9:57 AM
So let's say you really like this band and for some reason they've chosen MySpace as the one-and-only place for fans to listen to their new, unreleased, or rare titles.
That's great exposure for the band I guess, but not-so-great for the fans! MySpace uses a proprietary streaming Flash player which prevents you from saving the audio to your computer. It's not exactly DRM, but it's just as annoying.
It turns out that streamed audio is just a plain ol' mp3 streamed to your desktop using Macromedia's RTMP protocol. The MySpace MP3 Gopher will let you save that stream to your local disk with zero loss of quality.
This is definitely not a "record your audio card's output" scam. The program just grabs the stream (which is already an mp3) and saves it to your hard drive.
11:10 AM
Friday night I was finally able to track down an Xbox Live Vision camera.
Microsoft's been having some real distribution problems with these things, at least in southern California anyway.
They were supposed to hit retail last Tuesday, but nearly a week later every Best Buy, Target, Toys-R-Us, and Wal-Mart within like a 30 mile radius of my zip code still haven't received their first shipments. Best Buy told me they're actually not expecting them until the end of October.
I was finally able to find an EBGames near my house with one in stock and I nabbed it after work on Friday. (They had received a grand total of five.)
It's a pretty neat little gizmo, that's for sure. With in-game voice chat being all the rage over the past few years I found myself wondering why in-game video chat took so long to happen.
The console has built-in one-on-one video chat, and the quality's not too shabby:
Uno is a neat use of the camera, and it's hard to find an open game where at least one person doesn't have one. So far I haven't seen any man-ass mooning incidents, and for that I am grateful. Luckily there's a way to report disruptive users!
When I bought the camera it came with codes to unlock the full versions of Uno and Robotron: 2084.
I already bought Uno and you'd have to have downs syndrome to enjoy Robotron, so I'm giving away the codes to unlock those games to the first person to contact me. The only catch is that you have to give me your Xbox Live username so I know you're not just going to turn around and sell these on ebay!
Uno and Robotron are normally $5 each, so this saves you $10!
When I was a kid I used to really like mechanical pencils. Those were fun for a while but as I've grown up I've started to appreciate real, wooden pencils.
I love the way they feel, I love the way they smell, and I love the way they write.
All you have to do is stick a pencil into any pencil sharpener and in seconds you've got a work of art in your hands - a woodsy-smelling precision writing instrument. The simple act of sharpening a wood pencil gives me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Sometimes it makes me feel like a master carpenter, sitting there in my air-conditioned office whittling away at this little stick of wood to make something useful.
You can use a pencil to create works of art, literature, solve math equations...you can do pretty much anything with a pencil that your brain can't handle on its own. You can do it all with a pen too of course, but when you do it with a pencil it just feels so good and so pure and so right.
The gentle friction of the graphite rubbing along the paper is a sensation that just can't be reproduced by any other means. Press hard and you've got darker lines. Press lightly and you've got light lines. Hold the tip sideways and you'll make shades of gray. Roll your thumb across the final product and the lines will blur away.
The greatest pencil ever made (allegedly) was Eberhard Faber's Blackwing 602. It's been out of production since 1998, but you can sometimes find them on eBay for about $20 *per pencil*. I love pencils but I can't bring myself to spend that much to own something that I know I'd never want to use.
So all you kids with your fancy mechanicals and your erasable inks and whatnot, take it from an old timer. Wood is where its at. I know you've got some free time this weekend. Why not stop by Staples and get re-acquainted with an old friend?
2:05 PM
Once every six months Microsoft sends down a firmware/dashboard update to the Xbox360. It seems to be working well because they really haven't broken anything yet and they've pretty much only been adding new features or fixing some small usability issues.
In their Tokyo Game Show press release they've made a bit of a surprise announcement about the Fall 06 update. It's going to add 1080p output to the 360! Games can be created to take advantage of the mega-resolution natively, and if they're not the console will just upconvert them anyway.
Even your 480p DVD movies will get upconverted! How sweet is that.
Sony and whiny stats-masters like myself were always so eager to point out that while the 360 can only do 1080i, the PS3 ships with 1080p out of the box. Well soon that won't be the case anymore. Take that Phil Harrison!
Instead of talking like a buffoon all day I'm going to share with you some real pirate booty!
When Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean first opened in March 1967, the "Pirate Arcade" at the exit (now a pirate gift shop) contained a vending machine that sold two sets of pirate postcards, each a set of six.
All twelve postcards contained some of Marc Davis' original concept artwork for the attraction and all twelve were only available from that vending machine for not-very-long.
I recently came into possession of a complete set of these cards and I'm making them available today in the spirit of all things piratical!
6:34 PM
Can you imagine how much email gets sent to test@test.com? I bet it's a lot. I pretty much use that whenever I need to test something. I'm sure the folks at "Test Central" appreciate it.
Along those same lines... I once heard someone say that the two biggest ISPs in the world are 'Linksys' and 'default'. I believe it.
With it you'll be able to hold one-on-one video chats with your friends, map your face onto in-game characters, or just stream your video alongside your gamertag when you're playing games like Uno online.
I've got this Best Buy gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket, so guess where I'll be tomorrow!
For a long time I thought it would be a lot of fun to write a book. I've had a few ideas for science fiction stories bouncing around in my head but I've never really sat down and gotten to work on anything. Plus it's rare to see sci-fi on the New York Times bestseller list. That's sort of a dead end.
When I started hearing about how hard it is to get a book published nowadays I kind of lost enthusiasm for that whole idea. Why spend a few months of my life writing something that would probably never see the light of day? Not everybody can be JK Rowling.
So I've kind of decided to put the book thing on hold for about forty years. By then I'll be retired and looking for something to do with my time.
So lately I've been thinking how much fun it must be to write comedy for TV. I'm not talking about schlocky laugh(track)-a-minute sitcoms like Will and Grace, Friends, or Two and a Half Men. I'm talking about intelligent comedy like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia or The Office.
I could write some episodes of The Office without breaking a sweat, and I guarantee they'd be just as funny as what's on the air now.
5:28 PM
You know how whenever you're near a set of speakers with your mobile phone it makes the speakers go all crazy and make these half-beep/half-static noises?
I hate that.
I don't think this phenomenon has a name yet, so today I'm going to start calling it stabeeple. That's so catchy!
Treos are the WORST. The guy in the office next to me has a Treo, and even though there's two sheets of drywall and some metal framing between us, HIS phone affects my speakers more than my own phone does.
Nextel's entire iDen network is pretty bad too. I used to get HORRIBLE stabeeple when I was with them.
For our anniversary gift this year my parents took Tammy and I to see Willie Nelson at the Hollywood Bowl. They had won some box seats in a charity auction, so we tagged along and watched the Nelsonator on Friday night.
Willie's first set was mostly slow songs, but the LA Philharmonic played backup and it was pretty sweet. The second set was longer and just had his usual honkey-tonkery, with some funny new stuff thrown in at the end. I'm no big Willie Nelson fan, but I had a great time that night.
I hadn't been to the Hollywood Bowl in at least fifteen years, but I decided I really liked it there. The box seats all had these little tables so my mom had brought this big salmon dinner with appetizers and all kinds of neat stuff. They even let you bring in your own booze! That was nice of them I thought.
I like this picture because it makes the lighting rig look like an alien spaceship.
3:11 PM
Whenever I eat hot dogs I feel like I'm doing the meat industry a favor.
I imagine the inventor of the hot dog must have been sitting around the dumpster of his meat processing plant one day, watching all of the waste before him and wondering if things couldn't change somehow. We'll call him Joe.
Joe turned to his assistant and asked "What else can we do with all these hair, snout, anus, and hoof fragments, Frank?" Then a lightbulb went off and he jumped off his bench in excitment. "Let's grind up everything in this dumpster and squeeze the puree into tubes two-fingers wide! We'll grill them like ground beef and I bet they'll taste pretty similar!"
Frank looked up at him from the bench. "That's disgusting, Joe. You're insane. In fact, I just threw up in my mouth a little. So thanks for that."
Undaunted, Joe then reached the length of an entire arm into the dumpster and pulled it out to reveal a flap of discarded pork skin dangling from his elbow. "Look at this anus! This is a perfectly good anus, Frank! The newborn Baby Jesus himself could not have had an anus so perfect. Are you going to tell me that this anus is unsaleable? This dangling asshole is discarded profit!"
Joe wordlessly shook his head in disgust and walked back to his office inside the plant. Frank was crushed a few minutes later in a bizarre dumpster-dropping accident. While mourning the loss of his best friend, Frank decided to give the crazy idea a try and he whipped up a batch of hot dogs. They tasted wonderful, he called them "Franks," and the rest is history.
Despite their varied components, hot dogs still taste like hot dogs, year after year, week after week, pig after pig or cow after cow. I guess I really don't care what they put in them, as long as they taste like hot dogs.
12:45 PM
We went to Dave and Buster's Friday night for a little holiday weekend partying.
I got totally addicted to the 'drop a coin in and see if it makes the little pusher things knock more coins off the edge' game.
You know what I'm talking about, right? One of these bad boys:
I was seriously the master of arcade tickets that night. I knew when a coin-pusher machine was hot, and I knew when it was time to cut ties and move on to a new machine with more potential.
And no matter where I went, I kept winning! And winning big!
It was like I just couldn't stop machines from spitting out tickets! I'm telling you I was on fire. As soon as a machine finished up spitting out one run I'd make another big score and more tickets would come out in an unending stream!
Drunk girls stared at my fistfulls of tickets in awe. Their vato boyfriends would come up to me and ask me what my 'secret' was. I have no secret guys, please don't shoot me in the parking lot later.
I collected my spoils and took them to the redemption counter. 2600 tickets! Can you imagine how many plastic spider rings that'll get me! Oh boy!
Wait..what? You have no plastic spider rings? What kind of establishment is this! Every redemption arcade in the HISTORY OF MAN has plastic spider rings, and you're telling me you have none?
Oh I see, I can get 26 Dave and Buster's shot glasses. How practical! 2000 gets me a coffee maker, eh? That might be a good deal if I were a moron, but thanks for the suggestion!
In the end I couldn't find a single thing in their redeption store that I wanted - not even a little bit. I decided to bank my tickets (they store the value on a magnetic-stripe card) and I'll come back another time to grow my winnings.
In the meantime more suckers will go play those machines and load them up with coins that teeter on the edge for ME to push off!
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