Archive for the ‘Hobby Experiences’ Category
Saturday, June 14th, 2008 |
From my experiences, starting a blog is exciting, fun and a lot of hard work. Well, actually, starting a blog isn’t hard work, maintaining a blog is extremely hard work. Let me define maitaining: writing blog posts on a regular basis. This blog, From My Experience, started with lofty goals of being a resource to help other people by user and bloggers sharing their personal experiences in daily life situations. It hasn’t gone as I would have hoped. I have written the majority of the posts even when I had hoped I would only be kick starting the blog (more…)
Posted in Hobby Experiences, Internet Experiences | No Comments »
Sunday, April 20th, 2008 |
In the past couple of years, new sensations have been sweeping the nation in the forms of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. In the unlikely case that you have never heard of or played either of these video games, they require you to play plastic model instruments in time with a song track hitting as many notes as possible on varying difficulties to suit your skill level (both have Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert for the brave).
Guitar Hero Review
The Guitar Hero franchise has been growing in popularity in the past few years so that most everyone has played it at least once, and for good reason. The latest in the series, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, is one of the most played games today and chances are that anyone with either an Xbox 360 or a Playstation will have it. In my experience, it is so far the easiest to pick up and play. I say this because notes are easier to hit than any of the other Guitar Hero games because there is a larger area around each note for that note to be hit. The “grace period” is longer and you can hit a note, even after it’s past or before you’re supposed to, to a certain point.
The actual difficulty of the note charts of the songs, however, is much harder than Rock Band and any other Guitar Hero game and is meant more for the hardcore “rockers” rather than the casual players being the most difficult songs to play so far. So, notes easiest to hit, but also a lot more of them and faster. The song selection is excellent, as usual. There is a nice mix of classic rock, metal, punk and hard rock. Rather than list numerous examples, you can find the song list easily on Wikipedia or even guitarhero.com.
(more…)
Posted in Happy Experiences, Hobby Experiences, Music Experiences, Shopping Experiences, Technology Experiences, Winning Experiences | 2 Comments »
Sunday, October 7th, 2007 |
From my first time experience at wine tasting I have some good advice. Don’t drink everything you are given. True, the tasting amounts are small, but tasting dozens and dozens of wines can add up. Especially if you are wine tasting for a few hours.
I went to a Fredericksburg wine tasting festival this weekend (10/7/07) and there were 10 or so wineries represented. Each winery had about 10 - 20 wines each so there was a lot to taste. It pays to pace yourself and understand you are going to be sipping a lot of wines and you want to taste from each winery. Here is some good advice, once you find out what you don’t like, as in Chardonnay, then don’t keep tasting it at other booths. After the fourth Chardonnay I realized I don’t like them, no matter what winery is producing them. Luckily it only took 3 tastings to firmly convince myself I don’t like Merlot either. Halfway through I quit tastings red wines altogether. I don’t like them without food and it was giving me a bad impression so that I was afraid I was going to convince myself I don’t like red wine at all.
So I stayed to tasting just the blended wines and the white wines and was very happy with my choices.
Since this was my first time and I know nothing about wines I used it as an experience to discover what I do like. I marked down all the wines that I liked, regardless of price (the average price was about $15 per bottle). At the end of the day I have discovered 4 wines I really liked and about 3 more that could grow on me. I found I don’t like dry wines as much and I really like blended wines, which I wasn’t familiar with before I went.
Wines I bought and the wineries:
I also thought it was good that I went to a festival so I could try many winery offerings. There was one winery there that I didn’t like any of the wines from, including their white wines. What a disappointment that would have been to visit that winery and not like anything I tasted. So first a first try at wine tasting a wine festival is a great way to go.
Additionally at a wine tasting festival, you can cover more ground so to speak and tasted more wine in a short amount of time. Walking to the next tent takes one minute, while driving between wineries can talk 30 minutes or more.
I did buy quite a few wines while there, including some red which my wife liked especially. See the picture and let me know if you see any you recognize. This festival was in Fredericksburg, Va and the wines were all Virginia wines.
Posted in Food Experiences, Hobby Experiences | 5 Comments »
Saturday, September 15th, 2007 |
If this iMovie tutorial still doesn’t help, I can recommend ScreenCastsOnline. They have excellent tutorials for all your Mac products: iMovie, iPod, iPhone and so forth.
From my experience posting your iMovie video to YouTube requires the following settings to get the best quality you can. You want to send YouTube the highest quality you can while still staying within their video and audio limitations.
Of course the settings I’m providing can be used with any video editing application, but since iMovie is used by so many novice videographers I felt some specific instructions would be useful. If you aren’t using iMovie 6 for this, be sure that your application can export to a .mp4 with H.264 video. Quicktime Player Pro version can also do this.
Since YouTube upload limitations will scale the video to 320 x 240 pixels there is no point to export it at a larger size. Better to apply higher quality settings to your file size limit, which is 100 megabytes set by Youtube.
I am assuming your video has been edited and is ready for export. Follow these steps to have a video that you can upload with confidence to YouTube.
Choosing the best settings for iMovie when exporting for YouTube:
- Under the main menu click the Share menu option.
- Choose the Share option at the bottom of the drop down menu.
- The next window will allow you select from a popup menu. It is labeled “Compress movie for:”. You will chose Expert Settings. Click the share Share button in the bottom right. (see image #1)
- The next window will allow you to choose where to save the video and what to name it. At the bottom of the window you will see a popup menu labeled Export. Choose the “Movie to MPEG-4″ option.
- Click the Options… button to the right to choose specific video and audio settings.
In this window choose the following setting under the video choices. (see image #2)
- Video Format: H.264
- Data Rate: 2000 kbits/sec
- Optimized for: Download
- Image Size: 320 x 240 QVGA
- Check Preserve aspect ration using: Fit within size
- Frame Rate: 30
- Key Frame: Automatic
- Click the Video Options… button and then select the Main checkbox and the Best Quality radio button. Click OK.
- Next choose the following Audio Settings:
- Audio Format AAC-LC
- Data Rate: 64kbs
- Channels: Mono
- Output Sample Rate: Recommended
- Encoding Quality: Best
- Click the OK button and in the next window click the Save button and wait for your high quality video to export.
You can see the latest video I have posted using these settings by viewing my family’s Zip Line in Hawaii.
If you need more help and you like the video instruction method. I can safely recommend ScreenCastsOnline.
Posted in Hobby Experiences, Internet Experiences | 11 Comments »
Sunday, July 29th, 2007 |
From my experience you should only collect aret you like. Buying art for the sake of art is ludicrous. Only buy what you truly love and be proud to show it. Don’t let the price be your only deciding factor, in other words, don’t buy because the price is high and you feel that makes it more valuable. And don’t buy the art because it is all you can afford and you want to own something. Wait for the right price and the right artwork. You’ll feel good about it each time you see it hanging on your wall.
You can see some of my collected comic book art.
Posted in Hobby Experiences | No Comments »
