The good with the bad mini-update

Ok so things I left off, mom cleaning hours after the storm, if you know my mom you know she cleans and cleans the invisible dirt that is in my parents house. The best part of this, it was hours after the storm, hours, dirt was going to build up over the next 3 days till we got power back, so she cleaned everyday and swept up all the invisible dirt along with the maybe 1 or 2 sweeps of actual dirt. Dad was still able to pull off gourmet meals off a propane colman grill, amazing, we had 3 massive meals a day and we aren't talking cans of soup. The crazy generator people who leave them on all day long and all night long, yes all night to power what? Lights? Air? It was 65 outside. Best part was the guy's generator seizing up after the dumbass forgot to change the oil after 2 days straight. No more electricity for you mr smarty pants, loser. Saw more HurricaneHunnies today, I see no point in it but hey, since everyone else will be white as day from staying in, however you oh HurricanHunnies.com will be golden brown like the chicken everyone can't wait to eat from Publix as soon as they get in. Mmmmm already cooked Publix chicken, thank you Wilma for taking that from us. You know what else is weird I swear it was the same HurricaneHunnies I saw yesterday that I saw today in the gas line, like they filled up, drove to BFE and then needed to fill up to do it all again? I thought the point of waiting in the gas line was to get somewhere you really needed to go, like work, and keep driving to a minimum so you don't have to wait in line the next day, but alas I am not a HurricaneHunnie so I do not know for sure where they drove. Chrome and myself were also trying to come up with a solution for internet after a storm, DSL seems ok, but it's sketchy, cable seems to be worse, satellite is a no go since you need phone up, microwave is dependant on line of sight, right now only the edge card for laptops might be the way to go but even then, cell phone was crazy after the storm, who knows it the data portion would hold up well.

The Good with the Bad

Let's see, so we survived this crap called Wilma, first off I'd like to say a big "Up Yours" to all the people who planned the relief effort. Cause you know this happens so infrequently that taking 4 days to actually figure out where water & ice is going to be is FAST, yeah only not. Yeah and changing the times up every hour to keep us on our toes so we never know where to go and have to drive around in circles with no gas, that was AWSOME. Ok so fun stuff, cold showers, melting ice cream makes great tasting, fun flavored milk, lines at gas stations & home depot, people who yield at 4-way stops, same people who yield at downed traffic lights that are now 4-way stops, flying truck bed liners (what's up C!), parade of cars looking at nothing, line of cars that ends at a cop making everyone U-turn, yeah that was all the traffic you saw coming in the other direction while waiting in line, over flowing toilets (what's up Dad!), hotties sunning themselves on top of cars waiting in line for gas, new idea after seeing said ladies HurricaneHunnies.com (what's up C!) and probably a lot more.

Wilma.. what a bitch

So Wilma came, left a big ol' mess, knocked out all the power and internet, grrrrr and then left.... what a bitch. I'm here with Chrome @ his 2nd job which somehow has power and internet, so we both are sitting here getting are fill. Come on you can't have 2 techies living without power & internet for too long. All the word we are hearing is 4 to 10 weeks without power, so that is really going to suck hard. But at least everyone seems to be alright down here, well as many people as I've heard back from. So in the end Wilma was just a huge bitch and didn't even cook dinner or anything.

A Jedi Needs Not These Things... But They Sure Are Nice!

"Boldly striving to overcome the darkness both in this world and within yourself, you are righteously devoted to forging your own destiny.
It's your choice, but I warn you not to underestimate my powers.
Luke is a character in the Star Wars universe. For more information, see his character entry at the Star Wars Databank."

Oh Yeah, so which one are you?

Why?

Why do people act so inept around computers and laptops and then try and mack with gadgets and gizmo's that they try and perp all around like they know what the hell this stuff is? Case and point, new guy comes down from BFE, brand new IBM laptop, by our company. Hey's complaining about this and that and said his "company" laptop is running slow and doesn't know why. He has Steam running updates, some PSP movie converter running, TiVoToGo files everywhere, mp3's in god knows every directory and only 100MB free on a 60gb drive. Oh and he wonders where all his email went cause it disappeared after he setup his WinCE device to check email over POP3 and didn't check leave on server, I don't know what it did but 4 gig's of email went bye bye. And that little device sure as hell didn't store 4 gig's of emails on a 512mb flash card. Then throw his hands up and say it just freezes up and he doesn't know why?? So I clean it up, delete every last non-work file/program I can find and give it back. Guess what, he comes in today and the HD is totally dead, click of death and all. It's a good thing I backed up his My Documents folder to the server while working on his machine yesterday. So let's review, A) get your learn on at least a little when buying stuff, and know what it's doing. B) Don't use a company laptop to do massive amounts of shit for home and then complain it's running slow, I know docs and pics and a program or 2 get loaded on company laptops and workstations but come on 35+ gig's of personal crap C) Don't expect IT to get your episodes of Lost, Prison Break, My Name is Earl or 60 Minutes for you or any of your PSP movies off a crashed HD, you bring it in for repairs it's going back out the same as it should have come in, spotless, only word and excel docs intact. D) Just cause you want to show off to your kids, don't let them play on your company laptop re-re's, you're making the dough to buy all this other crap buy little Johnny his own laptop to fill with spyware

Sorry Tampa, nice to know you

So I was suppose to be off to Tampa Thursday and Friday be because of the everlasting gobstopper, come on I know you’ve seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, that is “headin’ right for us” people actually have told me to stay put this week, phew. But now I have to cover stuff up and yadda yadda so hopefully everyone will do alright, considering it is now a Category 5 and the CONE OF UNCERTAINTY, sorry I always hear the sound of the voice of God from movies and TV in my head when I say that, is basically the whole state of Florida, there’s a decent chance that you should bet on it at the very least it causing massive amounts of rain. Just a heads up for all you investing in companies that make yellow water resistant plastic tarps, you may want to have your broker, no doubt in NY, come on everyone has seen Wall Street, “SELL SELL SELL” on Monday.

And the sky parts and out comes.... Steve Jobs holding a copy of Cinderella??

Now we are getting some where, why cause people are pissed, see here. It’s always good when people get pissed cause it usually spurs creativity and ingenuity, things seriously lacking right now in this infant VOD/IPTV whatever you wanna call it, alphabet soup of a mess we have with distributed video. First things first, I know it takes money to make TV shows, and I also know it takes someone to invest in a infant show that just has a single pilot episode to hang it’s whole life on, I’m not debating that fact. But you do remember there was a time when most things were out of reach from contributing members of society and only available to the rich. What does this have to do with TV? Well everyone now wants their cut seeing as how big bad Apple went and cheated on Affiliate stations with it’s mistress ABC. What was born was the spawn of a million tech-geeks who have been waiting for this since they upgraded from running a 2-line BBS out of mom’s house to a full fledged 32-line, hard drive gobbling monster of a BBS where disks were ARJ’d up and set along Zmodem style to your friends and peers instead of trucking around that hard shell box you bought at Computer City that only held a pathetic 15 720k DS floppies. Anyway enough tech rant I find it funny that everyone wants old rules to apply to a new game. Hey this isn’t your mama’s Monopoly son, this is the Wild Wild Tech and we move faster than you’ll are used to, so if you need help catching up, sorry we’ll just leave you behind. Everyone also seems to say Video On Demand is already here, well if it is then why are these people bitching? Oh right cause no one packaged it up and made it nice and easy for Mr. and Mrs. Smith to use without needing to call their son Jimmy 8 times a night to just to record and playback “LOST”. See I like how everyone turns a blind eye till it’s one click one copy, or as we call it ‘round these parts a POPCopy, no muss, no fuss, just click and you’re done. Then the shit hits the fan, just like Napster, make it easy, give people what they want, when they want then give it media coverage and they will flock in droves. I also read, not in the article, wish I knew where, that Friends didn’t make any money until syndication and DVD. Now wait a minute, that was the highest rated show ever for like a million seasons, people gave out more money than all of you reading this blog combined and multiplied times 10 will ever see all for 5 seconds of advertising and they made no money? Well something is seriously wrong with your models there Mr. TV people, if that wasn’t a signal then I don’t know what is, I mean how do you expect to make money when you pay a group of actors a MILLION dollars an episode. Hi I’m what we call reality, and everyone here on earth makes a living acting, you see we all act in one form of another toward other people and put on a show and blah blah blah. I don’t get a million dollars a day to come to work and act more happy than I already am, cause a million dollars a day should would make me grin like I just got back from Jacob the Jeweler and he did my whole mouth in platinum caps, you dig? There’s even a little dirty secret most TV stations don’t know, it’s that most people will watch your crap with commercials, yup you can keep the ads. Hell charge more for the one without ads, or make the one with ads free and the one without premium, like Publix Ice Cream. Now I don’t have an iPod let alone a video iPod so I'm not some Apple fan boy, Spec I'm looking at you, but Steve Jobs and Disney, believe it or not, are changing the rules of the game back toward us, now we know it must help them some way if not there’s no way Disney wouldn’t be doing this. Disney is the parent company of ABC, but you knew that already, right? So here’s the thing, the rules of the game are changing forever, hell maybe they just might take commercials off CableTV and just keep them on Free Over-The-Air stuff, what a guy can dream. We need to give a big thanks to Bit Torrent for providing he masses with the means to accomplish distributing downloading, we all know how to share, no one just ever gave us a reason that we liked. And we need to thank all those Anime nuts who downloaded all million and a half of the Naruto episodes over and over again because someone had to do a better subtitle job each and every weak on the same damn episode to then show their friends who showed their friends who finally started using Bit Torrent to download Desperate House Wives and Lost because they were out of town that day. Which caused all this wonderful thing we have now because now lil Mrs. Smith comes home and downloads her show to her little iPod Video and that scares the crap out of Mr. CEO of TV.

My Content Pt. 2

My whole point was I would pay if I could get the resolution I want, they only have to encode the movie/show/etc at max 5 times, then store it, their work is done. Why start back at day 1 when we downloaded ViVo rips that fit 3 to a CD and looked like utter ass on TV out. We are the age of High Def and everyone else seems to move forward yet our lazy ass broadcasters here seem to want to cut so many corners, you have to pick and choose the HD content you would like to watch because sometimes it’s so compressed it’s better just to upscale the damn standard def image. It’s why Verizon is rolling out fiber to the home and on the cheap, piggyback IPTV on they throw down 20 HD streams and still surf the net at 25-50mbps, its already being done in Texas. And that’s 20 full 16mbps 1080i streams not some sloppy ass cable HD with 6mbps, hell I can get 6mpbs off a DVD and that’s 480i do you really think 1080i looks good at 6mpbs, yeah the law of DVDShrink says No, you can’t keep just throwing bits away and expect to keep the same picture quality, unless you’re Spec in which case you can shrink a move to 30% of it’s original size and he will still proclaim it looks just fine on his 4 inch TV or iPod Video Mac Nano, whatever the hell he has that’s made by Apple. If I pay for a show I want to watch it on my computer, on my TV, on my High Def projector, on my gameboy, on my casio wrist watch and on the 6 line LCD coke machine at school, I bought and I want to watch the damn thing anywhere I want so long as I’m not reselling it I should be a-ok. Oh and the Mobi cube sucks C, just because it can do 1gig and is the size of a quarter does not make it cool, all it’s going to take is your cat to see it’s sparkle sparkle you’ll know you’ve found it again when the litter box starts singing “I wanna Sex You Up” to you 2 weeks later.

The future of TV

So the iPod now plays videos, cool, sounds like a great idea of form and function, since we know Apple already mastered that. 320x240 screen, eh well it is a handy device, $1.99 an episode, uhm what? Let's look from the beginning, free Over-The-Air (OTA) TV is kept free by ads, which is why a 30min show is really around 22-24 min depending on syndication. Ok so I have to watch commercials because that's how the free stations stay free or need to go PBS style and ask for donations every so often, sounds good. Cable, you are going to charge for TV and offer more channels, ok cool, but you need to keep commercials in just for now to help with costs, sounds fair. Flash forward they never remove the commercials because they became so dependant on the revenue, yes this is how cable was suppose to work, someone got the bright idea to double dip and no one stopped buying cable. Oh and wait in there the VCR almost caused the industry to die because, NO ONE WILL WATCH COMMERCIALS, gee golly gosh Fred what ever will we do, uh-oh now we have these PVR things and now people don't even see the commercials zip buy as they fast forward they just triple click and the show is on, queue Rise of the Apocolypse. Wait so if we sue everyone, say that piracy and the internet is causing birth defects and a generation of theives we can get somewhere. Oh look at your shiny new PVR now, what you want to copy a show, no no no, no to that device, oh but you can copy it here where I say oh yeah and guess what I will force your machine to delete the content after a week because we know how much you want it on DVD anyway so shell out more money for the season don't keep it on that PVR. Which brings us full circle, cable we pay for, which is being restricted more and more to lock us in to missing one shows climactic ending, ala the old end the show at 10:05 trick, to watch another show on a different network, wait you mean you change the channel. Listen up I pay for TV, if I want to watch this show tomorrow I already paid for it, I want to watch it 10 times a week for 2 weeks, good for me, I paid you already get off my back. Charging me to own a show in resolution less than some guy sitting on his bed taping it with spy camera glasses is just dumb. That means if you buy a whole season of Lost $34, but wait the DVD is $40 and is 720x480, hrm that doesn't sound right at all, over double the quality for a mere $10 after tax. Television needs to seriously rethink their strategy, it's why I own a seris 1 TiVo, no access control on my box, besides the previous mentioned 10:05 trick, go ahead do it, change all the shows to start at random ass times, why do you think people download all your shows, DUH! It's backward ass thinking that higher ups say, "I know lets lock them in to our network so they will watch "Where Grass and Neighboors Meet Season 9" that we are still pushing" while all the interesting shows never make it past season 2 if that. How about we start over, start shows at normal times, let shows run for a season or 2 before deciding to drop them, and just let us watch. Hell I've rewound on my TiVo to catch a funny commercial, it's been known to happen, hell I may even buy something like Evergreen Rainforest Smelling Tide Ver. 8 because I know I need to do laundry and happened to catch it. In essence stop trying to force us to think what you want us to think, we'll let you know when we've decided what's good and what's not and you'll still make you billions of dollars just in time for Christmas. The more you network TV asshats try to restrict my TV watching the more I'm just going to give up and wait for someone to post it on the internet, in 1080x1920 resolution, commercial free and free as in linux. You have the original masters, you have the computing power and you have the bandwidth, make it easy, affordable as in $1 and in any resolution up to 1080i I want and why would I go anywhere else. I want the quality, you just aren't providing it for me and yet my money goes where it only has the choice and that's the cable TV people. Oh and another thing, cable asshats, stop stuffing 9 channels of HD down a pipe that can only hold 5, if you can't broadcast in full 15mbps per stream don't make it look like shit by claiming to offer more HD channels than the other guy, no one wants to watch their episode in HD only to have it more pixelated than an if the episode was stored on an Atari 2600 cartridge. The point of HD in case you missed it is CRYSTAL CLEAR images, not crap that looks fuzzy and like I just downloaded the episode only this is 1998 internet and I have to deal with something the size of a postage stamp.

Holiday

Yesterday shaped up to be a great day, besides the whole waking up late part. You know what I'm beginning to like the fact that I don't get Jewish holidays off at work, one being I'm not Jewish and two most of the population of my work is so that leaves three the fact that the bosses either leave early or just plain do not come in leaving me little to do but still getting paid all the same. After a nice easy day at work was done, I took my last midterm which is a load off my mind and feel damn good about the results, I think I did well on both of them. Then I had a lovely dinner, which could have gone on for 5 hours, but alas we both had work in the morning so 2 hours is all we could spare, though we did make the most of it. All in all a great day capped off by a lovely evening, I need more of these, "excuse my sir, may I have another".

Not yo mama's nuts

Ok lemme point out this link and in particular this sentence, "Crack squirrels are a recognised phenomena in the US." Say WHA?!? Dude I didn't know we had crack squirrels. I mean are they the type of crack squirrels like a crack team of specialists with machine guns and uzi's ready to do any job big or small for the right amount of cash and kick some ass? Oh wait you mean as in crack head squirrels, really... so if you fed 1000 squirrels crack and got them addicted and then trained them to follow your orders and then they would get more crack, then what... well I'll tell you an army of crack head squirrels that's what. Can you imagine that, who'd stop an army of crack squirrels with the ability to lift 10 times their body weight and take numerous bullets and still keep going. I mean hell if you wanted to go that far why not have crack head roaches, now there's an army you would never stop. But surely the Orken man could stop them right? WRONG he would just be pumping more drugs into their system at that point, they'd become super crack head roaches and probably make him a snack and his canister of bug juice their dessert. So who recognizes these crack head squirrels as a phenomena, I mean I don't see Chan. 7 reporting that late last night another drug dealer was struck down by an army of crack squirrels who couldn't pay so they just gnawed their way right through his body and ate the crack all the while leaving his guts spread out across the street spewing blood everywhere. What I wouldn't give for an army of crack head squirrels that's for sho'

The Theater is open for business

Lights On

Lights Off

So here's my new toy, the Sanyo PLV-Z2 in all her 1280x720 glory, that's 720p HD to all you non-techies. Right now it's on a temp screen I made out of blackout material that only comes 54" wide so I've got a 62" 16:9 screen if you do the math. Now once the projector is all mounted the screen will fill at least the width of the closet which is 72" so that makes a 82" 16:9 screen mmmmm tasty. The image is from Dawn of the Dead 2004 Uncut HD Edition, what it's fricken Halloween. Now the fun part comes when I finish everything in my room will I be able to make room for a 100" 16:9 screen well if you know anything you know I'm going to try damn hard.

Weakend update

Well thanks to the Dept. of Transportation I almost died on my way home after they decided it would be nice to close most of I-95 south of Jacksonville down to 1 lane @ 5pm on Thursday. Yeah it’s not like people will be on the road @ 5 on a Thursday cause you know they leave work @ 5 so they should all be home by then. Oh yeah and it was raining so hard you could only see the brake lights of the car about 6 feet away so I’m seriously doubting they were actually going to do any work, you know the thing they closed the roads to do. Brilliant I tell you, just brilliant, I swear do these engineers not play SimCity EVER! I mean they must right; they love to build city roads and shit, it should be part of their test, do not cause mass confusion in a SimCity after 8 hours of play when everyone wants shit like a fire dept. and police dept. within 2 blocks. Then let’s see how their planning skills are after they have to start demolishing roads and crap while fires rage cause the damn fire trucks can’t get to where they need to go. Oh well at least the badger, mushroom & snake hypnotize me into calmness.

Jacksonville

Jacksonville here I come, hopefully to return tonight after I install a workstation and get the hell outta there. Talk to ya’ll later

Rainy Ass Day

Well today looks like your typical Florida day, when are we all going to get out of here and live in our million dollar homes on a culdesac with gigabyte ethernet run to each house to get our game on locally?? That would be one fly THC block let me tell you. Finally had a chance to work on the Home Theater PC (HTPC) this weekend, mmmmm HD goodness let me tell you. Now for all you haters who say quality and big (in this case resolution) isn't everything I beg to differ. Can't wait to get some 720p, that's 1280x720 for all you nontechies, at 100 inches, now that's living large. And what you ask did I test all this wonderful new resolution with, Hackers, DUH! Besides the nacho cheese ending they atleast had, what I thought, was a decent depiction of what goes on inside my head when I wade through files. You know large skyscraper like virtual things with rows of file names on them. ;) What's next, Full Metal Jacket, a nod to our time plying BF: Vietnam. Now why this? Well it's the only way to get it in widescreen, I know some of you still don't see the point, widescreen/fullscreen it's all the same and to you I say ZIP IT. It's not the same nor will it ever be, you see more picture in widescreen and it's how it was filmed, why settle for 3/4 of a car when you aren't going anywhere with 3 outta 4 cylinders in that 4 banger of yours. And 2 good reasons why:

mmm Gran Turismo 4 multi-monitor love, oh wait what was that, you think it's just extra crap no one cares about, ok how about this:

Oh I'm sorry I only have this image in 4:3 Fullscreen not 16:9 widescreen guess you'll just have to fill in the blanks yourselves.

Box of Memories

Was organizing some stuff in my room and found a box with pictures and cards in it that I’ve been saving. It’s funny how I never seem to take enough pictures; all the memories are stuck in my head. But the ones I have taken somehow allow me to pin point an exact moment or feeling from so long ago and bring it back up like it was yesterday. I guess I was always good at that, remembering pretty much everything, things that most people would forget. Then there are the cards, seeing what people wrote about you previously is good and bad all at the same time. It brings up questions like, am I the same person I was back then, are they the same now, if anything has changed why and where did everything go that was written if things are different now. I guess that’s my biggest hang up, I try and stay true as much as possible to what I say, feel and write, it’s a fault really. When other people tell me they’re different now I can’t understand that, certain things I hold steadfast too as long as I can and don’t see how it’s possible for someone to change their minds or erase feelings. I look at the photos and read the cards and wonder just where that person went, what journey has that person gone through to come out on the other side different from what they once were. I know however that everything I have experienced has made me a better person and that’s something everyone should be proud of, if nothing else, we’ve all helped each other as much as we could and turned out better than had we not all been there for each other.

Current Music: Nickleback – Photograph