6.27.2005
11:16pm

Toothpaste For Dinner.
One of my favorites: Screw America

7:44pm

My weekend: 2500 miles in three days. Fortunately 99% of them were on board Delta flights and not in my car :). I had a quick but exciting mini-vacation up to NY where temperatures were above 90 degrees; it was like I hadn't left Florida at all. I got to see my parents and both sets of grandparents which was cool, and there was lots of family at the Gillow reunion on Saturday. Almost as soon as I arrived I had to leave though, so that I could go back to work today. My sister has a new boyfriend who I had the chance to meet; he's a bright kid from Blacksburg who was validictorian of his senior class... not too shabby. He's going off to U of Penn in the fall so I only wonder how long it will be before my sister decides she wants to go there as well. She still doesn't seem sure of what she wants to study; first it was marine biology, then it was journalism, now it's biomedical engineering so nobody's placing any bets on the final outcome.

I picked up a new book at the Atlanta airport: Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos." It's the successor to his other popular book, "The Elegant Universe," which I read last summer. I got through about 120 pages during my layover and flight back to Melbourne, and my head was starting to hurt about the same time. Relativity, quantum physics, and superstrings tend to do that to your mind.

6.23.2005
8:04pm

Heading out for NY tomorrow morning at 10am. I'll have to stop by Harris first to fill out my time card, then it's off to the airport. MLB airport is such a busy place I hear it takes all of 2 minutes to get through the security checks... I'm in Melboring alright but it's still a cool place to live. I'm giving myself another haircut in a few minutes so that I'll be presentable and everything for the family. I still feel strange going up there for such a short period of time, but it's the only chance I'll get to see my parents this school year.

My IP BUS adapter arrived today in an over-sized Priority Mail envelope that made the cable itself look rather pathetic. I wish Best Buy carried them because I probably coulda bought the thing for $2 there. I'm going to hold off on re-installing my headunit since my car's going to be parked at the airport for three days... no better theft deterrant than an empty dash.

6.21.2005
10:55pm

Wow it's gotten kinda dead around here. Not much to report I'm afraid; things are progressing as usual at Harris and Best Buy. I've got a few days to go before my quick trip to NY from Friday to Sunday. I wish I could take some work with me to get paid for Friday but everything requires a computer and I don't know how they would feel about interns working off-campus. I got to play with Windows 2000 Server and BartPE today to do some ghosting; more fun tomorrow. By the way, BartPE is awesome because it gives you a bootable Windows 2k/xp/2003 environment from CD. You make the Bart CD using your installation CD for Windows, and it supports networking, NTFS drive utilities, command prompt, file manager, etc.

I started a project on my car stereo yesterday to add some RCA jacks for my MP3 player. I figured out how to remove my headunit, drilled the holes in the frame, mounted some panel RCA jacks, and soldered a patch cable. It was painful to mutilate a perfectly good Monster cable but I got through it. Then found out that in order to get Auxiliary input on the Pioneer models you have to buy a IP BUS -> RCA converter. So I ordered one of those off Ebay for $26 and now my car looks like somebody stole my stereo while I'm waiting on the part. It was an educational experience to say the least--RTFM before starting a project.

I took a break from my PC to watch a lightning storm tonight. I was booted off anyway when my Energizer UPS failed to switch over in time before the surge hit. It works fine if I just pull the plug from the wall but for some reason spikes/surges knock it off its feet. Probably should have gone with APC like the rest of the world, but I wanted to have something different... Anyway I could hear it beep at least four times during the storm so taking a time-out was probably a smart move.

6.13.2005
9:48pm

As I'm sitting here at my PC, waiting for a couple torrents to finish, I'm enjoying Duran Duran's latest album, Astronaut, in 5.1 surround thanks to the wonders of DualDisc. The Dolby Digital track from the DVD side is easily ripped to hard disk via DVD Decryptor and a quick de-multiplex using DVD2AVI. What's ironic is that the CD layer doesn't read at all on my Lite-On player or burner, only on my old Sony laptop DVD drive.

With the slowly-growing popularity of DVD-Audio and the surge of DualDisc onto the market, it's only a matter of time before 5.1 becomes the strived-for audio standard for PC archival. HTPCs are finding their way into more and more living rooms, with the beautiful simplicity of Windows XP MCE replicating Tivo, WebTV, upconversion DVD playback, and DVD recording. As hard drive capacities continue to grow, high-resolution and surround formats are a viable option instead of plain-old CBR/VBR MP3. Windows Media 9 Professional was supposed to usher in an era of studio-friendly copy-protected 2/5.1 channel bit-perfect encoding but that never seemed to gain any popularity. So, what happens next? Hopefully somebody will develop an inclusive ripping solution for Dolby audio discs at the very least. DVD-Audio would be nice but the copy restrictions would probably forbid that without resorting to analog import from line loop, simultaneously limiting you to stereo. It would also make me very happy to see Sony release a SACD-compatible player for the PC, but the DSD technology doesn't play well with sound cards--it would have to be converted within the drive to PCM.

I've also been thinking about DD+ and DTS-HD lately. As we draw closer to the high-definition DVD formats, I wonder how they intend to provide backwards-compatibility with current generation receivers. For those lucky enough to have dedicated 7.1 analog inputs, the new players should be able to interface that way and provide discrete 8 channel sound. For those with just Coax/Toslink digital inputs, the new standards will have to transmit a traditional DD-EX or DTS-ES signal which will give at least the 6.1 discrete channels. Look out for a bunch of baffled consumers early next year. Not to mention all the people upset about the expensive DD/DTS receiver they just bought before the new standard was released.

If you made it through this post without visiting Acronym Finder at least one time, congrats, you're a techno-geek.

6.9.2005
7:06

I spent most of my day at work fiddling with a devious little device called a Cyclades that didn't want to cooperate with me. At 6pm I had most things working but will still have to spend more time on it tomorrow. We were required to take a tour of the Malabar Harris campus which was a 20 minute drive from Corporate where I work; I carpooled with Nate, Matt, and Chris. It was interesting to see the inside of an electronics manufacturing facility, and it's obvious that Harris wasn't putting on a show just for our benefit: all the workers were doing their own thing and weren't very interesting to watch. We got to see some bigger communications products like field antennas they assemble for the government along with the opposite size spectrum of PCBs.

Tomorrow will be a short day since I can only work 6 hours without hitting overtime. I'll find something to do with the time, to be sure. Who knows, Best Buy might call me and ask if I can work tomorrow night.

As far as movies go, I haven't been to the theater or bought a DVD since Star Wars III. There just hasn't been anything of major interest to me. I did rent a few movies with Rolo's pass but they wouldn't have been worth the regular $4 fee. I thought about seeing the new animated Dreamworks movie, Madagascar, but that ratings haven't been very high this time. I think they need to focus more on their story and comedic elements before wasting all those CPU cycles rendering the 3D. Dreamworks also got in trouble lately for failing to report below-estimate DVD sales of Shrek 2, so it looks like they need another Shrek to pull up their reputation again.

6.6.2005
7:38pm

Shed a tear today for the creator of DVD Decryptor, "Lightning UK." He was finally shut down by a major movie studio, most likely Sony since he cracked their most recent encryption and seriously pissed them off. I certainly found benefit to his product since it allowed people to back up their DVD movies to hard drive... very useful if you want to have a media server with all your movies in one place; also handy for business travelers to save battery life by playing a DVD off the hard drive instead of optical drive. Of course DVD Decryptor was also the starting point for products like Gordian Knot and DVD Shrink which went a little too far in simplifying the process of illegal DVD duplication. Moral of the story is that if you're going to make innovative software, make sure it doesn't tread on anybody else's profits.

Along those lines, Intel has a Mac mini imatation called Pandora which has just been released. As they say, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery and although Apple will probably try legal retribution it’s cool that PC fans will now have a similar ultra-small computer.

6.5.2005
10:27

In the summertime when the weather is high... wait a sec, no it isn't! In fact it's been raining way too much across the state of Florida--it doesn't have anywhere to go now. This morning started off looking promising but quickly turned to drizzling/pouring rain sporadically. I woke up at 9am for no particular reason, after a really late night of movie watching. If I was a more free-spirited person I might have said after a night of drunken revelry, but that would be far from the truth.

My entire day was planned around having to show up at Best Buy at 7pm for a night meeting of all the home theater employees. They were having one of their quarterly gaming sessions so Mike decided to combine both and save some people the extra trip. I spent the morning web/forum browsing, then watched a newly-rented copy of 12 Monkeys. I had originally planned to go to Smokey Bones for dinner with Cory and Chris since I got a $20 gift card there from Harris, but they got hungry earlier so we did pizza and wings at their apartment. Cory and I watched