After having a romantic Indian dinner out last night, and a romantic sushi lunch out today (God, I am expensive), we went for a walk in the park with my JBQ. We charged our digicams and off we went. We saw a wild rabbit there, such a beautiful animal. Here’s my JBQ using his Canon 5D to shoot his car, the Camaro Z28.

The following two pictures are from my cheap Kodak V1233, did well for an $160 camera.

On my walk yesterday I grabbed some random shots with the Kodak V1233 HD digicam. Because the camera is not really that worthwhile, I color graded the shots aggressively using four different commercial Vegas plugins: NewBlue Metallic MSP, Magic Bullet Look Suite, Pixelan CE BlurPro, Pixelan CE Posterwise, and Vegas’ own “Brightness & Contrast” and “Color Corrector”. Took 4 hours to render these 2 minutes of video. HD version here.

I went to a walk yesterday close to my home, shot some video and pictures. Here’s a pic:

Oh, goodie, goodie… Comcast now squeezes some of their HD channels so much that quality is really low. Check the screenshots.

And they still haven’t brought Sci-Fi Channel to the Bay Area. Let me get this straight. Silicon Valley is comprised mostly by geeks. Most geeks love sci-fi and they are very likely to watch “Battlestar Galactica”. “Battlestar Galactica” is on Sci-Fi Channel and its last season starts April 4th. So where’s my HD version of Sci-Fi Channel?!? I certainly want it in the Bay Area before April 4th. Not realizing the market over here, is a huge marketing weakness for Comcast in my opinion.

Elsewhere, Comcast wants to sue FCC for intervening to their P2P net neutrality mess up, while I did mention the other day that they want to spy in your own house.

While Comcast is not a monopoly yet, it surely acts like one. Microsoft was a sheep in front of them. That’s not to say that AT&T was/is better of course.

From TechConsumer: I picked up the Samsung, took it home, and within thirty minutes of setting it up, I realized that, in the words of Gob Bluth, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” […] Suffice it to say that the Samsung was back in its box within an hour, and peace was restored to the Shumway home as the Plasma reclaimed its rightful place as the clear, superior technology.”

After 17 days with our Pioneer plasma TV we are happy campers. The only, only, gripe we have is that it doesn’t feature Sharp’s “smart stretch” algorithm to stretch 4:3 to 16:9 (and they could have easily licensed that from Sharp, as Sharp owns part of Pioneer). Other than that, this is a NEAR-PERFECT TV. We love the smooth movie look, and JBQ surely enjoys the dot-by-dot mode where makes video games look pixel-perfect.

Update: We are selling our old TV.

The Nokia N810 arrived yesterday, and I will be writing a review for it at OSNews soon. It’s a nice device, but my hands are too small to comfortably write on its hardware keyboard (the device is still too wide for me). Also, I didn’t like that they changed the mini-USB to a micro-USB port. Everything else is good. Update: Review here.

Oh, and its webcam makes me look fatter than I am. Ho-ho…

Engadget posted the news that Adobe will port Flash to the iPhone. I replied there:

“Excuse me, but am I missing something here? You see, I am NOT interested in the “Flash Lite 3.0″ standalone application, like the ones found on many cellphones. I am interested in a full Flash plugin FOR the web browser. The LICENSE of the SDK *specifically prohibits* “plugins”. Unless Adobe kisses and makes up with Apple to get special treatment, there CAN’T BE a web browser Flash plugin. Lite or full.”

The reply I got from another user:
“I just adblocked your avatar. If that’s really you, I am very sorry.”

Flash-forward to today. Engadget makes a new story about Adobe and Apple:

“we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it” and “if we see this package pop up in the App Store later this year, we’ll know that at least one company’s been given a free pass to break the rules.”

Ugly or not, I am usually right.

I remembered today a great uncle and a great aunt of mine (brother and sister) still living in the mountainous north Greece. The great uncle was born with health problems, he is disfigured and he can’t control his body well. They are both in their 70s now. My aunt never got married. She dedicated her life in taking care of her brother. Sending him to an institute was not an option as not only these cost money, money that sheep herders don’t have to spend, but also because back in the day Greece didn’t even have such institutes, and the ones that appeared later were abysmal in living conditions. So she stayed with him. Never got married, never had a companion in her life. I am sure that there would have been some arranged marriage talks in her youth (that’s how it was done back then in the rural Greece), but by mentioning of also taking care of her brother probably cut these deals off. That’s true love, and even more importantly in this case, true responsibility, right there.