There was one Naan left and I got it! Take that, everyone else in the Merrimack valley!
Category: Uncategorized
Proclamation
Kitty Selfie
Patches is completely engrossed in the Bruins and is terrified by the Rangers having a 5 on 3 power play.
What is that Sound?
Listen closely to this video…
I had to run to the store for a minute. When I walked outside I heard the weirdest sound. I assume it’s a bird, but could it be something else? It sort of sounds like a turkey, but I can’t tell for sure.
You are going to have to crank the volume to hear the sound on the video. It sounded like it was moving away from me and by the time I got the phone out to try and capture the sound it was too far away to really come through. On top of that you have wind, and water running down the gutter on the side of the garage, and water dripping out of a hole right near the end of the gutter too. You probably will only hear this with headphones on and the volume way up, but give it a try and tell me if you know what bird or animal makes that sound.
It Begins
Let Robbie’s hypocrisy begin!
Photojojo Wide Angle and Fisheye Lens
I spent the last 15 minutes or so messing with the last two photojojo lenses. The wide angle and the fisheye. I am not happy with either. I think it’s my fault though. I am guessing that the metal ring that I glued onto my iPhone was placed ever so slightly wrong, and the result is the two wide lenses are screwed up. Still, I don’t have the intestinal fortitude to pry the ring off and place a new one on right now, so you all are going to have to live with this for now.
I thought it would be fun to do this test in the back yard. Unfortunately the sun is so bright and the reflection off the snow is so intense that I couldn’t see squat on the camera app screen. You know, you take what you can get. I supplemented the stupidity with more pictures of a coke bottle. The cat is sleeping on the couch, so I won’t be adding more of her just now.
Our first shot is just the camera app.
Now we have the wide angle. Note the horrible distortion on the right of the image, because I sure as hell did. Wait a second… I had this oriented wrong. ARGH!!!
Finally we have the fisheye. Not so much distorted as just having the effect off center.
The first test had the camera in portrait orientation. Now let’s try the same deal in landscape. First, no external lens.
Now the wide angle. Note the distortion on the right and the upper left. Yeah!
Finally, the grotesquely off center fisheye, although the sun peeking in on the upper right is kinda cool.
Test #3 has us back inside with the obligatory coke bottle. No lens here.
The wide angle is still distorted as hell, but you can still see that the field of view is wider. It’s not a total loss, right? Right?
Again, the off center fisheye.
One more time, in landscape.
With the wide angle.
And with the fisheye. For some reason I want to throw a capital F onto fisheye every single time I type it. Why is that? Note that the effect is really good. You can see Jen on the right side of the picture. She was in the next room, exactly 90 degrees to my right. It works, I just have it positioned wrong.
I tried shifting the two lenses around on the metal right to try and fix the errors, but nothing I did helped at all. I think the problem is the ring the lens connects to, not the lenses themselves. Any thoughts, or do I just suck?
The zoom is the lens I really wanted. The macro was the happy bonus. I would expect that there will never come a time that I will want to use a fisheye lens, other than just goofing around, so that one is just sort of there. The idea of the wide angle is nice, but I think I would be less apt to use that than either the zoom or the macro. As it stands, the two that I am disappointed with are the ones I’d probably go to the least. I’m still disappointed though. I’ll try fixing the ring and then try testing again. Like I said, I can milk 100 posts out of these silly things.
Bring on the Hypocrisy
Today is the day that I, your humble narrator Robert, become a major hypocrite. Hooray.
It all starts at 3:00pm Eastern Time today when the puck drops in three cities. Well, two. One of the 3:00 games is Chicago at L.A. and the Kings will be raising the Stanley Cup banner before the game, so they will probably start late… semantics. Nit picking. Shut up, I’m mad at myself. Chicago/L.A. and Pittsburgh/Philadelphia are going to be shown on NBC. I live in the East coast, so I assume there will be no banner raising ceremony for me, even though I was 100% a Kings fan from the second round on last year. No, I get the first of a shortened season’s worth of national networks washing and polishing Sidney Crosby’s balls. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those people who hates Crosby. I feel that before his concussion issues he was the best player in the world, and I hope to see him come back 100% healthy. He can be the best player in the world again, just so long as it does not come at the expense of the Bruins. Okay? Okay. I just get really, really, really, awfully, terribly tired of all the attention the media lavishes on him. Yes, he is a great story. Yes, he is the best there is. Yes, he is good in front of a camera. Yes, his is essentially the face of the NHL. Still, when you watch national coverage, be it NBC or Vs or ESPN (that’s a little joke) it’s always Crosby, Crosby, Crosby, Crosby rode a bike today. Crosby went to the movies today (think that’s a joke? Nope. ESPN ran a story discussing how Sid the not quite Kid enjoys going to the movies. When did they run this? Yesterdady) Crosby had a hang nail today. Crosby tried Shawarma and liked it. Enough already! I can see Pittsburgh’s local networks going off the deep end like that, but national networks? No thanks.
What the hell was I talking about? Oh yes, hypocrisy.
The Bruins play the Rangers tonight at 7:00pm. If I’m not doing anything else I might watch it. Maybe before I go to bed I might listen to the end of the game on the radio. Who knows.
I swore that if the league canceled one game I was off the wagon for good. Today, I am talking about watching a game or maybe even two. Crap. I just suck. My hypocritical compromise is to watch, but not invest. No money shall leave my hands and go to the hands of the NHL or any NHL franchise, including my beloved Boston Bruins. Nope. No money. No part of the NHL is going to make a dime off of me. Fortunately, the NHL Game Center iOS app is free. I installed it on both of my iOS devices today. Hypocrite! Last year I spent $15 or so to upgrade to whatever they call the package is that lets you listen to the radio broadcast of every single game. Not this year. This year I will get my 98.5 the Sports Hub (WBZ FM) stream from the radio.com app. That’s it. I am sticking to the no money thing for as long as I can. If one of the kids starts begging that they want to go to a game, that will be the only way I will break this oath. My step kids are more important than my being pissed off at the NHL. Still, I do not expect much begging and pleading, so I’ll be all right.
So what about the games themselves? What can we expect? I had 98.5 on in the car as I drove to Dunks to get some donuty breakfasty goodness this morning and a caller was breaking down how the Bruins and Rangers match up. I was laughing my ass off (figuratively) the whole time he was talking. About half of the Bruins roster played in Europe during the lock out. They had more players playing this season than any other team in the league. The rest of the guys? They worked out, they skated, they held captains practices, they did their best. Then they had less then a week of camp and then the idiotic shortened season started. In other words, these guys all had an extended summer break and are right about now getting into what would usually be pre-season game readiness. Folks, the hockey today is going to be AWFUL. It’s going to be a terrible, sloppy mess. You can’t look at any rosters and say this team should beat that team because no one is anywhere near ready to play actual games!
My prediction for tonight’s game between the Bruins and the Rangers at TD Garden in Boston is: Bruins 11 – Rangers 10 with new Ranger Rick Nash scoring nine goals, all off of Tuukka Rask, and Bruin Tyler Seguin scoring eight goals for Boston and assisting on the other three. At least one assist on each of the 21 goals scored will be given to a player who is generally considered to be a career minor leaguer, because all such players actually played hockey, in the AHL, over the last four months. Expect results like that to be repeated league wide for at least the first three weeks of the season. Alex Ovetchkin and Sidney Crosby and at least five other players will score 50 goals in 40 or fewer games. Why? Because the first few weeks of the season they will be playing against goalies who are still waddling in pre-season form.
Bring on the sloppy mess.
I am a hypocrite. Deal with it.
Go Bruins
Shawarma
Shawarma… It’s good!
I hope you enjoyed my Greg the Bunny reference. This is my wife’s entrée at Jocelyn’s in Salem, NH and yes it was good.
The NHL Apology
The NHL has apologized to newspapers across the continent. Or something like that.
Leave it to the league that followed record profits, disgustingly high profits, with an insulting, idiotic, moronic, douche bag of a lockout to tell its fans how sorry they are for taking their favorite league away from them via a dead medium.
Newspapers. You know, those things from ancient history that in the modern day are dying left and right because no on buys them anymore and therefore they cannot sell any advertisements and therefore go out of business?
The NHL took out full page adds in at least one paper in every NHL city, assuming the NHL city still has a newspaper because, as stated above, newspapers are going out of business left and right. Those papers that actually exist were probably overcome with bliss at the idea of actually selling an advertisement that takes up a full page. That means the papers published today will be at least one page long! The wonder of it all, eh?
Here is the add itself. Be amazed at the sincerity of the apology made by the billionaires who took our game away from us. It just brings a tear to the eye, doesn’t it? Of course no one is going to see the actual apology because no one in North America actually reads newspapers anymore. They may as well have broadcast this text via telegraph.
So there you have it. Shared on the internet (I got the image from this article, published in a medium that people in North America actually use, on a web page) because it’s the 21st century and all.
I guess now that the NHL has apologized to the people who pay their bills all must be forgiven, right? We’re all happy friends again, right?
Wrong.
Alex Lifeson Interview from 1977
This little video has just popped up. It’s Alex Lifeson of Rush talking about his guitars back in 1977. It’s funny to hear him picking on Les Pauls when he uses them everywhere now. One other comment… was he playing up his accent? He sounds extremely Canadian at times.
The camera man probably should have spent some time showing the actual guitars, don’t you think? Oh well.
Inside the Red Head's Head 