Category: General Carnage and Bloodshed

Memories Can’t Wait….

I present to you now a series of text messages between myself and my cousin the high school english teacher…. I was simultaneously delighted and dismayed by these messages….

 

CHSeT (Cousin High School English Teacher): You would be proud; I used and episode of “Star Trek:TNG” in class!

Me: Next time DS9… more thematic english type elements.

CHSeT: We watched the pilot. Our theme for the year is “what does it mean to be human” and we are doing a unit on confilict. What better episode then “Q” putting humanity on trial?

CHSeT: IDK what’s sadder though, that some didn’t like it. Or that many didn’t understand it!

Me: the “BattlestarGalactica” mini series from 2003

Me: I weep for the next generation of students

CHSeT: Was that pun intentional or just a stroke of ironic genius?

Me: Yes.

 

So knowing the audience for this blog, I know that all of you know that the pilot episode was “Encounter at farpoint” and as Renee would say… “the first couple years of TNG are a bit rough”…. In 1987 we were still in the Cold War, little did we know it would be over in 2 years and those early episodes had the same “hope for the future” quality that the orignal Star Trek episodes had… My overriding memory of that episode is one of great underlying tension throughout the episode.   Again overtones of the cold war.

A high school freshman is typically around 14 years old…. which puts them born in 1998 (dear lord I was in college in 1998) high school students today have no concept of the “soviet threat” (not that I did at 14 (which was in 1993, and at that point the cold war was officially over and the major concern was rouge nuclear warheads… my how times haven’t changed)) the boogeyman for todays kids are al-qaeda and sleeper terror cells.  Much diffrent from the supreme soviet threat.

I guess the part that has me most disturbed is TNG marked the start of a mini golden age of sci-fi on TV… Star Trek:TNG/DS9 (and to a much lesser extent Voyager), Babylon 5 (fuck you Curtis, B5 is awesome!), Farscape, Stargate SG:1.  TNG even influenced shows as distant as the new “Battlestar Galactica” (Ronald D. Moore creator and executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica was a writer for TNG back in the day).  I guess at the end of the day I’m more sad that my beloved sci-fi channel has become the “syfy” channel and now runs shows that are more soap opera then somewhat episodic science fiction…. I’m looking at you ‘Eureka”

 

I think in the final assessment I can’t fault me cousin for choosing “Encounter at Farpoint” for the course material, but for the record I tend to thing that “Best of both worlds” (parts 1 and 2) are a less obvious and far better example of human conflict and what it means to be human. Mainly because the writing was much better and it has the borg, and honestly who doesn’t like a good borg episode of Star Trek?

Excuse me while I go watch more Dr. Who.

 

Jaded….

In the end there is always the blog…

 

I haven’t forgotten you old friend I will return with new stories, musings, and deep technical thoughts that only matter to me.

 

I’m not going to lie though… I’m glad I had my username and password saved in Chrome… it would have been very embarrassing to be locked out of my own word-press blog.

Media and me….

OK so I’m not some super AV geek who has a IP based HD setup in house so I have HD via IP streaming to every tv in the house.

For starters I only have one TV so the whole HD over IP is a non-starter for me, but I do have a fair amount of media in DVD format that I would like to have accessible at my fingertips.  DVD conversion of media is another topic for another day, and honestly it’s more planning and process then actual problem so it’s not worth talking about.

I’m talking about the various digital outlets that I’ve gone to for my media more and more in the last couple of years. Basically it comes down to a simple oxymoronic premise I don’t want to be tied to a single service or outlet (iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) but at the same time have one file and device to rule them all.

 

Let me break it down for you, I have cable for one reason at this point ESPN and Fox Sports AZ, honestly those two things are barely enough to keep me on cable.  The only reason that I’m not a cord cutter is I have not devised a way to easily get my media onto my HD tv.  That problem is more a function of me being in a not research mood over the problem then anything else. As all great questions in the technical realm begin for me, I make a blog post about it.

How 2003 of me.

Ok so basic dilemma I have shows that I do want to watch, that I would like to not pay for if possible (and for the sake of argument and a paycheck lets just go ahead and say that bit torrent and it’s ilk are no longer a good way to go) so anything that is over the air is captured easily enough by a HD antenna and a recording device (hello TiVo) ok there are a few shows that watch that are not over the air… things like Top Gear… and damit if I’m going to watch six figure cars go fast I want to see them HD.   So things like that tend to be avalible in two spaces iTunes or Amazon which on a feature basis are pretty much at a even level with one another.   I have content from both of these providers so I’m not breaching new territory here either, which again I do like.  So the cruxt of the problem comes down to content and how it’s delivered to my TV.

In the case of amazon it’s almost all via a streaming type delivery with a download avalible in some case.  Essentially everything lives in the cloud though.

The iTunes model depends on a download to a device and then from the device it’s either watched on the device or streamed to another node on the network (HD over IP light)

Basically what I think this means is I need to get a Roku box and just use that.

drippings

Less brain droppings and more drippings this evening….. you know to tide you over.

 

Jay Feeley – I feel for the Kickers in the NFL… there is no love when you miss three field goals in a game.  At least he only missed two for us.

 

 

Gingerbread – The gingerbread update for my phone almost makes it seem usable (i.e. the battery doesn’t die if I merely think about using it).

 

Cards – Giants — I need to find the following items for Eve… a Cardinals license plate holder to go with her Cardinals Red car, A black Cardinals jersey (should it be a Dockett or Campbell Jersey?) for the black out game on Sunday, a Red Cardinals jersey for those games when there isn’t a blackout (I’m thinking Wilson or Rhodes),  And some matches so she can burn them in effigy.

 

And it seems that all of my Pandora stations lead back to Fatboy slim….

 

Finally a radio DJ that we can all agree is a oxymoronic name….

A letter….

Honest to god(s) I received this letter from my computer…

 

From pegasus@localhost

To Tom@localhost

July 15, 2011

Dear Tom, we noticed that you have recently removed a GTX280 video card and replaced it with a GTX580 video card.  We the componets of your computer protest, we liked the 280 he moved at our speed and had been in the neighborhood for many years.  The GTX580 that has moved into his slots is loud, hot, and is up at all hours of the night looking for aliens, folding genes, and making things go “boom”.  We humbly request that you bring back the 280 so we can have our friend and neighbor back.

Sincerely the CPU and Hard Drives et All of Pegasus.

 

Naturally I was dismayed when I recieved this letter…. First Intel CPUs aren’t supposed to hit sentient levels until the early 2020’s and second I got this email when I was logged into a Linux virtual machine and using playing around with”Pine”* just because I could… I mean seriously what self respecting Windows machine sends a email via Linux?

So after much deliberation and consultation I decided to evict the whole lot of the computer for a 30 pack of Coors light… which of course left me with a a very sad looking DVD burner and case.   So a quick trip to newegg.com and some CPU love from the folks at Intel… I present to you.

Anubis… Z68 chipset running i7-2600k w/ 8GB of RAM.   And all of the other stuff that goes along with a new PC… I really should just break down and get the SATA 6.0 Gpbs 10k drives… But the finance committee is already not looking kindly at the rounds of upgrades this year.

 

*Ask your husband/boyfriend/wife/girlfriend/friendly Linux geek kids.

Act nice and gentlemanly…..

I’m a Linux fan… actually more accurately I’m a fan of well written operating systems that do what they are designed to do in a functional and consistent manner…. Which means with the exception of 1 NT based windows OS I’m a Windows Fan…. And lets face it I do 95% of my personal stuff on the Mac but you know Mac is like 1 step to the Right of Linux… if Linux is the slacker brother who lucked into a wicked job and hot wife, then Mac is the starving artist brother who tried to reinvent himself 10 years ago with increasingly better results.

So I was going to write about music on my phone… Yeah music on my phone… which is Android… which is Linux… which in the previous paragraph I may or may not have mentioned I’m a fan of. I’m also a fan of iOS, but I made a conscious decision to not move to a iphone because I am not a fan of the walled garden approach that Apple takes with iOS (yes there are ways to get around it, but honestly I’m lazy and I don’t really feel like screwing around with it). While I’m fine with a iPad and iOS as a combination (the upsized screen makes apps just a little bit easier to use in non-app form and goto a browser based setup). One of my consistent complaints of Android has always been it’s kind of a pain in the ass to get music loaded onto, mainly because the iPod and other iDevices are the standard for this particular endeavor (shit just works and works well). It’s a small gripe and I don’t listen to music on my phone enough outside of Pandora to really be that worried about it.

Now Amazon has come along with their cloud player… and oh shit son I have a new favorite application on my phone. I already liked the Amazon MP3 store, and now that I’ve played with it and the cloud music integration I’m sold. Yes it’s 5GB free, but it’s $20 a year for another 20GB… I know several individuals who pay $25 a year for flickr-pro account and have no real business with a flickr pro account.

Will cloud music replace pandora? Probably not, half the fun of Pandora is listening to new music that you might not otherwise have listened to (there is a reason I’m started listening to alot more 70’s southern rock and it’s not the nascar). The main reason I like amazon cloud music… I don’t have to screw around with double twist and it’s slow syncing to get my music on my phone… turn on the app, get the data flowing and life is good my friends.

Now if I can just figure out a way to automate the moving of podcasts.