Memories

Well, Finally got a chance to digitize some of the old family photos. Still a lot more to go, but got a good start on them. Here are a few gems I cleaned up and put up on my Flickr page. Some are just good photography (well, with the equipment we had back then which was mostly disposable cameras), or a picture that brought back memories of the olden days (well, at least for me anyways).







This is just an altogether funny picture, especially if you knew the guy.










She's not really a native american, rather Vietnamese. I guess thats the irony that mademe post this pic.

Pics, Sunset mania

Well, I have taken a few pics recently and thought I'd post them since I have not posted anything original in a while.


A cool sunset I captured on the way home from work.


Another beautiful sunset. It did turn out well, but the camera just could not capture all of the "mood" that it had.


This one was on my camera after a few people came over one night. I have no idea who took it, but it turned out well I think.


And this is what happens when you mix alcohol, a Furby(ie?) in the road, and several people who detest furbies.

I just enrolled at USI in an attempt to get my BS knocked out of the way, so this next year will be very busy with classes and all. So far the experience has been good, but I've only been to one day of classes thus far. I had several issues with my transfer from Ivy Tech, but I'm sure many were at least somehow related to procrastination on my part. Also, this month marks the 2nd year of Perfected-Insanity. Happy birthday!!!

VOTD

I must say, this guy has the coolest job.... EVER!

I have been slowly working on getting a Web server running on my home connection. Insight recently upgraded all of our town to 10Mbps up/1Mbps Down for free, which will make a web server somewhat feasible now. I have a FTP server and domain name and such configured, but I cannot tell you any details just yet.

Bad Blood?

I recently ran across a FSF site called Badvista. It's aim (I always type this in CAPs first, then must correct thanks to AOL IM) is to inform consumers of some of the stuff that is happening in Vista that most of not heard, and to recommend free alternatives . I have to say, seeing as I have not had the chance to play around with Vista, yet I will have to support it (both personally and professionally), that this is a great resource.

While a lot of the info is whining and just common sense, and general Microsoft-Bashing, some useful information can be gleaned from articles like this: (check out the ad in the top right hand corner of this page, pretty inventive and not too intrusive)
"1. SMB2
Vista introduces a new variant of the SMB protocol called SMB2, which may pose problems for those connecting to non-Microsoft networks, such as Samba on Linux"

I never heard about this happening. Or this, which sounds awesome, as long as it doesn't require some ludicrous licensing scheme like so many other "standard" technologies recently:
"20. HHD
Hybrid Hard Drives. These are potentially a huge performance booster, but there's little information and support is available (even though should be available)."

Or this:
"25. WordPad
Ability to open .doc files has been removed."

This really sucks, because I've had a need to do this often. I can't imagine a legitimate reason why this functionality could not be moved to Vista. Just looks like a means to push "customers" to buy Office, which sure isn't cheap. Most of the Other articles right now seem to be Microsoft bashing, and are just cherry picked articles that contain speculation about what could be bad things about Vista. But I do hope they update with some more legitimate useful tech articles that will help me integrate Vista into existing diverse networks which contain anything from DOS,Linux, to XP.

On another note, is has been oddly warm the past week (Highs in the low-to-mid 60's in Mid December!). This has given me the chance to ride my motorcycle a few times, but I have not had a chance to ride anything longer that commuting due to other activities. I did manage to add a Flickr Badge to my profile info, as well as setup a Linux file, SSH, and FTP server at home. I chose Ubuntu server, and I must say this was pretty much a piece of cake if you know your way around the command line. I also have been playing around with TiddlyWiki, which I must say is pretty cool once you adjust to it, but confusing as can be when you first (attempt!) to use it. I think it will work great as a note-taking application for school, so I will experiment with it next semester.

This is why I love mobile phone companies.

I know I've had the run-around on the phone with these people, but this guy's call truely takes the cake.

VOTD

This looks like the coolest and most dangerous thing I have ever seen. I definately want one. Here's another video.

Sadly, probably the last trip of the year.

Well, by some freak act of nature we got a 70 degrees day on November 29th. Since I was off of work I decided to take advantage of this and take one last ride for the year on highway 66. Here are some pics from the trip.

It was quite overcast as you can see, but I didn't get a drop of rain and stayed warm.






I didn't get too many pictures as I was busy riding most of the day, but the few I took turned out decent. As always, click on the pics for larger images.

VOTD

Well, sorry for the lack of legitimate updates, but it's the holidays and time gets scarce. I'll try to upload some new pictures soon.

Here's a video to hold you over. I saw it quite some time ago, but still funny.


Also, ran across this today which just cracked me up. This might be the explanation, but I thought it would be funnier if it were Sony who they were referencing.

VOTD

Nothing much interesting as of late. Here's a video that pretty cool.

VOTD

Some crazy motorcycle riding.

Journey of the Hawk.

Well, It is a new month and a new bandwidth limit for me on Flickr. Here are the pictures of one of my latest trips on the bike out on highway 66. I had to take it for a spin after putting on a new front tire and doing an oil and filter change. The total milage for the 3 days ( I didn't ride any the second day, just visiting) was over 400 miles. Weather was very overcast the first day, but temps were perfect.

A pic of the bike overlooking the Ohio river at Leavenworth. Can you beleive this bike is 21 years old?


And a picture through the mirror that turned out well.


This bridge is outside the town of Rockport.


Doesn't look that big from the picture, but this is a pretty big hill. This is on one of the VERY curvy areas of this road. At the bottom (behind me in the picture) is a very sharp 150-160 degree turn. It's a scary one becuse there is always gravel in it and slowing down after this big hill is hard.


This one is also on the big hill, but looking down. I don't think you can see the curve, but trust me it's down there. It really sneaks up on ya.


I tried to get a picture of myself with this sign, but this tuned out to be the best one. I still didn't get the entire sign, but my arm was neither long enough, nor my lense wide enought to get it all in.


Here's a better picture of the sign.


This would be an awesome place to live. It is out in the middle of nowhere, but I'm sure you could see for miles.


I was woken up early while at my Mom's house so I figured that I'd take some pictures of the rising sun since it looked to beautiful. It's currently my background image on my work PC.



Well, that's it for now. I've started uploading 800x600 pixel images because with the full resolution images I was running out of pace on Flickr to quickly. Should you want a larger size of any of them, feel free to email me.

Cell Phone Blues...

Well, after I spent the day changing oil in different vehicles I noticed that my cell phone was misssing. I thought I remembered having while under the hood of my car. After looking for several hours over the course of a couple of days I finally gave up. It was going straight to voicemail by then and I figured the battery went dead. I figured I left it under the hood and it fell out on my way to work the next day. Anyways After I hit the store and spend $300 on a new one, I start getting emails and phone calls that Pep-Boys was calling everyone on my contacts... They had my phone.

Anyways, it sucked but I really wanted a new phone anyways. I went with the cingular 3125, and I must say its pretty nice. Feels real solid in your hand and the soft buttons are incredible. Windows mobile makes transferring ringtones and syncing with my outlook calendar, email, and contacts a snap. The camera is nice, but nothing amazing. Here's what it looks like:

I have some pictures of my latest trip back north on the bike, but my Flickr account is maxed out this month. I'll upload them as soon as I can upload again.

VOTD

Well, this video is much different than others previously, but I beleive it's definately worth watching. It raises some questions I've never contemplated.

One thing that I was thinking about while watching segment 2 of the video was about CEO's. It seems that they make a choice to put themselves in situations in which they have to make big decisions that effect many people. Most of the time there is no way to know all of the implications of these decisions, and making semi-informed choices some of them are bound to be bad ones. Is this not psychopathic in a way? Now everyone has to make hard decisions, but they normally do not effect hundreds or thousands of people. Now I don't beleive CEO's and other similar people are bad themselves. I don't beleive they purposely make choices that are completely immoral, but they have incentives that the common man does not have. Also they are not effected themselves by these choices other than whether it generated more revenue for shareholders. Most of the time the effects of their decisions are in a different country. When the effects hit close to home for them, they are wealthy enough to just move away from the problem, or throw money in it's direction to make it go away, at least for them. In the end he corporation's main motive is profit for shareholders, who also consist of... the high-end wealthy class.

Now don't get me wrong. Not all corporations are evil, and they are needed for certain services and goods. I beleive we need to take a look into what rights they are granted, and the power they currently have.

Anyways, take some time and watch the documentary.

Who's building the Arc?

Well, after no attack or catastophe on 9/11, we did seem to have a mild one here in town. After raining VERY hard ALL day, the water eventually started backing up. Here are some pics of what I came home to. I had to park a couple of blocks away and hike through peoples yards to get home.






And here is my brother's old car. And yes there is water all over inside.



My house did not have any damage as it is on a hill from the road, which is good. I wanted to see what other places looked like so we set out on our bicycle's.







I think this guy underestimated the depth of the water.

VOTD

Here's a nice video on how to wheelie on a streetbike.

As Promised

As promised here are couple of pictures of the new house. This is my newly painted bathroom, which was covered in green vines everywhere before. It almost hurt my eyes before, but now its relaxing.



And this is a Giant hole which is in my back yard. The previous owners had an above ground pool which they sank into the ground a bit. Still woring on finding an excavator to fill it in.


And this would be a nail in my brand new tire. I'm trying to get someone to patch it, but it looks like I may have to do it myself because all the shops are afraid of lawsuits.

Google Calendar Revisited

Well, I have finally had some time to try out Google Calendar, and I must say that I'm quite impressed. Not only is it easy to use, but it seems to have much less problems than Outlook's Calendar. Putting this on my customized google start page combined with the agenda displayed, it has become quite useful. Not only does it offer 99% of the features I want, but I can access it from practically anywhere. It is also fast as can be, no long loading times. On a similar note, I have noticed that Google Maps seems to be functioning much more smoothly in the past few months.

If you have not had a chance, then I suggest you give it a shot.

On a different tangent, I am finally getting stuff moved in at the house and walls painted. I also got my Camera back from repair finally, and hopefully can post some pictures soon.

HDCP + 32bit Vista = Crap

As an update to my earlier post about HDCP, it looks as if there is more bad news about the future of High Definition video. The following is from a post on slashdot:

"Pity the Vista user with a 32-bit CPU. Senior Program Manager Steve Riley announced today at Tech.Ed Australia that full HD content shall only be played at the full resolution where only signed drivers are used — only in the 64-bit version of Vista. From the article: '"Any next-generation high definition content will not play in x32 at all," said Riley. "This is a decision that the Media Player folks made because there are just too many ways right now for unsigned kernel mode code [to compromise content protection]. The media companies asked us to do this and said they don't want any of their high definition content to play in x32 at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection, so we had to do this."

Well... great no HD on Vista on any of my PC's! I really hope they get all these restrictions and problems worked out soon, because it's looking like I won't be wanting any HD media I'm restricted to playing it to it's full ability. It looks like downloading already ripped versions of the HD content will be much easier than worrying about all the hardware and software compatablility, especially when I plan on building a MediaPC soon.

Here is an excerpt from a comment in the post that I find insightful:

"The DRM will always be broken: somewhere inside that cable box or LCD monitor, is an unencrypted digital signal. With the right test equipment, somebody will figure out how to get it back into a computer and record it. From there, they need only to compress it with one of the many HD-capable codecs and video formats available and playable right now (H.264 inside an AVI or Quicktime container), and dump it onto the P2P networks.

This smacks of what we saw happen with MP3 music a few years ago. The music companies feared it, and hoped that they could kill MP3 by using proprietary formats instead (anyone remember ATRAC3?). Instead of buying the legitimate, overpriced garbage that the recording industry tried to foist on them, consumers ignored it and got their MP3s illegally instead. By ignoring demand, the music companies gave up billions of dollars in revenue and created a generation of buyers who got used to getting music for free.

The movie and video companies, together with electronics manufacturers, have an opportunity now to not repeat history. If they give the market what it wants -- HD movies without onerous restrictions, playable on the hardware they already have (which by-and-large is technically capable of the task), sold at a reasonable price -- they could start making money immediately. Instead, I think they'll probably resist the inevitable outcome as long as possible, and waste millions (or billions) of dollars in misplaced technological development and make criminals out of their would-be customers in the mean time."

Turbo power

HERE is a site that reviews the Art of Turboing. Basically it shows you how to get something done after you get stuck in the 7th ring of tech phone support hell.

Oh, and by the way... 5 days until moving day!

VOTD

Been a while since I've seent his one, but everyone must witness this guy's insane beatboxin skills. Combined with a harmonica!