Laugh Factory Long Beach: My Funny Valentine

February 14th, 2009.

Laugh Factory Long Beach had two sold out shows on one of the most ridiculously made up day of the year, Valentine’s Day. Patrons were lining up outside the venue, waiting to be seated. Temperature was steadily dropping as the night rolled on. The first show was scheduled to go on 7:45 PM, and the host of the show didn’t get to take the stage an hour later. Darren Carter was one of the comics to perform on the first show. Having just recorded his second live CD the night before, Carter entertained the audience with his staple bits.

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The audience for the second show started lining up outside the venue shortly after the first show started. The second show started close to 11:00 PM, 85 minutes later than scheduled. Last minute line-up changes took some of the fans by surprise as some of them came to the show to see certain comics. Some fans expressed their disappointments when they found out the comic they came to see were seemingly replaced at the last minute. Jill-Michele Meleán was scheduled to host the second show only to be replaced by Frazer Smith without explanations. Meleán ended up hosting Midnight Show at Laugh Factory Hollywood.

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Overall, the night was a smashing success. The Valentine crowds were entertained and the venue had two huge sold out shows. There are a lot of wrinkles for Laugh Factory to iron out to make itself the destination for attraction in the Long Beach area. Laugh Factory Long Beach is no stranger to last minute line-up changes. On its grand opening show, many comics were advertised but ended up absent from the show.

Panasonic HDC-SD100: Raw AVCHD Sample

Panasonic HDC-SD100 is the third Panasonic AVCHD Camcorder that I use. The first one is Panasonic HDC-SD5 and followed by Panasonic HDC-SD9.

I am really impressed with the video quality of HDC-SD5 while I have mixed results with HDC-SD9. It is possible that I have a defective unit, and I did send it back to Panasonic for evaluation and repair. Unfortunately nothing has changed since.

My HDC-SD9 unit has a really poor low light performance even compared to the HDC-SD5 unit. I am hoping that HDC-SD100 would perform better than HDC-SD9 under the same lighting.

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I tested Panasonic HDC-SD100 in-store, and recorded two videos on two different settings. The first one is recorded in 24p Digital Cinema Mode while the other is recorded in 60i mode. You can download the disk images below. Both disk images are in .iso format and zipped/compressed to save some disk space and bandwidth.

As of the date of this posting, iMovie ’09 will not import 24p AVCHD video from the camcorder or the disk.

I will be posting more videos recorded using Panasonic HDC-SD100 and some of the Raw AVCHD files.

iMovie ’09 Disables 24p Video Imports

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With the release of iMovie ’09, Apple explicitly removes 24p video imports. The same 24p AVCHD video can be imported using the latest iMovie ’08, although 2 seconds were missing in the import.

At the time of this posting, there is no workaround for iMovie ’09 to import 24p AVCHD video.

The Mysterious Face in The Sky

I love the new features in iPhoto ’09, especially Faces. I also am aware that Faces still has a lot of room for improvements.

I’m a little bit spooked with what iPhoto ’09 sees that I could not. There’s a face in the sky, is it a ghost?

iPhoto '09 mystery_face

iPhoto ’09: Faces

Apple introduces new features to iPhoto ’09 such as Places and Faces.

Faces automatically scans iPhoto library right after the upgrade, and it might take a while to process all the data. I have 3368 of assorted pictures in my iPhoto Library, and I’m looking at a good 80 minutes for my 15-inch MacBook Pro Core Duo 2.0GHz to process Faces data.

I’m going to post some screenshots from faces, if I remember to.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is in, Shiretoko is out

Release date: December 8th, 2008

Mozilla.org has officially dropped “Shiretoko” as name for Firefox 3.1 Beta 2.

See the new Robot here.

The good folks at Mozilla.org has just released Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 2. Don’t worry because Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is still free (seriously, has anyone paid for Firefox upgrade/updates?)

Firefox Logo

Mozilla Firefox is available for Linux Mac and Windows.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

  • This beta is now available in 54 languages – get your local version and let us know if it looks right.
  • A new Private Browsing Mode that allows you to browse without Firefox storing any traces of where you’ve been – perfect for online holiday shopping!
  • New functions that make it easy to remove the history of your past few hours of browsing, or remove all traces of a website.
  • New support for web worker threads.
  • The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is now on by default for web content.
  • Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
  • Removed the new tab-switching & preview behavior based on feedback from Beta 1 users
  • Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.

Get Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 from:

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