This is the good stuff that makes the world go round.
It took me a while to finally decide to jump into the high quality content pool and get an HDTV display. It’s a big one (50″), supports CableCard, HDMI inputs, and it goes all the way up to 1080P. High def programs look fantastic on it. DVDs look pretty good. Standard TV? Not so good, I’m afraid. It eats up a good chunk of the wall, but wow is it cool.
If you want more information on this monster, you can find it here: KDSR50XBR1
I combined three things I’m really good at today to great effect:
What I came up with was: an unflyable airplane and a dead hard drive. The airplane won’t fly because its internal wiring is so lengthy as to be its own distortion amplification device (aka an antenna). The hard drive died (less than 6 months old!) for reasons unknown to me, but it was being moved from one PC case to another.
There are a lot of other things worse in the world, but these two events have conspired against my state of zen today.
A friend of mine has taken to the airwaves for a weekly radio shown in NY. As part of his weekly (or almost so) regiment he has started producing segments called Jaguar Skills. This is seriously funny stuff, well at least to me it is. Its a UK DJ that has “superfly ninja DJ skills” and who battles evil about as well as he combats telemarketers or STDs.
You can find out more at the Jaguar Skills website, or check out the audio episodes below.
Jaguar Skills, ho!
I had one of those wake up calls today where I remember why its best not to leave all the thinking to someone else.
Microsoft’s XP Windows Update site pushed an upgrade to my home PC. Since it is automated, all I had to do was say “yes” to reboot the system after the update arrived. Once I did, I got a “blue screen of death”, had no working audio, and shortly found several dead files written to my hard drive. Of course, the WU Crash dialog appears shortly after my 3rd reboot, telling me that Microsoft has no idea what just happened. Funny, my PC worked just fine up until today.
To make this long story short, Microsoft pushed down drivers for my nForce2 APU audio SoundStorm product, and they were very broken. I had to roll back to older drivers on the nvidia.com web site to get working again. Now the Windows Update site keeps demanding that I install the “new” drivers again.
Talking with some folks at NVIDIA, it sounds like I’m not alone in this debacle. It was proof enough again why taking human common sense out of the loop on technology is a bad, bad thing. Shame on you, Microsoft.
An interesting phenomenon is occurring in my music library and I wonder if I’m alone in this behavior. I find that if I make smart playlists in my music and media player of the moment, then vote on the songs that appear in that playlist, then begin to weed out the songs I don’t really like all that much, that I am in fact listening to only about 10% or so of my total music library.
This gets me wondering: is the majority of music that I (and others) have actually crap or is there just no good way to relate the songs I like to the ones I haven’t heard or found yet? I am working on a project dealing with this very issue at work at the moment, but I am fiddling around with my library on my own time. I wonder if others have the same sorts of experience with their libraries?
In a burst of creative energy I decided to do some clean-up work around the old web site today, fixing broken modules, freshening CSS code, and the like. I occasionally try to fix the forever broken IE PNG bug known as the gray bar on this web site. In a futile attempt, I went to my trusty Google Desktop Search bar (highly recommended if you don’t have it) and typed in “IE6 PNG bug” and got back this juicy nugget:
What have you guys been doing since IE6?
Now, given where I work and the places I have worked I am the last one to cast stones, but the gist of the post works out like this:
We got to 95+% market share and we stopped listening to our customers, our partners, and our developers.
If you don’t believe me, click the link and go read it yourself. This is “How to Ignore Your Customer: 101.” As a 10 year product management professional I can’t tell you how sick this makes me. Stating this sort of thing to the world is tantamount to saying that you have absolutely no business being in the PM role and that customers are merely a bootstrap to getting a comfy office chair. Maybe I’m an odd bird, but if I’m not sticking my neck out for what the customer needs and wants during the product release cycle to the point where my job could be in danger, I feel that I’m not doing my job.
Maybe its time I round up some more PM’s and find out what they think.
Having worked with Microsoft in the past, I know this isn’t SOP for them, but maybe I don’t understand the circumstances for deciding to mothball IE development for so many years.
What can I say about this monitor? It rocks, it is certainly the best looking and brightest LCD display I’ve ever used. It handles games very well (with its fast <8ms response time) and eats so much less power than a CRT. It takes up much less desk space, is easier to move around, and looks cooler as well. I’m positively smitten with it.
I won’t waste time giving you all the specs (you can find them here if you want them) but its 1280x1024x72hz goodness, super sharp, great contrast, and stare at the sun bright. Yes, its about $600, but 19″ monitor goodness currently (as of this post) doesn’t get any better than this. Go out and pick one up… and I’m not just saying that because I’m an employee.
I put together my third PC, the “alternate” that I wanted to use as my server in the basement, but that I had left by the wayside for a while. In my quest to “get it done” I hurriedly slapped everything together and screwed everything back into the case. It looked good at the time, anyway.
Upon applying power I was met with the distinctive smell of cooking silicon, and a small waft of “magic smoke” slipped up past my side. Now the motherboard doesn’t even power on and I likely cooked the CPU and the motherboard. I got in a hurry and got sloppy somewhere, and the PC paid the price.
Now I have to decide what to do with the parts: go off and see if there is another motherboard worth building a server around or write this project off until I retire another PC. Bummer.
I’m glad I didn’t make it to CES 2005 this year, otherwise I would have to hear this directly: DirecTV is building their own DVR and intends to dump TiVo. Now this isn’t completely new news, but when put together with other comments they made this week (MPEG4 broadcasts for local HD, home media centers) DirecTV seems determined to separate themselves completely from TiVo, and leave us current Direc-TiVo owners high and dry.
TiVo isn’t sitting still, they announced that they are building a new class of stand alone HD TiVo just for cable and that they are partnering with Microsoft to offer a TiVoToGo service for sharing content around the home. They aren’t dead, but they are looking closer to death every day.
Good thing I have friends with access to Windows XP Media Center Edition. That may have to be the next new PVR/DVR for my home… and bring with it a TV regime change away from DirecTV. It won’t be a sudden change, but its got me thinking I need to get a solution together soon. Maybe SBC’s new IPTV solution (working with Microsoft) will save me? Right.
A funny thing happened to me this week. Actually, something funny always seems to happen to me, it just isn’t usually ha-ha kind of funny. I discovered the wealth of TV shows archived and presented for my (and your) viewing enjoyment on the internet.
And it’s not just any old internet. This is the super secret world of back room P2P file sharing, growing up and making it more tolerable for the masses. Using a combination of BitTorrent technology with the P2P search engine of the moment, ISOHunt, and a suitable download client on Windows, called Azureus, I have found that you can download just about any episode of any popular (and some not-so-popular) television shows. Seeing as how I currently have more time than common sense, I have installed all of this P2P-ware on one of my PCs and tried it.
I started off with an easy one: CSI. I found that virtually every show this season is online. Next I went looking for something I haven’t seen: Desparate Housewives. Not only did I find all the episodes, but some nice folks have bundled up the first 6 shows into a single archive. Whats better still is that most of these programs are HDTV transfers, so on my 21″ monitor I’m watching full screen goodness, not the SD (standard definition) postage stamp size video with horrible artifacts.
All of this learning has taught me a few things:
All of this TV, all in HDTV, all without commercials. It is truly amazing and as the bandwidth to the home continues to go up I don’t see how the TV market will survive in its current form. Lets hope they wake up and make the right moves for the consumer before they get Napser-ized like the record companies did.