My Adventures In Azeroth

So I had a brief fling with World of Warcraft the past couple of weeks. Years ago at Comic-con I got a free 14-day trial disc (now that’s good shwag). I have always wanted to play since it first came out but have always held myself back (I’ve come close to cracking numerous times) due to the fact that I know myself and my tendency to get sucked into games like this and figured this trial would be a good, um, trial. During these past couple weeks, I can already see how dangerous this freaking game is. My fourteen days aren’t even up yet and I’m already going to delete it off of my computer to save myself. Day and night I was playing, wanting to see what came next. I’m not saying that people who play this game shouldn’t, (I’m looking at you , Jezz) but I know that I just can’t restrain myself. The game is not for the weak willed. I discovered my fears were founded I now I must turn tail and run.

Of course, I’m not deleting my character off their servers, just the game off of my computer. Who knows, I may be back …. :)

Brent Spiner is a Dick

I’m surprised it took this long but Star Trek finally invaded my dreams. Last night I lived the live of an actor on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was actually a relaunch of the series so all the old actors were coming back and taking up their previous roles. It was actually kind of boring.

However there was one part of the dream that wasn’t boring and that was when Brent Spiner, or Data as he’s usually known, kept asking me for advice on how to act. He had forgotten how Data behaved and was looking for help so I basically just kept telling him to act like a robot, which, yeah, isn’t that great of advice but it was pretty funny hearing him try.

I did come down on him hard when during a scene on the Battle Bridge he started drumming his fingers (not drumming his fingers as in pinky to pointer finger style but as in taking his two pointers and hitting them against the table like drumsticks) and humming. I tell him, “Data doesn’t do that!” But he turns all mean actor on me and berates me. What a dick Brent Spiner turned out to be.

Right before I woke up I thought I would post on my site about it and ask everyone if Data would do that or not just to show him who knows what. I think it’s possible he would do it but not as part of his personality. He would drum his fingers and hum but it would be in a way where he is just experiments with the human mannerism. I don’t know. This is ridiculous. I think I win that argument, though. Casey=1 Spiner=0

I dreamed the night before that I had a huge brain tumor. It was messed up.

And Alex Miller wrote me an email that issue #1 of The Space Between was ranked #143 in the sales which I’m actually proud of. It sold just under 15,000 issues. Sweet. I hope the numbers go up, though, because I’m greedy!

But Is It Art?

Here’s my latest masterpiece entitled, “Who Farted?”

Ha, sorry. I’ve been working too much. Thank the heavens that next weekend I’ll be gently gliding through the trees in Lake Tahoe aboard untouched powder. Ugh, it’s so far away from now!

This Picture Remembers Me…

My dad gave me the heads up that my gallery had turned into a cluster-spam and he really wasn’t exaggerating. He didn’t actually use the word cluster-spam. I just made that up and I already regret it. Nevertheless he was right since there were over 1,500 comments and about 15 were from real people. Somehow I actually was able to keep most of the real comments but a few got caught up in the sweep, I’m sure.

Damn, I still need to put some newer pieces in there. I don’t even know if I remember the upload process…

Validating My Purchase

I’ve taken my 360 to the next level.

So for the past couple of months I have been watching videos off my computer on my Xbox 360. This was wonderful and all but it came at a price. The 360 only supports Mpeg-2 and WMV files for some sick reason so I had to jump through many hoops to turn an .avi file into a WMV file. First I had to use a program to encode the avi into an mpeg because the other program I was using couldn’t perform the task of encoding avi directly to wmv. So once I had my mpeg (a process that took almost 2 hours) I could start encoding that into a wmv using Sorenson Squeeze. Not only did this step take an ungodly amount of time (at least 9 hours) but it strained my aging computer to where I couldn’t perform any other tasks on it besides that one without it lurching to a near dead-stop and produced files of over 1.5 gb in size for each step. Because this took so long and took up so much space, I was juggling the processes on mine and Shelby’s computers. However, because Squeeze uses the same cd-key (ahem) it wouldn’t allow the two programs to run at the same time on my network. So because of that, I had to unplug Shelby’s computer from the router thus cutting her off the internet for hours at a time. This severely limited my opportunities to perform the encoding process.

And to kick a guy while he’s down, for some unknown reason after I would transcode the avi to a mpeg, the audio became out of sync. This occurred on both computers and I never did understand why. I even uninstalled and reinstalled codecs, drivers, programs, and files but to no avail.

Once this began, I decided to scrap the whole thing and graduate to something better.

I got XP Media Center.

However, like everything else in our stupid lives, we have to work for sweet things. Installing Media Center meant a fresh install of XP and a clean wipe of my hard drive. I, um, borrowed a friend’s copy of Media Center but had to burn it onto a DVD. Now I’m a bit behind the times so I’m new to the whole DVD burning thing. I got some DVD-Rs and looked forward to the future. But wait, I needed DVD+Rs to burn this OS. Son of a…. So that delayed me a bit as I had to get some new discs but once that was done with I had to move all my files off of my computer. I’ve accumulated a lot shit it seems over the past few months so this took quite a while as I had to rearrange and juggle in order to get it all onto Shelby’s computer and her laptop.

Time to begin installing! Almost there!

No, wait, my DVD-ROM drive is a POS and doesn’t work anymore. Of course. Time to cannibalize Shelby’s computer! So I have to open up her tower and yank out her drive and put it in mine. I unfortunately bought her the most awkward computer desk imaginable so all the cords running to the back of her tower are already stretched tight and the computer won’t move an inch out of its enclosure. So I have to basically hang upside down and use an extraordinarily large amount of energy and muscle to unplug each cord.

Now to install! Oh, it fails and freezes up a few times for reasons unknown to me. Now it’s about 3:30 in the morning so start it off one more time and go to bed. Wake up in the morning to find that it actually worked while I wasn’t watching it! Huzzah!

Now I had to put Shelby’s drive back in her computer after which I did the stupid thing of having too much confidence in my technical abilities so I attach everything and place it back in it’s awkward cubby without testing it. The computer won’t boot. It gets stuck on "Checking NVRAM…" Oh god, I’ve seen that before too many times. Do not tell me I fried her motherboard somehow.

My punishment for over-confidence is to hang upside down again and battle with the computer desk from hell.

Turns out I didn’t push the IDE cable in far enough. Grr.

That was the worst of it though. Aside from Media Center taking at least an hour to add all my media to it’s library, things start going smoother.

I download Transcode360, a third-party program that streams Divx and Xvid videos to the 360 and encodes on the fly. My god. It’s awesome. I’ve only tested the start of Deadwood (pictured, obviously) but it works like a fucking dream. All I do is find the video on my Xbox, select it and choose "transcode" from the options. Bam. I’m watching it. And it even looks better than the files I was converting multiple times over. I would even call it DVD quality. And no out of sync dialog. YES!

I haven’t even checked out it’s functionality with pictures and music.

So all my problems are solved and I now have access to anything my heart desires. My life is streamlined, my hair’s growing back, and I think I’m on the verge of curing cancer. All thanks to my 360, Media Center, and Transcode360. Life is good.

Did you read all that? No? Good, because you’d be a weirdo if you did. I just wanted to vent.

Broken Frontier Interview

Just a quick shout out to let you know that I did an interview at Broken Frontier this past week for Star Trek and it’s up now. I think I’m getting more comfortable with these things.