Category Archives: Life - Page 3

Why I buy DVDs but not CDs

Posted by on September 14, 2003 Comments Off on Why I buy DVDs but not CDs

Note: This is an entry I posted in this Slashdot story, it may be of interest to readers here as well.
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In the past year I’ve bought over 52 DVDs that works out to at least one a week. In that same time period I bought exactly NO CDs. Why is this? The DVDs are a much better value, many cast as little as $10, few are more than $19, they typically include making of featurettes, director’s commentary, music videos, actor interviews, a good story PLUS the movie itself.

I would say that I love listening to music, but at the prices CDs are going for I find that my money is MUCH better spent on DVDs. For the same or less than the price of a CD I can buy a movie with all sorts of extras. The DVD has audio on it and a picture, the CD just has audio and no extras, why should it cost the same? The answer is it shouldn’t.

I also have a lot of problems with the way the RIAA is trying to keep hold of their antiquated distribution methods and huge markups. Why should I support thier lawsuits with my money? Granted, the MPAA has not been the best player all along wither (they fought the introduction of the VCR for example) of course they have learned their lesson as the sales of movies in VHS form have made them a bundle of money. The RIAA refuses to see the future of music, not even doing a good job of promoting legal online distribution methods or interested in lowering prices.

I’ll continue to add to my DVD collection, but until prices are MUCH more reasonable for a CD (say under $5 for ANY title I’m interested in) I won’t be buying very many, if any. If the price and distribution method are right I think the record companies can get people to buy music again. Of course, this assumes the music is worth listening to, but that’s another story.

Cleaning My Desk

Posted by on June 10, 2003 2 comments

I’ve finally been getting around to some unpacking from school and been able to get my desk mostly cleared off and my room, well my room is better than it was, but I still have a few piles of books and a box of stuff to go though. Anyway… I got this email tonight from a reader of the site and thought I would share my reply as well in case anyone else finds this site and has experianced simialar problems.

Hi,

I came across your web site stating that you had bought the above DVD RAM. I am having an issue, and you being a tech type, I thought I might be able to get some insight that Panasonic’s useless tech support could not help me with. First of all, I am running Windows XP Pro, 512 meg of DDR RAM, 1.5 Ghz Athlon based system.

What is happening is really odd. The system perfectly recognizes the CD-ROM and DVD-Ram capabilities of this drive, however, when I try to access it, it says it can not access the drive due to an I/O error (not insert a disc…). I have the recommended 80 conductor/40 Pin IDE ATA 133/100/66/33 compatible cable on it. And the other CD-RW I have works perfectly (a Creative Labs CD burner). Windows XP reports the drive is working fine and sees no conflicts.

The drive does work intermittently. What would you recommend as far as first things to check. It may even be a mild software conflict. Any help you can provide is appreciated as Panasonic has proven they can’t help much at all.

Thanks
David

====My Reply====
Hi David,
The driver for this drive is built into Windows XP so it would be highly unlikely to be a software conflict, unless the problem only appeared when burning a disc. After reseating the cable, trying another cable or possibly trying another IDE port on the motherboard (or better yet in a different system) I would report it as a hardware drive failure to Panasonic. My gut feeling is you got a bad drive but it’s worth checking the drive in another system if you have access to one. I’m using my drive in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 without any problems so I doubt greatly it’s a simple software fix. Best Luck and thanks for visiting my site. If I can offer any more help please let me know.

–Ben Franske

and the good times roll

Posted by on June 4, 2003 Comments Off on and the good times roll

Wow it’s been a long time again since I’ve had time to update this. I finished out the school year with only two day’s of finals a few weeks ago and promptly packed and returned home, quickly unpacked just to pack again! I was off for the weekend to Ohio to attend the biggest amateur radio conventions in the country. The Hamvention was a lot of fun, I flew out with one of my professors from school and we stayed at his father’s house near the Hamvention. I did end up purchasing an Icom mobile radio and antenna there as well as enjoying the experiance and seeing an interesting presentation on the upcoming Icom D-Star digital radio system. We flew back home Monday the 19th and I started my internship the next morning.

So far I’ve been having a great time at State Fund Mutual the people I work with are great and I’m enjoying what I’m doing and the insight into the business environment as well. We’re in the process of replacing a fairly large percentage of older leased PCs in the office with new purchased ones. I’ve also been able to sit in on some of the meetings reagrding a new phone system, including the possibility of voice over IP which is another thing right up my ally.

Last week was also my big CurrentJam concert week so I basically got up, went to work, came home, ate quickly and headed off to work at the concert, got home, went to bed and did it all again the next day. It was certainly a lot of hard work but was also a very enjoyable experiance again this year and I’m already looking forward to next year.

All in all it’s shaping up to be a great summer, although I still haven’t unpacked, gotten my hair cut or any of the other couple dozen things I have on my to do list. One of my sister’s is graduating from high school on Monday but after that it should (hopefully) calm down for a while so I can get my list whittled down some. Well I best get back to that list, catch you later!

On the roof again, just can’t wait to get on the roof again

Posted by on April 13, 2003 Comments Off on On the roof again, just can’t wait to get on the roof again

Yesterday after our local Saturday morning ham radio get together a few of us decided to get our repeater’s antenna outside to try and get our coverage increased in the area. We’ve been waiting for months to get a hole drilled in the penthouse wall so we can get the antenna out on the roof, but it still hasn’t been done. Hoping to get a temporary solution in place we bought a jumbo size stoarge tote and put all the elecronics gear inside of it and just put it out on the roof. I climbed up the roof tower, mounted the antenna on our tower and ran a feedline down to our tub o’ electronics. Afterwards we took a ride around the couty to see how our coverage had improved, though it’s much much better than it was it still needs a little work, we now cover the entire town though.

In the evening I baked some frozen dough sweet rolls I had purchased earlier in the week. I finished studying for another professional certification test scheduled for Monday while they were baking. I also went out on my weekly grocery shopping trip and picked up the neccecities for college life including a wide selection of pears (my fruit of the week).

This morning I got up and did some more reading for my SCUBA class and did my laundry. Early in the afternoon I headed out for a Sunday matinee performance of Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas, preformed by University Theater. I’m just about ready to write my performance analysis paper for my theater class now. It’s an epsodic play as opposed to the climactic style you usually see performed. It takes a look at a typical day in a small Welsh fishing village and once you get over it being episodic rather than climactic it is quite a fun play to watch.

Notes on a Friday

Posted by on April 11, 2003 Comments Off on Notes on a Friday

A few notes today (I seem to be getting back into this blogging again). First I had a meeting this morning I forgot to tell you all about yesterday. Another thing I’m involved on here at campus is a design comittee for a new residence hall. You can find our meeting notes (and architechtual drawings when they get posted in a few days) here we had a finial design development meeting today and will be picking interior and exterior finishes on May 2. I’ll post again when I see that the building design plans have been uploaded because those will be more interesting than the meeting notes that are on the site now.

Help Mike get on TSS! Add the button below to your webpage or blog. We want to see Mike talk about websites, hosting and blogs on the show. Let’s see your support! One of these days I plan to get ambitious and start such a campaign myself, if I do say so I could probably straighten out a few things with home networking for people.

So much time, so little to say. Strike that, reverse it.

Posted by on April 10, 2003 2 comments

I hate being so redundant, everytime I write one of these it seems as if I’m saying how busy I’ve been; but this time, as always, I really have been busy. In the past few weeks I’ve continued to search for a summer job, participated in two wild chats with my friends from Leoville, studied for and passed a General Class FCC Element 3 exam, been studying for three Cisco exams I want/need to take before the end of the semester, woked on my Cisco instructor certification, interviewed for a summer internship, replaced the hard drives in both my laptop and desktop, started a SCUBA diving certification class, took a severe weather spotting training course from the National Weather Service, continued lobbying and meetings with the university for our Amateur Radio Club, debated purchasing a new ham radio, dvd writing package, Tivo/Replay and flat screen monitor. Oh yeah, and all my normal classwork too.

First things first though. My search for a summer job has prooved fruitful at last. Before returning to Light N Trax again this year for summer employment I decided to try and find a corporate IT internship so I could get a better taste of what I might be doing after graduation while gaining some real-world experiance at the same time. I sent out a pretty good number of resumes and cover letters, got a few responses none of which were promising. Eventually someone my Dad works for suggested applying for the summer IT internship at State Fund Mutual Companies which is an insurance company that specializes in Workers’ Compensation insurance in Minnesota. I headed back home last weekend after getting a call that they were interested in interviewing me. I arranged a ride home just in time to make it to my 2:45PM interview which wasn’t overly painful. They said they’d get back to me early this week. I was called and offered the position on Tuesday and I accepted with minor negotiations on my part Wednesday. I’ll be starting there May 20th at 8:30AM.

Now, since I don’t have a boatload of time the only other thing I’ll cover here (unless there is public outcry to hear about another of my recent activities) is my purchase dillema of the day. It all started again with Leo, yes, Leo. You see a few days ago Leo wrote an article on his message board about hacking his Tivo then on The ScreenSavers Wednesday they had a segment about using your PC as a ReplayTV node. All this Tivo/Replay talk got me thinking again about how handy it would be to have one of these gadgets for all the time shifting I do. For a number of reasons I decided it would now be practical for me to sell some of my VCRs and buy a PVR. After exhaustive research today I found that although they had gotten cheaper you could not simply use them as digital VCRs, you have to subscribe to the guide service for them or they cease working! This is either a monthly or one-time fee. I hate monthly fees and when you add the one-time fee to the cost of the device it becomes considerably more expensive. Besides I just don’t like things that have recurring fees and/or rely on a manufacturer to keep them going or they become doorstops, too much power for me to give up. I decided to investigate set top DVD recorders instead. I found the Panasonic DMR-E30K which allows me to do everything I want, plus burn to DVD-R media as a benefit! I could have this for only $390 at J&R Music and Video.

While I was contemplating this purchase a friend who works with me pointed out a hot deal posted to the Anandtech Forums, Dell is selling an 18″ LCD flat-panel for $390 (after instant rebate and 15% off coupon) as well! I considered getting this as well, but after a few hours of internal struggling I finally decided it wasn’t as important to me right now as any number of other things so I decided against it, we’ll see if this was a good choice or not. Back to the DVD Recorder/PVR debate. I had pretty much decided to get the Panasonic DMR-E30K when I stated thinking about how easy this would make DVD video editing on my PC if I got a PC DVD-R/RW/RAM drive as well. Not to bore you too much with the details, but after quite a bit of research and debate I ended up with the Panasonic SW-9571-CYY which I purchased from AvLogic.Com for $165 and will complement the DMR-E30K nicely allowing me to record on DVD-RAM media, stick it in the PC edit it on the media itself and save it or burn it to DVD-R for more permanent storage. You might ask why I didn’t go with the Sony DRU-500A which I was considering late last year. There are a few reasons actually, first cost, second availibility and third support for the DVD-RAM format. This is an older DVD format that uses random access and so it will work better for on-disk video editing and it’s also the rewritable format supported by the DMR-E30K.

When all is said and done I have a set-top dvd recorder, a computer dvd recorder, some blank dvd media, an internship and talked myself out of the flatscreen. I think I’ll be happy though, and isn’t that what really counts? Hopefully I’ll have some time to blog with more frequency soon. In the meantime I return myself to my regular busy life and you to yours. Stay tuned!

Surprise Email

Posted by on December 12, 2002 Comments Off on Surprise Email

Looking for photos from my mom’s 50th birthday party? Try http://photos.franske.com

I got an email from one of my Telecommunications Professors today saying I should drop by his office to sign something. Having no idea what he had up his sleeve I decided to head over to Modern American Lit early and drop by his office. He wanted to get some club callsigns and needed a club officer to sign on the FCC request. So as of today I am the interim CEO of the UW-Stout Amateur Radio Club.

Let’s backtrack a little bit, as you know I finally got my ham radio licence in early November after meaning to do it for years. I bought a used Icom T7H handheld radio and dove right in to this thrilling hobby. Being a very experimental group of people hams have contributed to everything from telegraph to cell phone and computer technology, but I digress. Right now a hot item in the ham community is voice over the internet radio linking allowing two people on radios to talk around the country or world through the internet. After hearing about this on a repeater at home I talked a professor (and friend) of mine into buying a computer interface for a radio so we could experiment with it. The interface came at the beginning og the week and we’ve spent many days this week experimenting with it and we’ve been having a blast. In any event setting up an internet link and repeater here on a permanent basis is what led to forming the UW-Stout Amatuer Radio club today.

In other news I have passed another Cisco exam, the Remote Access certification, one step closer to the next level CCNP certification. I also plan to pick up a CWNA wireless certification over Christmas break as well as working at Light N Trax where I worked this summer. Yesterday I got a perfect on my Remote Access class practial lab final which was another good feeling. Now all I have left for homework this semester is a 10 page paper related to Richard Wright’s Native Son which is something I’m not looking forward to starting tomorrow. Anyway I’ll be sure to keep you apprised of my happenings as time permits.

Weekend Suprise

Posted by on November 21, 2002 1 comment

Friday was my Mom’s 50th birthday. For some time we planned a surprise party to celebrate the event. I went home Friday night (I wasn’t supposed to be home until Thanksgiving) and we rented out a very nice enclosed pavilion at a local park. We got about 100 of her friends in on it and all gathered there. Using an elaborate ruse my dad was able to get her into the pavillion where everyone (including a number of out of state guests and people she hasn’t seen in quite a long time) yelled suprise and totally took her off guard. To top it all off we had a chocolate buffet catered there for her as well. All in all it was a great event and I took a lot of pictures some of which will get posted once they come back.

The rest of the weekend was good too although probably not as interesting for y’all. Saturday night Katie and I went to church and had dinner with my parents (soup with homemade noodles) and then drove out to visit with my grandparents for a few hours.

Sunday I was at a brunch in the morning with relatives in Nothfield, MN. Anna had a concert with the Minnesota Youth Symphony at Orchestra Hall but I had to get back to school so I couldn’t make it. Getting back to school was a little adventure because I found out about 5:00 my ride had gone back the day before. Luckily I was able to catch a ride on a shuttle from the Minneapolis Airport back to campus.

Kilo Charlie Zero Oscar Juliet Alpha

Posted by on November 7, 2002 Comments Off on Kilo Charlie Zero Oscar Juliet Alpha

yes ladies and gentelmen today the fcc approved my test rsults and gave me the amateur radio call sign KC0OJA. That’s all I have time to say today, just thought I’d share the news with you all…

inside the insanity: a look inside my head

Posted by on November 6, 2002 Comments Off on inside the insanity: a look inside my head

In an effort to do something interesting and different today I kept track of the totally (mostly) unrelated to what’s going on things that went through my head today while I was doing other things, you know the things you think about in the back of your head. Some other day I’ll keep track of and talk about the things actually related to the events of the day. Anyway maybe you’ll gain some insight into my insanity or head; maybe you’ll just be amused. Either way it was a very interesting activity to occupy my day.

This morning at work we had about 550 middle school student council members from the region at a workshop and motivational speaker. Part of my job was to help separate them into groups and direct them around the building for their breakout sessions. As I was down in the room standing, leaning against the doorpost, waiting to do this and looking over them I considered how much I love working with kids who are excited about learning. I thought maybe I should go into teaching after all. This is a struggle in me every time I get a chance to interact with students. I do seem to know I wouldn’t like the politics or the bad attitudes of teaching either though. As much as I like the idea of inspiring and leading future generations of students, exposing them to the wonders of the world I don’t think I will actively pursue a teaching career at this time. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll pick up a teaching certificate and do it on the side or in retirement. Anyway I was just struck by the influence I can have on a young person’s life seeing this group of students today.

The next thing that ran across my mind was sitting in speech class. We had to turn in these montage projects I spoke of last time, and yes I did just fine on mine. Anyway I was awed by the power of non-verbal communications and my ability (from what people in class were saying) to drive a point home in a short paragraph. Another thing I thought about in speech class today was how much I would have liked to get up and do an semi-improv informative speech. While my professor was talking about visual aids for our next speech I was looking at his Aquafina water bottle and was thinking how easy it would be for me to get up, use that as a visual aid and talk for several minutes about how plastic pop bottles are made, just using the knowledge in my head. Gosh I love talking to people, teaching them about science, technology and the world around them. How many of them have ever really looked at a pop bottle and wondered how it’s made?

Later in the day, during lit class in fact, I had a “college moment” as I like to call them. These are when I realize that I really am in college; you know what you look towards for your entire schooling career. This time I realized that I will be graduating with a real college degree, which is an amazing thing, to think of how much I’ve learned in the past twenty years and how this really is a landmark to that. The next two things I thought about in Lit are totally unrelated to that, first I was thinking that next time I’m home I’d like to go out on a night drive of the cities and do some night photography, I’ve decided I really like dusk and night pictures, and I’d like to take some of them myself, also take some winter scenes and winter night scenes. I also decided I’d like to do some portrait photography sometime soon as well.

Then later in the evening I did a Compline night prayer with some people from the Newman Student Association here. This was a great time and I really enjoyed it. Once I got back from that I was sitting down for a moment and I realized that in December I’m turning twenty years old. For some reason this seems to be a major step from youth into adulthood at least on a symbolic level and it just struck me for a minute.

So now you’ve had some insight into what goes on in the back of my mind, maybe you learned something, or had a chuckle, maybe both. In any event please share your insight because I am certainly still learning about myself and appreciate all input. Well many Minnesota races are still undecided but it’s time for me to get some sleep, we’ll see how this all turns out tomorrow.