September 22, 2007 by rfhicks.

It has been about five months now since I have built my computer now and have been patiently waiting for Creative Labs to write the software drivers that will support their X-1 Fatality series sound card. Creative Labs continues to be silent on the issue. There a lot of people at the Creative Labs forum that are frowning over the lack of support this corporation has refused to offer. There are many users like myself that have built a Duo Core machine with 4Gb of Ram and Windows Vista and unwittingly have invested in one of the many different versions of Soundblaster sound cards that Creative Labs manufactures only to find out that the devices have a plethora of issues with Windows Vista or simply don’t work at all.

I have spent the last couple of months checking the Creative Labs web site three or four times a week only to find scores of dissatisified users seeking out some sort of solution or updated drivers that will make their shiny new sound cards work. Many users are vowing that this will be the last piece of hardware they will ever purchase from Creative Labs. I am considering boycotting Creative Labs also.

Meanwhile I have found a way to accomplish what I set out to do, that is, record five or ten minutes of my acoustic guitar and transfer the audio to my computer and incorporate this into some video projects that I have in mind.

My solution is the Edirol R-09 made by Roland. I have spent about twenty minutes here recently with the device and recorded about 7 minutes of my acoustic guitar. The device accepts SD memory cards and has two internal stereo microphones. It is powered by two AA batteries and has a OLED display that is easy to read. I believe this little device will have me recording my acoustic guitar much more often since I am able to quickly accomplish the small tasks that I had intended to do in the first place. I would recommend this to any amateur musician such as myself and at the same time warn him away from the things that Creative Labs manufactures.

Posted in OLED, Computers | No Comments »

September 21, 2007 by rfhicks.

I went to the bank the other day and managed to get some of the new presidential dollar coins. One of the things that I noticed about the new coins is that ‘E Pluribus Unum’ and ‘In God We Trust’ is embossed on the side of coin instead of the face or back. Does this indicate that these important national statues have been ‘put aside’ in a manner of speaking? I’ll leave up to the reader of this blog to make his interpretation.

When I prepared the photo for this blog I created a synthetic image using one John Adams presidential dollar. I put the camera on a tripod and carefully repositioned the coin and merged three separate images.

Posted in Coins | No Comments »

September 9, 2007 by rfhicks.

This past weekend out of sheer boredom and having a day off I went to see 3:10 to Yuma. I had seen some of the previews at the local theater while enjoying the ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’. What had sparked my interest in seeing ‘3:10 to Yuma’ was all the gritty gunslinger characters shown in the previews. It also appeared there would be some actions scenes. Putting these things together brought me to the theater with a ticket in hand.

As I got settled into the theater I had no idea what the core story was. Judging from the title I had the impression that the movie would be centered around a grand stagecoach robbery that would be the climactic moment in the movie at 3:10pm( plot time ). The movie’s opening scene introduced us to a poor young Arizona farmer with a struggling family that were facing eviction due to the construction of the Southern Pacific railway.

Nearby, and at a later time, we witness a dozen or so of grizzly bandits subduing and surrounding an armored stagecoach. We are then introduced to the star of the movie, Ben Wade, portrayed by Russel Crowe.

The movie moves forward from here with the bandits successful with the stagecoach robbery. The thieves then ride into the nearest town and announce that the stagecoach has been robbed. The sheriff and his posse saddle up and ride out to investigate while the villains laugh it up and have a good time in town.

Finally the sheriff and his men realize they have been snookered by the bandits and from this point the story revolves around Ben Wade’s capture and delivery to a prison train in Yuma. We are once again introduced to the Arizona farmer and his family as the posse that has captured Ben Wade spend the night with their prisoner, Ben Wade, in tow. Meanwhile Ben Wade’s henchmen are determined to deliver Ben Wade from his prison fate.
I leave the rest to your imagination from here. There is a some dialogue about 3/4 of the way through the movie where the actors are whispering and at this point I took a little nap till the guns started blazing again.

The $7.50 that I spent to see this movie wasn’t that disappointing and I stayed to the end. I’ll give this one 3 1/2 stars.

Posted in Movies | No Comments »