0 comments Thursday, February 7, 2008


I own a very cool car: a Suzuki Samurai.  It belonged to my grandfather, but he gave it to me as a gift at x-mas of 2006, and since then, I have enjoyed ever bit of it.  By the way, it's from 1986!

A Samurai is a one-of-a-kind car, it's like a smaller version of a Jeep.  My Samurai is green and has street tires (I do not like those tires, but my grandfather put them and I haven't had money to change them).  Something very nice is that before my grandpa gave it to me, it was his toy car, so he spent a lot of money in it, he painted it, he bought the stock wheels, cleaned the motor and installed a CD stereo.

Another great thing is its soft top.  I think it's very cool because I can get it off whenever I want, and it only takes me around 5 minutes. But the most impressive thing is that it has never let me down.  I've gone jeeping to a lot of places and it has never failed.  I sure can get a lot out of the 60hp or so it has.  I'm still waiting for bigger tires :).

0 comments Sunday, February 3, 2008

Last night we had a relly big adventure, we camped in Las Copas Beach.  The journey was like the one we did two weeks ago, but this time we camped the night.  We arrived in the afternoon so we had sunlight to set up the tents.  And by the time the night fell we were having steak meat we cooked.  After eating dinner we lighted a bomfire and we talked for a while before we got tired.


We were about to sleep when we noticed something awful, the sand was incredibly hard! Everyone would think that sleeping in sand is comofrtable, but there is a thing with sand dunes: the very top of the dune is the softest part, whille the bottom is the hardest.  Since we didn't want the wind to be striking us, we camped in the bottom of the dune, so the dune would cover the wind, we messed up. Our night wasn't really comfortable.

1 comments Friday, February 1, 2008

Here's another video we made for our Literature class.  We picked one of the stories in Panchatranta (A really old Hindu book, made of short stories), and we choosed "The Golden King and The Beggar". Enjoy =)



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.

 

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