A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
So I got an email from my supervisor at work "We're gonna be shipping less and less to the stores now, so start hand spacing the items to be equally spaced apart" Yup, it's that time of year when the job begins to turn into a slow paced time of "we don't need you to be in as much" which is good in a way, because the semester is starting and I need the time for class, but it also means I won't have as much money. Crap. OH! Also, at work today, I helped a group of 3 kids and their mom go around the tropical plants section and buy 1 plant each for the kids, that was, as embarrassing as it is to say, a bit heartwarming...
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Ah, so now comes the problem with Tech.MCC, I believe you already know if you read each week that I picked up a big rear projection TV from someone's lawn a few months ago, and that I've been meaning to use it for a Tech.MCC project. Well I had a brainstorm with a member the other day, and the project was pretty much planned out in FULL, and it was really feasable and easy, from that one brainstorm, and the next day when I went in to ask the college if they had room for me to store it there, they said no, bottom line. So my dad doesn't want it taking up space in the shed and the college won't keep it, and it's a hundred an fifty pounds or so. I really hope a club member will take it off my hands because I'd hate to throw it out, it's a prefectly good tv in fine working condition......
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Jugglers On Juggling seems to be doing just fine, with a couple hundred views on the first two episodes, and all they were were convention reviews of the IJA. This third episode releasing today is something that I think really will help certain people. It's about how to capture images of you juggling and turning them into an animated gif. Yes, that's a bit narrow focused, but it's a detailed and useful tutorial, and I've found that trying to be too broad in topics over the course of a season leaves you without topics fast. That said the next 4 episodes after this will ALL be about juggling music videos.
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Daily Life:
Well the most interesting thing to happen this week was certainly, my laptop. As I was transferring downloaded files on Tuesday last week to free up hard drive space, my laptop suddenly died on me. One second it was transferring all the files to the USB drive no prob, the next moment it was a black screen. I didn't think much of it at first, after all my laptop has crashed on me numerous times before, seeing as how it was from 2002, granted it never crashed like THAT, but it was just another crash I thought. Key words being I THOUGHT. I hit the power button again and it proceeded to load through the bios, everything seemed to check out fine until it was time to load into windows... "Operating System Not Found"

Shit. This meant only one of three things, either the hard drive has died/been wiped, the hard drive got disconnected somehow, or my computer was dead. The easiest way for me to diagnose my problem was to go through and run another operating system from either a CD or a floppy drive, and when DOS didn't work on a floppy, I managed to load up Ubuntu off of my CD. What was I looking for? To see if it could see my hard drive. What did I find? Nothing. Well at least I knew one of the three hadn't happened, the hardware was still absolutely fine seeing as how it could run Ubuntu, and I knew the hard drive hadn't been wiped either because I would have seen it show up as just a blank disk. So it was either my hard drive was toast, or it got disconnected somehow.

Well in that moment I decided something, I realized that I had a spare 4 gig flash drive laying around, and I've been meaning to try running Ubuntu on my laptop long term. So I didn't bother to tear apart my laptop (at least not completely, I did open up just the basic panels to see where the hard drive would be located), I simply inserted the 4 gig drive, installed Ubuntu on it, and away I went using Ubuntu via the flash for the past week.

It wasn't bad at all, Ubuntu is a pretty stable operating system, and it ran just fine, and it wasn't too different from windows that I could easily use the system for whatever I needed to do online and game playing. One thing though that I noticed, support was DISMAL. There were only about a hundred games to choose to install when I searched, and programs besides that are pretty much useless to me. That said, I got used to it quite quickly and I'm gonna keep using Ubuntu on there from time to time.

Does that mean my hard drive works? YES. When my neighbors wifi suddenly didn't want to work for some reason last night I pretty much had no use to have the laptop running, and so I decided that that night would be the night to find out if I was royally screwed or not. I opened up my laptop screw by screw, removing the removable drives, the keyboard, then finally the outer shell. I lifted the shell off of the hard drive to find nothing looking off, and after giving a few pokes and nudges to see if it was loose or not connected properly, I saw it was indeed still intact and in the right place. So I went to undo the screws to take out the drive, and I quickly found out that the screws were hex screws and that I didn't have access to a set of hex screwdrivers until the morning, so I put everything back together and somehow I decided to try booting it up without the USB drive in the slot. It went to the bios, and as I was waiting to see the error message, the windows XP loading screen popped up! Holy Crap was I happy! By simply touching my drive, I managed to fix a week long problem! SWEET! Of course I still have no idea whether it will die again or not, so I'm backing everything up off of the laptop as I type XD


Juggle This:
So seeing as how I went to college again a few days ago to try and get space for the massive TV for Tech.MCC, I brought my rings and camera to see if I could get a few good tricks on film for my next video. I really want to make the next one a good one seeing as how Adverse Reaction was really a piece of crap. Anyways, I go into the stage and thankfully it's empty, but better than that. they're doing sound checks, so they're playing rock music over all the speakers, and it makes me feel good to juggle to it.

Of course the problem is, I haven't practiced my rings since the last time I was here a few weeks ago, and even more than that the lights were on in a way that I could not get any good angles near a power outlet. THAT SAID, I did get footage, and man did I get some, I recorded myself doing a 6 ring half shower for the first time after IJA, even managing to get a clean 10 catches of the pattern! I also, out of absolutely nowhere, tried to do two 3up 180's out of 3 in a row, and I made it on the first try, wow was that surprising when I saw my hands still running the cascade. I also realized how little spinning I was doing in the last and this video, so I went to try a 5 ring 3up 180, and somehow after not getting it a few times, I got the crazy idea to try a 5 up. I never got it back to the pattern, but it felt REMARKABLY easy, and most of the reason I was having trouble getting it was because I had already juggled 6 ring stuff for about a half hour before I started trying, so my arms were tired and sore and I was fueled only on adrenaline. I did manage to get it to a collect, and then to 2 catches of a cascade after coming back around. I am SO getting that next time I practice.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Listen Up!
Sorry about the delay, two reasons is that I was again quite busy now that Jugglers On Juggling is back in production, and nothing really all that interesting happened last week.
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Did you hear me say Jugglers On Juggling? Yes you did. I've started the new season of the show, and I have a few ideas for episodes now that it's started. The first 2 episodes are IJA convention videos, and after that will begin a massive 4 episode series about juggling music videos, starting with 2 episodes about video, and 2 episodes about music. Then I've got another episode where I will SHOW how to do animated GIF's from a video file instead of telling you like I'll do today. After that I'm not sure what to do, but I am ALWAYS open for suggestions.
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Work is doing absolutely fine. They keep rearranging the racks on me at Garwood, but hey, that's their prerogative and I just need to adapt to it. I've still got plenty of hours and the water tank at Elizabeth finally works so I can properly water the indoor plants. Overall things are good, even if I'm getting carts upon carts of Boston Ferns that nobody wants with nowhere to put them at a price that is STILL not low enough to sell...
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So college is almost starting up, and I've still got the dept with my parents from last semester, but then again once I get a few more weeks of work in that will absolutely be gone. I'm expecting this semester to be pretty good for Tech.MCC because we're gonna have a big TV that I found to tear apart and mod however we want, we're going to have the LEGO Mindstorms kit to work with, and we've got a brand new budget to work with, so things ought to be interesting, I just need to start setting everything up with the college, which I absolutely hate doing, but hey, I'm president and it has to be done....
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Daily Life:
So my truck has a new set of brakes and a new brake rotor! YAY, sort of, wait, no. Not yay at all.....
So as everyone knows, I had decided to drive all the way down to the IJA in North Carolina, and my truck had never had it's brakes worked on. So it's a few yeas old and the pads were wearing down, and I had the type of pads that DON'T give a warning noise before they run out of padding, they just go straight to metal. So on the 9 hour trip down I thought I was hearing some squeaks near the end, but dismissed it a little because it still braked fine and drove fine. As the convention went on it was still there, not getting any worse, but I knew something was up at the end when it was time to leave, so I started my big 9 hour journey back to NJ.

I did try to go easy on the brakes, but more and more along the trip they squealed more and more and the truck began to not brake so well. I knew they were worn out, but I had to keep going because I didn't have enough money for a hotel somewhere in Virginia, and I had work the next day, so I pressed on, knowing what was happening. When I got home, We saw what had happened, only what I didn't see was how much the left front brake had worn out the ROTOR, the thing looked like spin art from all the grooves it had in it, and though it was cool to see, it was a hundred bucks that my parents are making me pay. Granted a hundred isn't much and it is "Maintenance on the truck", but it really wasn't my fault......

Juggle This:
So as promised a few weeks ago, here is a quick tutorial on how to make an animated gif from a video file.
What you need is photoshop with illustrator, I use PS7, RAD video tools by Bink and Smacker.

What you do is in whatever video editor you use, find the 1-8 second long clip you want to use for repeating and clip the video and export it so it starts at the frame to begin and ends at the ending frame. This is the hard part because you have to find a clip where your body stays in the same position and your arms/props are moving really consistently, so take some trial an error, use windows media player classic or a lightweight media player to watch the exported clip and see how the beginning and end frames match.

Once you have that the hard part is over. What you do now is select that file in RAD Video Tools and hit "Convert", go up to the right-top box and change the exported filetype from "default (AVI)" to a series of jpg images. This will save every frame of the video as a jpg image in whatever folder you want. From there, go into photoshop and put all those files together into one project file, each file as a different layer, in order. This can get really time consuming if you have a long video. Go to illustrator. In illustrator, set all the layers to invisible (click the eyeball button on the layer in the layers window), then copy that frame in the frame window as many times are there are frames. So you'll end up with the same number of frames as there are layers. I order, select the frames and turn on the appropriate layer, so for the 1st frame the 1st layer is on, the second frame the second layer is on, etc...

save that as an optimized gif and there's you're basic gif! To add text and stuff, all you gotta to is make a new layer on top of all the other layers, write whatever text or borders/art you want, and make sure that layer is visible for every frame. Save that as optimized and there you go!


A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Listen Up!
And so we're off for another week's post! And once again it's late. I really need to get rid of this damned habit. Oh well, it's a problem I'll solve, next week apparently.
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Home Depot is treating me well, and by that I mean the new arrangement in the Garwood store is superb and allows me to water more efficiently and put out new stock better. Of course the problem that came with the new thing I've discovered is that the new rack is about 20% smaller than the old rack, so now I'm sitting there on Thursday with 3 carts worth of stuff and having to put an entire cart of 10" plants on the floor next to the racks. Brilliant. The Elizabeth store is doing well though, plenty of room and plenty of people buying it seems.
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Lets see, after about, how many MONTHS of waiting, the college has FINALLY decided to mail me saying my Certificate has arrived. Well it's about damned time I got something out of Middlesex besides great places to juggle, lol. Seriously though, now I'm gona go in tomorrow and pick up my CAD certificate, and hopefully use it in order to get a job in the field of Drafting somewhere. The only thing is I have to figure out where.....
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I'm about to start up my podcast again, I still need to come up with topics to talk about, but hopefully for right now, I'll have a few weeks to think about them while I work on the first few episodes of season 4. The first four episodes are going to be 2, two-part episodes. The first two being about the IJA, and the next two being about music as it relates to juggling and juggling videos. Then I think after that I'll probably be going over what I went over in my IJA workshop, videography.
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Reeses2150's Reviews For The Intelligent Human
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Well this movie was certainly a bombshell, for lack of a better word. I don't mean it in a bad or good way, because that's kind of how the movie felt, not good, but not bad. The main thing with the Half Blood Prince is it's the shitstorm everyone knew was coming starting up. Of course it only felt that way during the last 10 minutes or so, and not even then. There is the one confrontation right before the last ten minutes of the movie, and it lasts maybe 3 minutes. That's it. The rest of the movie leading up to that actually felt like a review/setup for the rest of the series. Literally every prop from the past movies makes an appearance, from Quiddich, to the Invisibility Cloak, to the Marauders Map. All of it comes back as if to say "Hey! We didn't forget about that stuff from the past!" And I was glad to see them not forget, but I would have rather it had been less obvious.

I'm not entirely sure that the reason this movie felt so passive is because I went into the theater waiting to get sucked in and spent the entire time sitting in the chair analyzing it, but then again I did the same thing for Star Trek and it still sucked me right into the story. I think that's where Harry Potter doesn't stand up this time around, is the story. It felt like there were two stories going on, both of them very thinly spread and convoluted, and they just kept changing between each other. From one moment to the next it just felt like it was meandering around, and that was the problem with the movie.

Artistically the movie was awesome, with the director going from scene to scene playing with hue and saturation like it was the Matrix Trilogy, and all of the settings were absolutely perfectly made, I just have to admire how the visuals of the tower room or the Weasley House just stick in my mind. So in that respect, if you want to go see a movie that will just have you gazing at beautiful images, this is definitely it. If you've been following the Harry potter movies, but not the books, this is also a must see, because it ties everything together for the scavenger hunt and final battle in the next two films.


Daily Life:
So I promised last week I'd explain my newest side-hobby, Geocaching. Essentially this can be defined in three words, worldwide scavenger hunt. The basic premise of Geocaching is that there are thousands of small containers hidden throughout the world by many people, and the exact GPS coordinates of each container are known, and posted up on google maps and the main website ( geocaching.com ). What you do is go physically to the spot with a GPS device, and search using the GPS until you're within a dozen feet or so of the container, then using the clues from the website, find the "cache" and log your visit on the piece of paper inside. Sometimes the cache will be a larger container and so you can leave random objects inside like a ring or a candy or something. That's it in a nutshell, and I know it doesn't sound very appealing like that, but imagine taking a friend or two out, on a scavenger hunt that you can start and stop at anytime, anywhere you are, and that will never end. It's awesome!

So far, I've found 4 Caches in various places, and I've looked for about 7. Yes, they are hard to find, especially the rural ones or the ones hidden in trees, but you find them eventually most of the time. The closest one to me though really sucks, because I went three times to search for it, the third time knowing EXACTLY where to look, and spending a full 30 minutes searching one tree for it, finding nothing, only to have the next day the placer come online and say it's gone missing. DUH! I hate it when that happens, but it does sometimes happen.

The easiest cache so far I've found has to be the one on my local main street, the clue was "USA TODAY" and when I arrived at the GPS location, there was a USA Today newspaper box, so I reached underneath, and sure enough, stuck with a magnet to the bottom was an altoids container. Signed it and left. awesome.

Here's a video of me geocaching in the town of Winston-Salem North Carolina.


A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150