I managed to beat Tron 2.0 this morning. I didn't quite get a perfect score, however there doesn't seem to be any bonus to doing so. Now I have to decide what game to play next in my pile of games. I am thinking either Max Payne 2 or Deus Ex : IW.
I am going to attempt the best buy and bookstore run again today, I am a slow learner I guess. Oh well.
Well Kevin, Greg, Jim and Dan all showed up last night. Most had already eaten before coming over. More leftovers for today I guess. Still have some burgers, dogs and chops.
Today is a bit dreary outside, the sun of the last two days disappeared.
Travis and I just got back from The Day After Tomorrow. It was a great summer Sci-Fi special effects bonaza. Personally I don't buy into the science and even less the politics of it. It brings up some interesting questions and all. Mostly it is an amazing site seeing some of the effects they crafted for it. The movie was if not soldout, very close. I don't know how much this one cost to make, but if my local theater is any indication it is going to do pretty well.
Today I went to Best Buy with the intent to spend money and purchase stuff. This doesn't happen as much as it used to since I am trying to save a bit. However I had $10 of reward zone gift certificates and 10% off coupons so I figured I could get some stuff. I was thwarted however by the new re-designed Best Buy. The local Best Buy's have changed to now have depth of hot items rather than breadth of choice. The selections for CD, DVD and Video Games has shrank greatly in recent past.
Best Buy's computer parts selection has changed a lot as well. They now carry motherboards, CPUs and other parts they didn't used to. However they dropped some other more useful stuff such as cables. The big problem is the lack of stock however, lots of empty shelves in the computer section.
The problem I had today at Best Buy also brings up some questions about the future of stores that sell things that like CDs, DVDs, Books and to a lesser extent Video Games. These products come with built in problems that online stores are purpose built to solve. There are two major problems as I see it; first, shelf space vs. selection; second, organization and sorting for finding or inventory. When I go to an online store I can instantly find something and usually determine stock. At a traditional bookstore I could spend 20-30 minutes just trying to find something and never knowing if it is even there to be found. There is something to be said for being able to hold a book or cd in your hand and look at it before buying, but this is for people who are shopping vs. people who are buying like myself usually. I just want to walk in, pick up, pay and walk out most of the time. It is just frustrating to not be able to find what you want for various reasons.
I attempted to use Best Buy's online site to purchase and then pickup in store. However it won't let you ring up your coupons or certificates. Oh well, try again I guess.
I spent some of yesterday playing Tron 2.0. It is a really good game, similar to Dues Ex. It is also reinforces a recent idea I have on PC games. Wait 6 months or so after a good game comes out to get it. This way if it is good and worth it they will have patched it to make it better and less buggy. Also you can get it much cheaper. There are a few games I will buy in the first week like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, but many of the smaller games just improve after patching. I first did this with Unreal, Deus Ex and Half-Life, all three of which became tremendously better with patching. The core game didn't change much, just the bugs were squashed so that the playing experience wasn't hurt. I was hoping this would happen with Deus Ex : Invisible War. However it looks like the patches only got it so far, then the urge to continue to fix it left Eidos who is the distributor and financer of the game. Also Ion Storm the producer of game is having issues and that never helps. Hopefully it will be good when I get around to playing it.
A good weathered Memorial day weekend is the best. Roger is out of town, but Travis is here. Yesterday we grilled out for lunch and dinner, Jim showed up for dinner as well. Today we are going to grill for dinner as well, probably with Kevin and Jim. Who knows who else will show up, the door is always open.
I went by Safeway yesterday and then Giant today to get supplies. Burgers, Hot Dogs, Pork Chops, Chicken, Corn on the Cob, we are ready to eat. If we grill some more tomorrow, may need some more food even.
It is in the high 70's and low 80's all weekend. Only downside is the Cicada's, noise and just flying around everywhere. Just nice and relaxing.
I did some house cleaning at work remotely today. Installed some updates such as Backup Exec 9.1 and Exchange 2003 SP1. Probably to some more quick testing and such over the weekend. Just little things that are easier to do when no one is there.
Well a Toshiba rep came out again yesterday and tried to win us over again. We basically said fix it and we love you, otherwise don't blame us when the parents lynch you.
On different side, I place an order with Toshiba (I know why?) for 65 M200 tablets. We got the bags and CD-RW/DVD-ROMs today (external). Hopefully we will get the machines in time for me to prep them without killing myself.
As I said above, why stick with Toshiba. Well when they build a machine right it is pretty good. Also they have by far the best tablet right now. Basically if we went with someone else it would be just to spite Toshiba and not for any good technical or business reason. I am just hopeful that the M200 is not another S1.
I got my car back today. As far as I can tell as good as new. I would defy anyone to just walk up and say it was fixed. Great job by Lindsay Collision center. They were even nice and buffed out the rear bumper where someone brushed my car and gave me some touch up paint. I would post pictures, but well it just looks normal now.
It appears Microsoft is finally putting some real anti-spam technology into the box for Ex2k3 SP1. I wonder how all those Anti-Spam vendors are feeling today. Since we already pay someone (and they do a good job) I won't be installing the new stuff at school right away. I will be testing it at home shortly however on hoyty.com. See how good it is. 99% of my mail is now either virus or spam based.
Well Shrek 2 did appear to be sold out, however we were some of the first into theater so it wasn't a big deal. The movie was very funny, however it did have some slow parts. The one thing that I wasn't sure about was that the characters almost looked too real. In the first movie the characters had a very computer like almost plastic feel to them. This time Shrek looked to have real skin, it was almost spooky. It just felt weird at times hearing Cameron Diaz voice and seeing this perfect looking ogre. I don't know how to describe it well.
Oh and went to Red Robin afterwards, always love there burgers.
If you use Notepad period and especially if you use it like I do to edit VBS/WSH you must try Notepad2. It is just as small and fast, however it highlights keywords in common programming and scripting languages. It looks awesome.
Yesterday while reading some magazines I watched some shows on TiVo. Due to TiVo's ability to archive essentially forever sometimes you experience something I like to call the TiVo time warp. I was watching episodes of Boston Public from as far back as September of '03. While watching these episodes I saw commercials for movies coming out in theaters that have now already come out on DVD. I also saw commercials for FOX shows that premiered and were canceled within the span of these episodes I was watching, such as Skin.
Speaking of canceled, it appears that Boston Public has now been canceled. I am sure this is due to ratings, of course caused by FOX stupidly moving it to the death zone of Friday nights. One of the additions this season was Dennis Miller, who I thought brought a nice change of pace to the show. Too bad it is gone now. For some reason FOX insists on scheduling shows that I like on Friday nights, such as Fastlane a year ago. Roger and I both liked that show.
Many of the shows I used to like are disappearing, and I must admit few of the new shows seem to be striking my fancy. Which I guess is having the good effect of me watching less broadcast network primetime programming. This is of course happening to the populace as whole as you can see from the declining ratings.
Last night I spent about 2.5 hours touching up the calibration on my 65" TV. Very few people do this, mostly because they don't know they can and others because they don't care. I can't overstate how important this is to enjoyment of your TV. There are three important parts. First is fixing geometry (so a circle is round), then fixing the convergence (so a white line is white and not a red, blue and green line close to eachother) and overscan (so the all of the picture can be seen) and lastly fixing the colors (so red is red and not orange). When this is first done some people don't notice it, but if it is done and watched for a period of time I guarantee it will be noticed if undone.
I learned some of how to do this from sites like AVS Forum and Home Theater Spot, a great deal of it I learned when I had a professional ISF calibrator come in work on my TV. Unfortunately not all ISF people are the same, however I can personally recommend Eliab from AVICAL especially on Toshiba brand TV's.
I ran into some oddities while calibrating the HDTV resolution on my TV so I posted to Home Theater Forum in hopes the Eliab or some other more knowledgeable person than I will respond.
If you buy a $1000 and up TV, spend the time (and possibly money) to make it work like one.
After calibrating my TV (more on that in another post) I watched Paycheck on DVD last night. It was a good Sci-Fi flick I must say. It is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick who has had Minority Report, Total Recall and Blade Runner made into movies as well. One of neat aspects of the movie was the idea of doing reverse engineering in a clean room and then wiping the engineers memories to make sure it can't be done again. Brings new meaning to the idea. Recommend move.
Hopefully the attempt to watch Shrek 2 this afternoon will go better than the attempt to watch Troy Friday night.
For the first time in about 10 years I mowed a full size lawn. At the last house I would cut the 15'x15' back yard with a weed whacker. Roger got a 6.75 HP Troy-Bilt self-propelled mower. It took me about 45 min to cut the entire lawn.
I am not sure if the Cicada's are still building or are near peak, but they are loud. I can hear them inside the house over the TV and my jet blower computer. The best way I can describe the sound is a wagging stick. Only 1000 of them surrounding you.
Well Travis, Jim and I attempted to go to Troy tonight. We figured a 9:15 showing with a previous 8:45 showing and going against Shrek 2 would be a good idea. We arrived at 8:55 and both the 8:45 and 9:15 showing were sold out out. BOO! This particular theater seems to be too popular for its own good sometimes. I guess if you can you want to sell out every show, but that means you are turning away and angering a certain amount of people.
Today in preparation for next school year I created some of the accounts for new students. This is one of the few times a year I look at the massive VB Script I have to create users, set attributes, create exchange mailboxes, join groups and create folders. During the past year I did some work on scripting folder permissions changes using cacls. Today I integrated that code into my master user creation script. Now the script creates the folder and sets permissions properly for me. This script saves me a few min per user and enables me to create over 100 users in a minute or so. I shudder to think of doing this back in the NT 4.0/Exchange 5.5 days.
As I am sure most of you have seen, many cars today have rims on them called spinners. These rims have a core that spins somewhat independently of the rest of wheel. I have seen some really poor looking spinners on some even poorer looking cars. Today on my commute in I saw a semi truck with spinners on its rear cab wheels. It was just bizzare.
This week Toshiba (via Siemens) was supposed to come on site and replace system boards in over 100 laptops that were faulty when made. I documented yesterday the quality of some of the workers sent on site to do the repairs. Now today I come to find out that they can't even get us enough system boards to do the repairs. They sent us 50 out of 130-150 or so that we needed. At least 6 of those 50 were DOA. The most aggravating thing is that I can do nothing about it, other then try to take business from Toshiba and hope they notice it.
I turned in my car for repairs yesterday. Enterprise is on site at the Lindsay Collision center and I got a rental from them. It is a Chrysler Pacifica. It is one of these SUV/Sedan/Minivan hybrid things. It isn't great at anything and has the absolute worst visibility of any car I think I have ever driven. The rear window is tiny and all I see out of the side is the corner of the door/windshield. It is huge and underpowered. It could have been worse I guess.
Now that the summer movie season is ramping up I will have to add some movie commentaries. This weekend I actually watched quite a few, none in the theaters though.
Timeline (DVD) - I really liked the Micheal Crichton book this was based off of. The movie however seemed to make it a lot more cheesy, more flash and less development. It was still an ok movie, just not as good as I had hoped.
Big Fish (DVD) - This movie wasn't quite what I was expecting, but was very good. It was more of a drama and less of a comedy than I thought. It was directed by Tim Burton and had music by Danny Elfman, which is always a favorite combo of mine. I would recommend this movie with the proper expectations.
Impostor (TiVo Sho HD) - First off this movie is in HD on Showtime, however they weren't using the Dolby Digital track for some reason? Anyway, this movie came out at Christmas of 2002 and was out for about a week. It just didn't catch on for some reason. It was a pretty good action sci-fi flick. It had some good twists and turns and really had quite a few starts in it. Worth watching on Showtime.
One other comment on DVD's and trailers. If you are going to force me to watch trailers, at least put them in anamorphic high res on disc. Most companies are so lazy that they put some wrong aspect ratio, poorly transfered trailers on the DVD. Big Fish had a beautiful Spider-Man 2 trailer on it, really how it should be done. It doesn't take the companies much extra work, they just choose not to do it for some reason.
Since I didn't update Saturday at all and not so much on Sunday I thought I would do a weekend review.
Friday - Karen came over to hang out for a while. This was the second time I had seen Karen in about 2 weeks. Before that it had been July '03 at my last Halo party that I saw her. We traded some MP3's between here iRiver and my server. We also went out to a Steak & Cheese place called Al's. The large sandwhich was so big I ate half for dinner and saved the other half. Very good sandwhich, highly recommended. We also watched Timeline on DVD, more comments on that later. The stangest thing was that Roger and Travis didn't drink, a rare Friday night.
Saturday - A bunch of us went to Brian Blankenships wedding. It was supposed to start at about 11:00 AM, actually started about 11:30 AM. The wedding was mostly in Spanish so I understood less of it than usual. Afterwards we went to reception in the building that the couple lives in. It was a fairly small wedding, only about 40 people I think. The crackerjames crew exhausted the supply of Corona's rather quickly and had to move onto the standy of Bud Light. We left the reception about 3:30 PM.
We went back to our place and hung out. I went out to get a Hard Drive for Sunday's activity that I detailed already. We ordered a bunch of pizza and everyone continued the drinking from the reception.
Sunday - I spent the majority of the morning upgrading the TiVo's as I detailed already. After the TiVo I helped with cutting down of a tree. Then Roger and Travis rented Big Fish on DVD, more on that later. In the evening we watched a TiVo of Impostor the movie from Showtime HD.
That's pretty much the weekend, all in all pretty good.
I am trying to remain calm currently. The Toshiba guys (well really Siemens) are here right now. Many of them appear to have never taken apart a laptop before. It is very scary to watch what they are doing, very slowly. They are supposed to do close to 50 machines today and they have gotten 2 done in 90 minutes. There are 7 guys.
Today I finally got around to upgrading the two Series 2 DirecTiVo's in the house. One being Travis's and the other being the one that was displaced by the new HDTiVo. I took a few hours, just because I wanted to make sure I did everything right. I got mounting brackets from weaKnees since the Series 2 models weren't made to handle 2 hard drives from the factory. Travis took a picture of me while working on his TiVo and pasted it in.
We now have a total of 5 TiVo's of various ages and sizes. I personally upgraded them all, here is a list of them. I listed them in the order they were acquired.
Sony SAT-T60 Series 1 DTiVo - 3.1.0b - Originally 40 GB and 35 hours - Now 120 GB and 108 hours - The Lounge
Phillips DSR-6000 Series 1 DTiVo - 3.1.0b - Originally 40 GB and 35 hours - Now 160 GB and 146 hours - Roger's bedroom
Hughes HDVR2 Series 2 DTiVo - 3.1.1c - Originally 40 GB and 35 hours - Now 200 GB (177 GB accessible) - Hoyty's bedroom
Hughes SD-DVR40 Series 2 DTiVo - 3.1.1c - Originally 40 GB and 35 hours - Now 200 GB (177 GB accessible) - Travis's bedroom
DirecTV HR10-250 HDTiVo - 3.1.5 - Still 250 GB and 30 hours HD or 200 hours SD - Will be upgraded this summer to at least 500 GB - TV Room
With these upgrades we now have 5 TiVo's in the house with 930 GB of storage space. Once I upgrade the HDTiVo we will have over 1 TB of storage for TV programming. Nuts I know.
When we first moved in to this house there was a tree in the woods behind the house that was leaning. It had apparently been uprooted to some extent. In some recent storm the tree was uprooted even more and the tree was almost parallel to the ground. Today Travis cut the tree down using a chainsaw and then cut it into fire sized logs. Then Roger trimmed the trees it fell through on the way down. I attempted to help clean up the branches and other debri after the cutting. Slowly but surely we are getting the yard into shape after the neglect of the previous owner.
I watched the series finale of Fraiser on TiVo Saturday morning. I actually think I liked it better than the Friends finale, it just seemed to actually progress the story. The reason for the ? in the title though is how they left the show. Fraiser took a new job in San Francisco and was following a woman to Chicago. This leads to comments that Kelsey Grammer made alluding to the fact that he may do a third Fraiser character on some other network. This guy needs to move on I think, I mean he has used this character for over 20 years now. It is done already.
At about 2 PM today we finally recieved 50 system boards for our Toshiba Tecra S1 rework on Monday. Hopefully we will recieve more in the next few days to ensure we have enough for all our laptops. The other interesting thing is today's system boards are different from the two we received earlier this week. We will see how this all works out.
Well I just installed this a week or so ago and now the new version came out. Great right, well apparently it changed from free to cost. This happens to most good products out there eventually, or they just disappear altogether under the weight of hosting charges and such. Apparently there is a free version for a single author, so I guess I qualify. I will see tonight.
On my drive in this morning there were 3 different cops sitting in the median at various locations and I assume clocking cars for speeding. I can go a whole month and see none on my commute and then there are days like today where they are out in force. Always makes me wonder.
Then there is the one that sits at the southern end of 295 everyday. It is a cruiser with a camera on the front. It is a joke since everyone knows the car is there and why. It serves to slow people down for a half a mile, but other than that it seems to be a total waste of resources.
Well driving home today I had not one but two people almost rear end me. By this I mean screeching and smoking tires sliding toward me. Adrenaline rushes are great and all, but this is getting old.
Well we still only have two system boards total. Lets hope we get some more tomorrow or is Monday going to be really bad.
This morning as I was walking into my office one of the girls at school pointed at me and kind of squeaked (no this doesn't normally happen) and just at that point I felt something tickle my neck. I reached up and grabbed (then threw down) a Cicada. YUCK. I am not ashamed to admit that I hate creepy crawly bugs. Spiders fine, snakes fine, mice fine, bugs ewww.
My parts are in for my car repair and I am scheduled to bring it in on Monday. They estimated 5 days for repair, so hopefully I will get it back the next weekend. My claims adjuster finally called yesterday and I have been playing phone tag since.
In working with the new Beta of Education Edge at work I am finding it is less done than one would have hoped. To equate to the MSFT style of beta, it is about beta 1 I think. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Releases Candidate. We keep finding bugs but not a whole lot of answers yet.
Well I went and got estimate on car today, only a pitance of $1700 or so. Fixing cars is a good racket I guess. Hopefully it won't take too long to get parts or to fix it. I am still driving it for now.
We got more fun Toshiba parts today. Screws and plastics in case anything is lost or broken. I told them to send screen latches which are our most often broken part.
I just finished watching tonight's episode of 24. It is still one of the best shows on TV I think. Its ratings have dropped off this year so it may be done. I am not sure what they can do to keep topping themselves anyway. It is about the only show also not ending this week for the season, it still has two episodes left. I got my nifty new HDTiVo and will soon have nothing (at least on regular networks) to record. I guess I will have to find HD movies and such.
Well today was pretty good to a point. We started receiving parts for the Toshiba Tecra S1 rework today. We got 150 new modems and syringes for silicon grease. The 150 system boards and other stuff should be in over the next few days.
I left work about 4:25 PM or so and headed home as usual. Now before I start this I will admit that I have been having some drowsiness problems on way home for last few weeks. I can't figure out why though. Well today was no different except for one thing. This time I think it caused my accident. As you can see in the picture (more pictures) off to the side, my passenger side front quarter panel is ruined. My bumper is a bit scuffed as well. I hit a pickup truck with chrome bumper so the damage to it was minimal. I am waiting until tomorrow to hear from a senior claims adjuster at my insurance company USAA. Then I will take it over to my dealer's collision center, which has agreement with USAA so there won't be any trouble. I think I just lifted my foot off the brake, so stupid. It was in this area with construction and no real defined lanes/lines, which is why it hit at such an awkard angle. If I or other car was 6 inches the other way, nothing would have happened. I will find out if I get rental tomorrow. Yipee.
Well I am in the process of watching the Survior All-Stars Reunion special. I watched the main show finale earlier. As Roger said "100% if a woman is in final two, she wins" he was right of course. Watching the people on the reunion special still whining about the stuff that happened on the show is funny. Any one out there reading this thing? It seems kind of cool.
Well since this is new I thought I would recap last week a bit.
On Tuesday I left work a little early and was able to catch the UPS lady. She delieverd my DirecTV HR10-250 HDTV TiVo. The TiVo is quite awesome, to be able to now timeshift HD programming just as I have been able to for 3 years with SD programming.
On Wednesday I stayed at work late to have a parent's Tech night and introduce the Toshiba M200 Tablet to them. It went pretty well, not as much turnout as we had hoped. More questions were along the line of why the school uses computers in a 1-1 fashion period rather than why the Tablet PC.
On Thursday I watched the series finale of Friends. I didn't watch this show from the beginning I must admit. It wasn't until about season 4 or 5 that I started watching. I think Karri may have made me notice it more. I must say it was kind of lackluster and predictable. Everything you assumed would happen did, oh well.
On Friday my brain was tapioka at work I must admit. Our upgrade to Education Edge Beta at work had been lots of work Wednesday and Thursday. I got a call that my stereo was back from being repaired.
I went by and picked it up on the way home, made my total commute about 3 hours. After dinner I hooked it all up and it seemed to be working well. Due to changes I wanted to re-configure remote. In the process I bumped the power cord on server (which was lose) and the server powered on and off a few times rapidly.
This apparently (after much investigation) fried the on-board SCSI card. I luckily had a spare, however it wasn't that easy. I tried many things and even gave in and called Microsoft to make sure I wasn't missing some new Windows Server 2003 trick. I ended up running an in place upgrade which seems to have fixed it. Which is why the server was down from 8:30 PM to 5:30 PM the next day.
Saturday was Cinco de Mayo observed party. Pictures. I also spend a portion of the day continuing to fix the server, loads of fun that was.
On Sunday I did finally reprogram the remote and it is controlling all the new stuff well and even doing some new tricks. Then I watched some HD shows from last week on the new tivo and read the Sunday paper.
After that I decided to follow up on an earlier idea and install the program (collection of scripts) you are looking at. I then spent a bit of time importing and cleaning up digital pictures. Lastly, I made this Blog entry. Um enjoy or something.
Ok so this is my first post to my new weblog. Lets see if this thing works.
