freshbytes

I’m hugely ignorant.

If there’s something that doesn’t interest me in the slightest, then I’ll probably ignore it.

This goes for pretty much anything you care to name: cars, cooking, house-related stuff, anything boring or tedious to work through. PHP and CSS are the two main ones I can think of at the moment. Oh, and Objective-C.

A good example of this is the recent purchase of a video camera for my overseas trip (Dad kinda figured we should get one, since our last video camera is ancient. Heard of Hi8? Yeah, I didn’t think so). When I was looking at the specs of the thing, I had no idea what the CMOS was, or what the difference between a CMOS and CCD was. (As an aside, I still don’t know what the difference is. If you do, feel free to explain it to me in comments). Sure, I knew what they stood for, as well as what they did, but the difference between the two escaped me.

So anyway, I ended up buying the budget Canon model. No HD here, folks – just plain, simple, which was exactly what we were after. Overall, I’m happy with my decision even though a minimal amount of reseach was undertaken.

However, being oblivious to the digital video revolution that I am, I had no idea how to use the latest version of iMovie. By all reports that I had heard it was utter garbage compared to the old version, but having never used iMovie 08 myself, I had no opinion on this. It wasn’t until I watched the August 2007 Keynote where Steve Jobs demos the new iMovie that I realised how easy it was to use and edit – making your mediocre footage into somthing prefessional-looking in a mattter of minutes. Literally.

As an aside, if you’re interested in watching the August 2007 Keynote, which isn’t available in iTunes as a podcast, hit this link for the QuickTime stream of the event – the iMovie 08 demo starts at 36:35.

Now, slashcare. /care. Just like “meh” is the universally recognised response for just about everything, /care will become the de-facto response For Everything That You Just Don’t Care About^TM. You’ll certainly see /care a lot more on freshbytes, as well as on on my personal website (I’m purposely not including a link here).

I’m not going to make a website dedicated to it, though. If you use Google, you’ll find one.

I think that’s about it. If I’ve missed anything, leave a comment and I’ll try and get back to you!

Note: Benny is currently on holidays. This post was automagically published using WordPress’ advanced publishing features, allowing Benny to write a post, and set it to publish at a prescribed time in the future. For the record, Benny <3’s WordPress.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: /care, apple, bliss, canon, ccd, cmos, fs11, ignorance, imovie, introducing, itunes, jobs, keynote, slashcare, steve, video

No deep and meaningful today fellas (although there may be later on, depending on how I feel ), just a straight news-only post because Chris did was supposed to do the blog post last week.

Radi8 last week (8/8/08) was awesome as usual – I wasn’t there for the first part because I thought they were cleaning up the dirt jumps, but instead they watched a movie.
After a Maccas dinner, we had some Lifegroups time where the Year 7-8 girls were the only ones to have a seperate group – everyone else was lumped into the one big group! It was different, actualy, to hear everyone else’s opinions… That being said – I didn’t enjoy it as much. Maybe I’m a small-group kinda guy
Our time after that consisted of watching the new Hillsong DVD – which prompted me to buy it the very next day after work. Favourite song at this very moment from that album is Where We Belong – love the vocals, the melody, and the music – but especially the message.

On that note, (pun seriously not intended) I had no idea that Hillsong and Planetshakers were available on the iTunes Music Store! Previously, I had been looking for them under “Gospel and Religious” but not under “Inspirational”! Here’s the iTMS link for the new Hillsong album. If it wasn’t for me looking for a song that Dean plays every single time he hooks up his iPod to the speaker system (without fail), Planetshaker’s “Saved the Day” from their album “Free”. then I would never have discovered that the iTMS is such an awesome place…. Which reminds me, by the time you read this I’ll have bought that album, too!

Sadly, I didn’t go to the KidsMin Drama on Friday night, instead spending the night with the NoSpoon crew – for once, James G and I played Diablo II online. Sure, it was only two of us, but it sure as hell was every bit as fun as TrackMania Nations Forever and Counter Strike: Condition Zero after it was. Killing the Undead monsters with Corpse Explosion, a Vengeance, and a Blessed Hammer is just awesome. Far too awesome to describe in words, in fact.

Now the Kingston Combined Churches event – what a farce. If I say anymore I’ll just rant, so if you do want to know how it went – talk to me. On a brighter note (again, pun not intended) the Radi8 youth band were excellent to the point of Nathan needing a new amp halfway through. I have no idea what happened to his other one, but it just seemed to stop work for no apparent reason! Epic lulz.

Youth Alive is on soon (August 30), so you better get your PayPal on if you want to go to Launceston to have an absolutely smashing time. I’m going – so that means you should be too!

I’m not going to the Radi8 Winter camp, though, because none of my friends are going

I think that just about wraps it up – if there’s anything else I’ve left out, leave it in comments.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: Blog, condition zero, diablo 2, hillsong, itunes, NoSpoon, planetshakers, radi8, trackmania

For those of you that didn’t get the title joke, read it as: “Mid Year Exams DO NOT equal FUN!”

Too geeky for you? I thought so.

Anyways, this week has been rather hectic – maybe it’s just me making up for all the study that I haven’t been doing during non-exam time, but it seems like I’m spending most of my day head down, reading from a textbook, scribbling a note in my information sheet every now and again, and then repeating this over and over again, day in, day out…

Luckily, though, I have a GREAT music collection to keep me company – The 100 Most Essential Pieces of Classical Music. I bought the album off the iTunes Music Store for the sum of $10.49 – bargain! If you’ve got iTunes installed, hit this link for a preview…

Now, some of you would say that buying classical music is silly because it isn’t copyrighted, but that’s a topic for another day, unfortunately…

Onto Radi8 news and it was yet another upsized version of the fantastic youth group last friday… Bush donuts are great, and the winter camp (if I go) will be great too! Can’t wait for the bonfire this Friday – exactly what everyone needs in the cold Winter night…

It’s always struck me as a little odd that even though we’re getting more and more sun each day (as we’ve passed the shortest day of the year), the days are STILL getting colder! How does that work, because more sun should equal more warmth…but apparently, it doesn’t.

I blame Tasmania.

Time to go, but not before one more video… This week on the Radi8 Digital Scavenger Hunt, it’s Dave O, Thomas v S, Angelo O, Eliot P and Wesley H as they buy 10c of petrol (this was back in 2007), singing Jingle Bells outside a supermarket, doing cartwheels in Kingston Town – you get the idea.

Enjoy, and as usual, comments below!

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: classical, digital, exams, hunt, itunes, mid, Music, radi8, scavenger, store, year