Connor Bevans

Nope, not that I remember at least. Why did this guy take my post? I don’t know. He doesn’t have a contact page, so I looked him up, and I’ll be contacting him. Most likely by email. His info:

  Ine Ikegami (webmaster@rayzedblog.com)  

    4050 Goosetown Drive     Asheville     North Carolina,28801     US 

Tel. +1.8285820079  

Oh, and here’s what he took: Mine, and his. The link back to me isn’t even correct. Bastard Somewhat less than likable person.

UPDATE: Alright, his email doesn’t work. Its not even real, I get a delivery notification error. So what do I do? Maybe I’ll phone him, maybe not. The info is probably fake for that too though.

Now, people have advised to get the Xbox 360, at least for someone who has one. But why? Because of the downloadable content. I am currently playing the game on my PS3. Why? Because that way I could get it as soon as possible. The reason I don’t really care about not having the downloadable content is the fact that there’s already so much content in the game. It’s fairly likely that I won’t finish the game for quite awhile, maybe even a year or so, and by that time, there will be another game to take it’s place. However, there is one downside of getting it for PS3 (personally). System updates. Some reason Sony has decided to make all of the updates for the PS3 force you to go into the system menu and download some huge ass file and install it. Though this isn’t really Rockstar’s fault, it still sucks that I have to take like, 10 minutes to update my PS3, and when you’re waiting to play GTA IV Multiplayer, those 10 minutes seem like an hour. The only reason to have the PS3 instead is the fact that the load times are a faster, often almost instantaneous is what I found. I have to say, though, I don’t think it’s possible for this game not to be enjoyable, I mean, this is probably Game of The Year material, and we’re less than half way through 2008. Alright, I’ve got to go, Roman is calling me…

Just a quick note to say I hate Rogers Internet. Why? They’re throttling bandwidth to bittorrent. I conducted a few tests to see how well they were doing it too:

1.  Juno - 3192 seeders, 390 leechers - Averaging less than 20kbps down - Averaging around 20 kbps up
2. Scrubs Season 1 - 43 Seeders, 83 leechers - Averaging around 25kbps down - Averaging around 50kbps up
3. Ubuntu 7.10 - 131 Seeders, 8 leechers - Extreme variatons from 10-100kbps down - Averaging around 15kbps up

This raises the question. What’s with Ubuntu? Are they somehow filtering our downloads on torrents? Would that not mean that they’re actually looking at what we’re doing on the internet? Even if it’s a bot which is looking, that means that they have access to everything we’re doing on the internet. I’m not sure what to do about this. I’ll be calling them soon to ask, and I’ll hopefully have a recording of it. I know that there’s ways around this, but they require doing a bunch of stuff to your router firewall/ports, and I’m really not going to give up. I don’t even use bittorrent much, but when I do I really don’t want to be reminded that they’re either a. looking at my data or b. throttling all of it. If you’re thinking of changing, Steve Saylor, suggested Cogeco.

PS - If I stay on rogers, I might be buying the Extreme Plus package, 18mbps down is pretty good - Though this package seems to have disappeared off of the website…Hmm…

Okay, instead of writing a post about why I love Earth Day, I’ll give a post on why I hate it. Earth Day is a superficial method of making people think that they’re making a difference, while still doing relatively little. Oh, and yes, it’s just for a day. Not a year. That’s the thing about it, we should just be doing this one day, or one week, or one hour; We should be doing this every day, every week, every hour.

And we shouldn’t have to have some sort of gain for us to do this, because the real gain is our planet being healthier. Look at what happened on Earth Hour; We saved a ton of energy in just one hour. Now imagine if we were doing that at around 20-50% the level, all the time. We’d save at least enough energy to power over 459 million homes if just Toronto did Earth hour 24/7 for a year at 20% of the effectiveness of Earth Hour. Now imagine if the whole world did that. We’d be doing a great service to our lord, Mrs. Earthsberg, and a great service to ourselves. 

So, if you’re going to Earth Day, why not make it an Earth Year? It doesn’t take that much effort.

Over the past year few months I’ve improved as a photographer immensely. Though not only in my actual image capturing, in my editing abilities as well. Aperture and Photoshop help, but many of the adjustments I make could be done in GIMP, just not as easily or as quickly. Example  of a shot I would have taken a few months ago. Example of a shot I’ve taken within the last week or so. Clearly, there’s been a lot of improvement. I’ve begun to take more time into framing, and choosing a specific ISO. I still generally use AF, just because most of the time it’s correct, but at least when it’s wrong I’m fast enough at MF that I can get it focused in a few seconds. Overall, I can gladly and truthfully say, I am a much better photographer than I used to be.

PS - I’d like to thank Michael for letting me use his D40x at podcamp, there was only a 50mm prime lens on it, which made me have to really think about how I’m going to take a shot.  

What is with everyone using the expression “buck” as a dollar? Example: “Dude, Final Cut Express is like, 200 bucks!” Really, Final Cut Express is the price of 200 male deer? Never knew. How much would that be in dollars? Probably millions, I mean, going out and capturing 200 deer, and then if any of them weren’t male having to find more would probably take a lot of time and money, and probably violate animal rights, so I guess that would make it an illegal buck smuggling act? Maybe there’s a huge marketplace for that somewhere, like, I dunno, wherever ONLY male deer are needed. Yes, as the title suggested this is the first post in a series which looks into the deeper side of everyday expressions, see, this post really made you think, didn’t it? No? Well, it made me think…Of writing, and a deer in a golf shirt! *Chuckles* I guess that this series is partially about not taking things so seriously, but lets not make it more than it is.