1 comments Thursday, January 31, 2008

Here, in the city of Los Mochis I found a very interesting job oportunity, video editing.  Video editing is a thing that is really easy to learn, yet only a few know how to do it.  But why is it a job opportunity? Because big companies charge around $500 pesos for a 10 min. video edited.  And there's my bussiness, those little school proyects that have to be done, but are not worth those $500 pesos.


And it all started when my friends called me and asked me if I could do them a little favor, and I said yes.  They asked me to edit their video and I wasn't planning on charging them, but when I was done they gave like $50 pesos.  Then, months later I was called again, but this time I didn't know the people in the team, but they said they would pay me $100 pesos if I did, so I accepted the deal. And I kept getting called like that, right now people pay me like $150~$200 pesos.


What I think happened is that some people saw the video and saw my name in there (I always write my name in the credits, that's how I publicise myself), and they liked the quality of the editing, so they called me.  And I think that, for a team of 10, $100 pesos means $10 pesos per person, so it's not really expensive, that's why my service is so popular.  I edit around 1~3 videos every two weeks, so I earn around $200~$500 pesos every two weeks.  And the best part about this job is that I enjoy it!

2 comments Wednesday, January 30, 2008

I wrote a while ago how I felt when I wrote in English, but now I'm gonna write the history behind my writing. I remember learning to writewas fun. It all happened back in kindertgarden, on my 3rd grade. I used to have a book a very good book, and in the cover it had a giraffe. In it I had to write the same letter, circle or line a lot of times in the same page, and it was tiring, but still, never lost its fun. After I had done tons of circles, dots and lines we started to read and write simple words like mom or dad, and after a little while we were writing short sentences. At the end, learning to write was fun.

0 comments

Few days ago, I talked about HTDVs, but today I'm talking about cables.  To get the most out of your new HDTV, you need to use new cables.

The most old cable that is still supported by TVs is the coaxial cable.  The one that has a little nut and a really thin copper cable inside.  Coaxial cable has the worst quality and it is only good to use it on old TVs.  The second worst is called RCA and it's the most common right now.  A RCA cable has three plugs, yellow, red and white, and the most this cable can get is around 480i (read my previous post if you don't understand what 480i is), but the image quality is somewhat blurry.  Above the RCA cable is a little variant called S-Video, which replaces the yellow cable from the normal RCA set.  S-Video also gets around 480i, but the image is a lot sharper and clearer when compared to normal RCA.

But still, those cables are not enough for HDTVs.  The next cable is VGA, and it is the standart for connecting computer monitors and proyectors, and while VGA is very good and precise for computers, it's not so good for movies.  With VGA you could get whatever resolution you would want, but the sys specs (system specifications) rise a lot.  Around VGA's quiality is the component cable.  This cable has the same form-factor of RCA, but it replaces the yellow cable with a blue, a green and a red ones, and it still needs the red and white for audio.  Component cable works in progressive scan and it works perfectly on 720p, althought it could also work on 1080p, but not as good.

All the cables that I've mentioned have something in common, they are all analog.  But what does this mean? It means that those cables will always have some quality loss, depending on the plugs, the sockets, the material of the cable, and even other cables around them.  So for HDTVs was created a new digital cable, called HDMI (High-Definition Media Interface).  This cable is just like any other cable, but the devices it connects use the cable to "talk" to each other in packages of information; therefore, there is almost no quality loss for really high resolutions like 1080p or even higher.

So that's it.  When you try to connect your TV think of what you'll use it to, and then buy the appropiate cables.  Wouldn't want to waste your new $1'500 HDTV's quality.

2 comments Thursday, January 24, 2008

A few years ago, some big companies created a new TV technology called HDTV (High-Definition TV). But the question everyone has about this: What's new with these TVs?

The difference that a normal consumer would notice is that HDTVs are a lot thinner, these new slim TVs' technology is called Plasma or LCD. But here's the catch, not all plasma or thin TVs are HDTVs, plasma is just a technology that makes TVs thinner. Then what is a HDTV?

Before proceeding, you should know what TV resolution is. When you see an image on a TV, what you are seeing are tons of tiny squares, those are called pixels. Well, the resolution is how many pixels are there in the display or the screen. The more the pixels, the clearer and sharper the image will be. So how do you find the resolution of a TV?

The resolution of a TV is written like this: "480i", where the number is how many pixels the TV has in height. For example, if the resolution is 640x480, 640 would be the pixels across the screen and 480 the pixels from the top to the bottom, and you would only write the last number, 480, not the whole 640x480. Also, the screen proportion also matters. Conventional TVs are 4:3, that means that the screen width is 4 times x quantity, and its height is 3 times x. The new widescreen TVs ratio is 16:9.

We're almost there, the letter in the resolution (in "480i" the letter "i") means the technology used for displaying the image. "i" stands for interlaced and means that only half of the image is refreshed every time. And like "i", "p" stands for progressive. "p" is the new technology and works by refreshing the whole image everytime, the result is a sharper image.

So, what are HDTVs? HDTVs are TVs capable of playing video in 720p at least, and almost all HDTVs are widescreen. Compare the regular 640x480 interlaced video rendering, to the new 1280x720 progressive scan resolution, it sure makes a difference. However, 1280x720 was when HDTVs were just starting, today there are new FullHD HDTVs, and those work in 1080p (1920x1080 progressive scan resolution).

So there you go, now you understand what's going on with HDTVs. You should know have a good idea of what to look in a HDTV before buying it. Tomorrow we'll review HD cables.

0 comments Wednesday, January 23, 2008

There is a new generation of boys and girls that take the word emotional to serious. But before writing about them, lets review their predecesors. It all started back in the 80's when the punk was just starting and the first punks were born. They called themselves punks and wore really weird clothes, they said they weren't understood and started to get apart from the society.
Then, some other people with other interests starting to wear only black clothing and did "demoniac" stuff. They only heard really hard rock music, and as punks, they weren't understood.


Now let's talk about Emos.  Emos are often teenagers that have very low self-esteem, so they try to "escape" from our world by wearing all black (and sometimes black and pink), have weird and extravagant haircuts and wear piercings. By the way, the usually don't have friends.  Emos hear rock-punk music that talks about social incomprehention, suicide and drugs.  The scary thing is that emos are becoming the new cool thing.

1 comments

Here's a video me and my team did for our Literature class. It's about the book Art of War but it only covers chapter 3 - Ofensive Strategy. And by the way it is in Spanish :)

1 comments Sunday, January 20, 2008

Right now is 9:27 pm, and today is Sunday. A few hours ago I was waking up (at 7:00 a.m.) and getting ready to make an awesome trip, a trip that only a few have been able to do.

Around 7:45 a.m. me and my dad were heading to the funeral chapels Las Misiones (Don’t worry, no one died, that is our meeting spot because the brothers that own it were also going to the trip) and as usual, nobody was there. By 8:15 a.m. Enrique and Mauricio appeared but we were still waiting for Mike and his son & crew. My dad, Enrique and Mauricio are “Jeeperos”, and all it means is that they ride in Jeeps that are modified to be able to go off-road, but not only off-road, extreme 4x4. But Mike is another different story. Mike and my dad are really good friends, but Mike rides ATVs, so my dad invited Mike and his son & crew to our trip, so they could ride the sand dunes in Las Copas.

By 8:30 a.m. everyone was ready and we started our journey. We stopped for Gas and batteries for our walkie-talkies while Mauricio was buying his beer. We took the highway to Culiacán and rode for about 20~30 minutes, which was the most boring part of the trip. We rode until we reached the road to El Cerro Cabezón (In Spanish “cerro” is a mountain and “cabezon” means big headed, El Cerro Cabezon is a mountain with the shape of a big head) and we rode that way. But before that we stopped a little bit to turn on the 4x4 on the Jeeps and to get the ATVs down from the tow (ATVs are really fast, but not fast enough to ride on the highway).

We reached a small village called El Carrisito, (from what we had researched, the trail to Las Copas was closed by a gate with a lock) and in there we looked for the Comisario (like the village mayor, who was an Indian about 50 years old). My dad talked to him and told him that we were doing, who we were and where we were from, and he agreed to open the gate for us. (he explained that there was a gate because of hunters. There are lots of deer in that zone).

So basically, our journey has just started, the trail became really though and rocky. We rode that way for around one hour until we reached the most critical part of the journey. The reason that nobody goes to Las Copas in cars is because there is no trail beyond the part we were about to cross. Also, there are few times in the year when you can cross the valley that divides Las Copas from the rest. That valley is flooded with sea water so only during winter the sealevels are low enough to cross the valley, but still, it isn’t easy.

Before crossing it we did some math, we had from ~10:00 a.m. to ~4:00 p.m. to cross, get to Las Copas, enjoy it, take pictures and then come back, and if we took longer, the sea levels would rise again and we would have had to wait until the next day. But we didn’t think about it twice, we stepped on the gas pedal and cross the muddy valley. For us in the trucks was though but comfortable, but for those in the ATVs was way easier (since ATVs aren’t as heavy as trucks, they don’t sink that much) but they got covered in mud, and it was only the beginning.

After we crossed it, we rode for a while until we found a really cool cavern, we got inside (by foot) joked around and took pictures, that cavern was amazing. We took a 30 minutes break in there and then we resumed our trip. We rode for a while again until we finally got there. From the beach you could see El Maviri Beach and Topolobampo Port.

By then we were done with our goal, but we kept riding a little more until we got around the tip of Las Copas and we found something very interesting. We found a lake like thing behind the beach, and there were some fisherman in there. They were astonished to see us because it is the most uncommon thing to see in Las Copas, cars. But those were not common fisherman, they didn’t actually fish, what they did was grow oysters. They had an oyster farm, and I believe it’s the first one in the region. We talked to the fisherman there and they told us that every oyster was “planted”. The oysters are put in some bag-like containers and sunk in the water. Every “seed” is like a baby oyster produced in a laboratory in La Paz. Every million seeds costs $45’000.00 pesos, so it’s some serious business. From what we talked to the fisherman, we learned that every oyster takes around 8 months to grow up enough to be sold and eaten. Coincidentally, the boss in there was Beto’s uncle (Beto is an old friend of the Jeeperos, actually, he was the mechanic in the crew, but he moved out of town), so he led us try some off the bigger oysters. They were delicious.

On the way back two of the ATV’s tires flattened out and we had to fix them, then the gasoline container fell and spilled so we had to pray we didn’t run out of gas. Fortunately we managed to get to El Carrisito safely and from there we took the highway to Los Mochis. The trip is a one-of-a-lifetime. I would recommend anyone to take the journey.

0 comments Friday, January 18, 2008

There are tons of inventions that seem very simple, and indeed they are simple, but have made our lives easier and more comfortable. One of those inventions are shoes.

Imagine what it would be like walking on the street on a summer day here in Los Mochis, I'm sure you wouldn't even last a block walking. But that's only in the city, imagine living outdoors, or in small villages, your feet would always be cutting or getting stinged.

And I have also thought about our ancestors and I've two theories, either they also used some kind of shoes made from leather, or they had ultra-resistant feet, because if they migrated from Asia they must have had feet made of steel.
Anyways, I thank that guy that attatched things to his feet. These small and simple inventions make the world a better place.

0 comments Wednesday, January 16, 2008

One of the most common topics when people talk about ocmputers is how it changed people's lives. But for me it maskes no sence because since I was born there have been computers. So I guess that the argument must be directed to old people. But not that generation of 40-50 year olds, but the parents of that generation. People like my grandparents. Those persons do not fully understand the working of these new machines, so they become afraid of the machines, so they don't even try to learn how to use them. And not only computers, they also feel akward using wireless technology, like mobile phones, pagers and all those appliances.

0 comments Tuesday, January 15, 2008

When I write in English I feel a lot of wonderful but very akward emotions.  The first thing I feel is a bit of acomplishment because I spent a whole year learning it, and I have to admit it wasn't easy.  I also feel really good thinking that my parents would be very proud if they saw me writing in English, like their kid just grew up.  But then I feel like if I were leaving something behind, my whole childhood, my parents, my traditions, my hometown, even myself.  But then just before I fall apart I can somehow look up and I see myself in the future, with a good job and a big happy family, and all thanks to my english.  But suddenly I come back to me and I realize that I'm just writing in English.  What a big deal.

 

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