Jump to content

ChrisT

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1895

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by ChrisT

    Brush with tabloid greatness

    in Spray

    Posted

    Yesterday on TV it was reported that two other women have been arrested for statutory rape for the same crime - teachers have sex with 6th graders! They're good looking women too. I don't get it - what do they see in these 11 year olds?!?!? confused.gif

    Easy to Be Hard....

    in Spray

    Posted

    Prof. Churchill has made a career from his incendiary remarks. Funny how this is only *now* making the news - long after he first wrote it. I think we're having a slow news month or something.

    Bush administration bribed journalists

    in Spray

    Posted

    One in three American high school students believe the press should be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, a new survey says. Thirty-six percent of the 112,000 students polled think that newspapers should have to get government approval before printing a story, while 51 percent believe papers should be able to publish freely, according to a First Amendment rights survey conducted by the University of Connecticut. The concept of a free press being essential to a free society appears to be eroding

     

    This is the scariest thing I have read in a long time.

     

    It is scary how conservative teenagers have become these days - inlcuding one of my own. confused.gif

    Seymour Hearsh Is At It Again.

    in Spray

    Posted

    GWB as quoted in an interview by the NYTimes yesterday:

     

    "I've, you know, heard the voices of the people that presumably will be in a position of responsibility after these elections, although you never know," Mr. Bush said. "But it seems like most of the leadership there understands that there will be a need for coalition troops at least until Iraqis are able to fight."

    Making home climbing DVDs?

    in Climber's Board

    Posted

    A thought: What about a VCR-DVD recorder?

     

     

    Videotape to DVD, Made Easy

     

    By DAVID POGUE

     

    Published: January 27, 2005

     

     

     

    WHOEVER said "technology marches on" must have been kidding. Technology doesn't march; it sprints, dashes and zooms.

     

    That relentless pace renders our storage media obsolete with appalling speed:5¼-inch floppies, Zip disks or whatever. And with the debut of each new storage format, millions of important files, photos, music and video have to be rescued from the last one.

     

    At the moment, the most urgent conversion concerns videotape, whose signal begins to deteriorate in as little as 15 years. Rescuing tapes by copying them to fresh ones isn't an option, because you lose half the picture quality with each generation. You could play them into a computer for editing and DVD burning, but that's a months-long project. You could pay a company to transfer them to DVD, if you can stomach the cost and the possibility that something might happen to your precious tapes in the mail.

     

    There is, fortunately, a safe, automated and relatively inexpensive solution to this problem: the combo VHS-DVD recorder. It looks like a VCR, but it can play or record both VHS tapes and blank DVD discs, and copy from one to the other, in either direction. Pressing a couple of buttons begins the process of copying a VHS tape to a DVD, with very little quality loss. (You can't duplicate copy-protected tapes or DVD's, of course; only tapes and discs you've recorded yourself.)

     

    And if your movies are on some other format, like 8-millimeter cassettes, you can plug the old camcorder into the back of this machine, hit Play, and walk away as the video is transferred to a DVD.

     

    (Of course, now you have to worry about the longevity of recordable DVD's. Fortunately, a DVD's movie files are stored as digital signals, not analog, so you won't lose any quality when you copy them onto whatever video format is popular in 2025. Video contact lenses, perhaps?)

     

    As a bonus, a combo VCR-DVD player-recorder can eliminate one machine stacked under the TV, one remote control and, in most cases, one set of cables to your TV. (None of this makes it simple, however. All of these machines are far more complex than, say, a stand-alone DVD player.)

     

    I sampled four of these combo boxes: the Panasonic DMR-E75V, the RCA DRC8300N, GoVideo's VR2940, and the JVC DR-MV1S. (Who makes up these model names, anyway - drunken Scrabble players?) All are available online for $285 to $350. As it turns out, shopping for a combo recorder is an exercise in compromise. Here are some of the trade-offs you have to look forward to.

     

    JACKS Each recorder has a dazzling array of jacks on the front and back panels, for ease in connecting to your other home-entertainment gear. For example, each has so-called component video outputs for a superior picture on recent TV sets. JVC and GoVideo even included a front-panel FireWire input, which lets you dump footage from a digital camcorder directly onto a DVD.

     

    Unfortunately, the GoVideo deck lacks an S-video input, a high-quality connection to many camcorder models. And a note to videophiles: The RCA, JVC and GoVideo decks can play both VCR and DVD signals through the same set of component video cables, so you don't have to switch TV inputs to get the best quality. DISC FORMAT Thanks to a foolhardy war between electronics companies, there are two incompatible formats for blank DVD's, confusingly called DVD-R and DVD+R. Recorded discs of either type will play in most recent DVD players, but you have to be careful to buy the right kind of blanks for your recorder, and many stores carry only one type.

     

    The RCA and GoVideo decks require DVD+R (and their more expensive, erase-and-reuse variant, DVD+RW). The Panasonic and JVC players take DVD-R discs (and the erasable DVD-RW). A disc of either format must be "finalized" (a 2- to 15-minute electronic shrink-wrapping) before it will play in other DVD players.

     

    As a bonus, the Panasonic and JVC models also accept a third format called DVD-RAM, which doesn't play in most everyday DVD players. But if you just leave it in your recorder, you can use it pretty much like a hard drive, adding and deleting recordings at will, slicing out commercials, watching the beginning of a show whose ending is still being recorded, and so on.

     

    Frankly, understanding the differences between all of these formats makes most people's brains hurt. At the outset, you might want to consider just buying straight-ahead, ordinary blanks (either DVD-R or DVD+R) and treating them as burn-once-and-forget-it DVD's.

     

    COPY QUALITY The quality of the copy depends on the speed setting you choose. The one- and two-hour DVD settings, for example, are nearly indistinguishable from the original VHS tape. Remember, of course, that VHS quality isn't so great to begin with. The four- to eight-hour modes look pretty terrible. The JVC and Panasonic decks also offer in-between settings that maximize quality based on the length of the recording, as long as you know the length ahead of time.

     

    VCR FEATURES Only the JVC and Panasonic models offer VCR Plus+, the shortcut system that programs your recorder to record a show when you copy its code out of the newspaper TV listings. This feature applies to recordings made on either a tape or a disc, so a better name might be VCR Plus+ Plus DVD Plus+.

     

    REMOTE CONTROL None of the remotes are fully illuminated, although the JVC's primary playback controls glow. Most require you to press a DVD or a VCR button before pressing Play, Pause or whatever; only the RCA is smart enough to play whatever is in the machine (a disc or a tape) - or, if one of each is inside, to ask which you want. The buttons on GoVideo's remote are especially poorly designed; they're all alike, all tiny, all the time.

     

    DVD FEATURES All four of these decks work fine as DVD players, but the GoVideo's AutoPlay feature can skip all the ads, movie trailers, FBI warnings and so on at the beginning of a DVD movie, and just start playing the movie itself. DVDelicious!

     

    Speaking of smart, the JVC, Panasonic and RCA decks offer a 30-second skip button that works on both discs and tapes; the JVC and RCA also offer a 7-second replay button that's great for catching mumbled dialogue.

     

    CHAPTER MARKERS Each deck creates a new "chapter" of your DVD for each new recording you copy to it. But within a long recording, the Panasonic, RCA and JVC models just put a chapter marker every few minutes.

     

    The GoVideo offers two more sophisticated features. One, an option called YesVideo, produces a handsome main menu featuring thumbnail images of the chapter breaks - an infinite improvement over the invisible markers of its rivals. (GoVideo's ads imply that these breaks are intelligently placed at scene breaks, but usually they're just spaced at regular intervals.) Better yet, if you pop the finished disc into a Windows PC, you can print out a DVD jewel-case insert depicting those thumbnail images, so you can see what's on the disc without having to put it into a player. Very cool.

     

    YesVideo is available only if there's just one recording on a disc. Even without this feature, though, GoVideo still lets you place chapter markers manually during playback, complete with thumbnail images.

     

    SUPPORT GoVideo should take pride in the fact that it prominently displays its toll-free tech-support number right on the box, part of what it calls its "widely heralded White Glove Customer Care."

     

    It should be ashamed, however, of the fact that White Glove Customer Care turns out to be keeping you on hold for an hour, waiting for an agent - until a recording tells you that everyone's busy and hangs up on you. I never did get through.

     

    Panasonic's player has a jaw-dropping list of features, including an amazing one-minute full-tape rewind speed, picture-in-picture, and so on - but its manual reads like a bad translation of the Japanese income-tax form. (Writing sample: "The title is irretrievably erased when you use this procedure and cannot be retrieved.")

     

    On the other hand, RCA's manual offers standard high-school English-class writing - which means that, among electronics manuals, it's practically Shakespeare.

     

    MAKING A CHOICE The GoVideo is the least expensive deck ($285 at shopping.com), its DVD preview-skipping feature is almost irresistible, and that YesVideo chapter thumbnail thing is a worthy exclusive. Its reliability is worrisome, though. My review unit froze several times during testing, and after a few days refused to burn any more DVD's. A replacement unit occasionally stopped burning discs until it was unplugged and plugged in again, earning it the household nickname Don'tGoVideo.(GoVideo's buyer reviews online are similarly discouraging.) The RCA ($346) and Panasonic ($342) are fine machines, but they can't touch the JVC ($312) for good looks, price or genuinely useful features. For example, only the JVC has two tuners, so that it can record two things at once (one on tape, one on DVD). And only JVC offers an infrared blaster (when you send in your registration card), which changes the channel on your cable or satellite box for a scheduled recording. VCR Plus+, a full complement of jacks and the glowing remote only sweeten the deal.

     

    In any case, the arrival of the combo VCR-DVD recorder is a welcome moment in format-turnover history. Now all we need is an equally automated machine that rescues our vinyl records, Apple II floppies and 8-track tapes.

    Random Anger Thoughts.

    in Spray

    Posted

    The Holy Now

     

    There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time -- or even knew selflessness or courage or literature -- but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

     

    There is no less holiness at this time -- as you are reading this -- than there was the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Chebar, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of God. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. There is no whit less might in heaven or on earth than there was the day Jesus said "Maid, arise" to the centurion's daughter, or the day Peter walked on water, or the night Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in a tree. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.

     

    Purity's time is always now. Purity is no social phenomenon, a cultural thing whose time we have missed, whose generations are dead, so we can only buy Shaker furniture. "Each and every day the Divine Voice issues from Sinai," says the Talmud. Of eternal fulfillment, Tillich said, "If it is not seen in the present, it cannot be seen at all."

     

    --Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

    Dealing w/ junk mail

    in Spray

    Posted

    I don't have the time for such hijinks with direct mail, but if you do send back the business reply envelopes, it's costing the direct mailer a minimum of $0.47 per piece (more if you fill it up with sheets of paper etc. and raise the weight above 1 oz.).

     

    If you write "no longer at this address" on the piece and put it back in your mailbox, one of 2 things is going to happen, assuming it's been mailed at Standard/Bulk Mail Rates: (1) if they've stamped "address correction requested" on the envelope, they'll get it back and be charged $0.70, or (2) if they haven't put such an endorsement on the piece, the USPS will throw it away. But the real problem with doing this is you're going to confuse your mail carrier & local post office. And most direct mailers don't bother with address corrections, 'cause they're probably buying your name from a list broker like Expedian, and letting them handle all the list management.

     

    The direct mailer *should* absorb the cost - they're the ones sending out unsolicited bullshit in the first place.

    Yoga Classes in Portland

    in Fitness and Nutrition Forum

    Posted

    well the room was big and cold for one thing. Second, the instructors weren't very experienced in yoga - they taught it more like a quasi-yoga-aerobic-fitness class. They didn't even know what the poses were called. There was no personal attention or correction. But maybe I was spoiled by the first rate instructors at Holidays. I swear Eugene could twist himself up like a pretzel! cantfocus.gif

     

    Mike - are you going to be a chiro soon? My mother's looking for some relief for a bad knee (torn meniscus), pinched nerve, sciatica (sp?) bad back and she mentioned going to a chiropracter which frankly has me alittle worried. confused.gif

×
×
  • Create New...