December 2004 Archives

Back in Mid-May I documented my previous TiVo upgrades. On Monday of this week I finally got around to upgrading the HD TiVo. I ordered another bracket from weaknees. Went through the whole backup and BlessTiVo process. Went pretty smothly other than the fact the acrade machine really didn't feel like booting from the CD. Once I got beyond that it went well.

Here is the current status of the TiVo's in the House of the Damned.
Sony SAT-T60 Series 1 DTiVo - 3.1.0c2 - Originally 40 GB and 35 hours - Now 120 GB and 108 hours - The Lounge
Phillips DSR-6000 Series 1 DTiVo - 3.1.0c2 - Originally 40 GB and 35 hours - Now 160 GB and 146 hours - Roger's bedroom
Hughes HDVR2 Series 2 DTiVo - 3.1.1e - Originally 40 GB and 35 hours - Now 200 GB (177 GB accessible) and 157 hours - Hoyty's bedroom
Hughes SD-DVR40 Series 2 DTiVo - 3.1.1e - Originally 40 GB and 35 hours - Now 200 GB (177 GB accessible) and 157 hours - Travis's bedroom
DirecTV HR10-250 HDTiVo - 3.1.5 - Originally 250 GB and 30 hours HD or 200 hours SD - Now 650 GB and 83 hours HD or 559 hours SD

With these upgrades we now have 5 TiVo's in the house with 1.33 TB of storage space. I think that is enough for now.

Last night we made our yearly visit to the DC auto show. It has become kind of a tradition for Jerry, Karri, Jerry's Dad and I to go to the auto show. Joe's friend Charlie has gone the last few years with us as well. This year Brad and Trisha joined as well. Mostly the auto show is like have every car dealership in the world under one roof. It is neat to see all the cars at once and do side by side comparisons that you normally wouldn't be able to. I saw the Honda Accord Hybrid which is interesting to see. It is a totally standard Accord that gets close to 40 MPG. I also got to see the car you see pictured to the side. It is my dream car. A dark blue Porsche 911 Turbo S, it was perfect. It cost a mere $131K, but it was perfect. Almsot 500 HP. The other car of import I saw was the new Lexus GS. I just haven't warmed to the new styling, it looks like a stretched ES. It isn't like I need a new one anytime soon anyway.

Well it took less than 10 hours, probably like 8 and could have been 6 if I was better. However given that the game was a lot of fun. It had really amazing facial and body graphics. Every once in a while the graphics would glitch in the attachment of parts, gaps in the neck and such. These are nitpicks though. A good deal of the game is spent in hand to hand combat, the rest is with various weapons. It had a good story, filled in some gaps in the Riddick history. I am not sure if making it longer would have made it better, it had kind of an arade feel to it, which is good.

Now decisions decisions, what game next. I am seriously considering getting KOTOR II, since I know I can spend time next week playing it. It is a huge time sink, last one was 40-45 hours long.

Well I finally managed to beat Half-Life 2 today. I stick with my earlier statements of game of the year. It had a nice mix of all out FPS action, platformer jumping, driving and even a level of Myst like amusement park ride. The next to last level is just beautiful and most of it you just sit back and watch. The ending was, well pretty much what I expected from the game.

What's next? Probably Chronicles of Riddick on Xbox. See how the mood strikes me.

Well mostly to get Travis to stop asking me I have put up Festivus pictures. Every night it was, where are the pictures, are the pictures up, have you done the pictures yet. Yes they are up, ok, he he.

I also wanted to say a few words about this year's Festivus and all the fun that was had. Roger started with the cleaning on Friday to prepare, with some help from Travis and I. Also Roger had acquired some liquor and the 16 oz and 24 oz Buds pictured. Then Saturday things got really into gear. I went out in the morning to get food and other supplies. Travis then spent 3 hours or so hand making the pies you see pictured at the side. The last piece to the puzzle was the keg. You can see in the pictures that Roger and Travis had to test the tap and make sure all was in working order. About 5 PM or so I began putting out the food. I didn't think I got any more food than the year before. However, there was quite a lot left over this year, so I guess people didn't eat as much. Also Karri brought over some tasty desserts, some Krispie Treats and cupcakes.

About 6 PM people started showing up. By the time the gift exchange happened there were 30 people in attendance and 28 participating in the gift exchange. The gifts ranged from the really cool and highly sought after to the um questionable (*cough* shark poster *cough*). One thing that came out of this year was a no Simpsons gifts rule. While most people like the Simpsons, we had at least 4 Simpsons based gifts this year and almost as many last year as well. No more. After the gift exchange people dispersed around the house to enjoy adult beverages and food.

People started to leave around 11:30-12:00, of course there were many left over in the morning. Some wanted to do their best to kick the keg, a feat I am sad to say didn't happen. Also we obviously had many other adult drinks left over at the end of the night, or the next morning as it were. It was strange seeing this after last year. One of the things that no one got to enjoy however was the pies that Travis worked so hard on. As you can see from the second photo the pies were destroyed during the evening to prevent anyone from enjoying them. Too bad, since they did look tasty.

All in all it was a pretty good Festivus. All I know is it won't be here next year, our two year duty is up, time to move on. Four of the last six years have been with Roger and I, somebody else can step up now.

Festivus for the rest of us, indeed.

They are a little, ok a lot, late but I have finally put up my Thanksgiving pictures. Here is a link. It was another fun event with all the extended family.

Two Christmas's ago I decided that DVD was ready for the ultimate test, my parents. Now my dad is a trained Electrical Engineer and pretty smart besides, however he really doesn't like new things. He says this is because he is old and can't learn anything else. Well I decided that DVD was ready for the test. I am happy to say it has passed with flying colors.

Now this year I felt that another test was in order. This time it was TiVo. I got one of the first DirectTV/TiVo combo units when they came out in late 2000. I now have 5 currently working in my house, so you can see I really like it. My parent's have cable without a cable box, so I figured a Stand Alone TiVo would work well for them. I will admit it still helps to have someone set it up, however I think my dad could have managed everything except maybe the wireless link.

It appears to have passed the test as my dad emailed me yesterday night and said he made it record a movie and was able to watch it. My mom is most enthused about the ability to see what is on a channel at any time and in depth description. I now declare TiVo ready for the masses, as it has passed the Hoyty Parent Test.

Hmm, HPT maybe there is something there.

On Thursday before leaving to journey to Pittsburgh and my parent's house I had another fun adventure. It started with me walking to the Metro from my house. Next Metro to Union Station (more on that later). Then MARC from Union Station to Penn Station. Cab from Penn Station to friend's house. Then drive from friend's house back to mine. Interesting journey, even if it was a crappy day. Lots of people watching.

This time I had about 30-40 minutes to waste at Union Station. I must say it is a really nice place. It has lots of places to eat. It has a small mall in it. Also it is just a beautiful building on the inside. I just hadn't seen it like that in a long time (if ever).

After that journey I began my trek to Pittsburgh. I had originally planned to leave about 9-10 AM, however due to circumstances I had to postpone my departure to about 1:30 PM. This allowed me to be in real traffic. The traffic was further compounded by the fact that there was a winter monsoon moving through. Luckily it was almost 60 degrees, otherwise there would have been a foot of snow. I took me about 3 hours to get to frederick, should have taken about 75 minutes. Other than a little snow in mountains mostly a normal trip the rest of the way.

I just wanted to say that friends are great to have. Even those that are sometimes anoying while drunk. A special thanks to a couple of female friends who are nice enough to listen to me grumble and advise me. I will get it someday hopefully.

Coming home in a crappy mood and having two drunk pricks to deal with.

Also the fact that a 19 year old knows way more than I do. About important things.

Well on my first weekday vacation day I played Half-Life 2 for about 4 hours. I still must stick with my earlier statement of a great game. Especially now that I have upgraded my machine with better video and more ram and they seem to have patched the stuttering hiccup problem. After returning my machine to normal speed and stopping the crashing it played silky smooth for hours. Very highly recommended.

For the first time since the summer of 2003 I am taking a vacation. I did get time off between Christmas and New Years last year when my school was closed, but I just chalk that up as normal now. This time I left work on Friday December 17th and won't return until Monday January 10th. My blog entries will probably be more frequent during this time, since I will in theory have more free time. They may also get weird as I slowly go insane. We will see.

I watched a couple of movies recently and thought I would comment on them. First is Last Samurai on HBO. I TiVo'ed the HD version of this. It is a good period piece and has some awesome battle scenes. Imagine Braveheart in 1800's Japan. Tom Cruise is very good and not his usual role.

The other ones are DVD's I recently got. I will go best to worst. Lets start with Dodgeball. This was pretty much total cheese. There were some funny parts but were mostly slapstick or other visual. The dialogue based jokes mostly fell flat. Second, is Collateral. This movie was really good until about the last 10 minutes, then it just imploded. It was a neat action/drama/mystery thing. This also has Tom Cruise in it, very different role as well. The best movie of this lot in my opinion is I, Robot. This was straight up popcorn movie action, but it did it really well. The robots looked amazing and Wil Smith was very good. If you are in the mood for some good chase scenes and Sci-Fi action I highly recommend it.

Just a test, move along.

Somehow destroying the pies that Travis worked several hours to create for everyone to eat at Festivus punishes Roger. At least in some people's minds. I don't think that I understand that logic, but I don't drink either. Oh well.

Going into this fall I had it in my mind that I was going to build an entire new machine by now. As time went on and I did research I just wasn't excited about the possibilities. I currently have a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 C Northwood (512 KB) CPU overclocked (stabily) to 3.0 GHz. The best available now is a Prescott running at 3.X GHz and 1 MB of cache, and quite expensive at high end still. At this point I am waiting for Prescott's with 64-bit and 2 MB cache as that will be the point where features and performance will be worth the upgrade.

Instead I have done some upgrades to my current machine that are pretty good bang for the buck items. I got a XFX geFroce 6600 GT AGP 128 MB card for a pretty good price. This was a major upgrade video wise from my old geFroce 4 4400 TI. I have been enjoying it in Half-Life 2 and haven't had chance to test it with Doom 3. The second upgrade was an additional 512 MB of PC 3200 DDR ram from Crucial. The last upgrade was a Pioneer A08-XLB 16X DVD burner with 4x DL burning.

The only other things I am considering right now are some new hard drives. Something like a 36 GB 15K SCSI drive from Seagate and a 74 GB 10K SATA drive from Western Digital. Also maybe a nice CD-Burner before they all disappear.

Last week I was doing some work on our two video editing workstations. I had rebuilt the older one to make it more like the newer one software wise. Then I wanted to test the input encoder box from new machine on the old machine. This is because it wasn't working right on new machine. It seemed to work fine, which is good. Then I wanted to make sure the standard input method still worked. I switched the cables on the VCR to test. I got no signal! I thought I maybe messed up the drivers by installing the other input box. So I used system restore to rollback. Still nothing! I had the previous image (I thought) so I tried to restore it. It was corrupt somehow though so that was a no go. Then I tried to rebuild machine again, ugh. This time the drives got assigned wrong. I figured I needed to get it right so I rebuilt it a third time. This time it still didn't work. Finally I started listening to the nagging voice in my head to check my inputs. I hooked up a TV to the VCR I was using and still nothing, hmm. I checked and moron boy (me that is) had connected to the VCR input rather than output. ARGH! Several hours wasted due to not checking my cables.

We went and saw Ocean's Twelve on Friday night. We got there about 30 min early but since the movie was sold out the theater was already packed. We had to sit in the front section. The movie was mostly about the interaction of all the characters, everything else seemed secondary. There was a pretty good story with some twists and turns. The locations in Europe were interesting although some seemed to have been recycled from earlier movies. If you liked Ocean's Eleven you will probably like this one.

With Andrea coming to US soon I may get to see some more movies over next few weeks. We will see.

I went out and did the food shopping today. Travis and Roger are out getting the keg as I type this. The cleaning is done. Travis and Roger have baked the pies. Now all is left is to get to food put out and for people to arrive.

I figured I would mention a couple of recent movies I saw. I have seen two in the theaters in the last week after having a couple month drought. First, National Treasure which I saw with my family on Thanksgiving weekend. It was a good mystery/adventure movie. Very much a modern day Indiana Jones. It had lots of good chases and clues to track down. One of my favorite parts was the fact that it was actually shot on location. DC was used for DC rather than Toronto or LA. There were many locations used all over DC. There were also several shots done in Philidelphia and New York. Overall a fun flick.

The second movie I saw tonight with Roger and Travis. It was Blade: Trinity, apparently the end of the Blade Trilogy. Basically if you liked Blade and Blade 2 you will most likely like this one. The story wasn't great but it was good enough to tie together the various action scenes. There was also a very good chase sequence. There were a few sections that seemed very music video like, lots of rapid cuts and not much else. There were also several shameless plugs for Apple's iPod. A good action flick if nothing else. Also probably the finale for Blade.

I may also get to Ocean's Twelve this week, I will post my thoughts on it if I do.

On Sunday of last weekend Travis decided to make a fully homemade apple pie. He made the pie crust by hand. Then he cored and peeled the apples. This was a very entertaining piece for Roger and I. Being the curious engineer types we are, we were amazed by the tool he had to do this. It even made the apples into slinky like pieces. Quite cool. The end result was great as well. I have had several pieces of pie now and it is just as good if not better than any store bought pie. Now we must investigate other flavors.

We are hosting the annual Festivus Extravaganza at the House of Destruction. We have begun planning the event this week, about time since it is Saturday I guess. The debate between a keg or many (many) cases of beer. The investigation continues. Also this year we will have one maybe two pies created by master pie technician Travis. I need to get the various trays of snacks and sodas as well. Hopefully all will be ready.

Today I was running Ad-Aware SE Plus on one of the student tablets and saw a new trick. At the end of the scan process I saw the ad-aware window jump around a bit and then the right click menu came up. I wasn't sure what exactly had happened so I let the program finish. Afterward I noticed that there were over 40 items in the ignore list. Most of them were from the famous CWS program. I then went and removed the ignore items and ran it again. This time it removed most of the items. I then rebooted to attempt to remove the rest. The first I ran Ad-Aware after the reboot whatever it was tried to do it again. I think I finally removed it all after 4 runs and a reboot. This stuff is amazing.