Go Skateboarding Day

Last week was Go Skateboarding Day… Here’s hoping you had a better day than these guys.

All I can say is STAY THE HELL OUT OF ARKANSAS! Apparently the cops there don’t care who you are… These kids ranged in age from 13 – 17 years old and were celebrating Go Skateboarding Day when the cop grabbed one of the kids by the throat and slammed him to the ground. Even a 90 pound teenaged girl got put into a chokehold. And people wonder why we don’t trust cops?? Here’s hoping the pig gets what’s coming to him.

Don’t buy an SUV

Last night I was driving another press car, this time a 2007 Land Rover. I filled it up with the company gas card.

Dapcentral + VisualHub + Connect360 = We’ve Got Movie Sign for Mac users!

At long, long last… I am finally able to watch all of my favorite episodes of MST3K that have not their way to DVD on my own television.

About 6 years ago, a good friend of mine helped create a website called The Digital Archive Project, dedicated to preserving episodes of our favorite TV show, Mystery Science Theater 3000. I’m sure you remember the show… a guy and his two robots sat in a theater and were forced to watch crappy old movies. However, in order to legally air these old movies, the network had to lease the rights to the movie featured in the episode. Unfortunately, once the network’s lease on those movie rights expired, they could no longer legally air the episodes. Therefore, after a while, many of these great episodes only existed on VHS tape – recorded by fans.

The BestBrains (as the creators of MST3K called themselves) were aware of this problem and encourated tape trading, even ending each episode with the words “Keep Circulating the Tapes”. It was with this in mind that the Digital Archive Project (or the DAP) was born. As the community grew, MST3K fans hooked their VCRs up to their desktops and started encoding episodes to a digital format and sharing them via their own eDonkey server. Of course, the quality was questionable at first – as the tapes were well loved. After a while, better quality encodes began to surface, and eventually they even ventured into creating their own DVDs, with custom menus and all.

Along comes VisualHub, another great shareware program which enables users to convert pretty much any video file into any format and video quality you wish – small files for your iPod or PSP, or larger quality files for AppleTV, etc. Thankfully, it also converts video to WMV, specifically for play on the XBox 360. So now I can convert my old DAP avi files to WMV and thanks to Connect360, it’s incredibly easy stream them to my 360. VisualHub is only about $23 to register, and Connect360 is $20. So for just over $43, you can pretty much watch any video file you want on your Television.

So… for the OS X users out there, this may prove helpful. Personally, I hate watching video on my computer now that I actually have a decent television. Thanks to a few people who haven’t forgotten about the Mac users in the world, I don’t have to.

Dyson.

If you read this site (and judging by my traffic, you don’t), you know that I get obsessed new gadgets fairly often. I either end up buying it or become obsessed with something else and forget about whatever it was I was obsessed with the day before. Last year, it was the T-Mobile MDA, which I ended up buying and then selling a few months later once I became obsessed with the Blackberry Pearl. Same thing happened with the X-Box 360, and the Panasonic Plasma TV that I had to buy after buying the X-Box 360 so I could actually see what the hell I was playing.

Earlier this week, I somehow managed to become obsessed with Dyson vacuum cleaners. Normally my obsessions are somewhat more glamarous, or sexy. I generally don’t become obsessed with household cleaning supplies. I didn’t feel too guilty about this particular obsession though, because at least it’s practical.

The only problem is once I started looking into them, I realized how expensive they are. The base model starts at $400 and they go up to about $650. Factory refurbushed models sell for around $250.

One of the cool things about Dyson is that they have special models for Animal hair, which I got really excited about because my cat sheds like a maniac, and we still have some hair lying around from the dog that we had for a few months last year.

Yesterday afternoon, the vacuum Gods smiled upon me, and someone put a DC07 Animal model up on Craigslist. I went out there this evening and picked it up. I got a hell of a deal. The DC07 “Animal” model, retails for $500, and I got it for $150. The people who were selling it had purchased one of those robotic vacuums that vacuums on it’s own, and were seling the Dyson because they didn’t need it anymore. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. It came with all of the attachments… nothing missing.

It smelled a little like dog (which is to be expected from a used vacuum cleaner which is designed for pet hair), so I cleaned it up once I got home. I cleaned the Brushbar, filters, and rinsed out the “Cyclonic Chamber” (which is not recommended by Dyson, but someone posted the tip on ehow.com claiming it would help get rid of the scent) and it was much better. At one point when I first tested it out, the vacuum randomly stopped working on me for a second but I switched outlets and it worked just fine after that.

Incidently, I had to drive home with the vacuum in the passenger seat, because I was driving a press car from my job. The new 2007 BMW Z4 Roadster is a sweet car, but not much on trunk space.

If you think your floor is clean… go buy a Dyson and see how wrong you are. We had vacuumed fairly recently, and this thing pulled up a ton of fur. A TON. I guess nothing cleans like 150,000 Gs of centrifugal force.

Yeah… so that’s my post for today. Vacuum cleaner. I posted about a vacuum cleaner. But it’s a pretty gangster vacuum.

This brings up another aspect of the Dyson that I noticed. Dyson has managed to do something that nobody expects of a Vacuum cleaner. They made a vacuum cleaner COOL.

Amazon has tons of user reviews. People write about Dysons in their blogs (like me). People make videos of their Dyson vacuums and post them to YouTube and receive pages of comments from other Dyson owners about how great they are. What the hell makes Dysons so popular and cool?

I read a post in which a Dyson owner professes his love of his new vacuum and starts a raging debate over Dyson’s marketing techniques.  People have suggested Dyson of modeling their advertising after Apple, and it makes sense. In doing my research, I have discovered that Dyson owners seem strangely loyal to their vacuum cleaners.  It’s a strange cult… one which apparently I have just joined.

I couldn’t find a Dyson commercial on YouTube or Google Video, so instead here is something in a language I don’t understand.

STOP THE INSANITY!!

You know that the Hyphy phenomenon has spiraled out of control when you see crap like this…

Paris Hilton rocking the stunna shades?? Mac Dre is rolling in his grave…

Rasheed Wallace is a record hater…

I was so happy to see the Cavs win the Eastern Conference…

Well… lemme be more specific. I was so happy to see the Pistons LOSE the Eastern Conference. In classic style, Rasheed Wallace went into whiny little bitch overdrive in the 4th quarter and got his punk ass ejected for trying to take Lebron’s head off and then proceeding to thug-talk an official after they called the foul.

The irony of the situation is that had the Pistons been able to turn the game around, Rasheed wouldn’t have been allowed to play in game 7. His technical foul was his 7th in the post-season which results in a one game suspension. That fool was the main reason I hated the Blazers for so long… The NBA needs to come down harder on people like him – he has had the highest technical foul count in the NBA for years.

I’ll be rooting for the Cavs in the finals… the Spurs are a dirty team and I look forward to watching them lose. I’m hoping someone knees Bowen in the balls and hip-checks Horry into a scoring table.

Any guesses as to what Sheed threw this time around?