1:37 PM
My non-computer-geek dad is really interested in getting an mp3 player for himself, so I've been doing some research into what's good.
What really amazes me and even makes me a little mad is that people are still making mp3 players that don't use hard drives. It's like..."Wow. 256 megs. That'll hold like...4 albums. But it's 50 bucks cheaper than this 30 GB player that holds 500 albums." TOUGH CHOICE THERE, MY FRIEND!
The iPod would have been #1, but it's too expensive. A 40 GB iPod is $500. A 40 GB Zen Xtra is $350. The Zen also wins on battery life - 14 hours on a single charge vs the iPod's 8.
The iRiver is a sweet little player, but it's got a whole bunch of features that I don't think my dad would use. It also costs as much as an iPod. If I had a use for an mp3 player, I'd probably want an iRiver for myself.
12:01 PM
If you'd like to stay up to date on the fires burning throughout Southern California without having to rely on the media, Tracy Justus over at Freq Of Nature has a whole bunch of fire frequencies up on the front page of his site. Bust out the scanner and tune in!
11:06 AM
Apple Juice is nature's cruel little trick on me.
It tastes oh so very good when you drink it. However, you can expect the rest of your day to be filled with bad breath and lots of farting. The apple juice is to blame.
7:55 AM
The past few days at my house have been like a nuclear winter. There's so much crap in the air from the fires burning in and around LA that everything outside is covered in ash, the little sunlight that is able to reach us is reddish-yellow, and the sun itself looks like a huge red fireball.
The closest fire is 40 miles away, but you'd think it was a whole lot closer if you looked outside. I guess the one good thing about this is that the 95+ degree temperatures that were supposed to reach us this weekend never happened. The ash is keeping the air temperature down in the upper 70s.
I just updated my Firebird installation to 0.7. The 'automatic bookmark update checker' thing actually works now. Hoo-ray.
I ditched iTunes for Winamp5 the other day, and I feel all warm inside. The media library puts 3.x's to shame, and it's a heck of a lot faster than iTunes.
Microsoft's running a big developer's conference next week in Los Angeles, and they're going to be revealing a lot more info about the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn. Longhornblogs.com is a bunch of blogs worth reading in the next few days. I mostly only care about Avalon, the super secret new GUI which will be revealed for the first time at the conference. It could either be really cool, or it could just be some stupid rehashing of the Start menu like they've been doing for the past 7 years. We'll see.
12:49 PM
We went to Ralph's this weekend to do our grocery shopping despite the strike. None of the strikers tried to hassle us or anything.
In fact, I can't remember having a better time shopping on a weekend. The store was loaded with food, the new employees were friendly, they gave us crazy coupons when we walked in, and they had a two-for-one sale on ice cream!
AND there were practically no other shoppers in the store - on a Saturday afternoon! I hope this strike lasts forever, because it's saving me a lot of time and money!
My BEFSR41 from Linksys had proven to be a solid performer for the many years that I'd owned it. Unfortunately, I recently found an application that brings it to its knees. Something about peer-to-peer network traffic caused by systems like Overnet would lock up the router after only a few minutes in operation, requiring a hard reset to get it up and running again.
Overnet is quickly becoming a program that I use on a regular basis, especially with excellent sites like ShareReactor.com being out there, so this problem - unresolved by any firmware upgrade or downgrade I tried over the course of a month - was unacceptable!
The solution was to wipe the slate clean and ditch the heretofore rock-solid router and replace it with something from Linksys' main competitor, D-Link.
The D-Link DI-624 now sits next to my DSL modem and has worked perfectly since I plugged it in. It also does 802.11b and .11g, so if I ever go wireless that'll be nice. Apparently they've even figured out a way to double throughput on the 802.11g side of things for a max theoretical speed of 108mbps. That's faster than plain ol' cat5 ethernet!
I'm hanging on to the receipt and I'm not going to mail the rebate right away until I've had a chance to really put this thing through its paces, but the first 12 hours of its operation have been pretty good so far!
5:00 PM
A few years ago Disneyland opened up a music store on Main St. that contained these nifty interactive kiosks. The kiosks would let you burn custom CDs containing up to 10 tracks of vintage Disneyland attraction audio from the park's opening in 1955 all the way up to the present. The system was called "Disneyland Forever" and it was a true rip off at $20 per CD. (A complete track listing is here.)
I of course made it my mission to purchase every track available on the system as soon as I'd learned about it. I'm glad I did, because they shut the whole thing down and tore out the kiosks about a year ago. I got some good stuff though! A huge chunk of Yesterland is now sitting on my hard drive in audio format.
Anyhoo, Randy Thornton of Walt Disney Records just made a super duper announcement. The CD-burning kiosks will be making a comeback, and they'll now contain digitally remastered vinyl albums that have been out of print for at least 30 years. Some of them were only available for purchase at the park, some are park-themed, and some are just old Disney recordings that at one time or another were available for purchase at your local record shop.
The individual recordings in the style of Disneyland Forever as we used to know it will be returning eventually, probably not until spring, but any new tracks that they can add would be welcome. Yay!
10:39 AM
Yesterday Apple released iTunes for Windows. It seems to be pretty good as a music purchasing mechanism, but it's iffy as an mp3 player. I like how I can share music with other people on my network, but I don't like not being able to copy those files locally.
The application seems pretty sluggish and it feels like overkill to launch this huge program just to be able to listen to and organize your mp3s. There's also no way to maximize the window.
I dunno. I'll probably use it for another day or two but I'll probably wind up switching back to Winamp.
Spreaking of which, Winamp 5 was released to beta yesterday as well, and initial reports seem positive, so that's exciting! Also, the guy who made my favorite Winamp 3 skin, MMD3, also made the default skin for Winamp5. Yay!
11:15 AM
Tammy and I have been playing through Diablo II on battle.net lately. She's an Assassin and I'm a Druid.
Last night we killed Diablo, after dying about 30 times each (no joke.) The good thing about dying that many times is that you run out of money really quick - so you eventually have nothing to lose by dying over and over.
You can just keep portaling in, grab your body, hit Diablo once (if you're lucky,) die, then repeat. The whole process takes maybe 20 minutes.
Anyway, tonight we're going to start playing the fifth act, included in the Lord of Destruction expansion pack.
If you've never played Diablo before, there's downloadable PC and Mac demos here!
12:29 PM
Be sure to tune in to Travel Channel Secrets tomorrow night for a behind-the-scenes look at Disneyland. You see stuff like this all the time when they do documentaries about the Florida parks, especially with WDW's innovative Utilidoor system. But, for whatever reason, security in Anaheim is a lot tighter, and backstage areas have never been seen on TV before. So this is big!
And if you've never been to Club 33 before, now's your chance to see what it looks like!
11:42 AM
I am having an extremely awesome day today.
My drive to work this morning was amazing. There was no traffic to be found on any of the freeways that I take! It was like driving to work on a weekend! Then Tammy told me it was Columbus Day and it all made sense.
You'd think I'd be a little bummed about working on a holiday, especially when so many other companies have the day off (apparently,) and I sort of am! But it's just such a nice day that I don't really care!
It totally feels like Fall (or Autumn, if you swing that way) and I'm loving it. The air is so crisp and clear and it really feels great to be outside. Or to drive to work with the sunroof open.
The thermometer's pushing 80, and it's just a beautiful day.
5:10 PM
In some ways, it's a blessing to live in California.
In other ways, it's a curse.
The air is nice (usually), the ocean's close, they film movies and TV shows all around you, there's no shortage of things to do, and the rest of the country is jealous of you. (They might say they're not, but they really are.)
On the flip side, real estate here is horrendously overpriced.
If there were anything worth doing in Boise, Idaho, you could buy a sweet 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath, 3 car garage, 2400sq ft home for $219k.
Something like that in LA or OC might START at $600k.
3:19 PM
I heard on the radio this morning that Wally George died of pneumonia.
Wally was an ultra-conservative who invited guests like porn stars and drug legalization advocates onto his show so that he could yell at them at the top of his lungs.
When I was a kid, I tuned in from time to time so that I could listen to his completely nonsensical arguments and the completely nonsensical comebacks by his completely crazy guests. The studio audience was 100% screaming fratboys, so Wally could do no wrong, and that was part of the crazyness of it all.
Wally had been on the air for 20 years before he filmed his last episode in July of this year.
1:28 PM
Apparently that Valve hack was much worse than previously thought.
At first it just looked like the source code was stolen. Actual level data and art assets weren't part of the 'robbery', so anyone who actually downloaded the source wasn't able to do much with it, other than build a brand new game using the HL2 engine as a base.
Or so it was thought.
Today CNN is reporting that maps and other crucial data WERE stolen, and that a playable build of the game is now 'out there'. Doh.
5:09 PM
Saturday night Tammy and I went with Stacy and Steve to Rockin' Baja Lobster down in Newport Beach. Living in OC is cool, because Newport isn't some exotic far-off locale like it is when you live in LA.
Tammy and I split a 'baja bucket' which came with lobster tails, chicken, carne asada, and baja shrimp. So good.
I had two Tom Collinses bookended by gin and tonics. That's the most I've ever had to drink before, and I think that's my limit. I had the mildest of hangovers the next morning for an hour or three, so I'm glad I called it quits when I did.
Yes, it's true, I've started drinking. Tammy made me, what can I say.
Right now I only drink gin. I haven't developed a taste for anything else, and I doubt I ever will. You see, sweet lady gin is a jealous mistress.
11:03 AM
Tammy and I went with Stacy and Steve last night to the 2003 Haunted Mansion Holiday sneak-preview event.
It was decent. Didn't knock my socks off of anything. The value of Disneyland's after-hours special events have taken a slow but steady decline in the past few years, so I'm definitely not as excited about them as I used to be.
Here's a trip report with a few photos from someone who attended the dinner package last night. We got the cheap tickets and opted instead for dinner afterwards at Naples in Downtown Disney.
I'm glad today's Friday, because waking up today was the hardest thing ever.
Valve's developing what's turning out to be the most eagerly awaited PC game of the year, Half Life 2, due to be released before Christmas this year. It looks like someone managed to totally infiltrate their office network, steal the Half Life 2 source code, and post it on the Internet.
10:55 AM
Remember when PDFs were cool? How they used to open right up in a second or two?
What the hell happened?
Acrobat Reader 6 takes almost a full minute to load on my 800mhz machine, and it usually takes just as long to close, God knows why!
PDFs are still cool I guess, but the reader has just gotten worse and worse. It actually annoys me when I click on a web link that turns out to be a PDF. I find this funny because Adobe is pimping the PDF on TV like crazy now.
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