I'm sorry your life turned out so hard, Eugene.

Testing...

Download file

I'm trying to make it where you can just click play instead of downloading it.

It didn't work.

Doctors Change the Way They Think About Death - Newsweek Health - MSNBC.com

So I got these neat grow things at Walmart. They grow 600%! I remember getting things like this from gumball machines when I was a kid and they were so much fun. Well, not fun because all you did with them was put them in water and watch them grow. Since I like to watch various things grow, I got a few to play with. The question is, how big is 600%? 600 is such a big number for small minds.

Here's the grasshopper compared to his little non-swole up friends. Is he at his growth limit yet?

And here we have a starfish and a seahorse that have been swelling for 3 days now. They were each about 2 inches long when I put them in the water. How big is 2 inches + 600%? Should I get a swimming pool to put them in if they grow too large for my kitchen?

Everything I tried to use to edit/view/watch any kind of media in Vista would immediately crash. It wouldn't even let me use my tuner card. Yes, all my drivers were updated. I don't know how long I screwed around with that crap. I finally found the fix though. I can't remember the website I saw it on and that's sad. But if I ever have to do it again, I'll have it typed right here so I won't forget.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Driver32

Rename msacm.voxacm160 to no.msacm.voxacm160

That fixed everything. Oh, I just remembered that site! It's http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net/Index.aspx
It's posted on their forums.

It's a nice place to go if you like WMM.

I finally did it. DVD to ipod without itunes. Yeah, it's all been done before but I had to screw around with everything before I could get it to work with audio. So this is how I did it so I won't forget.

Load up dvd into DVDDecrypter.
DVDDecrypter settings: Mode:IFO Streaming Process enabled with 0xE0 - Video -720x480(NTSC)/16:9 and 0x80 - Audio - AC3/6ch/English only checked. Tools:Settings: IFO Mode File Splitting set to None.

After that decrypts, open it in Videora iPod Converter and wait about an hour or 2. Load the new MP4 into Winamp with iPod connected. Right click,add to iPod.

This is just some screwing around trying to get video to work again. Don't waste your time watching it..
http://www.vaporheart.net/media/spidermovie.wmv

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | US could approve clones as food

Trying out this new Flickr photo thingy on the sidebar.-----> Over yonder. I don't know how often it updates though. And I noticed after you upload a pic to the Flickr place, you can get an html to link to it so I'm gonna see how that works now. And it if does actually work, you'll get to see a rare family pic! Oh how I hate to part with my camera at times like this. I'm the one that's supposed to be behind the camera!

oh hey it worked! omg am I really that fucking short?!

:::.. testmy.net test results ..:::
Download Connection is:: 631 Kbps about 0.63 Mbps (tested with 579 kB)
Download Speed is:: 77 kB/s
Upload Connection is:: 108 Kbps about 0.1 Mbps (tested with 386 kB)
Upload Speed is:: 13 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net (Main)
Test Time:: 2007/08/07 - 10:30pm
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6 [!]

oh hey my birthday is in 2 days!

It's oh so hot outside and oh so boring inside. Me and Kara loaded up and headed for the big town so we could find something to do in Walmart. We (she) decided we'd make some shirts. We got the stuff to make a few tie-dyed shirts and some fabric paint for her old white shirts. After she wakes up from her nap, we'll get to dyeing! I did make her a shirt as a surprise though... She wanted a Spongebob shirt but all they have around here are the shirts for big husky boys. And after looking at it, I just might make me one to match! and for 10 bucks you can have one too!

While I'm thinking about it, I read somewhere (atleast I think I read it) that sometimes the best deeds that people do are the deeds they don't boast about but keep them quietly tucked inside and covered with a smile. To the anonymous person that paid to have my Mom's truck fixed, thanks! There is indeed some good left in this world.

Once upon a time, there was a friendly dragonfly. I'm sure his name was Blue and I took his picture 57 times. And here they are! Well, here are two.. I mean three. Unaltered and unshrunk so they're about 2.5 - 3mb each.

One
Two
Three
and here's a flower I forgot about.

"What do you do with the mad you feel?" I have found a solution! Wax your hair off! By the time you're finished ripping hair off various parts of your body, you'll be smiling because it's over and would have probably forgotten what ever you were mad about. But when I did it, I wasn't even mad! I'm sure if I had been mad at the time, I'd have been smiling afterward. *insane smile*

And no, this is not a link about waxing..
http://www.vaporheart.net/contacters.jpg

If you have Tivo desktop, that's great. But now I have to remember how I did it.

1) Dig around in 'Pick Recordings to Transfer'.

2) Find what you want, 'Start Transfer' then go make a sandwich. The recording is then magically sent to your computer while you eat!

3) Take your .TIVO file and open it in Windows Movie Maker. You can cut out credits/commercials and whatever if you have the time. Then 'Publish to Computer' so it will be saved as a .WMV file.

4) Take your new .WMV and and load it into Videora iPod Converter. You should see a heavenly beam of light fall upon your computer.

Then just sync it to the iPod and enjoy. What? Yes, I do own that Harry Potter video! Why did I Tivo the movie if I already own it? I don't have Playguard!

OK.. We have The Gimp, Paintdotnet, and Picasa. And Photoshop CS3 but that's a different story. I decided to do basically the same thing in each editor to the same picture to see the final results. Mostly sharpen, screen, blur, multiply and then some minor opacity adjustments.

Paintdotnet was about 6 minutes. Two of those minutes were spent waiting for the unfocus to render. Used 4 layers to sharpen,screen, unfocus and multiply.

Picasa was maybe 3 minutes. Fill-light, sharpen then export. Undo. Shadows up, soft focus then export. Collage with Multi-exposure the new exports. Contrast..Didn't like the results at all and the exporting/undoing/changing made it a slight headache. Someone had made a tutorial about Picasa and Orton effects. I can't remember all they did so I just had to try what I could remember.

TheGimp... Using a script someone wrote, it took about 30 seconds and that includes saving the file after it was done. That's all I got to say about that.

Then I stuck all 3 edits and the original into Picasa collage thingy and did the multi-exposure output and I like that one best.

The time it took me to write this post? About an 1.5 hours.

http://www.vaporheart.net/bugsnshit/

I was playing with the photoshop gallery maker thingy. Here are some bugs, atypical deer skull and something the cat puked up.

I never knew just how interesting it could be to have a few caterpillars in a small fish tank until Kara decided they could not possibly live outside. I think we started out with 3 but it soon got populated with 8! I've been feeding them small branches from our wild cherry tree. They love them! There were a few days when I thought they were going to die. They would just be dangling off a branch looking all limp & pathetic.Then they'd wake up to eat, drink then go dangle some more. I think we've had them for about a week now. They were tiny when we first found them. Now some are longer than my finger. That's not saying much though... Last night I got out a bigger fish tank for our growing family. This morning, they were building cocoons. There are two full cocoons now and another in the making. I find myself wondering if they're making their little wormy houses because they are comfortable and well-fed in their man-made environment or if they're making them out of sheer desperation to find any way to remove themselves from this Hell I have created for them.

Thursday I ordered:
ATI Radeon™ HD 2600XT and 2 GB (2 x 1 GB) Memory Module Kit for XPS 400.
My current cards is a GeForce 7300 LE. And I have 2g memory installed.
Now let me try to make a table for my own amusement.

Later on when I get time, I'll post  screenies of w0w with my graphics sets to full and minimum along with the FPS I get at at those settings. I know you two won't mind a bit. :)

Oh and Happy Birthday Rod!! I didn't forget yesterday.. I just never know what the dates are until I write a check.

Here's my performance information for today:

So things didn't work out so well with the Radeon. Every 5 minutes (usually less) the screen would go black and I'd see "display driver atikmdag stopped responding and has successfully recovered". I spent hours updating to the latest catalyst drivers then I spent hours downgrading to older drivers. SO. After careful consideration and hours of reading forums, I chose the eVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SUPERCLOCKED 512MB DDR3 PCI-E 2.0.

I think this is the card that Rodney has and he says it's pretty good. It may not be the same card, but it's the one I ordered. The only thing I was worried about was my stock 375watt PSU. After reading the Dell forums until my eyes bled, I found that several people can run this card and higher cards by using the stock PSU. Apparently the 375watt can handle it because it pulls more from the wall and has one of those little thingies you can connect to your card directly to your power supply. A P-4 cable (6-pin connector). I also looked at the 8800GT and the.. well I looked at just about all of them. I wanted to keep my price UNDER 200 and I did. My next dealie to buy for my 'upgrading' will (maybe) be a X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Professional. I may decide to upgrade my something else instead.

I need a f00kin job so I can pay for this shit now. I feel like a bad person making my husband unknowingly buy me things while he is hard at work.

Before: 3.1	After: 5.0

Before on full: 19fps After on full: 33fps

In Shatt  I was getting around 60-70fps with just a few things turned down.

I am still occasionally that sound stutter/snap/crackle/pop but I noticed the 2 times I had that problem I had paint.net running at the same time as w0w. Maybe that's the problem? Another thing is an occasional freeze after installing the ram yesterday. It's froze up both with and without a new card installed. I checked and changed a few things in BIOS so maybe that will cure it.