Thanksgiving be gone

Starting this year we are not doing thanksgiving. Everyone is absolved and released from coming over to our house. Please attend to your own families. We will just be having normal meals. Death to tradition! Christmas.... (yeah I'm looking at you!) you're next!

Knights (mare) Inn

So yesterday about eight-ish in the evening I noticed that the AC in our house sounded a little funny but didn't really pay attention to it. Around nine-ish I noticed it was getting warm in the house. So I check on the AC and sure enough the Inside fan motor isn't running. I can also smell a strange oil like smell, and cold air coming from the return. Great! we call J.R. Perkins but they can't come out till 10am. I can't sleep if the temperature is above 79. So the choice was go to my moms house (yeah right) or a get a hotel for the night.

I looked up hotels to see what was near by and there wasn't much to choose from, a Motel 6, a Holday inn, and a few others. I figured the Motel 6 would be ok. My wife said lets stay at the Knights inn on 32nd st and earl. Uhmm ok I guess. Called and they said rooms were $45.00 per night, ok we quickly packed up some stuff and off we went.

Well..... The room was rather big, had a fridge and microwave, but.... and that was a BIG BUTT!

It had the following issues:
Decorations... There were 5 count them FIVE of this picture in the suite.
Missing Items.... The Smoke detector, Hair Dryer, and several light bulb were missing.
Damage... There was a large hole in the wall in the bathroom.
The toilet seat was not attached to the toilet (so that was fun).

The Beds were like sleeping directly on a box spring.

Cleanliness.... My pillow looked like a car mechanic had slept on it, and well just pretend that those aren't blood stains on the curtains.
But.... I digress.

SO, we went to bed around 11:00 and everything was fine as there was almost no one in the rooms nearby. Around some time in the middle of the fucking night! I hear a knocking or banging noise, (and it woke me up). I start to go back to sleep and it's happens again! Oh... It's someone banging on the door! "Hey Odie! let me in!" BANG BANG BANG (on the door). WTF! CRACK CRACK CRACK (on the window) Uhm! hmmm! Yeah this isn't funny. LUNGE! (against the door). OK I'm up! "ODIE!" (that ain't Garfield). I sneak up to the windows and see a blurry brown colored person (dammit I sneak back and get my glasses). Yeah there is a guy out front in a wife beater t-shirt and bling (can't see much because I don't want to move the curtains). BANG BANG BANG LUNGE (against the door again). I go back to the phone and call the front desk:

Front desk: "Front desk can I help you?"
Me: "uhm yeah there is some guy banging on my door and yelling"
Front desk: "OK I'll check it out"
Me: "Thanks I'd appreciate that"
Lunatic: "Knock BANG CRACK ODIE! LUNGE"

The one time I didn't bring my gun! Oh look it's one of those fold up suitcase holder thingies.

So while I wait for the front desk guy to come out, I'm waiting by the front door so if this guy breaks in I can smash him in the face with the suitcase holder while screaming "I'm going to eat your eyeballs" in the most demonic voice I can muster.

Finally the front desk guy comes along and I hear an exchange that goes something like this:
Front desk guy: "hey! what are you doing?"
Lunatic: "Uh I'm looking for this girl that's staying in this room here"
Front desk guy: "They left yesterday"
Lunatic: "well I just got here and I'm looking for them, and so now I'm leaving... now"

I waited a minute or so and checked out the window. The guy was gone. I went back to bed but did not get back to sleep for about an hour.

Did I mention my wife slept through the whole thing? Well she did.

She only woke up when I went over and poked her in the leg and said "Next time we stay at the Motel 6!"

I got up the next morning and took a shower where I noticed the tub and ceiling were rather close together and the light fixture in the bathroom (which was right over the tub) was missing it's cover and one socket was broken. So if say a tall guy like me wasn't paying attention and stepped back my wet hair would have touched the broken socket and I would have been electrocuted.
Oh and whats up with this?
all in all I give it a half star for no bed bugs (so far as I could tell) and another half star for no dead hooker under the bed.

Sony Vegas 9 pro freezes when rendering AVHCD

Posting this for anyone searching for a solution or work around for this problem. The problem is that if you are trying to render a video in the AVCHD for burning to Blu-ray, for some odd reasons Sony Vegas Pro 9 (8 and 10 as well) may hang or freeze or crash or give an out of memory error.

I have been researching the problem and trying all the solution (or lack thereof) on the internet. While the problem definitely exist in Sony Vegas and not with your hardware. I do not have a solution. I do have a viable work around.

First the issue seems to be caused by the AVCHD encoder not being able to handle certain scenario's. In one case I was rendering a video that included panning over still pictures and cross fades. at certain points the program would always freeze at exactly the same place. My fix at the time was to replace several of the stills with smaller images, and less complicated pans. I then rendered the video in short blocks on several computers at one time and joined them together re-rendering in AVCHD. Other scenario's are multiple clips in different video formats like AVCHD and quicktime H.264. The ACS Encoder does not like certain aspects of the H.264 quicktime files.

My workaround is thus. I can render the video just fine in any other format. So what I did was render the video in full 1080p using the Windows WMV codec at a bit rate of 16 megabits per second. Then reloaded the clip and rendered it in AVCHD. IT rendered easily and the video quality seems to be just fine.

What have I been up to lately

I have been really busy lately and most everything I do is posted on my Youtube channel.