10.31.2007
2:27pm
Scientists find oldest living animal... then kill it.
10.30.2007
5:06pm
Apple's Leopard operating system sold over 2 million copies since last week. Unfortunately they forgot to support the latest Java release.
On Sunday we had a bbq and pumpkin carving event at Nate's. He did a Linux penguin and Ryan made a Volkswagon bus. Adam and Tammy's pumpkin was a little less geeky, with a cat & moon scene. Before it got dark Ryan took his Air Hog boat/airplane out for a spin on the pond behind the house.
Yesterday I successfully got the cats to wear their halters and leashes for about 15 minutes. After the initial confusion they found them very amusing to play with. Also someone finally committed to coming to pick up my coffee table so that should be gone after this evening. I put on the Blood Diamond HD DVD that I borrowed from Adam; I thought it was a great movie, except for the rap song by Kayne West that played during the credits... no chance of me ever buying any of his crap.
10.27.2007
12:04pm
On digg today: Bold Move Pays Off. Also the funniest thing I've seen all week: Britney Spears is writing a book on parenting.
2:19am
I really should be asleep. I got back from Nate's after a night of fun (and drinking) and decided to put on some Frou Frou at low volume so as not to upset any apartment neighbors. Something about Imogen Heap's voice is very alluring and the music style is creative. Some of Nate's friends that he went to high school with in Indiana are down visiting for the weekend so there's some stuff semi-planned for the next two days as well. Unfortunately they chose to have their mini-vacation at a time when the weather in this part of Florida is horrible. Cold(er than usual), overcast, drizzly, and generally unpredictable. Nate said they went to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal on Thurs night and it was packed full of people, very expensive, and not worth the time at all. Not to mention we are under boil-water alert in West Melbourne due to a water main that supposedly ruptured yesterday. We didn't even hear about it until we went out for lunch today, and the restaurant said they had no fountain drinks due to that little complication.
My feet are propped up on a cheapo ottoman from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. $12.50 each + shipping, quite a deal in my opinion. Definitely more comfortable than the unforgiving wood table, but still with a firmer cushion than I would like. I'm just waiting on somebody to come pick up my old junky coffee table that Rolando and I rescued from the trash a few years back. It's amazing how many people at Florida Tech will peak up at the mention of something free, even though they pay rather obscene amounts of money for tuition. I think it's hard-coded into all college students whether attending ivy-league or community college.
Lately at work I've been wrestling with BusinessObjects software again, trying to get things working properly under the Solaris operating system instead of Windows. It's about as much fun as Windows NT 4.0, and I hated NT with a passion. On the positive side, Microsoft released a new version of Desktop Search for XP/2003 that provides the functionality of Google Desktop without selling your soul to Google, and without having to use that awful OS called Vista. Out of curiousity, I re-visited the Dell support page for my Inspiron 6000 laptop a few days ago to see if they added any new drivers for Vista 32-bit. I was amused to see that they actually removed all Vista drivers for my model, I guess they gave up on trying to acquire those sound card and touch pad drivers from vendors.
Apple released Leopard today. If I was a Mac fanboy I'd be a lot more excited about that, but even as a passive observer, Leopard has some cool features. A MacBook will be tempting for my next laptop purchase, but I hope this Dell machine lasts me another 1-2 years before that has to happen. The keyboard definitely has to be replaced soon though. I can't complain about the cpu speed or memory, both have been more than suitable for compiling simple Java programs for CIS class, browsing the web, managing my ever-increasing email accounts, even the occasional video editing. Some web sites with extensive flash can be a bit sluggish, but I attribute that mostly to poor design. Any web programmer who assumes the average user has more than 1.6Ghz Pentium-M on tap is acting under delusion. Your flash app with simple vector graphics doesn't need to be delivered in 1280x1024 resolution.
10.24.2007
11:39pm
Mother nature was putting on quite a show tonight. A storm moved through rather quickly while I was still at work, then hung off the coast for a long time. Once it got dark there was a lot of lightning visible, but most of it was silhouetting clouds so it looked a bit more interesting than usual. I went out for a walk to better enjoy it, and ended up getting caught in a few sprinkles of rain but nothing bad at all.
After I got back I did some music listening and checked out the photos of Adam's new HT setup.
12:25am
10.23.2007
5:12pm
One of the integration field engineers at work got promoted a week ago so today he took everybody from the team out for lunch to Shells. We piled 6 people into an Oldsmobile sedan on the way over... not very comfortable.
Tonight some people are coming over to watch Transformers since we didn't end up doing it last Friday. Should be great.
10.22.2007
11:25pm
South California is going through hell today with multiple wildfires spreading across the area. Hopefully conditions will improve very soon, otherwise thousands of people may be without homes.
10.20.2007
6:01pm
My right shift key on my laptop has broken, totally ruining my productivity. I quickly discovered that I almost never use the left one so now I have to re-learn with that key.
I went out to some furniture stores today to see how much a new couch would cost to replace my crappy ones and was disappointed to find that there were no black fabric couches to be found. Nothing in dark navy or dark green either. Only way to get black is with leather or that fake leather stuff. I guess they figure it's Florida and people prefer the lighter colors. So instead I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to get a couple couch slipcovers in stretchy black fabric. They actually worked really well and now I have an easy way to wash them if something gets spilled.
10.15.2007
5:40pm
We got our CIS5100 midterms back just a few minutes ago and I got a 35/35. Low score was 16/35, so not everybody is familiar with Java programming yet.
I recently changed my browser home page to Wikipedia Main Page because it offers a nice consolidated page with interesting things including trivia, news, and article/photo of the day. The AOTD for today was Donkey Kong. I still use Doggdot heavily though.
10.13.2007
9:57pm
Adam let me borrow some of his HD-DVDs since his Xbox drive had to be sent off to Microsoft for service. I watched Billy Madison earlier today, funny as always and as close to theater-quality as possible. He stopped by a few hours ago and we decided to put on Syriana, which neither of us had seen yet. IMDb calls it a drama/thriller movie but they really should have just called it a dialog movie because that's what 97% of it is. Very little action and plenty of missed opportunities to give the movie better pacing. I almost fell asleep partway through.
10.11.2007
5:38pm
Lunch gratis today courtesy of NetBoss; some visitors were in town from Mexico and RTP so all of the integration group went to the nearby Hong Kong buffet. I'm technically not part of integration anymore but I was for today ;)
I realized today that I hadn't been keeping track of how old the kittens are... 19 weeks this past Monday. I need to see if I can get them to sit still on the kitchen scale for a weight measurement but I know they won't. I had a lady from Melbourne with a bengal and F1 bobcat email me to see if I would be breeding them in the future, she saw some photos on an internet message board. That won't be happening as both of them are altered. I finished a project I was working on for my PDA with a bunch of 240x320 formatted wildcat photos from various places on the web.
Valve released Half-Life 2: Episode 2 yesterday via Steam and I'm going to make myself finish Quake 4 before I buy it. I've only played about an hour of Quake so that might take a while. Episode 2 is priced at $30 which seems high for an "installment" but they have been working on it for over a year so maybe it is worth it.
10.09.2007
4:59pm
Today for lunch I tried Hurricane Wings with Adam, think BWW but with three times as many flavors to pick from.
10.08.2007
11:24pm
My TV lineup for this season has settled on the following: Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, Heroes, House, South Park, Reaper, and Chuck. That's quite a few to keep up with. Prison Break didn't grab my interest although I know a few people who watch it every week.
12:40pm
The Audioholics event on Saturday was pretty good but exhausting. I woke up at 4:15am and went to bed around 3:30am the next day. After I picked up Adam the drive over was pretty quick and there were only a few sections of rain. We got there shortly after 8am and got our registration papers and goodies: Audioholics t-shirt, a pair of surround audio discs, and some calibration discs. Most of the demo rooms were still being tweaked so we stood around for a little while and had continental breakfast. I talked with Dave, who I had met at the Sound & Vision event, since he was helping with registrations. Around 200 people had signed up with paid registration.
Around 9am things got busier and the educational sessions started. Adam and I missed the first one so we checked out the Emotiva and RBH demo rooms. Emotiva had a couple new amplifiers, a new subwoofer system, and some main/surround speakers that they are introducing to market soon. The folks there were laid back and friendly, and I asked some questions about a few products. The Blu-Ray player that they were using was a Sony model and it was having some playback issues with dropped frames.
The RBH demo room was combined with a new Yamaha receiver called the ZX-11 which is the first 11 channel surround processor. They had five front speakers and six surround speakers connected instead of the usual 7. The additional channels are used for height information which means they have to be placed 3-4 feet above the normal speakers. None of the disc formats out there support 11 discrete channels so it will take 5, 6, or 7 channels and expand them to fill all 11. The RBH guy played the stampede scene from King Kong which was very immersive and had a lot of impact but the bass wasn't working all that great in the room they were using. Most of the bass was traveling outside the room and they had some complaints from 3 stories up in the hotel.
After that we attended a couple information sessions on 3LCD projector technology, Dolby HD audio formats, surround music production, and acoustic panel construction. After that it was time for lunch so we walked up and down the street a bit and settled on a cafe that was cheap and fairly busy. When we came back we stopped in the Dolby Labs room which was showcasing some 7.1 and 9.1 audio with some high-end Denon electronics and B&W speakers. Auralex did the treatments for the ballroom so they made a room-within-a-room with panels. The PS3 was a very popular Blu-Ray player there and Dolby was also using one. The song clips they cued up were 1080p video of the performance combined with 24/96k lossless audio which was very impressive.
DVIGear was there with a big table set up with all sorts of cables and switchers and whole-house integration equipment. Adam and I talked with one of their reps for a little while and they had a HDMI-over-fiber example set up with a very long transmission distance through the spool. We got a free shirt for stopping by so that was nice of them.
Axiom Audio really brought out the big guns for their demo room with two tower speakers, dual center channels, the usual four surrounds, and eight subwoofers. All of them were finished in piano gloss rosewood which is a large price upgrade over the normal black vinyl. Four of the subs were the large EP600, one on each wall, and the other four subs were the tiny (by comparison) EP400 placed right next to each large sub. The subs were wired so that they could switch between the large subs and the small ones with the intention being so show how an 8" subwoofer could produce bass as deep as the 12" model. Axiom also had their new digital amplifier hooked up which supports 8 channels up to 1400 watts total. Unlike traditional amps it can share power among the individual channels which means if you are only using 2-3 speakers each one can get 1/2 to 1/3 of the total power. I wasn't impressed with the dual center setup, I think they should have just used a single one placed under the screen instead of one above and one below.
There were a substantial number of door prizes that had accumulated by 5pm which were going to be given out after the banquet was over. Pairs of speakers, acoustic treatments, cables, electronics, gift certificates, etc. Also lined up were silent auction bidding sheets for some other donated equipment with the proceeds going to Habitat for Humanity. Adam and I talked with Dave and his wife a little while after the sessions were finished and then we had to get changed into nicer shirts for the evening activities.
The dinner was preceded by hors d'oeuvres (quiche was excellent) and open bar during the bidding period. By 7 o'clock we were led into the main dining room where there was a stage and podium set up for the speaker. Gene DellaSalla, president of Audioholics, talked for a bit and then a guy from the web site operations gave an overview of demographics which was obviously intended for the vendors. After that they introduced new business partners who will be opening an e-tailer storefront on the Audioholics web site; hard to be positive about that announcement but I don't visit their site that much anyway so it won't affect me much.
Dinner itself was good, as I expected from the Hilton. Make your own salad, top your own mashed potatoes (that was a new one for me), potato salad, ribs, baked chicken, salmon, and a huge assortment of deserts. Since the actual number of people in attendance was quite a bit lower than the registered number, they abandoned the assigned tables concept so Adam and I sat together with a few other people including a young guy who ran his own audio consulting business. It was obvious from the mood of the crowd that lots of people there knew each other, and most of the companies attending had 3-6 representatives. As things wound down the door prize winners were announced; since there were so many it took a while to get through all of them. I was called near the end when they had given away the bigger items, but I still got a heavy-duty HDMI cable worth $35. Adam unfortunately didn't win anything in the drawing.
The last event of the evening was wrapping up the silent auction, but a lot of people left after the door prizes were dispersed. Those who remained were bidding on the items they wanted and one guy ended up taking home 5-6 items. The Habitat guy was hanging around too to collect checks from the people who won the auctions.
10.05.2007
10:59am
Interesting article about domains and typosquatting. Not exactly recent but it came up on one of my google searches.
10.03.2007
11:58am
Ron is in town today for the Florida Tech career fair (representing APL) so a group of us are all going out for dinner tonight. He's got to fly back to Maryland at 9pm from Orlando so it will be rather quick unfortunately.