Richard Moose

About 16 months ago, I went to San Diego to visit my friend Chris, and he showed me his 3D setup. It made a real impression on me and started me down the path to creating my own 3D home theater experience, and I’m glad to say it is finally here.

It was a bumpy ride.

The main pieces are the video projector and the video card, and the physical setup was easy to get going.

The problem, as always, was that I couldn’t get everything configured right. I got my games to work in 3D, but I couldn’t get movies to work. The Cyberlink software wouldn’t recognize my projector as a 3D capable display.

After messing with it for a couple of weeks, off and on, I finally gave up on movies.

After a while, I moved on to a new project, which was upgrading my system to Windows 7 – 64 bit. I added more RAM (16GB total) and installed it on a solid state hard drive.

That all went pretty well and eventually I got around to trying 3D on the new system and it was a total bust. Couldn’t get it to work anywhere except the Nvidia demo. Fuck.

So then last week, I decided to give it another go and the first thing I did was check for new drivers and sure enough, there was a new driver so I downloaded it and as soon as it installed, Windows 7 went out and got something it needed from Windows Update and presto!

Now it is all working perfectly and I couldn’t be more pleased. Games are great, movies are great, it’s all really fun!

When I was a young man, I used to think politicians were stupid.

As a middle-aged man, I used to think politicians were greedy.

As an older man, I think the problem isn’t that politicians are self-centered; I think it’s that we are.

They’re taking away our liberties in the name of security, they’re stifling innovation in the name of protection, and we let them do it because we basically don’t give a shit.

I think I must have been around 10 years old and it was a special day. My dad and I were fishing!

Even at that age, my father and I did not have a close relationship. He was always somewhat distant. But the one time he let me in was when we went fishing! We both loved it and it was the one activity that we always had together.

So there we were at the Newport Beach Pier and we had been fishing since just before first light and we already had a couple of nice halibut in our bucket when I noticed a man and his son setting up their gear to our left.

It was immediately apparent that they had little or no experience and were in fact using gear rented from the store at the base of the pier. Soon enough they got going and we all settled in to wait. Fishing is waiting with a healthy dose of anticipation.

The boy was a little older than me but when he came over to look in out bucket, he was suitably impressed and I felt like the expert fisherman giving the rookie the benefit of his broad experience.

It must have been about an hour later when we heard the splash and the cry-out. The boy had been holding the rented fishing pole and had accidentally dropped it over the side of the pier.

Disaster!

As an adult, I can appreciate that the loss of the rod and reel probably represented a significant amount of money to this man. The man definitely looked very worried and the boy immediately burst into tears. However, the man did not chastise the boy, he comforted him and calmed him. He told him they would simply have to pay for the lost gear and go home and while the day was over for them, it wasn’t the end of the world and they would be fine.

I think that really impressed my dad because he then did something very uncharacteristic for him. He reached out.

“Hold on, maybe we can find it.”

He calmly reeled in his line and then removed his sinker and hook and replaced them with a large steel hook that we sometimes used to pull mussels off the pilings when no other bait was available. Then he dropped that over the side of the pier and began walking along, dragging the hook on the bottom and hoping to snag the lost fishing pole.

Sure enough, on the second pass, he suddenly smiled a big smile and starting reeling like crazy. We watched the lost pole appear from the water and we all let out a shout of joy!

My dad had saved the day!

The man was so happy and he offered to pay my father a reward, but my dad refused and said that he was glad to help and their thanks was payment enough. “We fishermen have to stick together” he said.

I can remember feeling so proud of my dad. I felt like he was superman and had performed a miracle to save the day.

My dad was a complicated man and our relationship was never really close, but he had a good heart and he did his best and he taught me by example what it means to have generosity of spirit and to be willing to help your fellow man in time of need.

It wasn’t always easy, but we were family and we loved each other and that counts a lot.

The garden is cranking and I’d like to take pictures and video, but those will have to wait until tomorrow for sure.

I’ve got tons of marketing work to do and I still have the whole NewportFive.com site to build. I have to setup email so I can contact Facebook and take control of the Place page there.

Tomorrow is the Tustin Chili Cook Off. I made some flyers for the Newport Five, so that will force me to get off my ass and go! I plan to take a lot of pics and shoot a bunch of video. The day starts off with a pancake breakfast at the Knights of Pythias Hall on Main St. from 7am to 10am and then the Chili Cook Off officially starts at 11am.

Plus, I just got two new Wheel of Time books and three more marketing books on the way. I’m going back through the last Wheel of Time book now so I can remember where everyone is at before I read the new books.

Time to git ‘er done!

Wow!

Srsly…. wow!

The combination of going to Windows 7 64 bit and mounting it on a solid state hard drive has made a dramatic difference, to say the least. It’s shocking.

This will give you the idea… from turned off dead cold to up and fully running is 25 seconds! And 10 seconds of that is the motherboard posting up. So yeah, Windows is booting up in like 15 seconds. Fucking awesome.

I’ve always known, intellectually, that browser performance was part of the “speed” equation when using the web, but I always tended to think about that experience more in terms of connection speed as being the limiting factor. Well I’m here to tell you, browser performance is a HUGE part of that experience. It feels like my connection speed has doubled!

It was obvious that going to 64 bit was going to improve the performance of my system, but this has exceeded my expectations by a mile! I’m fucking stoked!

Naturally, there were a few hiccups along the way with doing a new install, but all in all it was a remarkably fast and pain free experience. There is always the pain in the butt of rebuilding your software library but it is doubly necessary to take advantage of my new processing power unleashed. It’s remarkable that it was there all along just waiting to be tapped and I never realized it!

The little SSD is cool. It’s completely enclosed in a smooth aluminum case and it’s thin and small. It comes with a mounting tray that you use to make it fit in a standard drive bay.

If you’ve been thinking about going to 64 bit, I’m saying do it! And get yourself one of these new fangled SSD hard drives in the bargain, you’ll be glad you did!

The radishes, as always, were the first to show themselves so they were ready to be thinned this week. The first planting of salad greens was completely devoured by the birds, so I found some hardware cloth that I had in the garage and I made a cover with it and replanted. We’ll see how it goes.

I got the star jasmine in the ground last week and it is showing signs of new growth, so it is on its way. I still need to develop the rest of that area for corn, but I saw that the fields up the street on Newport have corn shoots well up so that’s given me a kick in the ass to make sure that corn is definitely going to be my project for the coming week.

The crenshaw melons aren’t showing much obvious growth yet but the icebox watermelons are sprouting and the tomatoes are growing well. Mr. Stripy is definitely the most improved player this week. He’s really taking off.

The raspberry vines have lots of shoots coming up and most of them are in good places, so I’m going to let them go. A couple of flowers have come and gone so I’m assuming there are going to be a few random early birds, but for the most part, the vines are barely getting started.

It’s March 20th and the 2011 Garden Project has officially started!

As you can see, I have a few pots with young plants but most of the garden will come from seed. I think seeds are just more fun and they’re certainly more economical.

I’ve finally entered the digital entertainment age completely (or as completely as I care to at this point). It started with a sale on HDTVs at Costco… it ended with three or four days of madness setting everything up. But now… this is the shit!

It’s the 3D Blue-Ray daddy that handles the heavy lifting. It took a couple of days to get the wireless talking to the DSL and finally I figured out what neither ATT nor Netgear “support” could sort out. Hey, I’m not proud, I call techsupport first thing. Let the experts do their job is my motto. The problem is sometimes the experts aren’t so expert. Anyway, all is well that ends well and this setup is crazy cool. The Blue-Ray player handles the wireless connection to the computer and Sony has their own “Bravia” network and the player software is the front end to that along with any “DLNA” media server you have running on your system. And just like that, anything I want to watch on the HDTV I can just drop into a folder on my media server and there it is. Very cool.

The player has the built-in connections to YouTube, Netflix, etc. so it really is a total package in basically a few clicks. Not like the bad old days of cables and engineering class applications to handle the media.

So I’m stylin’ digital now and I’m too cool for school.

It was traumatic when my motherboard died last week, but getting the new system going has been a mostly pleasant experience. I had to get just 2GB of RAM to start and so I have been frustrated by the lack of performance caused by too little RAM, but I ordered a 16GB set that is being delivered today and so by tonight I should have a screamer of a system with the quad-core processor and the maximum RAM.

Geek stuff, eh?

I finally was able to let go of all the bullshit I was holding on to and I went to see Jackie and we had a great talk and a lot of really great things came out of it.

I had been thinking that “the problem” was that I was in love with her. But after we talked and we re-established our connection, the next day I came to understand that love wasn’t the problem. The problem, all along, was neediness.

What happened, was the next day she sent me a very nice message that just reaffirmed how great it was to be friends again and how much comfort it gave her to have me back in her life and when I read that simple and heartfelt message, it was like all the neediness I had been feeling just dropped away and I was able to let it go.

It’s such a great feeling, because now we really can be great friends with nothing getting in the way of simply enjoying each other’s company and conversation.

Life is good and I feel incredibly motivated to do something nice for someone. A random act of kindness is definitely called for.

But first… it’s back to The Challenge!!!