First off, you should check out my Future Enhancements page if you have not already. As of right now, I am hoping I can knock off most of those things if not all of them by the end of the year. Of course, there will likely be new items on it by then so I doubt my work here will ever be done.
Another hobby eating up a lot of my time is how much I have been getting back into Call of Duty 4 on the Playstation 3. This entails a little more though than people might think. Considering I am an active member in a videogame clan, we have started to look at playing the game semi-competitively again rather than just dominating random people in regular games. This means I spend at least an hour dealing with administrative work for every match we play, but I think I will save the details for another post. Things, unfortunately, got a little rough this past weekend due to a hack released on the internet allowing opposing players to be able to fly as well as being invincible during that time; though, they cannot shoot. It was enough to put a damper on the game unless playing with a strong party capable of embarrassing these players.
In conjunction with all the game playing and competition overhead, I have started to dabble some with recording video from my play. I have around two to three hundred gigabytes of video sitting on hard drives from last summer. This used a rather bland recording rig so the quality is not very good. Nonetheless, I have finally started going through it in order to build some video editing competency. It will be posted on youtube for all to see once it is complete. Do not expect any quick turnarounds on it. However, before I could do the editing, I needed to find some good software. Sony Vegas exists, but it costs a lot of money unless you want to pirate it. Even then, it is primarily a Windows-based application unless time is spent finagling with it. I managed to come across kdenlive which is more than enough for my needs. I think so far I have only found one feature in Vegas that is not in kdenlive, and yet, I am easily able to workaround it. In addition to all of this, I bought a new bit of hardware back in April that allows me to get much better quality of video. Did I mention I am also able to use it from linux? My previous rig required me to boot Windows on a machine. I was not even able to get the old Hava to connect with a Windows vm. I probably could have if I had spent more time tinkering with the vm networking, but I never did. My Hauppauge took me about a day to get working on an Ubuntu server. I used a website and then posted on the Ubuntu forums for a bit of help. I had it working within an hour of coming home from work the next day.
I also got a new phone almost two weeks ago. If you feel you should have my number, email me and I send my number to you if I feel like you deserve it. My phone is an LG EnV3 on the Verizon network. Despite some interesting news about how insecure Verizon is, I decided to go with them since the other providers do not seem to be any better. The nice part about my new phone is I have unlimited text and picture messages, 3.0 megapixel camera, email and web with unlimited data, as well as a national plan. This means I am connected to the internet pretty much wherever I am. I have discovered though that my website crashes my phone’s browser. Needless to say, I will have to update the list of future enhancements to go mobile.
I went out golfing yesterday and shot fairly well overall. I actually shot amazing for four holes, mediocre for two holes, and terrible on three. The highlight of the day was by far my near eagle on hole six. I was sitting out roughly 130 yards from the pin in the next fairway. Distance was hard to judge because the markers were terrible and impossible to find. There was a tall tree directly between me and the pin. I figured if I hit a 7-iron, I could make it over the tree, but I would have to hit it strong to make the green. I went for it and absolutely crushed the ball, hitting it just over the top of the tree. The ball landed short of the green, bounced twice, and rolled into the pin before deflecting a couple feet away. I made the short putt for the second birdie of my life. I also put the ball on the green off the tee on both par 3′s and hit one of the prettiest drives of my life off the tee at hole 9. I still need to work a bit on avoiding water hazards and losing my ball into the brush. I could have dropped four strokes or more with that alone.
Those are the events of the past couple of weeks. I will be heading down to Kansas City for some fun this weekend before moving back to college the following weekend. I am looking forward to the week I have off between work and classes starting. Best part about this fall is I am only taking two classes, doing my undergraduate computer science research, and sitting in on another class. In other words, I will have a lot more free time than is normal for me. That being said, I am sure I will still be busy with personal projects and hanging out with friends.