Viva the Digital Overlords

I was sitting here at my desk working on building an HTML version of a digital scoreboard to show who is awesome at Air Hockey. I used to play with my coworker Greg and we both just got extremely busy at work. So we are going to start it back up again. When we left off I was ahead like 131 games to 126 I believe. We would play 3-5 games a day.

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.

Where the Hell is Rachel (2009)

Hey Everyone! If you follow my twitter you probably saw me make notes about the “Secret Christmas Project” well I thought I would show it to you now.

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.

Remember Remember the 5th of November

So here we are in another glorious month. I haven’t updated the blog in a while and I usually get reminded by my lovely girlfriend Raleigh. “You need to update the blog!”

November is usually the month where the world is winding down. Getting ready to bundle up for the holidays. I am really excited for Thanksgiving. I was listening to this podcast called No Agenda and they were discussing Turkey. They were talking about this thing called Heritage Turkey’s so I decided to order one of those for the family thanksgiving. They are the “original” style of Turkey and they are supposed to taste amazing. So looking forward to that.

Today I had the carpets in the Pipo Palace shampooed. It had been a while since it had been done and it really brought some new life back into the place. Taking a little longer to try then I expected. So having a rather chill Friday night lounging around the bedroom updating the world via laptops.

The household has 2 Mac Laptops a Mac Mini and Raleigh uses some old 2003 Dell. I can’t say I understand why she keeps that thing. But I bought a new laptop last June to replace my old Powerbook G4 that I bought in September 2004.

Other then that work has been rather insane. Everyone is drinking from the fire hose lately and it seems like patience is wearing a bit thin and we are hoping the holiday lock downs mean we get a little break for a short while.

Raleigh and I are heading to Hawaii in December so look forward to tweets and facebook pics of that while we are away. If you don’t already follow me on twitter you can check me out at http://www.twitter.com/tristanpipo

But I wish everyone a great weekend and I will work on getting back into this blogging thing and lay some social commentary on the line soon. Next weekend I will be heading back to Poulsbo, WA to go to my mothers art gallery. If you would like to grab lunch or something let me know.

Tristan Out.

Welcome to October

Hey Everyone!

We have arrived at October. It has been a rather interesting month so far. My schedule changed at work which has been nice. I got moved to 10-7 last October and was told I would only be on that work schedule for 3 months. Here it is next October and finally getting it changed back. Which is awesome on my end.

Coming up this weekend the girlfriend and I have a fall party to attend. With one of my girlfriends coworkers which should be a good time. I always dig carving pumpkins getting drunk and making scarecrows. I will be posting pictures to Facebook most likely or perhaps my tumblelog. Which if you care to find it’s located at tristan.tumblr.com it’s also a nice aggregation of everything I do online.

But anyways it’s getting a bit late. I think I will hit up a little Beatles Rock Band before I go to bed.

Hopefully everyone has a great week. Send me an e-mail or text message let me know what you are up too.

Holy Crud!

It’s June and been a crazy busy month at that. Now that summer is here every weekend has been planned and full of events. I purchased a new MacBook Pro the ones they announced last Monday. It’s a screaming 2.8ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and all kinds of awesomeness. iPhone OS 3.0 comes out on Wednesday which will be all kinds of awesome because I will finally be able to Copy and Paste.

I picked up a Flip Ultra HD video camera so that I can record all kinds of awesome videos in HD.  You can check out my adventure the the grocery store here.

http://gallery.me.com/tristan.pipo#100087

But other then doing the life thing. Started going back to the gym. Nice to get back in the groove after a few years of vacation from it. I haven’t lost that much strength and the belly is slowly going away.

But next week I am on vacation and I won’t have any cell phone or internet access so hopefully the world doesn’t blow up while I am gone. It will be odd turning on that vacation auto responder I haven’t used that ever since I got gMail back in 2004.

Well hope to here from everyone soon drop me a line.

500 Internal Server Errrors

This issue should now be fixed as well with some helpful guidance from the Ramblings of a Bored Geek.

All that’s left on the TristanPipo.com website is to change the font’s around a bit and I will do that when I get home with my trusty CSS editor.

I would like to thank Raleigh and Junniper for being my unoffical blog Quality Assurance Team.

500 Internal Server Errors

Update: Looks like the changes that I was recommended to do didn’t resolve the issue. We shall see what GoDaddy support can do.

Well looks like the fun doesn’t stop around here. I have been getting reports of users getting “500 Internal Server Errors” this seemed to be happening for Firefox, IE, Safari. I did some googling and found out that the error is an issue with the hosting provider I use running out of memory allocated to PHP which is running Wordpress. I have made the changes that the other sites have recommended and next time that the services are restarted for this server that should resolve the issue. So hopefully the GoDaddy Support team gets an easy close for the support ticket I opened.

RSS Downtime

To those that get to read blog posts from this via RSS. I wanted to let you know that RSS will be down for approx 72hrs while all the feeds get moved from Feedburner to Google that has not purchased Feedburner. On a side not that means if you are reading this via RSS this doesn’t really apply as the move has worked as expected. To those reading on the site that are going “RSS? HUH? Did you insult my mama?” Well then it doesn’t really apply to you either. I guess what I am saying is that I have nothing to say. But I am working on updating the look of the site yet again. So stay tuned as this is a work in progress in realtime. So changes could come every day or every couple of days to the design. So not really much to see or say.

Cheers!

Teleflora.com Has Made the Fail List

So Saturday is Valentines Day. I am going to write my experience thus far. I happened to be watching the Super Bowl and saw this rather funny commercial toward the end of the game.

So I got thinking hey this sounds like a good idea. This site looks they do flowers correctly. I think I could make a great impression with flowers like this. So next day I went to Teleflora.com and ordered the.

Deluxe Teleflora’s Rubies & Roses Bouquet

They show the default flower setup to look like this.

I paid an extra $10 for the deluxe set which they show on the Upgrade your Gift Page to add the following.

I also tossed in some balloons and a medium box of chocolates to my order. Which added up in price rather quickly. I placed my order on Feb 2nd and 1:15pm EST according to the site. I requested delivery for today Thursday Feb 2nd.  Well that part goes of fine they delivered them today. But they forgot the Chocolates. They didn’t deliver them at all. I also was sent a picture of what my girlfriend had delivered to her office.

How in the world does that look like a Deluxe Flower Arrangement from what I ordered above. I can go to Safeway and get a better flower arrangenent then that for what I paid.  That doesn’t look deluxe at all.

The description on the site for this arrangement reads as follows.

This elegantly romantic bouquet is a win-win gift of love. You’ll win her heart with lush flowers in a ruby red heart vase she’ll treasure. And she could win gloriously real rubies in Teleflora’s Rubies & Roses Sweepstakes.*

• The radiant arrangement includes pink stargazer lilies, red roses, miniature pink carnations, red carnations and pink waxflower accented with lemon leaf and myrtle.
• Delivered in a stunning clear glass vase decorated with an etched “necklace” bearing a ruby red heart jewel.
• Bouquet is approximately 14.5” W X 17.5” H
• Item number: 09V100B

So according to this I am supposed to have a Clear Vase with a “necklace” on it. They appear to have not been able to construct what they are clearly trying to sell me. Hmm maybe there is some loophole I am missing. Let’s take a look at their fine print.

So they have a “Substitution Policy” that states.

Substitution Policy
Occasionally, substitutions of flowers or containers are necessary due to temporary, regional availability issues. If this is the case with the gift you’ve selected, our experienced florists will ensure that the style, theme and color scheme of your arrangement is preserved and will only substitute items of equal or higher value.

Hmmm this doesn’t appear to be the case. You state a “Clear Glass Vase” It appears I got a dark short vase. It just seems like very little fluff when I was expecting a great deal more. Part of me wonders if I am just suffering from that symptom I had as a child where I saw I got a Tony the Tiger diver on the outside of a Cereal box only to discover it was an Orange Tube. But I feel like I am paying a great deal more then $3 for a cereal box in this case.

So moving on I get a phone call from the girlfriend about how excited she is and thrilled to get the flowers and all of her coworkers were jealous. So I feel on one front mission accomplished. But on the other front I feel like I need to fight this battle. So Battle #1.

The Chocolates.

I ordered a “Medium Box of Chocolates” for $19.99. I could probably order a better set then what they had offered but I was going for the complete package solution. So I wasn’t exactly wanting to coordinate that delivery as well. So I went for this. So I get a phone call around 1:30pm saying “I love you so great my jaw dropped I am told.” I ask about what she got and she said 2 balloons and some flowers. I asked what about Chocolate? She said I didn’t get any. I got rather pissed off about this so I called the company.

Most websites don’t have numbers to call right on the front page. This made it easier so I call them up and press 2 to get to some guy that is hard to understand. I let him know about the situation and he apologizes and says they can refund my account and someone will call me from research. He first tries to refund $9.99. I am like no that’s what I paid for the two balloons you need to refund $19.99 for your “Medium Chocolates” he said no they are $9.99. I went to the site and logged in and I said I paid $74.95 for the flowers and $9.99 for the Balloons and $19.99 for the chocolates on top of all your other fees. He finally agree to refund the $19.99. I would have preferred they just tell their delivery guy. “Hey you screwed up. Go deliver the chocolates.” I would have rather had this and got my service fee refunded. Since that seems like a better deal to me. Because I am still paying for the screw up.

So now I wait for their research department to call me. I will post about that when they call me back. But until then.

Teleflora.com is on my Fail List. I need to bring that page back.

Update 2-13-2009: A day later I still have not heard anything back. I got to see the flowers in person last night and they were even more disappointing then I had expected. I am going to call and complain again today. I feel like I totally got ripped off with this. 

Tristan Chimes In! With Ringtones! And Geekness!

So I got an e-mail yesterday from my stalker. Aka StalkerDave asking what ringtone I had on my phone. Well it’s the ringtone from the best TV show of all time. Arrested Development it’s the theme Gob uses in his magic show. I still need to grab the DVD and get his chicken sound for when I get a text message but all in good time.

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.