twenty-first century code monkey

Kategori: Ikke kategoriseret (Side 3 af 4)

New photos

New photos are up from the yearly summer house trip with the boys. Actually they’ve been up for a while I just totally forgot about it. The first night was a little crazy as I’m sure you can tell from the pics. This year I also bring you a small video clip – slightly NSFW – enjoy 🙂

The hunt for HD content

I’ve had my new TV for a little while now and am really satisfied with the picture quality for both HD and SD content. The problem is the amount of HD content I have access to is really rather limited. A HDTV feed in my area is too expensive for my taste so that pretty much leaves me to get HD content via the Internet. I am considering getting one of these HDDVD drives, but I would rather wait and see how this whole next-gen format war goes.

Anyway, so far I found a couple interesting HD sources on the Internet. There is Microsoft’s WMV-HD Showcase, but they’re only fun to watch for a short while. Then there’s Elephants Dream, which is an animated short film. It’s sort of an open-source movie which is pretty cool. You can download all the production files, making of and extras along with the movie itself from their website.

Probably the most interesting thing I found so far is Mariposa HD, which, as they put it, is the world’s first HDTV show for the Internet. If for nothing else, the show is worth download just for all the nice girls. I also like the scenic parts, which is quite amazing in HD. Their sixth episode will be out later this month so check it out.

That is pretty much all the free stuff I’ve found so far. Not a lot. Of course there’s a lot of HD trailers for both movies and games around, but that only goes so far. If you know of any other free HD stuff around please let me know.

Oh yeah, I also found this pretty cool Sony Bravia advert in HD, but it’s kinda wrong to play it on my TV since it’s a Philips 🙂

April Fools

Frantic Sound April Fools 2007 (1)So this years April 1st is over and a lot of good and not so good april fools jokes surfaced on the internet. We did a little one over at Frantic Sound simulating an acquisition by MySpace with a new design and an attempt at an hilarious news post. I don’t know if it worked too well, but at least I had fun making it 🙂

You can see the frontpage design by clicking on the image on the right and the news post here.

I’ve listed some of my favorite april fools jokes from 2007 below:

The story of my new TV

This post may look like fiction to the untrained eye, but these events did in fact take place during the past two months.

I had planned for a long time to get myself a new flat screen TV during January this year, so early January I sold my old TV. About a week later I had done enough browsing and decided on the Philips 37PF9731D, and as I always do, I checked the pricelisting sites to find the cheapest place to buy. Tape Connection in Århus was the chepeast with an actual real life store, so I decided to order from them.

The order went well and after a couple of days I was notified that they were out of stock, but would be able to deliver about three weeks later. Dammit, I thought, but I was prepared to wait since the price was reasonable.

Three weeks pass and I was contacted by Tape Connection. Now they did not want to sell me the TV becuase they experienced too many issues with this specific model (See previous post). My initial reaction was something like “*!@#$, are you kidding me?!“, but after a little thinking I ordered the 32PF9731D instead – and this is where the real fun begin!

As with the first order I receive a delivery date notification, which in this case is in one to two days, since the TV is in stock. After a week with no futher messages from Tape Connection I send them an email asking what’s going on. I receive no reply. A couple days later I call them. And I call them. And I call them. And I… well I think you get the point. They don’t answer, except for one time where I got through, but apparently to a mobile in someones pocket, since all I got was noise and no response. After trying to reach Tape Connection 8-10 times via phone and several via email, I come to the conclusion that I really don’t feel like doing business with them. Since I couldn’t reach them on the phone. I sent them yet another email to cancel the order.

At this point I check the pricelisting sites again I find laptops.dk to be even cheaper than Tape Connection. Since laptops.dk is a netshop I call them to check on what to do if I have issues with the TV and suchs, but it’s no different that if I had purchased the TV in a real store. I order the TV around 4PM and received in the next day around noon. Speedy delivery indeed! So a little over a month after I sold my old TV, I receive my new TV. Good thing my Xbox was broken in that time period as well or I would probably have had a psychic breakdown 🙂

Unfortunately the story isn’t over with Tape Connection. The next week they notified me that they had sent me the 32PF9731D TV. I call them immediately, they are a little puzzled, but accept that I want to cancel the order. Conclusion to this little predicament: They don’t read their mail. However they already withdrew the money from my account. The next day they transfer the money back, the only problem is they transfer the amount for a 37″ TV instead of a 32″ TV, which is approximately 50% too much. Since I’m an honest man I call them to tell them about the error. I get their accountant; she’s absolutely clueless. She immditaely thinks they owe me money. I explain it to her, but she keeps mixing up my two orders. After several minutes of me explaining, she reiterates what I told her and she got it all wrong. At this point I’m seriously considering hanging up the phone and just keeping the money, since they would probably never find the error anyway. But after a couple more minutes of explanation, we decided that I should simply transfer the difference between the two prices back to them.

This concludes the Tape Connection purchase expirence so far. In case you were in doubt, I highly recommand you do not order from them. Still, I have read about people that are satisfied with Tape Connection, but let’s just say I’m definitely not and let’s stop right there. At this point in time I’m just wondering if they are going to mix up the orders again and withdraw or transfer more money from/to me. I hope not.

If you understand Danish, you can read more about the reasons and issues with the Philips 37PF9731D on recordere.dk. I believe this is the reason why Tape Connection didn’t want to sell me the TV and judging from their website they don’t sell Philips TV’s at all anymore. Currently my TV shows no sign of these issues, but in case they show up it’s just a matter of calling Philips anyway, and so far it’s been the TV of my dreams. 1080 HD input from the 360, 720 HD input from the media center (which this post is written on :)), ambilight, dual tuners, UPNP capable media browser, instant Text-TV and all the other stuff. I highly recommend it!

There’s a brilliant review at LCD Reviews and the Philips website has more information.

Aarrgh!! no big ass TV for me…

Crap, crap, crap. I can’t get the TV I ordered a while back. The place I ordered have had a lot of issues with that specific model and simply don’t want to risk the hassle of a lot of defictive TV’s. In short: They’ve decided not to sell it.

This sucks as I was really looking forward to a 37″ TV and this specific model because it has a lot of nice features. I’m going to settle with the 32″ version of the same model, which actually was my original plan anyway – but that’s a different story.

The e-mail I received is quoted below (in danish).

Vi har i den senere tid oplevet flere problemer med Philips 37 PF 9731 og vi
håbede at Philips havde fået styr på problemerne, men det har desværre vist
sig ikke er tilfældet.

Derfor har vi taget konsekvensen af det og ønsker ikke at levere den
pågældende model da vi ikke mener at kunne stå inden for kvaliteten.

Videos from elementary school

Skolegade Skole logoThis year we had our ten year anniversary from elementary school and back in July we held a party to celebrate. Back then we decided to meet up later in the year and watch various videos recorded back then. I had the chance to digitize them and they are now available for download right over here. Quality is average, keep in mind the videos are from the late 80ies and early 90ies.

The videos are mostly from elementary schools – 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grade (at least that what we call them in Denmark) – where we read a story and usually sing a song. The last one is actually in English, which is quite fun to hear. There is also one video, where we are performing at the annual school party. Good times indeed.

I don’t remember what we felt back when it was recorded, but I bet we hated it 🙂
Still it is quite fun to watch these days, so I’d like to thank our teacher for giving us this opportunity. Without her we wouldn’t have the recordings today. Thanks!

Oh yeah. That name of the school is Skolegades Skole – have a look.

eighty point oh

So it finally happened. I got home after work and a nice swim and there they were. The big 80.0 digits on the weight. Finally all the cycling, swimming and other stuff I’ve been doing the past couple of months have payed off – rawks! 😀

Back when I started on all this I was on around 86-87 kg, so this is really nice. I guess the next goal should be at least a couple of kilograms below 80, but it would be nice to be around 75. We’ll see how it goes 🙂

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