant and giving it a 1 star review for not having a freshly slaughtered piece of flesh for me to consume.

Some days I would really kill to have this T-Shirt.

I think the two highlights of the year were when I came back to Seattle for 3 weeks for my sisters graduation. I got to borrow my aunts truck when I was visiting so I had freedom to just do whatever the hell I wanted when I wanted. Went to a few Lan Parties and all and all it was a great vacation to see my friends.

When I was living in Indiana I honestly had no real friends. I had all of my internet peeps that I connected with and that was enough to make time pass easily enough. But I had no such happiness in Indiana. Which resulted in the end of my time their. The girl I had been seeing broke it off with me in December of 2003. To which I promptly got on the internet and let my mother know of the situation. The resolution was I could be out in two weeks to tie up all of my affairs. I flew my buddy Darin out from Seattle to Indiana. We drove from Indiana to Seattle in a few days with threat of a winter storm at all moments. I have been really meaning to finish writing about that drive since it was incredibly interesting. But have just never been able to find the time to do so.

I got back to Seattle a few days before Christmas it was the first Christmas I had spent at home in 2 years. That was pretty much 2003 in a nutshell.

I am going to write up a yearly summary daily up until this year. Friday-2003, Monday-2004, Tuesday-2005, Wednesday-2006, Thursday 2007-2008. Let’s see how well I do to meet that goal. =)

So a few weeks ago I went to the dentist. I hadn’t been to the dentist since I was 11 or 12 or so. The last time I recall was when my mom was working at a Nursing home and my sister and I were getting babysat at some construction site for one of our tenants named Stewart. A Scottish fellow that was incredibly odd but if you really care to know how odd shoot me an e-mail. I remember all day I was brushing my teeth and using mouthwash. Must have been at least 20 times that day. So I go to the dentist without any hitches then and because of parents and lack of insurance or drive I hadn’t been to the dentist since.

This appalled Raleigh and she did a check on my insurance and was like “You are going to the dentist” Had I refused the circle of someone being happy would be broken and well bad day for everyone. I really am not a fan of the dentist ever since they started using needles and I hate needles because some nurse screwed up giving me an injection when I had mono. So the general idea of needles has made me rather unhappy and I tend to freak out. Bees scare me because they are basically needle marines that inject you with micro poison. They are quick to anger as well. So pretty much anything with a needle is a “No” unless you give me something to calm my nerves.

So the first time going to the dentist in many years my thought was that all my teeth are going to be broken and sucked out and I would need to get dentures. Raleigh had me basically thinking my mouth was a cesspool of vermin and decay and death. But after all this time it turned out I only had one cavity and needed a stronger cleaning then normal but not a program of deep cleanings. So which basically raised my ego about a billion points because I had healthier teeth then the lady Raleigh. They had to use this thing called a gouger and soul extractor or a hook thing and a water pick as Raleigh would say because she says I exaggerate things to much.

During this cleaning I was holding on for my life. Because I feel like they are ripping my face off with these hooks and picks and tools of death. What I was told was an hour and a half seemed like just 20 minutes of pure hell. So for the filling they gave me an Rx and told me to come back in two weeks for the drill. They gave me some Rx for something which is purely amazing. It made me not remember a whole day. I totally didn’t have to recall an experience going to Ross.

I am sure everyone knows what Ross is. But if you don’t let me enlighten you. It’s a discount retail store for discounted retail stuff. So something goes to Macy’s lets say. It doesn’t sell there or there is something wrong with it. They send it to their outlet store and if doesn’t sell there they send it to one of these Ross type stores to sell. So they have lots of cheap crap they couldn’t sell anywhere else. They are always horribly lighted and trashed and no room to do anything with crappy music and they just smell dirty. Raleigh loves this shopping establishment. I would rather pay the extra few dollars. To not deal with any of these issues. But I digress. I was told we went there on Friday and I don’t recall it at all. But we do have a new can opener. Which I use mostly. I have yet to see her use one. I know when she reads this it will be “Shutup Tristan. I use the can opener. I use it all the time. I am the can opening goddess of the greenwood” Which I will probably laugh at and get “Baby, don’t laugh” see right now as she is reading this she is pondering what she is going to say to me when she looks to her right and sees me sitting there. If I had to guess what I am doing right now as she is reading this I would say probably working out a math problem in the air.

But anyways back to the gloating of teeth cleaning. So I took 2 pills Friday morning to make my filling experience a bit more pleasant for everyone involved. Which was probably the best idea anyone had. Because I had never been so relaxed. They put all this crap and a rubber sheet over my face and it was like whatever. I don’t care what you do just keep me pain free. I bought an audiobook to keep my mind busy but turned out I didn’t need it I don’t recall what I listened to there didn’t appear to be a thing that could get me down on Friday. They took care of my teeth and now have a perfectly clean mouth other then the obscenity that pops out for a random reason. So really this entire post was a reason to gloat.

After my teeth had been cleaned Raleigh actually did something I had never seen her do before. It happened on Sunday. We were at a Red Robin and she had an Iced Tea and I got some Strawberry Lemonade. I had a drink of my lemonade a few times and she decided she didn’t like her tea. She actually took a sip of the lemonade. I was beyond perplexed she will never try a drink if I touched it. But she did so I guess in that respect having my teeth cleaned was worth it.

In case you didn’t get the circle reference here is a little flowchart. To help you understand since the flow can go either way it can have an affect on either party involved.

Tristan is Out.