1:29 PM
Sure, Dish Network and DirecTV offer some HDTV channels, but a new upstart satellite provider, VOOM, seems to specialize in HDTV.
Unlike the competition, however, VOOM doesn't appear to subsidize equipment costs. A dish, off-air antenna, one receiver, and professional installation will run you $750. And no, that's no typo! It really is seven hundred and fifty american dollars!
They won't actually start charging subscription fees until March 1st, 2004, so if you order now you'll get two months free. Basic service after that date will be $40 a month. Local channels are included at no extra charge. If you can swallow the insane setup cost, their pricing is actually really competitive with Dish and DirecTV, the only other two competitors in the satellite field.
I gotta say it's nice to see a provider targeting the HDTV crowd for a change. The faster we all move to HDTV, the better! I'm still waiting for plasma screens to come down in price (way down) before I get one, 'cause the lack of focus on projection TVs pretty much wipes out any benefit afforded by the high-definition signal. I think I'll be waiting a long time. :(
10:52 AM
My Dad finally made a decision on that mp3 player. He decided to go with the iPod rather than the Jukebox Zen Xtra, mainly becuase there are so many accessories out for the iPod.
It'll be my mom's Christmas gift to him and I volunteered to get it for her. Apple.com and every other website I could find were sold out of the 20 GB units, so last night I went to the Apple store in Costa Mesa (which had plenty) and picked one up along with a PCI firewire card.
We did some other shopping while we were at the mall, too. When we were in Z Gallerie I accidentally knocked over a small metal flask which fell on the floor and made a horrible clattering noise that you could hear all through the store. It was right next to some tall wine glasses and for a second I thought one of them had fallen, but nope! During the three seconds when the commotion was being made I saw everything happen in slow motion and in the back of my head I saw dollar amounts slowly adding up. $15...$30...$45...how much is this going to cost me...
I'm not sure why, but no employees ever came by to check on what had happened. I bet that people had been knocking that flask down all day long and they were just tired of checking. Score one for Brett!
11:45 AM
The lowest price on the Internet that I have seen for a GameBoy Advance flash cartridge and linker can be found at MW Electronics. A 256MB EZ-Flash Advance cartridge with USB linker is a mere $100. That's a good $50 less than I've seen anywhere else. Shipping is $7 more. They're located in the USA, so you don't have to worry about waiting two weeks for it to pass through customs.
Here's how I got this 16 bit marvel running in XP:
* Download johnnycastaway.exe
* Don't run it. Instead, extract its contents to a temp folder. (It's a zip file in disguise, so winzip or winrar should handle it.)
* Delete install.exe and installx.inx.
* Rename 'JohnCast.scr' to 'ssJohnnyCastaway.scr'
* Move these four files into c:\windows
And viola!
Seriously. It's getting a little out of control now.
I supported them...for about the first week. Now they're just being idiots. When you have a job, you have to understand that management makes the big tough decisions. That's why get paid more and have fancy job titles instead of, say, "Deli Clerk" or "Shelf Stocker." If you don't like the decisions being made, you go find yourself another job. That's just how it is.
Most Americans have to pay a little bit for their employer-provided health insurance. I don't think that's too much to ask. The union has raised some other issues that I don't see as mattering at all, so I won't even address those.
I especially like how they chose to start picketing grocery store distribution centers the Monday before Thanksgiving, effectively screwing up Thanksgiving for countless families. That wasn't an attack on management - that was an attack on customers.
This whole thing just makes me hate unions, and now I really support the grocery companies' decision to stick to their guns!
11:06 AM
So we caught Saddam. That's good, I guess. The whole point of the war was to get him out of power and we did that a long time ago.
Much more exciting news came this weekend when Sandra won Survivor. I was actually pulling for Johnny Fairplay to win it, just because he turned out to be such a great manipulator. True, he was an asshole and I couldn't stand him, but I still think he played the game better than most of the other contestants. I don't mind Sandra winning it at all, although I'm still not really sure how she managed to last so long.
The next Survivor starts on Super Bowl Sunday and it'll be an all-star reunion show. The roster of contestants hasn't been announced yet, but survivorfever.net has made some informed guesses...
Here's the story in a nutshell:
* Guy's happy with his day job.
* Guy writes shareware software program to fill a void in the text editing world.
* Guy goes to sleep one night and says "God, if 20 people register my software tomorrow, that is a sign from you to quit my job!"
* Guy gets 21 registrations the next day and quits his job.
I think the guy was just bored at work. Sometimes I play games like that too.
"If the next truck that passes by my window has more than six wheels, that means I need to go to the bathroom."
4:09 PM
The most unfair part of the California Vehicle Code is as follows:
27602. No person shall drive a motor vehicle which is equipped with a television receiver, screen, or other means of visually receiving a television broadcast which is located in the motor vehicle at any point forward of the back of the driver's seat, or which is visible to the driver while operating the motor vehicle. This section shall not apply to a mobile digital terminal installed in a law enforcement vehicle.
Granted, this doesn't really apply to me because I don't have an in-car TV, but I wanted one. It'd be nice to spend my 60+ minutes in the car on the ride home from work watching the news or the Simpsons or what-have-you.
4:59 PM
Out of the box, Game Boy Advance flash cartridges let you play GBA games - not old Game Boy games.
Check out Goomba! It removes that annoying limitation by emulating a GB on the GBA.
You might recall that the GBA has GB emulation hardware in it, so this might not seem like much of a breakthrough. Not so!
GBA carts run at a different voltage than GB carts, so having a GBA flash cart running at old-school GB voltage levels wouldn't work. This emulator truly emulates an old school Game Boy on the souped-up GBA hardware at full speed.
I just ran across it a few minutes ago, so I'll check it out tonight!
10:16 AM
In TV news, TechTV and the all-video-games-all-the-time G4 network could be merging as early as the end of this month. I feel that this would suck very much. Although I've never seen G4, all reports I've heard say it's first rate crapola.
TechTV is good as-is. It'd be even better if they got rid of Robot Wars and those imported British documentaries about spy tech and other conspiracy stuff.
Last night I watched part one (of two) of the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries. I was expecting it to be awful, but I found it riveting!
My favorite part of the mediocre BG TV series from the 60s was the menacing Cylon robot army. In this new series, you hardly ever see the Cylons - and when you do they're CGI versions that bear very little resemblance to the orignals. So that part sucks, but at least the story's good.
I must be the most unconnected loser ever, because here it is 338 days into 2003 and I'm only just now finding out about the incredibly super duper 365 Days Project! For each day of 2003, 365DP will post one obscure mp3 file for your listening enjoyment, complete with documentation for each composition. All of the files will go away on January 5th though, so I've got to bust my ass and get downloading before it's too late! You too!
One of the founders of the 365 Days Project, Otis Fodder, has also started his own record label. Comfort Stand Records is an online-only record label dedicated to spreading new and old music - FREE. There's a catch, though! With bandwidth pricing being what it is, Comfort Stand's albums will be in limited release and won't be available for download after a certain date.
Two Zombies Later is Comfort Stand's first and only release to date. It's a double-CD complete with high-res printable CD labels and liner notes. After Feburary 1st you'll need to hop on your P2P network of choice if you want to download this gem, but until that day comes, you can download it now!
11:12 AM
The other day at Target I was wandering around looking at their GPSs. I saw two Garmin units: the basic yellow eTrex and the Geko 201 side by side for $99 each. I checked out Garmin's site today to try and find out what the difference was between the two, but I couldn't really tell! The Geko is REALLY tiny though. It's as small as some cell phones that I've seen lately. The eTrex is much bigger (but still pretty small!)
I guess this is just one of life's little mysteries that we'll never really know the answer to.
10:11 AM Max Lyons is a photographer who specializes in large-format photography. He takes a several pictures of one subject with his high-end digital camera and then stitches them all together to get an insanely crisp high-resolution image that captures a much larger field of view than you'd expect any camera to capture.
Sadly, all of the photos on his site are just a few pixels too small to be used as desktop images. Still worth a look, though!
2:38 PM
I didn't know this, but a new Tim Burton movie opens next Wednesday. It's called Big Fish. At first glace it doesn't look as weird as you'd expect a Tim Burton film to be. The Black Beauty and Edward Scissorhands music in the trailer gave me goosebumps.
I seriously do think that Edward Scissorhands has probably the best film soundtrack ever made. Yes, better than Star Wars.
10:54 AM
For a mere $19.95, you can have a real live actor give a phone call to one of your friends just to say hello or whatever. The actor actually makes the call and has a little conversation with whoever they're calling. These are not pre-recorded messages.
4:14 PM
Pal Jeff just purchased and moved into his new house! Sounds like he's got his hands full what with the painting and wiring and whatnot. I wish that we could have done all the fix-ups that he's doing now when we bought our house, but the wedding pretty much sucked away any spare cash that we had at the time.
Reading of Jeff's adventures in the world of house fixer-upping reminds me of a problem I have yet to lick! We have really hard water at our house. It's a little annoying because it means we have to clean bathroom fixtures about twice as frequently as most people have to.
Anyhoo, the calcium deposits have really gunked up the insides of an aerator in one of our sinks downstairs. Water still flows through it, but it's not a smooth stream like you'd expect to come out of a faucet. It's a minor annoyance, but I can't fix it.
The minerals have built up and solidified inside it so badly that I can't even unscrew the darn thing to replace it. I've tried to squirt CLR (the Calcium-Lime-Rust remover) up in it, but that had almost no effect whatsoever. I guess I could always call a plumber, but man what a waste that would be. A new aerator is like...a dollar.
I will continue to fight my battle with hard water, and will contemplate the purchse of a water softener.
Roy Disney's resignation letter is an awesome slam on Eisner. So many of us theme park lovers have waited for someone to publically say something like this to Michael Eisner, and now it is done:
"3. The timidity of your investments in our theme park business. At Disney's California Adventure, Paris and now in Hong Kong, you have tried to build parks 'on the cheap' and they show it and the attendance figures reflect it."
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