I’ve found a wonderful comic about a month ago called Malfunction Junction. It is incredibly witty, and hilarious. The author went back to college and hasn’t posted anything new since April, so I’ve been combing through 3 years of archives, and I came across quite a jewel today about Creation Science:
Matt Milby is fucking hilarious! I’m really sad he doesn’t write them anymore.
I’ve been a ‘pirate’ for about 8 years now. Pretty much as soon as I set foot on a college campus, it was what everyone did, and this was during Napster’s hay day. After Napster shutdown, I resorted to stealing files from the UNM network that users left exposed (this was usually intentional on their part and almost all music files). When I exhausted that, kazaa/limewire was on the scene. I used kazaa for a long long time, and eventually I got tired of downloading one song at a time, only to have it turn out to be static that was planted by a record company in the network. It would seem that I quit that right before the RIAA started snooping on shit, and lucky for me, I never had an open share folder, I just downloaded. And then, Sloot’s brother turned me on to BitTorrent, which I perceived to be really complicated at the beginning. Since then, BitTorrent has gained public acceptance and they have super easy to use programs now for 5th graders and house wives. Consequently, more and more things are available via BitTorrent; music, movies, software, ebooks, and often times it’s used to legitimately distribute large files, like homebrew indie movies. When I got a laptop for work I started getting more and more into downloading movies, usually the ripped files from a DVD (as opposed to the handheld camera in a movie theater). One uploader has proven himself over and over again, that is AXXO, and his counterpart KLAXXON (who came to fame by ripping older movies when axxo took a break for a couple of months). If you google either of those terms, you’ll be greeted with a flood of torrents that are backed up by thousands of seeders, I downloaded The Bourne Trilogy this morning and at one point was rolling at 449kb/s, the fastest I ever remember in NM was 170kb/s.
Things in pirate land had been going just fine, and then the concierge asked me this morning why I couldn’t burn all those movies I had downloaded to a DVD so that we could watch them on the TV. I didn’t know the answer the that question, but in this day and age there must be a plausible solution right? Indeed, which brings me to the next level of piracy. To burn a video file you must first convert that file to DVD format. This was done by Xilisoft’s AVI to DVD converter, torrent provided here. The trick with that one is that the original file must be an AVI, and for a 90 minute movie the conversion takes almost 3 fucking hours, but it’s worth it. If you’re original file is not an AVI check out WinFF which is a freeware program that will convert pretty much any video format to any other format, this program is also useful for making videos play on your iPod. Alright, now that you have your DVD video files, you need to put those on a disc for which I recommend Nero 7, and of course there’s a cracked version here. Now what’s really amazing is the quality, it translated incredibly well to TV, I thought it would’ve been much worse, but from a couch’s distance away, it looks awesome, and it’s all mother fucking free!!!
The next step is for me to cancel my cable and use that money to get a netflix account and then rip every single one of those disc, which I’m told is also easily accomplished using DVDShrink.
Happy Plundering!
WIRED Magazine used a picture of my tattoo online for a section called “Reader’s Best Geek Tattoos”, how rad would it be if they actually printed that in the magazine:
Woot!
Only in fucking Las Vegas (or maybe Tempe, right Dan?) can I sustain a cycling injury like this:
I was on a 14 mile ride (which is my longest outside of a poker ride) and the outside temperature was 108. I stop at an intersection and lean on stop light pole with my right arm. A split second later I realize it’s hotter than fuck and instinctively jerk away. When I did that, part of my skin had melted to the pole, and it separated when I pulled away, it’s the bloody spot in the photo. If you look close you can see a little bit of the skin flap on the bottom. There’s definitely a clear red box from the contact area.
Lesson learned. Outdoor things in Vegas can burn you…badly.
I am 
