I added a new feature to the site. Just in case someone wants to link directly to a post and not just the main site, I added an archive feature. Right after comments, you will see a link that says “Archive”. Just copy that URL and you can use it where ever you want. I am going to add a calendar view system so that you can see when I posted but that’s later.
OSCon (OpenSource Convention) and Wil Wheaton (yes – Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: TNG) were both in Portland this last week. Wil has a funny story about packing his book Dancing Barefoot (he also mentions meeting Tim O’Reilly) on his site.
If you want to see some pictures of some geeks at OSCon, click here (I know, I know contain your enthusiasm). If you only see one photo you have to check out this guy. I’ll have what he is having.
Here are some DVD’s that I thought my be of interest to other people out there.
Here is a funny little site about broken things (websites, roads, signs, etc.). Which reminds me, I have to start taking pictures of those funny signs that you see all over the place. You know the ones that I am taking about. The ones where the stick people are hurting themselves (tripping, slipping, making the vending machine fall over on them, etc.). I think that they are the funniest things.
This morning, I was awoken by the sounds of music. Awww how nice. WRONG. I left my windows open in my bedroom open so that it could cool off in there (yeah there is no AC in apartments – unless you want to pay the really big bucks). I have no problem with people playing music, ‘cause I play it all the time. However, some music should really be played with headphones so that no one else can hear it. The song that was being BLASTED throughout the corner of the complex where my apartment is at sounded like something off American Idol – one of the LOSERS of American Idol. The woman that sang the song could sing in a so-so manner, but whoever gave her a record deal should be sent to prison. She was flat all over and couldn’t hit notes worth a damn.
The kicker? Whoever was playing the song, had it on repeat or something because it was playing over and over and over and over…you get the idea. <sarcasm>Ahhh, I love apartment living.</sarcasm>
I saw Terminator 3 this afternoon. I would have to say that it’s not half bad. Not great, but not bad. There were times that I thought that the humor that was injected into the scenes were a bit “forced”. Humor is fine, but this is a Terminator movie. I thought the guy that played John Connor did a pretty good job and made the character seem believable. The girl in the movie was played by Claire Danes and played the character of Kate Brewster. Mostly I thought that she was annoying because all she did for most of the movie was scream and just react to the stuff that was going on around her. The special effects were top notch.
Below are some observations that I had about the movie (I’ve made the text white because it contains spoilers). Highlight the blank area below to read.
At one point early in the film John has a dream about Judgement Day. I like the visual effects of the skulls all over in the water. Then it pans to hundreds, if not thousands of Terminators (without their human “skin” moving and firing at humans (you never see them though). My only problem with this is that John Connor has never seen a T-100 Terminator without its skin. Only Sarah has.
John Connor keeps trying to stop Judgement Day. I don’t know why he is doing this. It would be impossible for him to stop judgement day. It’s only because of Judgement day that he exists. If there is no Judgement Day, Kyle Reese can’t be sent back through time and there is no John Connor. Judgement Day MUST happen.
Also early in the film, the female Terminator (TX) is driving a huge semi with a crane attached to it. She extends the crane so it is facing sideways into the street in an attempt to destroy Arnold (he is hanging from the very tip of the crane). She drives through three for four buildings, through cement blocks, over cars, through telephone poles, etc. I don’t care how tough a semi is, if you ran into that much shit, friction would eventually take over and you would slow down and/or stop.
Arnold tells John that he didn’t send him back in time this time around. It was Kate Brewster. She did so because John was killed by the same Terminator that is protecting them in the movie. However, by telling him this, he probably won’t allow that to happen. Oy time travel stories are hard on the brain.
I’m having one of those days where you are so tired that you get nothing accomplished. Even the slightest task at work seems so energy draining that I might collapse onto my keyboard. Hopefully, I will get a surge of energy before I hit the gym today or it might be a lackey weakling workout day and I hate those.
Good news is that I found my missing Office 2003 Beta 2 CDs at work. I was looking for the CDs this weekend and I only found the beta CDs that I didn’t want to install (Front Page, Publisher, OneNote). Now if only I can find the Red Hat Linux CDs that I burned a little while ago. After I find those, I will install Linux onto a VMWare 4 virtual machine. The last time that I installed Linux into a virtual machine (3.0), it couldn’t detect the video card and I was left with console only. Reminds me of the early days of Linux when I had Caldera and it would never detect my video card. VMWare 4 has better support for Linux though, so hopefully I will actually be able to see a Linux GUI that isn’t 5 years old. The keyword is hopefully.
I’m setting up a server at work and I’m putting a .NET Windows application that I wrote onto it. Usually, when you go to Windows Update, it is in the download list for Windows 2000, but for some reason it isn’t. Luckily people don’t count on Windows Update for shit and I was able to find it on Microsoft’s download site. Lame.
There is not much that I can say about this. He already says it all. It’s one of the funniest little reads that I have read in a long time.
My favorite is:
Finally, when people, too stupid to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot, were awarded a huge settlement, Common Sense threw in the towel.
Common Sense, we barely knew you at the end.
During Terminator 3, I saw the preview Hidalgo. At first I thought it was Airbiscuit, I mean Seabiscuit (which I won’t be seeing) and after I realized that it wasn’t, I was rolling my eyes because I thought it was going to be a lame movie. Washed up racehorse and rider try new stuff by being some sort of clowns or something stupid.
However after that, it got better. It turns out that some sheik invites them (the guy and the horse) to race in “The Ocean of Fire”. A 3,000 mile survival race across the Arabian desert.
For the entire preview, I was watching the main character and thinking, “Who the hell is that, he seems awfully familiar?”. Then it dawned on me. That’s Viggo Mortensen of Lord of the Rings’ fame. Click on the Hidalgo link above to see trailers of the movie.
I was sitting at a stop sign on my way back from lunch and for some reason the video game Kid Chameleon for the Sega Genesis popped into my head. Anyone remember this game? I remember playing this with a friend of mine for hours and hours one summer.
The game was fairly simplistic. It was a side-scroller and you either jumped with a button or hit another button to make your guy go faster. One of the cool things about it was that you could put on several masks and become something else and take on its powers. For example, you could become a ninja that could jump really high, a bug that could walk on walls, or even a tank. Also, there were 100 levels and over 1500 screens. The levels were timed and some had multiple exits. Depending on which one you took, depended on what level you went to next. It was really fun. Ah the good ol’ days when I had way too much time on my hands.
Looks like there is a big MS bug. It’s for all operating systems from NT to 2003 and it is listed as “critical”. This is targeting systems with TCP ports 135 open. So if that’s open on your firewalls you better close them or install the patch. There is another one that is listed as critical for all but Windows Server 2003 but it doesn’t seem as bad as the other one. Read up and patch up!
Just read that the Kill Bill movie by Quentin Tarantino will be split into two movies. I don’t know about you, but from watching the trailer, which is really entertaining I might add, I don’t see why this movie should be split into two separate movies. It’s pretty straightforward.
“Kill Bill” is the story, told in chapters, of the world’s deadliest female assassin, who survives being shot on her wedding day and, after five years in a coma, seeks revenge on the man who tried to kill her. The film’s samurai-style fight sequences were filmed largely in China and take place in everything from a nightclub to a snow-covered garden to a suburban home.
Well I finally figured it out. After killing Linux two nights in a row, I finally solved my conundrum. I was trying to change the resolution of the Linux install in my VMWare 4.0 virtual machine. Every time I used the SuSE YaST program to change the resolution, it would kill the VMWare session and I would have to “end task” it. If I attempted to restart it, it wouldn’t even try to start the virtual machine. I had to kill it and create a brand new virtual machine and re-install Linux. Tonight I found the answer. Below are the steps that I followed. NOTE: I’m using SuSE 8.2, so if you are using Red Hat or something else, it will be different.
Came across this site. This guy has a project to make Star Wars starships for all of the other letters of the alphabet that haven’t been used (like X, Y, A, B – those are used) out of Legos. He does a damned good job too. Someone give this guy a job at ILM designing starships. If he does this good with Legos, imagine what he could do with ILM money. My favorite ones are the Q-Wing (aka Sith Eviscerator), the P-Wing, and the K-Wing. Check out his personal site too, he has non Star Wars starships on there but they are just as cool.
Find out here.
I just got done watching the last episode (The Fall of Night) of the second season of Babylon 5. It’s a great episode. If you are a sci-fi fan and have never watched this series, you owe it to yourself to pick it up. However, I do have some complaints. I don’t know if it is my DVD player or if it is the DVDs themselves but they seem to skip and freeze quite a bit. This happened several times during the last episode of that season and I was on the verge of throwing the DVD player through the window. If anyone has these DVDs or knows anyone that has them let me know if they experience similar “defects”.
I should have something better to do than watch TV, but alas I don’t. I’m watching Geraldo’s program on the FOX News station and for some reason, with all the news that is happening in the world, they are spending almost all of their program on the Kobe Bryant thing that is going on. It’s incredible how the media latches on to certain words and how often it is introduced into the lexicon of the American language for the time that the news is “popular”. A few weeks ago, it was “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and the flavor of the week for the media is “vaginal tearing”. In the course of 30 minutes, I think I have heard those 2 words about 20 to 30 times. The media is garbage. One thing is to report the news and one thing is to make enterainment out of it.
My friend Autumn and I drove to Gresham for Megan’s (another friend of mine) pre-wedding/shower type thing. Funny thing is that she (Autumn) showed up early and I was just getting out to the shower. As I let her in my apartment, I realize that all I had on was just a pair of shorts. <blush> Oh well! Anyway, the thing was held at my boss’ house way out in the country. Quite a drive from my end of of town to his but his house is really cool. It’s a big two story house with a large yard (for Oregon) and there are really no neighbors around. After that it was the long haul home.
Later on, I was on my way to the store and I saw someone stopped in the middle of the road. My nice guy instincts took over and I stopped and asked her if she needed help. She said that the car had no power and had just died. I was going to push the car into a side street but for some reason the car wouldn’t go into neutral. Some firemen that were in the area because of an accident stopped by and managed to shift into neutral after about 10 minutes of playing with it. It surprised me (actually it doesn’t now that I think about it) to see a lot of able bodied “men” just driving by without stopping to help. I guess if the lady was a hottie, they would have come in droves. Finally we got the car out of the road and onto a side street. I thanked the fireman and they thanked me after finding out that I was not with the woman.
I gas up my car for the week and go through a couple of traffic lights that weren’t working. Come home and realize that my apartment complex didn’t have power either. Nice. No cooking for me. So I went to the office and waited and ate shitty fast food. So now it’s midnight, so much for getting up early. Oh yeah, it’s also fucking hot here. Right now it’s 80 in my apartment. Not like I could sleep anyway.
My email server decided that it was hot enough today and it was gonna take a nap. Shortly before I leave work, I get an IMAP message that says that my mail server wasn’t responding anymore. Oddly enough the web server and my workstation were doing fine. When I came home after my work out I rebooted it and everything is fine again (let’s see if it stays that way). For those that would like to know, it’s almost 90 in the room where my servers are at. Blasted Oregon and their no-air-conditioning-having-apartments!
Cartoon Network has begun airing short films about the happenings between Attack of the Clones and the third prequel movie. There are six episodes out right now (out of 20) and each one can be viewed with or without director/animator commentary. You can view it in either RealPlayer or QuickTime.
Eno-Palooza was this last Saturday. For the un-initiated, Eno-palooza was the bachelor party for Ernest.
We met over at Adam’s house and donned out panty hose (on our heads) ready to kidnap Ernest. Our plan was to throw duct tape over his mouth, put a pillow case over his head and then throw him in the getaway truck. Unfortunately he woke up just in time to see 4 masked men in his bedroom. His brother Jon was the first to jump on him followed by Adam. I attempted to bind his feet with makeshift restraints they had made with zip ties. Unfortunately, the bride (love you Megan!) put the kibosh on that shit. She also denied Brian of putting the duct tape on his mouth. Eventually we got him restrained and out the door although Brian nearly killed himself going down the stairs carrying our prisoner.
We tied a ball and chain around his ankle and then hit the Denny’s for breakfast (the ball and chain was a real chain with a 12 pound bowling ball screwed to it). Soon after, we were on our way to Splat Action in Molalla. Now, I’ve never played paintball so it was really an experience for me. The first game was a game of capture the flag. Right after the referee said that the game was on, everyone took off. A bunch of guys, including myself, took off to the right towards the enemy fort. Since it was my first game ever, my adrenaline was pumping like mad. You wear a mask (much like this guy has on) so that the paintballs don’t take you out permanently if they hit you in the face. All I could hear was my breathing in that damned mask. As we approached the enemy fort, I kept thinking that I was seeing Charlies in the trees and I was sure that I was making enough noise to wake the dead and kill it again. Didn’t get much action that game as the ref called game over before I got in any type of firefight.
The next game resulted in my first kill. Some girl popped my friend and then took cover behind a tree. Unfortunately, she didn’t see me and she peaked her head out. I unleashed a torrent of paintballs her way until I heard her call out “HIT”. The third game is where I first got shot. It was in the right leg and it didn’t hurt as bad as I thought that it would. I guess the first hit made me fear death no longer (ok well I wasn’t scared of getting hit anymore) and I became a man possessed because Megan called me Rambo on Monday morning. Here are some of the results of paintball. I’m not sure where this came from, but it might have been from my warrior-type action skillz. Gotta love it.
After paintball, we headed on over to Stanich’s but alas it was closed due to a company picnic day. So we ate at a really good pizza place (can’t remember the name of it) and met up with Dustin. We headed out to some place in BattleGround, Washington to do some swimming in some river but we weren’t there very long because it was lame. We headed out to his parents house where they have a huge plot of land, partook in some hot tubbing and that’s where I had my first taste of the Yucca. All in all, it was a good weekend and a great bachelor party for him.
For the past week I have had a friend parked outside my apartment door. The damn beast must love it there because other than his legs, I don’t see him move…ever. Even when the door slams shut, he stays there happily. I could attempt to kill the blasted beast, but that would leave a mark the size of my wallet on the wall. Of course he could retaliate against my indiscretion and cover me in silk and then eat me. I’m still waiting to see his friends (yeah I know Mothra is technically a female) flyin’ around. Where is he when you need him.
Due to reports (here, here and here) of hackers starting to probe ports 135, 139, or 445 for a new worm to exploit this Windows vulnerability, I’ve had to do some late night patchin’ at work. Although the above ports are not open on our border routers, I thought it would be wise to take the “better-safe-than-sorry” approach and do some emergency patching to pretty much ALL of our servers. This patch does require a reboot and when I rebooted our FTP server, it didn’t come back up. I forgot that it has a stupid warning message in the BIOS where you have to hit F1 to continue. So I had to drive 30 minutes from home to work to hit one stupid key on a keyboard. Damn, I really need to investigate KVM over IP. By the way, I’ve already started getting scans on my home firewall on ports 445 and 135, so patch now or be sorry later.
Last Sunday, Megan and Ernest finally got married. The ceremony was held at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in North Portland. Most of the times, I think weddings are dull and boring, but hers actually entertained me. Megan looked stunning in her dress and the ceremony was sprinkled with Filipino traditions. After that it was off the reception where I sat at a table with 3 people from Spain. I actually talked to them a lot in Spanish. After that there was eating, drinking, and dancing. I stayed pretty late helping Donna (Megan’s mom) out with the presents and then I went home to go to sleep. All in all, it was a good time even though I couldn’t find my black socks.
I rounded out max week at the gym. I took a week off last week to rest my left arm. I must have hyper-extended it one time working out and anytime that I push pressure on it, it would hurt. This week, I wanted to know what the maximum weigh that I could lift, push or pull was. My goal was to do only one or two reps. If I was straining my the first or second one, that was my max. Here is what I did:
Is it me or are the majority of the roads in the Portland Metro area just absolute crap? On my way in to work this morning, my Van Halen CD was skipping everytime I hit a bump, jump, hole, crevasse, groove, etc. No wonder SUV’s are so popular here, you need a 4×4 vehicle to be able to traverse the rough terrain.
I was perusing Apple’s trailers site and I came across the link called Shaolin Soccer. Just by the title, I thought that it was stupid sounding. It sounded like it would be like the 3 Ninjas movies. Remember those? I’m still trying to forget. Regardless, I watched the trailer, and now I’m definitely going to see it. If you like Kung Fu comedy, this is right up your alley. It also reminds me of that game, Super Spike Volleyball, for the NES.
The max is 180 now, not 170. :)
I was gonna write a post yesterday but I upgraded to .NET Framework 1.1 on my webserver and I couldn’t put HTML in the body of my posts anymore. I fixed that and all is well now. Well, regardless here is what has been going on.
I might not be able to run in the Race for the Cure marathon in Portland. For a few months now, when I run I get this awful tightness/sometimes pain in my shin/calves area. So I’m going to the doc on Thursday to see what’s up. Maybe, he can patch me up for the 5k run. We shall see.
When the RPC DCOM worms came out, I patched our server systems immediately. Unfortunately did not patch our client systems because, in theory, they should have been protected by our firewall. This worked for a week until some clueless user plugged in their infected laptop and it started hammering our systems. Luckily everything was pretty much contained in about 3 hours. It was a pretty interesting day yesterday, nothing like a crisis every once and a while to keep an admin on their toes. Now I get to think up policies and technological ways so that this doesn’t happen again.
On Tuesday, I went to my first class of Tae Kwon Do. It was a fun time. Since it was my first day, one of the black belt students took me aside and taught me some basic moves and stances as well as the correct way to do stretching, etc. Today is going to be my second day in class and I’m eagerly looking forward to it.
I also went to the doc today to see what could be wrong with my calves/shins. She taught me some other stretching for calves/Achilles heel and shin muscles. She also suggested that I walk for 5 minutes, do the stretching and then try running. So I’m gonna try that out and if that doesn’t work then I go to a specialist.
I just got my copy of Babylon 5 Season 3 on DVD from Amazon.com. Guess what I will be doing this week after working out and TKD? They also sent me a little promo disc with the first 2 episodes of the second season of 24 on DVD. The full set comes out on September 9th. Megan also points out that that is the same day that John Mayer’s new CD Heavier comes out.
I went to see Bruce Almighty at the Bagdad this last Friday with Terra. I had never been to that theater but it was really cool. It’s a McMenamins so it’s not your regular movie theater. Eating and drinking (spirits) while watching the movie is a must. After the movie, we were walking back to my car and we were accosted by a someone pandering their reggae wares. Joy. Luckily I was able to fend him off with quick comebacks and we walked away without further incident.
Yesterday was my third class in Tae Kwon Do and I am loving it. I started learning the first form yesterday and I am getting really good at the first five steps in it (although reading on the Internet, I think that there are 20 steps). At first, I’m thinking “Boy this seems like a lot”, but after I kept practicing, it started coming to me a lot quicker. Grand Master Choi did mention that the first month is the hardest because you learn a lot in a little time and it’s easy to become discouraged. I can’t wait until Thursday.
…is not now. I tried to go to bed 30 minutes ago. No love. I just laid there in bed listening to the people above me stomp around their apartment and other various nocturnal noises. So I broke out the MP3 player and started listening to music. Still can’t get to sleep. So now I’m writing posts. Note to Sandman, please come to my house earlier. Thanks.
If you follow the news at all, you might have heard that FOX News was in litigation to prevent Al Franken’s book from using the words “Fair and Balanced” in the title. Of course they lost. I was doing some surfing, since I can’t get to sleep, and came across some spoofs of Al Franken’s book cover. This one is one of my favorties. I also like this one, this one, and this one. You can see the entire list here.
Well, the weekend is over. Mine was pretty boring overall although there were some highlights.
We have Network Associates’ GroupShield for Exchange on our email server to prevent bad attachments from getting to our users. For each attachment that is quarantined, the administrators (that’s everyone in the IT Department here) get an alert. Ever since the SoBig.f virus found its way on the Internet, we have been getting hammered with these alerts. Over the weekend, I received 46,000+ messages. Luckily, I have a rule that diverts the alert messages to another folder as soon as they come in. Unfortunately, my boss did not do this so when he came back from vacation he was greeted with 96,000+ messages in his inbox.
I started writing this at 12.48 AM. I tried to hit the sack over an hour ago, but alas I am not destined to go to sleep early. So I’m sitting in my living room watching VH1 and I hear my phone get a text message. That can only mean one thing! Gotham City (please don’t sue me DC Comics) is in trouble and I need to go bust some heads. Ok fine, it means that a script of mine that I wrote is has failed or there is a warning alert. So I look at it and sure enough my script that detects low disk space on servers kicked off (damn I’m good).
So now I’m at work completing a full backup of the email server; which truncates the logs and gives me my disk space back. Can’t wait for those 36GB drives to come in.
It’s almost 3 am. Can’t sleep because it’s about 1000 degrees in my damn apartment! I never thought that I would hear myself say this, but “Bring on Winter Time”! By Saturday the temperature is supposed to drop 20 degrees at the high and isn’t supposed to reach 90 during the day for the rest of the year. GOOD. I don’t care if by Sunday I’m wearing a fur coat that is bigger than DMX’s.
Oh and one more thing, boss scheduled a 9 am meeting tomorrow. Great that means that I have to wake up in 5 hours.
This past Saturday was the company picnic at the beach. We all went to Rockaway Beach and the company paid for rooms for each of us at the Surfside Resort Motel.
I didn’t want to drive, so I hitched a ride with some co-workers (Johnny, Trish, and Autumn to be exact). Johnny drove, Trish played navigator and Autumn and I rode in the back. Autumn slept, my stomach was growling, and I could have sworn that Trish and Johnny were married by the way they carried on. Overall it was a good trip with no one strangling each other.
When we arrived at the motel, we all got our rooms, put on our sweatshirts (this is the Oregon coast remember) and went down to the beach to play some team volleyball. For some reason, everyone there thought that I was some sort of volleyball god. There were 4 teams and to win the tournament and it came down to a tie breaker match to win between the team that I was on and another team. Needless to say, the team that I was on won and now I have a medal on my desk as well as the trophy.
After winning we all took little break in our rooms (I actually went up to Megan and Ernest’s room with Terra) where we hung out and watched TV. Then we went back down to the beach to eat, make S’mores, drink and hang out. Lana got me out into the water up to my ankles in exchange for promising to get me a cool FBI visor when she goes back to DC. The water was so cold it hurt.
A while after night fell, we went to the party rooms where board games and drinking games were played. After the drunken debauchery was over, Terra and I stayed up a had a great conversation.
The ride back the next morning was a bit less animated as we all had hangovers of some kind. There are lots of photos, so I will put them up when we get them back.
Well, the Race for the Cure is on Sunday and I will be walking instead of running it. My shins still bother me when I run and even in some other activities now like Tae Kwon Do. I’ll have to go back to the doc and have her send me to a specialist or something. Maybe they will give me bionic legs and then I will become a super-hero.
I picked up A Perfect Circle’s new CD Thirteenth Step (if you want it, get it at Best Buy for $9.99) and after a few listens to it in my car I find myself disappointed with it.
Most of the songs on this CD are really slow and take forever to get absolutely no where. You won’t find songs like The Hollow, Judith, or 3 Libras on this disc (which all made their appearances on APC’s first disc Mer De Noms.
I think that the best tracks on this CD might be track 2 (Weak and Powerless) and track 3 (The Noose) and the latter track takes a while to build up steam and once it does it’s over. I will have to listen to it at home and the office when I’m not driving to see if I warm up to the CD some more.
I don’t know how I forgot to post this, but yesterday was Megan’s birthday. Luckily, all I did was forget to post here. I got her a card and wished her happy birthday! Happy Birthday Megan!
I’m almost through the 2nd disc of 24 Season 2 and I’m really annoyed with the character of Kim Bauer. Granted, when she is running around and her boobs are bouncing that’s great but the character is so colossally stupid that it boggles the mind and the whole rescuing Megan thing gets really annoying. Thank god for her boobs.
I’ve been kinda slacking on this and not posting. For the next month, I’m going to try to post at least once a day. Now I’m going to run off to the gym.
My friend Lana and I were walking through the mall on a break and on the way back I spotted this good looking girl walking the other way. I looked at her and she looked at me then she kept looking at me…then it finally dawned on me…I know this woman from somewhere…now if only I could figure out from where. We stopped and exchanged glances and then she said hi. At that point, I figured out who I was remembering, sort of. See the woman has a twin sister and at one point they looked pretty much the same. After I heard her talk for a while then I figured out that it wasn’t Sarah (I used to work with her) but it was her sister Jennifer. I got her new cell phone number and I told her that I would call her. Weird how things work. Good thing I didn’t randomly ask her out.
The new Matrix trailer is up. It reveals more than has been revealed in the past few teaser trailers about what is likely to be happening. I would suggest downloading WGET (available for both Linux and Windows) and using it to download the trailer. If you use your browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, etc.) you will only time out about thousand times. WGET has a resume function, so if the connection gets cut off, it will re-try and resume where it left off downloading. The link for the big trailer is: http://progressive.warnerbros.com/thematrix/us/med/rev_theatre_0x3839_640_dl.mov.
Unfortunately, the trailer is Quicktime 6 only.
At work, we have made significant database and web application changes. Yesterday was our big deploy day which consisted of a 14 hour outage of services while we upgraded. I left work at about 5 PM to go work out and then go to Tae Kwon Do and then came back at about 8 PM. Hung out with the boss man, Megan and my other co-worker while they deployed files, database changes, played Diamond Mine and Alchemy (ok Megan played these while we watched), and spun the back off to tape.
Since this was such a big deploy, the boss man rented a suite at the Residence Inn down the street so we could catch some z’s before coming in to do our part. Megan, the boss man, and I went to the suite watched some TV and then Megan and I decided to make a late night run to Chez McDeath for some chicken nuggets. About halfway there, her phone rings and we have to go the office because my co-worker is having difficulty getting SQL replication to work through the firewall. After doing some IP trickery (yes Megan, I said it again) and then setting up replication we were on our way to McDeathville and then back to the suite. I think at this point, it was like 1.30 in the morning.
After eating the not-so-good-nuggets, I decided that I should get at least some sleep since I had to be back in the office at 4 am to do my part. I went into the bedroom laid down and immediately thought to myself that Megan would be knocking on the door to use the bathroom. Sure enough, like 30 seconds later, there was the knock. I was laying there in the dark after she was done and I kept hearing the toilet re-fill its water supply. After a minute, I’m thinking to myself, “This can’t be normal”, so I get up turn on the light and there was water all over the place! I go and get Megan and show her the disaster and we just start laughing over and over again. Megan turned off the water and then we used all of the towels in the bathroom but they sent more up because it was dripping through to the suite below. HAHA. The deployment worked great and services were restored to our membership 30 minutes early with one exception, third party access.
There are third party applications that access one of our SQL servers directly to get data. Despite having known about these massive changes for 30 days and having a development SQL machine to develop against, most of them didn’t do crap until today when their applications broke. It’s incredible, how does one run a business like that and succeed?
I haven’t slacked off this much on a Friday, since, well, I can’t
remember the last time. I came in talked over our chat program (Exodus)
with a co-worker and then went to lunch with Lana and the accounting
girls. It was Lana’s last day. Sad. Boy after that, I came back and
have done nothing since. Ok I did install Win2k on a server that was
having problems. I think it was one of the pairs of RAM that I yanked.
On Tuesday when I went to Tae Kwon Do, Master Choi said that there would be a TKD Tournament on the first of November and it was mandatory that we participated. He then later said that it wasn’t really mandatory, it was just recommended since his school is hosting it this year. So I might be getting my butt kicked in front of a lot of people on the first.
On our way to racquetball Robert and I saw the strangest thing. This lady was walking her little Cocker Spaniel dog and upon closer inspection the little beast had a mask over its muzzle that looked like something that Hannibal Lecter would wear. I curse myself for not having my digital camera!
I’m still missing my John Mayer CD but Megan was kind enough to tell me that she had the entire album in WMA format at work. So on Friday night, I logged into our Corporate VPN Server to and assumed it was on our file server. Interestingly enough I couldn’t access her home directory by name, so I went to the root and saw that there was still a home directory for the original programmer. Thinking that it was blank and just needed to be deleted, I took a look inside. There was still stuff inside of it, including photos of said original programmer and her sister (the one that I met that the mall the other day).
I’ve been meaning to make an RSS feed for my site for some time, I just didn’t get around to it.
Yesterday, I started writing a homegrown XML generator in C# and today I finished it. It generates the XML feed every 10 minutes. You can find it on the front page (just click the XML icon or go here My RSS). The RSS feed allows news readers to subscribe to my website’s news (as well as others) and places the articles in one software package. Those that read a lot of blogs know that this is a blessing.
Earlier today the weather got real nasty outside. It was so dark that it seemed like a giant space dragon had eaten the sun (if you know what that is from good for you!). So I’m working away at the office and all of the lights go out and so does the power to my PC (much to my chagrin since I have a mini-UPS). Immediately after the power outage, someone screamed like Flanders and (it lasted for a second) there was a huge boom of thunder. I wonder if the building got hit by lightning… Oh yeah, and some of our servers got rebooted as well, even though they are connected to a huge UPS. I guess it doesn’t help that the UPS, with its batteries, has been around since I was in high school.
I’m doing a test upgrade from Windows NT to Windows Server 2003 but I’m really annoyed by this. The server that I’m upgrading is in the server room and while technically not too far away from my office, it gets really annoying have to go babysit the damn install every 10 minutes. Get up from my desk, go to server, press a button, go back to desk, repeat. ARRRGHHH!
By the way, Windows Server 2003 seems to be largely incompatible with old hardware which is odd because Microsoft was really pushing the upgrade from Windows NT at the 2003 launch. I wonder how many customers are going to have to chuck their old hardware because Windows Server 2003 won’t support it.
Everyone back in the day knew what Napster was. The pioneer of online music swapping was summarily reduced to ash by the horrible RIAA. After that online music swappers swarmed to P2P services instead of the server-centric Napster. Meanwhile RIAA continued its annoying tactics and to this day continues to alienate its customers.
We all know that CD prices are so overblown that it is unreal. Luckily, several companies including Apple, EMusic, MusicMatch and the resurrected Napster are offering pay per music service. This type of service is a good thing because we all know that some CDs have 1 or 2 good songs and the rest are complete shit. With that being said, I think that the Napster service is just trying to cash in and use its name recognition. Napster was a pioneer, once it died, it should have stayed dead. It’s amazing that the music industry didn’t go with with method of business sooner.
Watch for more companies trying to get in on the money making scheme by offering their own music downloading services. Oh and Microsoft missed the boat again on something huge so expect them to buy one of these fledging companies and try to integrate it into one of their Internet products.
Every once and a while we have a joint developer and IT meeting. Most of the time during these meetings I sit there think about other things and maybe interject a few words. Although this meeting was a bit more involved, when I was finished, my notepad consisted of a smiley face and a cube. That’s the extent of the notes that I took. Luckily during that meeting I kept thinking about our big NT to 2003 domain migration.
I was reading an article on CNN.com about a new face lift procedure. Here is how it works; “…Thermage’s $40,000 ThermaCool tissue-contraction device works much the same way, using a ray-gun-like radio frequency emitter to heat the collagen beneath a patient’s skin, causing it to shrink. As the tissue heals during subsequent weeks, the face conforms to the tighter, smaller structure — with no downtime spent wrapped like the English Patient”.
When I read about this, I immediately thought of the face stretching that Ru’afo had applied to himself in Star Trek: Insurrection.
Last night Mike and I came in to un-rack some servers from our oldest rack and place them into one of our newer Blackbox racks. Unfortunately the custom Compaq rails don’t fit in the Blackbox rack, so we had to put them all back. I finally got to bed at around 1 am only to get up this morning at 6:30. Normally I get up at least 2 hours later than that. I swear that man wasn’t made to get up before the sun, it just seems wrong.
I got up so early because my friend Kathy asked me to take her to work in the morning and she had to be here before 8:30. I noticed something on my way to work this morning. Traffic is really horrendous at this time in the morning. Normally when I leave I don’t have to sit in traffic behind lines and lines of cars. The most I ever to when I leave work is sit at the poorly managed traffic lights. I’ll stick to coming in later rather than waste my life sitting behind some yahoo in an SUV.
<a href=“http://www.apple.com>Apple has released ”http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/“>iTunes for Windows. The software allows you to interface with their iTunes store (where you can purchase individual tracks for 99 cents a piece), it also allows you to play MP3’s, Rip tracks from CDs, and burn CDs from your digital music files.
I’ve downloaded it and so far it seems pretty cool. However, there are some catches. ”http://arstechnica.com">Ars Technica has an article that has some of the pitfalls of the software. Read that article before installing and running the software.
I’m in the design phase for version 2.0 of this site. Currently, it’s at version 1.0. Behind the scenes there will be a lot of work done on the admin interfaces (something that you have to login for) and some tweaks to the front page, including limiting the number of posts that show up and side navigation for archvies. I’ll also start on putting some of my source code on (projectsourcecode.com — there is nothing there right now) including my RSS Generator and images from the admin portion of this site.
It might take a while but, I’ll get there.
I didn’t post for 4 days (15th – 19th) because I didn’t want to shoot off my mouth about work stuff. Needed to do some coolin’ off before I started writin’ words. I had been developing an Intranet site for work for some time. The first version was a horrible looking (it was just text links) site done in ColdFusion, but it was the template to empowering the staff to use web based tools to help them with their jobs.
After I started playing ASP.NET and C# on this site and I decided to try my my hand at porting that site to the new .NET codebase. I should mention that at the time of the first site there wasn’t an in-house development team as our IT infrastructure was in its infancy. However, now that we have a great development team in place, there was no more need or want for me to develop the site and the project of making an “intranet site” was handed over to them.
My first opinion? SUCK! As with all things that one creates, it sucks to have that given (your baby per se) to someone else to take over. I know each and everyone out there knows the feeling. If you say that you don’t, then you are either 1) Still in high school, 2) Lying. But what am I going to do, cry about it? Nay laddie. Truth be told, it’s better off in their hands than mine. I just don’t have the time to really devote to that as much as I would like. Oh well, it was good while it lasted.
The good news is that I will be able to devote all my coding to my sites instead. Keep down your applause.
I went to validate my RSS feed today at this site and it didn’t validate! Arrrghgghh! Luckily, I found the problem quite easily. It’s off by one tag.
Just finished making some changes here. I limited the front page to 15 posts and added a monthly archive on the right side. I also updated the code on the RSSGenerator and now my RSS XML feed is compliant (therefore the cool little button)! After a mad night of hacking, it’s time for bed.
There is a TKD tournament on the 1st of November and I’m gonna sign up for it if I can. I just have to have money and have it postmarked by tomorrow. The TKD school that I go to is hosting it so our TKD master wanted everyone to go to it. So if you are in Portland and want to see me fight and stuff, pony up 8 bucks and come watch the pain (hopefully it will be someone else’s pain and not mine).
Interestingly enough, I’ll go in as a white belt but I could probably take the test for yellow belt now.
There is an update for the iTunes software for Windows. It fixes bugs that were in the first version. Get it if you already haven’t!
This week kicked off the 2003 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. They also devoted an MSDN site to their next OS version that is code-named Longhorn. This site has screen shots of what the next client version of Windows will look like.
I’ve seen screenshots of their new version before this beta build and from what I have seen, I’m not impressed. I don’t like the Longhorn side bar with that stupid analog clock (as seen here). I think that it takes up too much screen real estate. The Longhorn sidebar also allows you to stream weather information to it, stock quotes, etc. Doesn’t this sound like something they did with IE 4 (Active Channels and “Push” technology anyone?). That technology, while hailed by many as cool and innovative, fell flat on its face. I’ve seen more innovation, and originality from the Apple shop (in terms of the GUI) that I have seen from Microsoft.
November will be a busy month for me. On the 21st, I will be going up to Seattle for Apple Cup where we get to see UW and WSU fight it out on the football field. Then we hang out in Seattle that night and get loaded, come back on Sunday, and then on Monday I will be leaving early in the morning, headed to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving.
Although it says that I’m reading the book, I’m done with it. That doesn’t mean that I actually read the whole thing. I couldn’t stand it to finish it. The main character breaks up with his “Legendary Girlfriend” and then mopes around for almost the entire book. As someone that has done their fair share of moping, I don’t think that I was ever that bad even during the dark times. Will (the main character) was such a mopey, whiney, pussy that I felt like strangling him just so that he could be put out of his misery. This book is a piece of shit.
24‘s new season debuted tonight. There are some interesting plot twists already and they take some of the main characters from their “invincible” status and bring them down to earth. Quite interesting really.
A couple of other things. I don’t know why Jack and Kate didn’t get along, but I think that she should give me a call. I’ll give her the lovin’ she needs. Second, the little display of techno-legerdermain by Kim seemed a bit odd, seeing as how horribly stupid the character was in season 1 and 2. That would be akin to my ex beating me at computer/system administration.
I went out on a date with this girl that I met on the Internet on Saturday night. She had me meet her at a Warren Miller exhibition. After that we went to a bar called the Paragon and shared a burger, fries and had a few drinks. Although neither of us were watching the clock and we seemed to get along quite well there was no “chemistry” per se. Which is good because I really didn’t dig her anyway.
It’s 3 days before the Tae Kwon Do tournament and I’m not really all that nervous. Last night, during class one of the higher black belts gave me insight on how to perform my form in front of the judges and gave me some sparring tips. As soon as I can after the tournament, I will see about testing for my yellow belt. Everyone in class says I’m ready, I just weak on some of the Tae Kwon Do vocabulary. Hopefully, I won’t need to run out and get some Depends on the day o the tournament.
Was many years ago that I left home and came this way,
I was a young man full of hopes and dreams,
But now it seems to me that all is lost and nothing gained,
Sometimes things ain’t what they seem,
No brave new world, no brave new world,
No brave new world, no brave new world.
Night and day I scan horizon, sea and sky,
My spirit wanders endlessly,
Until the day will dawn and friends from home discover why,
Hear me calling, rescue me,
Set me free, set me free,
Lost in this place and leave no trace.
Stranger in a strange land,
Land of ice and snow,
Trapped here in this prison, yeah!
Lost and far from home.
It’s twice that I’ve opened iTunes Music Store to download (legally) a song and it ain’t on there! ARRRGHHH. Luckily a friend called WinMX let me have the song.
This past Saturday was the 30th Annual Martial Arts competition and it was hosted by Master Hung Choi and the school that I go to (Choi’s Tae Kwon Do). I got there way early to pre-register and then sat around forever (they start with the younger people first) waiting to do my Poomse (form exhibition). I got 4th place in that and got a medal.
While waiting, I saw some cool stuff. One of the dudes did an “open form” exhibition. OMG, he rocked the house. He was a cop from NYC and is a black belt in Karate. He did everything in style which included leaping kicks and backwards leaps. The next cool thing that I saw was a self-defense exhibition between said NYC cop and what I think was his sensei. The NYC cop dude had a knife (fake) and attacked the sensei guy. As the NYC cop charged him with the knife, the sensei intercepted him and turned his arm around so that if it were a real knife the attacker would have stabbed himself in the stomach. The other cool one was where the sensei had a belt and the NYC cop charged him with the knife (again). The sensei looped the belt around the attacker’s wrist and then turned him around so that the attacker was holding the knife to his own throat all in the span of 1 second!
After another huge long wait, I got to do my sparring in which I got another 4th place medal. The first time I fought, I won by two points against a yellow belt (I’m a white belt which is underneath yellow). I think it was 4-2 in my favor. The rounds were a minute and a half but while you are in the ring and actually fighting with all that gear on, it feels like an eternity. In the second match I fought another white belt and he was good. I was still tired from the first round and this other guy came in fresh. Oh well. At the end of the match it was 8 to 7. All in all, it was a great experience.
One of Belkin’s routers apparently grabs a random HTTP connection every eight hours and redirects it to Belkins advertised web page. The negative publicity from The Register and on Slashdot pretty much assure that any technical minded person won’t be buying any Belkin router anytime soon. Thanks for playing Belkin!
My friend and co-worker, Jason Olson, has started his own tech-centric blog. Check it out.
CBS MarketWatch put out a list of the Top 10 Overpaid Jobs. Definitely a must read. It’s amazing what people make for the crap that they do. Among the jobs on the list (and I think is so true since my work involves some of them):
6) Real estate agents selling high-end homes
Anyone who puts in a little effort can pass the test to get a real estate agent’s license, which makes the vast sums that luxury-home agents earn stupefying.
While most agents hustle tail to earn $60,000 a year, those in affluent areas can pull down $200,000-plus for half the effort, courtesy of the fatter commissions on pricier listings.
Luxury home agents live off the economy’s fat, yet many put on airs as if they’re members of the class whose homes they’re selling, and eye underdressed open-house visitors as if they’re casing the joint.
Over the past 5 years or so, Linux has slowly crept into the enterprise workplace. Its insurgence has been sped up by anti-Microsoft geeks and Sysadmins looking for solutions that Microsoft couldn’t provide cheaply.
I’m a Sysadmin, and the majority of the systems that I work with are Windows-based systems. However, with that being said, unless Microsoft does something creative, I firmly believe that in 5-10 years there will be more people that can administer Linux rather than Windows Servers.
Back in the 90’s Microsoft got a strong foothold in the enterprise from Novell and older UNIX based servers by offering ease of use for administrators with their release of the NT 4.0 Operating System. There are countless other reasons as to why Microsoft has succeeded in the enterprise, but there is one reason that isn’t so obvious.
At the time, there was no such thing as Product Activation and this allowed burgeoning Sysadmins to install NT 4.0 Server at home (albeit illegally according to Microsoft) and gain experience administering such systems. Contrast this to UNIX which is nigh impossible to have installed at home.
With Microsoft attempting to exterminate piracy with its Product Activation it virtually eliminates something that made them so popular in the beginning. How are young adults going to become experts in Windows Servers if they can’t actually get hands on training with them? Microsoft Certification classes are too expensive for most young adults to finance. Most Universities and Community Colleges offer Windows based training, but students are probably going to flock to something that they can install at home rather than going to the lab all the time to finish their assignments. Granted, Microsoft does offer a trial version of Windows Server 2003 which supposedly lasts for 180 days but in my experience, it only lasted 18 or so.
The fact that most young adults can install Linux, play with it, gain huge amounts of experience with it before they even leave High School or Middle School is something that Microsoft will be hard pressed to combat. It will be interesting to see how things unfold.
Well, I saw Matrix Revolutions this past weekend. What follows will probably spoil the movie for some, so stop reading if you don’t want the movie spoiled.
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Still with me? Good. Matrix Revolutions suffers the from the same thing that other thought provoking movies suffers, it is the audience. The audience, American in particular, has an addiction-esque behavior when watching sequels to popular movies. A drug addict needs more or better drugs to keep alive his high. This type of mentality can also be attributed to these movies. We were WOWed by the effects and suspense in the first Matrix film so by the time Matrix Reloaded came around, we needed a bigger, better high. Obviously, while the visual effects were good in Reloaded, they weren’t enough to satiate our need (Matrix Revolutions got 54% less box office gross than Reloaded). That same theory applies to Matrix Revolutions. There is not a lot in this movie that can WOW someone that has watched the previous incarnations of the Matrix films.
Since it can’t WOW you with visuals, the story has the duty of keeping the audience’s attention. For the average person, it does this quite poorly. Matrix Reloaded asked a lot of questions that one expects to be answered in Revolutions. I don’t think that it significantly answers any questions, and in fact, it does the opposite. Most people won’t put up with this. Their movie-ADD won’t allow for something that isn’t handed to them and explained to them. I have no problems with not all of the answers being explained, what I do have a problem with is having no answers explained. That’s the same thing that the X-Files suffered from in their late seasons (along with no David Duchovny). The bait and switch can only intrigue your audience so long before it pisses them off.
Matrix Revolutions also commits a large movie faux pas. You don’t care about some of the characters’ plight. The dock scene, although nice to look at, seemed wasted on me because I didn’t care about any of the characters. The kid? The Captain? Why should I care about these people? They have been on the screen for about 1 hour (in the entire trilogy combined), so why should I care about them? The audience wants to watch a movie about Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus. Those are the characters that they have invested their time into. The rest are expendable in the minds of the viewers.
Which brings me to another point. Morpheus’ character becomes a paper-weight after the club scene in Revolutions. It would be better to have him die than drag him around the rest of the scenes with nothing to do.
There are some interesting philosphical and psychological points in this film though. Throughout this film and Reloaded, the topic of choice comes up several times. The Oracle, says to Neo, “Nobody can see past the choices they don’t understand”, and while reading reviews of this movie, I came across an very interesting and thought provoking post on Slashdot. Here is what the whole choice thing boils down. Humans have free will but they don’t realize it. They make impulsive decisions but don’t know why. They are slaves to the ideas they use to justify their impulsive decisions after they’ve made them. They don’t actually think freely, and they certainly don’t act freely. It reinforces what the Oracle says to Neo in Reloaded; that he had already made his decision, but didn’t yet understand why.
Overall, it was an average movie which needs more viewing time to understand all facets of it. However, at 8-9 bucks for a viewing though, I would rather wait for true understanding on DVD.
There is an article on Slashdot that reads; “Globes Online ”http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=740083">reports that Steadicopter’s prototype pilotless helicopter was stolen a few days after the completion of its test program and final test flights. Interesting to note that Steadicopter claims that their helicopter is unique and there is no other of its kind in the world.“
Wasn’t something like this in an episode of ”http://www.joeheadquarters.com/“>G.I. JOE? Which reminds me of a dream that I had that I was ”http://www.newsarama.com/Devils_Due/GIJoe2f1.jpg">Snake Eyes, but that’s a different story altogether.
I know that I’m late with this one, but I thought I might remind people just in case they were feeling generous this year. :) Time Magazine has released a list of the coolest inventions of 2003. The invention of the year goes to Apple’s iTunes (although I don’t think that’s a real invention per se – just a company opening their eyes to a market that was ripe for the picking).
Other cool things on the list are:
You remember my Microsoft PDC post where I talked about the new version of Microsoft’s Operating System that is in alpha (not due for release until 2006)? Well as an MSDN subscriber, my company is getting the Alpha release of Longhorn (new OS) and Whidbey (new version of Visual Studio)! Can’t wait to install them on a VM at home.
JO has moved his blog over to here. It’s chock full of geekness for you.
Cartoon Network has begun airing short films about the happenings between Attack of the Clones and the third prequel movie. There are six episodes out right now (out of 20) and each one can be viewed with or without director/animator commentary. You can view it in either RealPlayer or QuickTime.
I’ve been out of town for what seems like 2 weeks (it’s actually more like a week and 2 days) but it feels like longer. Well I’m officially back and will be posting again like a fool.
Apple Cup weekend has come and gone. This time around it was 15 of us in Seattle. On Friday we all met in this pub/eatery joint called the Ram-something and started the drinking, talking and fun-having. We migrated to University Ave. for some pub crawling shortly after that. I can’t remember what time I got back to the hotel room, but I think it was after 2 AM. Sometime at about 3 am, the Jagermesiter and beer started having and all out brawl in my stomach and I spent most of the rest of the night praying to the porcelain gods.
The next morning I got up and dragged myself to the tailgate party where I took it easy in an attempt to recuperate from the last night. Not a whole lot of drinking happened before the game. The game was a good time although we had horrible seats. I guess 2 of the people in our group were interviewed for King 5 in Seattle although I never saw the interview personally. After the game we did some more tailgating and I made out with some college girl. Then it was back on the road the next morning for the trip back to Portland.
I was watching the Suze Orman show this weekend (don’t ask, just go with it) and she is talking to this single mom with financial and depression problems. During the conversation, Suze says something akin to “All the hope lies in the children”.
For some reason, the nature of that statement is offensive to me. As someone that is no longer a child, it seems to imply that my generation doesn’t have the capacity to inspire hope anymore. Are we so old that the purpose of our lives is pretty much forfeit with the exception of procreating so that we can bring “hope” into the world? It reminds me of a Star Trek: Next Generation episode where there is this alien that is a brilliant scientist and he helping his world extend the life of their sun. However, because he is “old” by their standards he has to go home and basically kill himself before he becomes “too old”, senile, etc.
I’m not stupid, I know what Suze was attempting to say, but just because you are 18+ years of age that doesn’t mean that you can’t inspire “hope” in this world.
And since we are talking about the children, go here and read about all the fucking crap that happens in public schools now. Utterly ridiculous.
The Sci Fi channel has re-made the classic Battlestar Galactica into a two part mini-series. Part one premiered last night at 9 PM PST with the second part airing tonight at the same time. Overall I thought it was quite good. Below are some of the things that I liked and didn’t like.
The Good
The Bad
I heard about this yesterday but didn’t feel like posting about it. But just in case you have been in the same hole that Saddam was in, we caught him.
Two software music players made their debut this week. Winamp 5 and iTunes 4.20
Let’s talk about iTunes first. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of new in iTunes, I think it is just an update really. Regardless, I’ve been using iTunes off an on for a while and I think it is ugly. It’s horribly ugly. What’s with the un-inspired gray all over the place? I would like to be able to skin my iTunes interface. The display where it plays songs is lame. I know it’s supposed to be imitating an iPod display, but an iPod is a little device which can’t handle color. This is a PC that can handle millions of colors. Perhaps, Apple, you would like to use some of them. I also cut down the columns that are displayed in the interface. Seeing what genre the songs are is ok, but seriously if you are listening to it, you pretty much know WHAT type of music it is. I don’t think that I need to be reminded of the genre, how many times I’ve played the song, etc. I’ve cut mine to only display Song Title, Time, Artist and Album (I can live without this column too).
One more thing, if you download a song from iTunes Music Store, it downloads it to a protected AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format. The file in this format cannot be converted to an MP3 from iTunes. Why? I just legally paid for it! Why can’t I use it in any manner that I want? I can’t transfer the thing to my MP3 player because it doesn’t accept that format. Thanks DRM. I hate you, leave my life alone. And no, I’m not getting an iPod. I refuse to get something that costs almost as much as the rent to my apartment. I would rather have a place with 4 walls to sleep rather than sleeping under the bridge with my iPod.
On to Winamp. Winamp 5 has several features that I have found. You can rip CDs right to your computer without having to donwload a separate plugin. Unfortunately, unless you want to pay for Winamp 5 Pro, you can only burn to AAC format (there is that fucking format again). That sucks. Of course, updating your player to Pro will eventually be hacked just like everything else. In fact, cursory check of astalavista.com shows that, yeah, it has already been hacked. Some other cool features that I have noticed are opacity and scale. You can scale your player down to 10% its original size or increase the size of it by 300%+. You have similar settings for opacity.
Oh and I just found out that Walmart has started their music download service. You can download tracks for 88 cents. Beware however, you need Windows Media Player 9 with DRM (I hate you DRM) in order to play the wma files. It gets even worse, check out all the restrictions on the files that you buy!
Here is a billboard (originally found here) that doesn’t seem to be getting the message across correctly. Where is it written that you have to forego sex to be an engineer? No wonder there are so so few engineers nowadays. I bet the “doctor” billboard says “Be a doctor, you can have money and SEX too”!
Want a list of all of the Microsoft Bloggers? Well here it is.
A U.S. appeals court has just handed the RIAA a setback in their underhanded tactics. Their ruling says that RIAA does not have the ability to subpoena customer names from Internet providers without filing a formal lawsuit. I find this funny; the appeals court said one of the arguments by the RIAA “borders upon the silly,” rejecting the trade group’s claims that Verizon was responsible for downloaded music because such data files traverse its network.
This is great news!
RealNetworks is apparently suing Microsoft to the tune of 1 billion(!) dollars because they used Windows Media Player to gain an unfair advantage in the digital media market. Here is what I have to say; fuck you RealNetworks! They lost the advantage in the digital media market because their product sucked. For years I refused to install or use the invasive program on my Windows machine and it wasn’t because I was using Windows Media Player. I stopped using it because it was a terrible software program that always started no matter how many times you removed the damned thing out of the registry. It’s hard to argue this point when the majority of the online community hates your product and your company. I hope that the judge throws your case out because you tortured his computing experience.
