A Man and his Penguin

I started a Facebook profile a while ago so I could add that chick from Call For Help. I quickly found out that Facebook sucks arse as a social networking site.

But I got a message in my hotmail account today telling me that a particular person had sent me a message on Facebook. I recognised the name as someone I went to high school with.

Anyway, I logged in to find that I had 12 friend requests, 9 of them from people I know. And this guy who sent me a message was apologising for being nasty to me during high school. (lots of people were nasty to me back then).

I don’t hold anything against those people - it was a long time ago, and we were all very different people back then. But I appreciate the guts it took to apologise, so thanks for doing that.

Since so many people (some of whom I haven’t seen online for YEARS) have found me on Facebook, I guess I’ll have to log in a bit more often and see what new features the site has.

I still prefer Friendster, as far as features go

I have figured it out!

I watched the rest of HSM last night, still annoyed and surprised by how Autotuned their voices sounded. When the last song "We’re All In This Together" come in, I thought "Gee, that sounds higher in pitch than I have heard it before".

A quick check against the official music video on the DVD confirmed it, and I realised why all the singers had sounded massively Autotuned.

Part of the reason is that they HAD, of course. But the film was made for American TV - 30 frames per second, and the video standard here in Australia calls for 25 frames per second. To get the 30fps video into 25fps, you have to SPEED UP the video, hence the reason why the voices sounded high to me.

If the video wasn’t sped up, the movie would blow out to 105 minutes.

The reasons why it is not more readily noticed are:

• Most American stuff we get on DVD isn’t musical.
• That which is, is shot onto film, and film is 24 frames per second (very close to our 25fps)
• Most people are not musical, and therefore don’t notice differences in pitch (my first draft had a description of these people which was less nice :-P)

In short, I’m not worrying about the DVD transfer of Hairspray, as that was shot directly to film, and undergoes almost no speed change to get it to 25fps.

I have figured it out!

I watched the rest of HSM last night, still annoyed and surprised by how Autotuned their voices sounded. When the last song "We’re All In This Together" come in, I thought "Gee, that sounds higher in pitch than I have heard it before".

A quick check against the official music video on the DVD confirmed it, and I realised why all the singers had sounded massively Autotuned.

Part of the reason is that they HAD, of course. But the film was made for American TV - 30 frames per second, and the video standard here in Australia calls for 25 frames per second. To get the 30fps video into 25fps, you have to SPEED UP the video, hence the reason why the voices sounded high to me.

If the video wasn’t sped up, the movie would blow out to 105 minutes.

The reasons why it is not more readily noticed are:

• Most American stuff we get on DVD isn’t musical.
• That which is, is shot onto film, and film is 24 frames per second (very close to our 25fps)
• Most people are not musical, and therefore don’t notice differences in pitch (my first draft had a description of these people which was less nice :-P)

In short, I’m not worrying about the DVD transfer of Hairspray, as that was shot directly to film, and undergoes almost no speed change to get it to 25fps.

To the people who eagerly wanted to see if I could copy the Lovewrecked DVD, well, I apologise because I didn’t keep you posted as promised!

I copied it!

It involved using Acidrip on Linux to rip the raw DVD video data, then I copied it onto my big stonking NTFS partition, and used Nero on Windows to create a DVD from the raw data. Works brilliantly, but I lost the surround sound (which from my experience was barely there anyway) and the menus. I also lost the annoying trailer for Happy Feet, which I’m pleased about.

Today I posted UbuntuOS Podcast #44, and recorded #46.  Josh is editing #45.

And one of my other friends (who looks 13 but I found out is actually 18, lol) has definitely seen Hairspray for the fourth time. Some cinemas are running singalong sessions, where the lyrics are put up onto the screen during the songs.  I think Hairspray is going to end off being sorta like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where every year certain cinemas will hold a night where they show the singalong version and encourage patrons to come dressed as their favourite character.

Apple is very red-faced. Despite its best efforts to lock the iPhone customers to AAPT and lockdown the phone to only "trusted" applications, the hackers have written programs that allow third-party applications to be installed AND for the phones to be unlocked from the AAPT network. Not surprising considering the iPhone uses OS X as its operating system.

So, in the new iPhone firmware upgrade, Apple has designed it to "brick" any modified iPhones. Yes: If you add capabilities to your iPhone, and then try to upgrade the phone’s official firmware, your phone gets stuck on the "Activate" screen and becomes USELESS.

But I don’t need to worry about it. I’m not one of the zusbuns who just *had* to buy an overpriced, over-restrictive phone from a company that has a history of hating expandability and of supporting DRM.

I mean, fucking hell. People are purposely not upgrading to the new firmware, because they prefer their iPhone to have the capabilities that third-party developers have given them than to have the tiny new features that Apple is offering. If that’s not a sign that the iPhone is a failure as a product, then I don’t know what is.

On the Hairspray blog, there’s a guy who claims to have seen Hairspray 11 times. If he’s telling the truth, then that’s amazing.

EDIT: There are a number of Australians who say that they’ve seen it 3 times, even 5 times. Someone else reckons they’ve seen it 14 times. That would cost them almost $200. Are these people just lying, or is Hairspray even MORE of an instant classic than I imagined?

We had a Cost + 5% night at work, where the customers in our database from T to Z were invited.

Most customers are alright on these nights or days, but there’s always ONE who doesn’t mind behaving like a dickhead. Unfortunately, I had the dickhead this time.

He started off looking at microwaves; I asked if I could help him and he asked if the prices on the paper bags were the best prices I could do. "Oooh yeah!" I replied, enthusiastically. He headed off to look at the cordless phones, and I spent what felt like half an hour trying to help him choose a phone. He claimed not to have a power point near his phone plug, and asked if there were any cordless phones that didn’t need a power point (is this guy for real?).

Finally, he settles on a particular Panasonic phone. Great. But there’s a catch: He asks if I can do a better price if he buys a microwave as well.

Now, these prices that are ticketed are invoice cost + GST + 5%. The 5% is an extremely narrow profit; we can only do this on these VIP nights because we know we’ll have lots of people come in. Even so, the total profit figures for the night are only about as much as a reasonably-good regular day, plus we’ve got the overheads associated with having extra staff and sending out hundreds of letters. After everything, we don’t make much. But this guy insists that we must do a better deal since he’s buying a cheap phone and a cheap microwave.

I feel like telling him to get lost. Instead, I show him the regular price of the microwave - $349, compared with its VIP price of $258, and explain that this is the same price that I’d have to pay if I wanted to buy the microwave (true). He still keeps pushing for a further discount, before saying "Well, you’ve lost a sale" and walking out.

At this point, I wanted to laugh in his face. "Mate, if I took any more off the microwave or the phone then the shop wouldn’t make any money; so it doesn’t matter if I lose the sale because either way I wouldn’t be making anything; I wouldn’t have lost anything.  But YOU would lose the ability to take advantage of these prices, and NOBODY will even get close to the prices I’m offering".

I didn’t say that. I just let him walk out - good riddance. If he never comes back, good: One less person to make my job difficult. He did come back a few minutes later, claiming that his girlfriend called and told him to get the microwave, and he did buy it at $258. But I know that he realised what I had wanted to say to him anyway.

Dickhead.

On the plus side, today we got our new fridge! It’s a beauty, but unfortunately it doesn’t hold as much in the fridge part as our old fridge. However, it has a light, it has glass shelves, it’s upside down, it opens the correct way, it draws less power and it doesn’t require defrosting; so it’s really a step up.  I’m amazed that the old Kelvinator had been running for more years than I have been alive, and has never needed a service.

Angelica has gone to Singapore for a week, but when she gets back I really want to see her again. Even if I have to drive to her place just to get half an hour with her, that would be nice.

Hairspray is officially my favourite movie of all time. It has actually dethroned Madchen Madchen ("Girls On Top"), and judging by the number of people I know who loved Hairspray (Connie described it today as "Gold!"), I think it instantly became a classic. It’s a complete reversal - earlier versions were loved by the gay community, and if a straight person watched those versions they’d be thinking "WTF?!"; but this is the first time that Hairspray has been enjoyed by a heterosexual audience (and ironically, this is the first time that the poofs disliked Hairspray, even though many of the producers and directors are gay).

In Spice Girls news, there’s a Spice Girls megamix that is tipped to be released at some point in time. I’ve got a copy of it; though it’s actually only a mix of some of the hits from Spice and a couple of hits from Spiceworld.  A friend (who doesn’t remember Forever being leaked to the internet, and therefore didn’t see the irony of the greatest hits album being released on the 7th anniversary of that happening) claimed that there was a rumour going around that W.O.M.A.N was going to be released as a single. I honestly cannot believe it! This rumour has persisted since 1999 - it must be the second longest running rumour in the history of the world, after the chain mail that "MSN Messenger is closing down unless you forward this letter to everyone on your buddy list"!

MSN hasn’t closed down on all the other occasions that I’ve recieved this particular e-mail, so it’s not going to happen. W.O.M.A.N wasn’t released on all the occasions that I heard the rumour in the SFN (Spice Fan Network), so people, it ain’t going to happen!

I have found two things that Linux can’t seem to do.

1. Create a stonking big ramdisk.  The kernel automatically creates a bunch of ramdisks on startup (which don’t use your RAM until they are formatted), but they are a useless 4 megabytes each!  I wanted a single 700 megabyte ramdisk!

2. Copy my Lovewrecked DVD.  Man, that disc has some strong copy protection in it.  When I use k9copy, right at the end, the dvdauthor program chokes. K3B with libdvdcss support will copy the disc, but no DVD player or DVD playing software will be able to get past the menu.  I’m trying a roundabout way of doing it - I’ll keep you posted.

In other news, I bought the High School Musical DVD. I haven’t seen the movie, I’ve only seen Vanessa Hudgen’s private pictures :-P   But I’m hoping it will be worth watching, as it cost me bloody $30!

I’m still listening HEAPS to the Hairspray soundtrack. My favourite tracks are You’re Timeless To Me, Without Love, Big Blonde And Beautiful, You Can’t Stop The Beat, and Come A Long Way (Got A Long Way To Go).

Oh, and I set up MPD (Music Playing Daemon) but I’m not really so impressed. It’s probably great for a dedicated music jukebox machine, but a little inflexible for me. I do love its low memory requirements, and the low screen real estate it uses.

I have found two things that Linux can’t seem to do.

1. Create a stonking big ramdisk.  The kernel automatically creates a bunch of ramdisks on startup (which don’t use your RAM until they are formatted), but they are a useless 4 megabytes each!  I wanted a single 700 megabyte ramdisk!

2. Copy my Lovewrecked DVD.  Man, that disc has some strong copy protection in it.  When I use k9copy, right at the end, the dvdauthor program chokes. K3B with libdvdcss support will copy the disc, but no DVD player or DVD playing software will be able to get past the menu.  I’m trying a roundabout way of doing it - I’ll keep you posted.

In other news, I bought the High School Musical DVD. I haven’t seen the movie, I’ve only seen Vanessa Hudgen’s private pictures :-P   But I’m hoping it will be worth watching, as it cost me bloody $30!

I’m still listening HEAPS to the Hairspray soundtrack. My favourite tracks are You’re Timeless To Me, Without Love, Big Blonde And Beautiful, You Can’t Stop The Beat, and Come A Long Way (Got A Long Way To Go).

Oh, and I set up MPD (Music Playing Daemon) but I’m not really so impressed. It’s probably great for a dedicated music jukebox machine, but a little inflexible for me. I do love its low memory requirements, and the low screen real estate it uses.

Yes, I bought the soundtrack album, and I’m enjoying every moment of it. It’s so infectious and now I can hear every word! It’s $23 full of fun. I especially enjoyed John Travolta and Christopher Walken’s duet, as well as all the upbeat ensemble’s songs. A special mention must go to Queen Latifah, who sings "I Know Where I’ve Been". The first time I’ve heard her sing without wanting to vomit ;-)  I didn’t mention it last night but she was surprisingly very good in the movie.

I ripped the album into FLAC, which is a lossless audio format (it’s smaller than audio CD data but doesn’t lose quality). I also made a copy in MP3 to put on Mum’s MP3 player, and I’m going to make another MP3 copy in a high bitrate for my own MP3 player.

I don’t remember the song Cooties in the movie though?