I heard this one on an episode of 10 Items or Less tonight, Carl says that his Mom gave him one good piece of advice:
Just because it feels good doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lock the bathroom door and turn on the fan.
Quote of the week 2/6/08
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Shameful plug: Live After Death DVD
Yep, I’m plugging someone else’s product but I don’t care. I think that Iron Maiden‘s Live After Death could be the best live concert recording ever. They are re-releasing it on DVD in a couple of days and at US$15 for two discs it’s a steal. Below is the teaser video from their site. I just might even pre-order it from Amazon.
Better yet their 2008 tour is named “Somewhere Back in Time” and according to Blabbermouth.net itrevisits the band’s incredible history by focusing almost entirely on the ’80s in both choice of songs played and the stage set, which is based around the legendary Egyptian production of the 1984-85 Powerslave tour. This is arguably be the most elaborate and spectacular show the band have ever presented, and includes some key elements of their Somewhere In Time tour of 1986/7, such as the Cyborg Eddie.
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Kubby for Prez
No I’m not a closet Mickey Mouse Club fan, I decided to vote for Steve Kubby in the Libertarian primary election next week. (Actually I’m a lazy bastard and registered a few years ago for permanent absentee balloting so that I can just mail in my votes every election.)
Here’s are the firsts paragraphs of his Wikipedia entry (linked to above):
Steven “Steve” Wynn Kubby (born December 28, 1946) is a Libertarian Party activist who played a key role in the drafting and passage of California Proposition 215. The proposition was a ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana which was approved by voters in 1996. Kubby himself is well-known as a cancer patient who relies on medical cannabis. He has authored two books on drug policy reform: The Politics of Consciousness,[3] and Why Marijuana Should Be Legal.[4] He was the Libertarian Party candidate for Governor of California in 1998 and has declared his candidacy for the Libertarian Party’s 2008 presidential nomination.
In 1968, at the age of 23, he began experiencing symptoms of hypertension and palpitations. He was diagnosed with malignant pheochromocytoma, a rare, fatal form of adrenal cancer. Kubby underwent surgery to remove a tumor in 1968, 1975 and 1976. This last time, his medical records show that the cancer had metastasized to his liver and beyond. All other patients with this diagnosis have had a 100% mortality rate within five years. His physician, Dr. Vincent DeQuattro, a specialist from the USC School of Medicine, monitored his condition and treated him with conventional therapies, including chemotherapy, until referring him to the Mayo Clinic in 1981 for yet another surgery and radiation.
For the next 25 years, Kubby claimed to control the symptoms of his disease solely by smoking medical marijuana and by maintaining a healthy diet. His original doctor, an expert on this condition shocked to learn he was still alive, said, “In some amazing fashion, this medication has not only controlled the symptoms of the pheochromocytoma, but in my view, has arrested its growth.”
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Geek Hierarchy
I originally saw this a long time ago but today when a guy at work asked if I had heard of LARPing (sadly I have) I decided to hunt down the image and post it myself. I don’t know about you but I find it quite humorous and based on some grain(s) of truth. If you don’t know what LARPing is just go to YouTube and search on LARP and you’ll be horrified. Lightning Bolt!!
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HDD storage cost bell curve
Like my friend Darana said this is Nerds R Us. Somebody compiled hard drive costs from Newegg and plotted a graph of GB/dollar across various drive sizes and came up with a basic point graph here. Looks like right now the sweet spot is 500GB drives where you can get just over 5GB for each of your hard-earned dollars (~$100). He did the same thing for flash memory cards but there isn’t an obvious sweet spot on the graph. The HDD plot is actually a slightly-skewed bell curve though.
His picture on the main page is a bit creepy but if he’s programming in Python, C and PHP and he is “currently 14.6906376277 years old” then he’s got a great future ahead of him. He’s even working on the PCB for a quad-rotor UAV.
Posted in Geeky Computers
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Cat in a suitecase? That’s unpossible! (Not once, but twice)
Boy this one is wacky: not only does a cat fly from Florida to Texas in a suitcase but it isn’t even the owner who opens up the suitcase. Can you imagine picking up someone else’s suitcase by mistake, getting all the way home with it and then seeing a cat jump out when you open it?
I actually originally saw this story on my cell phone but found the full story at the AP web site when I got home. And wait, it gets better, while looking for this story I ran across another story where a Canadian lady ended up checking her cat by mistake also. This story was titled Cat is out of the bag on Saint John Airport Security though, leave it to the media to make everything sound scary.
“They had asked me, when they put … the luggage through the X-ray, whether I had a turkey,” Martell said.
“[Security] kept going back and forth with [the suitcase],” Martell said. “I was adamant. ‘Look, I have no turkey.'”
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Finally, a new look
I really liked my old theme (Fighting the Darkness) because it had the rounded, bolted on to the side look for the sidebar but I finally decided that I needed to get a newer template that was widget-ready for WordPress and handled CSS better (the sidebar fonts on the old look weren’t right). I settled on Mandingo from onehertz. It has a lot of customizable features including color schemes so don’t be surprised if you see a something besides green on your next visit. I also got off my ass and made a favicon out of one of my favorite comic book character, Milk (from Milk & Cheese). In case you have a really high-res monitor here’s the original image:
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Custom USB drive (COBRAAAAA!!!)
One of my buddies linked to a story on Engadget that ultimately pointed back to this thread at the JoeCustoms web site. This guy basically hollowed out an old holographic Cobra Commander action figure and inserted a small USB memory stick in it. This of course has set the gears in my head turning, wondering what objects (especially action figures) I have around the house that I could hack that way.
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TSA-Inspired Art
These cool sculptures were on the back page of Reason magazine this month and I thought that they were just cool looking in their own right but there’s more: they are made solely from objects seized (rightly or wrongly) by TSA agents at airport screenings. Read all about it in the original article.
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Reason Magazine
I have been subscribed to Reason magazine for many months now and I find it a great read every month. It’s a libertarian magazine that deals with all the ways that our freedoms are being taken away (civil liberties, privacy, economic freedoms etc.) I’m probably going to start quoting articles since there have been some great quotes in recent interviews & articles. Here’s their About Us statement:
Reason is the monthly print magazine of “free minds and free markets.†It covers politics, culture, and ideas through a provocative mix of news, analysis, commentary, and reviews. Reason provides a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-wing opinion magazines by making a principled case for liberty and individual choice in all areas of human activity.
Reason Online is updated daily with articles and columns on current developments in politics and culture. It also contains the full text of past issues of the print edition of Reason. Reason Online is entirely free.
Reason and Reason Online are editorially independent publications of the Reason Foundation, a national, non-profit research and educational organization.
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Curved gaming monitor prototype from Alienware
Holy hell, this prototype DLP monitor from Alienware for gaming looks awesome. It displays at 2880×900 resolution and the curve is supposed to simulate peripheral vision. I can only imagine that it will cost something like $1000 if it ever hits the streets. Thanks to Pingmeister for the link (he’s an Engadget freak).
Engadget article about Alienware curved DLP monitor
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Ticket To Ride
I picked up Ticket to Ride from my local game shop to take with us to my parents’ house for vacation last week. This is an amazing game, very quick to learn but each time we played we picked up on more nuances. I really would like to find some local people to play so my wife & I don’t have to play by ourselves all the time.
I had asked my online buddies for suggestions for a board game to play with the family (Tripoley and Trivial Pursuit were getting old) and the most common suggestion was Ticket to Ride. Extra bonus: when you buy the game you get a code for six months of online play on the Days of Wonder site.
Official Ticket to Ride web site
I am a big fan of Board Game Geek and highly recommend it to anyone looking to buy a game, you can read reviews etc. before making a purchase. You can check out the Ticket to Ride page here. For geeks like me with a lot of board games it also offers a tool to track your collection.
On a related note I’m a big proponent of supporting your local shops, be they for games, hobbies or whatever. I could have bought this game online for $25 plus minimal shipping but I paid $40 plus sales tax at my local gaming shop, Pair-A-Dice Games, instead just to help them stay afloat. They offer a gaming room with different games each day (board games, Magic: The Gathering, LoTRO minis etc.)
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Schedules Direct to the Rescue
Well a quick visit to the MythTV site led me to Schedules Direct which might be my replacement when the ReplayTV guide eventually goes away (which I know it will, at least it was available long enough to make my $200 “lifetime” subscription pay for itself and then some). SD is only charging $20 per year which is great, I may join just on principle to keep the project alive.
One of my future project was to build a homebrew DVR at some point instead of buying one. All you need to do is get a nice PC enclosure and build a Linux box to load MythTV or Sage onto it with a giant hard drive and one or more TV tuner cards. Now that I know about SD I may still be able to go that route once my budget allows for it. Thank goodness hard drive prices have fallen through the floor since I’ll probably build an HD-capable box which will take a ton of drive space.
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TiVo vs. ReplayTV
Once again we see that the superior technology has lost the battle. I agree with all the comments about how the ReplayTV DVR feature set has always been better than TiVO (it took TiVo five years to add Ethernet for cryin’ out loud) but of course TiVO had better marketing and basically drove RTV out of business.
Here’s an article about DirecTV buying the ReplayTV patents and intellectual property (IP) from the Japanese company that bought it from Sonic Blue when SB went bankrupt a couple of years ago. Luckily there are a lot of other hardcore RTV fans out there so even if the current program guide goes away we still have options.
I remember choosing RTV over TiVO many years ago because it had Ethernet capability. I hadn’t even discovered DVArchive yet but I obviously made the right choice. I have really enjoyed being able to download shows to my large PC hard drive and then burn them to DVD to save for posterity. I even upgraded the small hard drive in my RTV from 40GB to 150GB a year ago with no hassle at all. I’m really disappointed that RTV lost the DVR wars. I read that Tivo will let you buffer a whole 30 minutes of live TV, that’s ridiculous. The RTV will buffer as much empty hard drive space that’s available, sometimes we can pause a show for twelve hours and come back to finish watching it.
Luckily you can still buy old RTV units on eBay and get the program guide for free from Zap2It Labs. Sadly I just today came across an article from six months ago that says they were going to discontinue the free program guide service in September. I found this forum thread from June that discusses options so now I’m going to have to go in search of current news about online program guides. I don’t have a problem paying a modest fee for program guide info every month (say US$5) so hopefully someone has stepped up to the plate on this.
One disconcerting thing I did read in a thread was that
FYI, Tribune Media (aka TMS, the company that owns zap2it) is the *only* source of episode guide data in the US other than the stations themselves. They have an exclusive license to all of it (even if a large chunk of the descriptions are incorrect). Everyone else providing listings is just buying it from TMS.
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Do you know your sci-fi sounds?
Thanks to Mangoat for finding an Internet quiz that was actually interesting. Apparently I’m “an extreme sci-fi geek. I’m probably wearing my very own homemade TRON costume right now.”
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I received 86 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you? |
| Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz | |
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