Hugh's Worthless Blog

Someone in our department wanted a couple YouTube videos burned to DVD so I figured out how to do it without any new purchased software, so I thought I would document how I did it so I can always remember in the future. This first step is just to grab the YouTube videos to a computer, and my favorite way to do this is using the YouTube Downloader from BienneSoft. This is terrific, free software that downloads the Flash FLV files from YouTube so they are sitting on your hard drive. If you have a copy of VLC Media Player that is really all you need to watch YouTube videos offline, but if you want to watch them on a standard DVD player you must go a bit further. I took the files off my Windows PC and moved them to my iMac for the next step. Since I have an iMac in my office and I was familiar with iDVD, all I needed was something to convert the Flash FLV files into a format that iDVD could read. The easiest solution was to convert them to QuckTime MOV files, so I used FLV Crunch wh...

Personally, I am not a huge Lady Gaga fan, but I know she is extremely popular right now, so I found it incredible that Amazon.com is selling her brand new full album, " Born This Way ", for only 99 cents as a digital MP3 download (less than most single songs cost). At that price it is not even worth stealing it using P2P software or getting someone else's poor quality rip they share via sites like RapidShare or MediaFire. If you buy the album at iTunes , it costs $11.99 and you have to deal with using the iTunes software, so I cannot imagine why people would prefer going the ITunes route unless they want the iTunes exclusive " Bonus Edition " for $15.99. I much prefer buying music downloads at Amazon over iTunes, although in reality I prefer purchasing real, physical CD media because I am just an old geezer that way! I also find Amazon's Cloud Drive Player as an interesting concept, although currently the only thing I am storing in my cloud drive are som...

Yesterday must have been my lucky day since I actually received two new loan offers in the mail. One was yet another "Personal and Confidential" notice with "Official Documents Enclosed" from Golden Oak Lending like I received in February . I love the fake check for $48,500 that comes attached to it that says THIS IS NOT A BANK CHECK . I also enjoy the fold and tear away edges on the envelope which I always like to fold and tear away since it is so fun. Then I recycle the crap in our recycled paper bag for pickup every week. I know I will never use these people, yet they keep sending me their ridiculous offers! The second notice was a bit more interesting as it was from a more reputable firm, ING Direct, and it was for some new plan they called the " Easy Orange Mortgage ." They make it sound appealing until you realize it is not much more than a adjustable 5 or 10 year mortgage that you repay on a bi-weekly schedule. They keep saying you get a ...

Of course, one day after I posted that lovely video of the house down the street sitting idly half demolished, they came by and knocked down the walls and put a orange fence around the whole thing! At least that gave me an excuse to walk the streets with my family and take more photos and a new video to post on YouTube! I am now interested to see what the new house will look like that they build there. I also took my own picture of the house on the street they are trying to sell for over $1.5 million. I cannot imagine anyone spending that much for that house. It does not even have a sign in its yard, but it is easy to spot amongst the other homes. I wonder if the new house on the corner will look like this one or not.

From the state of the house in this photo you would think this is tornado related damage here in the St. Louis area, especially after the terrible destruction we saw on Good Friday last month. But this house is located in a neighborhood that was not even touched by the tornado, a prime location in the Ladue School District surrounded by $300K-$500K homes. In fact one house just four houses down the street from it is currently on sale for over $1.5M . We were just walking the neighborhood on Mother's Day and my son had his digital camera so he took photos and this exclusive video of this eyesore in our rather upscale neighborhood. If progress were being made on the house I would not be complaining, but it has been standing idle now for a number of months with no change in activity. Plus I wanted to post something new to YouTube , and it was just so easy! I did not realize the videos could now be up to 2GB in size, so the 100MB file from my son's camera was not a problem at...