Category: questions for the ages

Pigs (three diffrent ones)

So with the recent demise of HD-DVD as a viable High Definition physical video format I’ve been kicking around the idea of making the jump to Blu-Ray and all of it’s glory.  This thought was helped when my brother bought a PS3.  And since he is not a game one can only assume that he bought it for Blu-Ray movies.  And over the course of the last month or so as I’ve mulled this decision over in one form or another I kept hearing about how integrated the PS3 was and all of the other normal chest thumping when the users of one particular technology smell blood and indecision in the water.

I honestly had not been bombarded with so many reasons as to why the PS3 was superior to every other platform out there since Jr. High when Donny Witt and I used to spend hours on end taunting each other as to which was the greater the 16-bit system Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis.  Hey when your 13 these things make a difference.  And just for the record the Super Nintendo still kicks the Sega Genesis’s little white butt!!!1!11!!0ne

However I digress, so through some weird combination of coworkers, an alignment of stars, and a promise to not hack or break anything I have been loaned a PS3.

Que jaw dropping… for those of you keeping track the last time I owned a Sony system willingly was 1996 when I bought the then state of the art Sony Play-station using money from my job at Albertson’s.  I had sold it within a year and bought a N64 which I still have to this day.  I do have a PS2 that my brother gave to me, however I have not hooked it up and have made no attempt to.   In the ten years since I sold that first Play-station   I’ve bought two other Nintendo systems and when I’ve played them I’ve enjoyed them immensely.  Key phrase “when I play them”.  I’m a PC gamer and I hold a special place in my game playing heart for all things Nintendo as I’ve often stated here I don’t care much about games other then are they fun?  And my general experince with Nintendo games is I often find them to be immensely fun!

So what gives with the change of heart?  First off, at $400 the PS3 is a bargain of Blu-Ray player right now and will be BD 2.0 compliant when that spec comes out.  And since Blu-Ray is a Sony format you know damn well that any future profiles will be supported by the PS3.   Second it’s backwards compatible with that gianormous library of PS2 games and more then a few are sure to classics when we look back on them in 10 or 15 years (classics in the way I see “Super Metroid” and “The Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past” as great games of my youth).  Finally all of the new gaming platforms support some sort of link to your PC so you can play movies, show pictures, and stream music to your living room (sorry Windows only apparently Mac/Linux et all don’t want to support or just don’t care to support anything that would make their platforms accessible to the box in the living room (yes Tivo does run a Linux Kernel, but it’s heavily modified and we will get to why that is not a media platform in a bit)).

So for the past 5 days I’ve been playing with a PS3…

It’s more fun then I expected so it’s got that running for it.   The downloadable games from the Play-station Network makes ALOT of sense and I do I really like it.  Even if the selection is somewhat limited at the current time.  Hooking up with my home network was no worse an experince then the Wii or the Tivo was.  It’s a good media server  for the front room of the house and I could see me streaming things to the PS3 with out to much of a stretch of the imagination.    The games were “OK” I had a couple loaded onto the Hard Drive (Teken 5 being the closest thing to a “A” title and unless your a 12 to 18 y/o male a fighting game won’t hold your interest for long).  Teken has held up suprisingly well over the last decade or so and I have to give the the developers credit it’s still the fighter to beat.  “Call of Duty4” was a abysmal experince…. the game looked good, but I’ve never liked FPS type games on a console with the loan exception being the “Metroid” games.  I’m a PC gamer first and foremost and “COD4” on the PS3 reminded me of why this is in spades.

So what finally turned me completely off to the PS3?  My cable provider!  One of the big points of the PS3 is that you can stream music and videos off of it onto your PSP over the wireless network in your home or the internet!  And the PSP can play Tivo To Go files too!  Imagine my utter dismay when I was presented with the following screen.

Content you can't touch....

And this is true for about 85% of the shows on my Tivo, there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason other then for some obscure reason Cox sees fit to set the copy protection flag on certain programs.  Ultimately this what led me away from the PS3/PSP combo more on principle then problems with technology.  Since if you look on current TIVO and PSP advertising they each tout how you can transfer tv shows from your Tivo to your PSP!  This killed it for me right here.

That and after watching “300” on Blu-Ray I could not tell a difference in picture quality, but the sound did seem improved.  Not enough of a reason to switch physical media formats.  But enough to give me faith that Apple may be onto something with the Apple Tv.

Good night and good luck.

Where I begin to question…

My sanity or the sanity of my coworkers….

This was the first email I opened at work this morning…..

—————————-
From: Nathan
To: Andrea; Brad; Sherpa; Greg; Jim; John; Scott; Tom
CC: Victoria
Subject: I got elfed
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 23:35:42 -0700

Hey, I just made a total elf of myself. Check it out by clicking the link below.
http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1157868405
———————————————

Some days it just doesn’t pay to get a second cup of coffee…

Quotes from work…

I don’t talk about work much…. but here are some out of context quotes from this week that hopefully you too drop on your coworkers

“We’re saving lives here man, were not rolling out grass and planting trees”

“When your space shuttle is going 19,000 miles an hour and 1 inch off the launch pad, you best make sure your shit is working like it should”

“Dan read your monitor” (As Dan is trying to figure out if a character is a “5” or a “S” on a 6 foot projected image)

Q – “Why do you guys have such big monitors?”
A – “Easier to look at porn on”

Go Go iShit!

Ok the iPhone has been out for a week now and every technology pundit with a computer and internet connection has given their $.02.

Time for me to give my $1.25 about their $.02.

There is no way to make a technology pundit happy… they always find some flaw with the item in question that will then be repeated by every half twit out there (I would have used more colorful language but this particular half twit has used technology pundititry in more then one or five cases…) So the biggest complaint about the iPhone has been the lack of inclusion of 3g data for it’s data service (HSDPA for the GSM folks or EVDO Rev 0 or Rev A for the CDMA folks). The official line from Apple is something to the effect of…

“Current 3G chips suck power and we have included WiFi to use instead of 3G data” And they are absolutely correct. I will take a shitty WiFi connection over a good EVDO connection any day of the week.

Now for the counter point to the iPhone when Palm released the Treoo 700P it included EVDO data for CDMA (The Treo 750 on GSM has HSDPA) and what did the technology pundits roundly criticize?

“But it doesn’t have WiFi”

Mary MOTHER OF FUCKING…….

And now I remember why I stopped watching TV news… because at least with technology pundits I know they are idiots… With political talking heads they could be feeding me a steaming pile of shit and I wouldn’t know the difference… though that probably has more to do with the fact that I tend to skim over the politics sections of CNN and the BBC.

So where does this leave us? Well the iPhone is a interesting piece of technology that will be unlocked shortly (I give it 3 weeks from this posting and 6 weeks after that before it’s so easy that my brother and mom could both do it) I’m still out in the cold since there will not be a CDMA version of the device unless Apple launches the iPhone in Japan and just happens to leave the door open for the device to work with CDMA carriers in the states.

Me? I’m going to pass on the iPhone in it’s current revision and wait for the iPod with touch screen and upgrade. Of course I need it to be at least 40 Gigs before it’s worth the money to me. I don’t feel this great need to condense my gadetry down to one device between my Treo and iPod I’m good and for those long hauls I always take my laptop with me.

So there you have it kids the iShit from the iTwit’s brain.

“Premium” cable shows and you…

Fucking Cody….

Fucking Little Brother….

It’s not often that friends inspire ire in me, when they do it is worthy of blogging. The last person who got this kind of treatment was Curtis with SEVEN SEASONS OF STARGATE!!

Actually I can’t blame Cody all he did was say how much he liked “Entourage” which is even more impressive because Cody gave up TV a year ago. Which leads me to thing that Cody has pulled a “Hoff” with regards to TV and non sporting type events.

No No the real enabler in this whole scam is my brother who gave me two and a half seasons of “Entourage” to watch (for some reason the producers of Entourage put the second half of season 3 on a separate DVD set did I mention how much that annoyed me with Battlestar Galactica?). So to you little brother I say thanks a fucking lot… now I have to go spend the extra money on my cable get HBO so I can get my Entourage fix in a somewhat timely manner.

Ok now undoubtedly you the loyal reader of 5 years (Curtis) why don’t I bit torrent them. Well Curtis we have already had this discussion but for those of you who weren’t there who were there but didn’t listen and just heard alot of “beeps” “bops” and “boops”. Downloading TV shows is something of a legal grey area… I’m already paying for cable and so the show has already been sent to my house I just missed it. There are some schools of thought that think of the internet as a giant TIVO. So while yes you are in the wrong for downloading a TV show you’ve already received the content. Now HBO is a little different, if you aren’t paying for HBO you are defiantly in the wrong if you download one of their shows.

So hence my dilemma… of course I could just wait for Scott to keep buying the DVD’s but honestly I don’t know if I want to wait that long.

And in the interest of full disclosure yes I have downloaded TV shows… I dare you to find someone under the age of 35 who’s used a computer for more then a Day and hasn’t downloaded a TV Show.

States of mind….

So every now and again I hit a point where things just move along swimmingly and I don’t have anything that really inspires me to write. I call these events “life” events with in my “life” as of late drive me to write. You know the occasional trip to wal-mart that generally sets me off in more ways then you can imagine.

Why do I keep going there when I have so many choices available to me that are just as easily reached? Simple you can’t beat the prices on the same high quality name brand merchandise that you get at other department stores. There is no fighting the evil empire, just accept it and move on.

Speaking of evil empires, my coworkers and friends will tell you that I know way to much about cell phones. And to that charge I completely agree. They are intersting bits of technology that you can tell alot about a person from.

Smart phone… either they are trying to look smart (me) or it was issued to them (check for barcode on the back of the neck)

Music phone/Camera phone… I don’t get these they have iPods for a reason people. The nice things about music phones is they are also camera phones and you can tell how naughty someone is by how much they react to their cell phone “disappearing” I know one or two people who are really naughty.

Basic phone…. they use this phone to talk… how quaint.

Anyway I ran across a article about how a quarter of all people under the age of 30 only have cell phones. So I stopped to think about this for a second. I could only come up with 3 people under the age of 30 who had land lines. And if I wanted to get ahold of any of these people I would call their cell phone and not even bother with their land line. So that means that 90% of the people that I know are totally wireless. Granted this is way shifted towards the under 30 crowd. But still you get the idea.

So I started to think about why do I have a land line? Honestly it’s thrown in free with my cable tv and internet (i.e. it costs the same if I have my cable service and internet with or with out the phone option). Granted I have a couple of upgrades to my cable but that is beside the point. Why else do I have a land line? I send all of my credit cards there, you know since you have to call and activate credit cards from your home phone line. I just don’t feel comfortable doing this with a cell phone. I’ve read enough articles over the years to know that cell phones are just as susceptible to cloning today as they were 15 years ago.

Paranoid? you betcha…

Final reason? I send my voter registration to that line. So since voter reg is not under the federal do not call lists I get a million and one calls during election season. Last year I got enough phone calls on my land line that didn’t goto my cell that I was happy to keep it. And that was a off year!

Would I ever give up my land line? Yeah, and probably goto some sort of cheap voice over IP setup (like $5 a month cheap) or cheap cell phone. But since VOIP isn’t exactly that cheap and pay as you go phones are a huge rip off in my mind the land line stays collecting dust.

Tales from the punch bowl… the punch bowl that is my back porch.

Favorite thing about living in Phoenix? The wind doesn’t blow 100% of the time.

Yes I know, thats pretty lame. Where I’m from though the wind never stops blowing ever… it’s always windy. Here it actually dies at night, to the point where you can sit on your back porch with a beer your work pager (because your on call this week and your a good doobie) and a laptop and just start writing. Actually 5 of the last 7 posts have been made from the back porch.

Wow when you turn down the screen back light it doesn’t hurt your eyes nearly as much… that is so cool.

Diffrent theme tonight… I’ve got “Massive Attack” on the old iTunes and the Moose Drool Beer is going down rather smoothly (thanks again Eve (the woman not the game) and Cody (the mac to my PC)).

A while back I wrote about the “file wenches” at work (as I lovingly refer to them) and how they pretty much figured I hated women. So somewhere between now and then the hot one (Izzy) has made it her personal crusade to get me to stop drinking coffee (currently I’m a 2 cup a day man). To which she has made some inroads (like I’m almost willing to try the mix stuff from Nestle…almost) now this being at work my coworkers aren’t exactly helping her out… I’m a bit nasty when I haven’t had my sweet sweet caffiene fix.

So as I keep asking Izzy “what is the incentive for me to give up coffee?” She and she keeps trying to break me… Risking life and limb to get to me before 9 AM on somedays to try and break me of my oh so lovely habit. To say that the deck is stacked against her is probally understating the challenge in front of her.

So if I suddenly stop drinking coffee and become way more irritable then I normally am I must have found an incentive to give up coffee.

Wind w/ Fire!

So I’ve been dicking around with my Linux server this weekend…

It’s pissing me off.

That is all I will write about Linux… needless to say the thought of lighting several DVD’s on fire to exercise my Linux frustrations is really appealing to me right now.

While dicking around with said Linux box I wandered back to the ole website of long ago (rollingskull.com) which really didn’t come into existence until I moved down to Phoenix but for all intents and purposes it’s the same damn sight I had when I was in Kingman and doing this with Frontpage and Geo-cities.

I got to reading the old posts and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed opening up the old semi-journal to random emails from readers (all 3.2 of you). I got to thinking that I should do something like that again… then I thought if Curtis AND my brother both have a blog then there really is no point.

So while my install of CentOS 5 died for the 5th time in a row I was thinking…

Maybe what I should is something along the lines of that post card site where people mail their post cards in anonymously… it’s sometimes a riot other times really sad and typically it’s both on the same day.

So maybe I should open this thing up to a anonymous emails of whatever? (Thanks to Eve who reminded me it’s postsecret.com is what I was thinking of)

I like the idea… and it gives you (all 3.2 of you) a little bit of interactive opportunity.

So here are the rules (I know always rules)

1. Send the email anonymously…. ideally from a one time use site it’s up to you how you want to do it. If your to lazy to do that and send me an email from your regular address that kind of defeats the purpose doesn’t it?

2. Send the email to cignus20 at hotmail dot com use the subject line “Wind w/ Fire!”

3. I will post received emails (if I get any at all) up here…

If you don’t like the rules you don’t have to email.

City by the sea….


Flashback to the summer of 2004…. Young Tom had just gotten involved with a little project at Kingman Regional called “PACS” he was playing Star Wars Galaxies way more then was healthy and his girlfriend had dumped him earlier that year because he didn’t want to join her during grad school rather choosing to build a life in Kingman and join her once she finished. That was in late January early Feburary.

It’s July 2004 the dark side of Catalina island. The first day of what would be 4 day stay on the dark side of Catalina. Young Tom is sitting under a palm tree drinking a Guinness Irish stout that he bought earlier in the day for $9.00 at the two harbors general store (which really amounted to highway robbery with sales tax). It’s late in the evening and Tom is talking with his friends Sabrina and Tim about “What makes you and adult?”

Among the ideas bandied about between the three while Tom drinks his Guinness while Sabrina and Tim drink something that involves rum are… a mortgage, children, car payments, thinking about retirement, and marriage… ultimately all rejected because one of us can name one person who has one of the above items but yet we considered them to be not adult. I barely considered myself an adult at the time I was 25 job, mortgage, and thinking about investing but honestly I still thought of myself as a kid.

Why were we drinking? Well that part is easy there were 7 adults and 6 kids. And someone was not having any part of the kids (his name rhymes with mom). Sadly the 6 Guinness wouldn’t make it through the night as I shared with Brandi and we were dry by the morning. It was a long 3 days after that.

Flash forward to 2007 young but slightly older Tom is sitting on his back porch thinking about his life. No girlfriend but friends he wouldn’t trade the world for and thinking to himself as Rage Against the Machine plays in the background (Renegades of funk) am I an adult? Young but slightly older Tom would say yes only because as he was grilling a steak earlier in the day walked through his grass and pulled up weeds.

Young but slightly older Tom doesn’t know if that makes him an adult but it makes him alot more like his father then he would would care to admit to.