Smokey’s House of Paincakes

Play some mad Gears of War with Gwildor this weekend! Saturday we played through Acts III and IV to completion, which took us IV hours to do! I had no idea we were playing it that long, it was crazy, but completely fun!

Oh, about the title, I love hot chocolate and I’ve been drinking a lot of it because it fits so well with the weather we’re having, but I keep forgetting to buy marshmallows. How can I properly enjoy my coco without the itty bitty marshmallows??

I would just like to point out that my very own Mom has just comment on my blog, as seen here. My Step-Dad Terry has as well for awhile now, but he’s more techno savvy.

What does all this mean? I’m officially upgrading my mom from Computer Illiterate to Computer Ebonics status. Basically close enough to understandable, but not quite there ;)

Now, hopefully I’ll still live long enough to post again after making that comment! Ha! I can see her shaking her fist at me right now!

BTW Mom… Take a look at my Think Geek Wishlist over to the side (hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink). —>

Rocky Balboa (2006)
Better than Rocky V! Has enough entertainment value to make it enjoyable, but not great. Recommended watch for a Sunday afternoon.

DOA: Dead or Alive (2006)
Typical video game movie. So bad that Ewe Boll would have done a better job directing this. That’s saying something. Not recommended at all. Reminds of advice my brother once gave me. “Never watch an Eric Roberts movie.”

I downloaded this little program that’s keeping track of my non smoking. I enter in the day I quit along with how much I smoked and how much a pack of smokes cost.

From there it calculates how much you haven’t smoked and how much you saved and prints it out to the screen.

It’s latest update is:

My name is SmokeyB, and I am a nicotine addict.
I have stopped nicotine for 23 days, 10 hours, 52 minutes and 17 seconds (23 days).

I’ve not smoked 399 death sticks, and saved $163.62.
I’ve saved 1 day, 9 hours and 13 minutes of my life.

Not too shabby if I do say so myself!

I’ve had another inspiration today and I can’t start it until the spring, but I’m going to start running. I’m probably gonna suck real bad at it, but I’m gonna try it out anyways! I figure, if I can stop smoking (and keep myself from smoking) then I should have the will power to run as well. A little experiment to try out! In the mean time, I’ve been riding a stationary bike everyday to hopefully help repair my lungs!

Wish me luck!

If Microsoft would just get it right and natively support Divx, we wouldn’t need this tutorial and everything would be wonderful!

That not being the case, I figured I would put this together because it took me a hell of a long time searching for this correct information. Now we have it step by step.

What you’ll Need:
Microsoft Media 9 Encoder
The Divx Codec
Plus any other Codec you may need to view your Divx file with (ie: AC3).

Once everything is installed, start the Media 9 Encoder and start a New Session.

1. On the Input tab click the File radio button and choose your file. Give it a moment cause it needs to examine the file and it may look like it has frozen. Don’t worry, everything will be fine shortly.
2. On the Output tab, select where and what to call your new file.
3. Now select the Compression tab and click Edit.
4. Under the Media Types section, select Quality VBR for both Audio and Video Modes.
5. Click on the newly created Quality-based tab.
6. For Video Size check the Same as video input box.
7. Change the Video quality to 100.
8. Click Ok to go back to the Compression tab and click Apply to set your options to the video. Again, this will take a few moments to process, so have a little patience.
9. Once applied, click on Start Encoding and watch ‘er go!

This will now create an Xbox 360 compatible WMV at the best possible quality. The file will be significantly larger, but it will work. Burn it to a DVD or stream away with Media Player 11.

If you don’t need the best quality, play around with the options to suit your own needs.

Warning: This method took me 4 hours to convert a 2 hour movie on a Pentium 4 3.4 with HT. The same method was less than 2 hours on a Duo Core Pentium 3.4.

DRM
Was: Digital Rights Management
Now: Doesn’t Really Matter

PETA
Was: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Now: People for the Eating of Tasty Animals

If I find anymore or you know of anymore, let me know and I’ll update the list!

Gwildor came over last night for a little old school videogame session!

Back is high school, every Friday night I would go this his place and we’d order to extra large pizzas, two big bags of chips, two 2-litre pops, 2 movies and 2 videogames. We’d be done the pizza and chips before the first movie was over!!

Anywho, we re-lived that experience last night sans-movies and it was great!!! Throw in a couple of red bulls and you’ve got 2 hyper gamers! We played everything under the sun, but the highlight of the night was definitely original Doom Co-op mode!! Wooo!! Followed by getting the achievement for killing a berserker on hardcore mode in Gears of War (My love for you is like a truck!).

I don’t remember the last time I was up till 4:30 in the morning without any booze at all! My question is “If I didn’t have any booze, then why the hell do I feel hung over????!!”

Gwildor also rock the original Street Fighter II beating the single player mode again, which just goes to prove, he has a ton more patience for that than I do!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know that Gwilly and Steve-O want to get their hands on one of these bad boys!

Hell, if I was going to buy a projection tv, this would probably be the one I would get!

Now, that the title has a warning in it, this just made me laugh!

To tell you the truth, the Least I Could Do series is really awesome and funny too. When I first started reading it, I spent an entire weekend starting from the beginning reading them all. Highly recommended!