In my many years on this earth I have picked up on a few tricks that everyone should know.

1. Whenever rendering video that was shot on a standard miniDV tape in widescreen you will end up with either a video that is rendered with the black bars top and bottom or the better option is to render just the 16:9 portion of the video. The latter method is preferred but will lead to issues with non-square pixels (don’t get me started). Instead of trying to get video playback devices to understand this, I have found the best solution to be rendering a video that is 875×480 with square pixels. I don’t know if that’s how you’re supposed to do it, but it sure works!

2. Parking on campus at Cedarville University normally requires you to buy a parking sticker from Campus Safety. You can actually do that or you can just always back into a parking spot. In doing this, you require the Campus Safety officers to have to get out of their car to check the sticker on your back window…that my good friends is never going to happen!

3. You know those kroger cards they want you to use to get their special deals on stuff? Well I’m like 83% sure the government uses that information to track my dietary habits. The trick is, for some strange reason you can scan your Speedway Speedy Rewards™ card instead. Of course this only works at the self check-out.