Category: WTF?

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.

Up in smoke…

I don’t often take a activist type stand on the old blog but I thought that this particular story merited some additional time and analysis above and beyond the usual mass of not caring that I usually imbue on to a article in the East Valley Tribune.

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/109768

The cruxt of the article is this. In 2006 the voters of the state of Arizona passed a law that made it illegal for people to smoke in public places you know bars, restaurants, theaters, museums, libraries, and doctors offices. You know all the places it was already illegal to smoke, but now it was just actually put down into law.

The original intent of the law was good and I will admit I’ve enjoyed going out much more now that there isn’t a cloud of tobacco smoke hanging over every nook and cranny of every place that I go to. However we as a society need to question the actions the of the Arizona Department of Health in going after these particular establishments. They don’t serve food and only have a liquors lisc so that they can provide a full variety of drinks to the customers. I think it would be safe to say that Mr. and Mrs. along w/ Peanut will not be going to one of these establishments.

So why then is the Arizona Department of Health on what amounts to a crusade against these places? That I cannot answer since I’m not a investigative blogger I’m just a guy who’s been to Stogie Cutters down the street a few and have grown to know Rich and Jen (the owners). Do I smoke cigars? Not a regular basis, I’ve given it a couple of shots, but the results are never positive. I do however like the clientele that shows up there and sometimes you just have to watch the Suns play with other people who care.

I’ve never been one who agrees with the state taxing “sin” items (alcohol/tobacco) but I put up with it since it’s about the only way that any taxes get paid in Arizona it seems. Hey I live in a urban area I want my police department to armed to the teeth and well trained. As it stands today the Mesa Police Department is well trained and doing a stand up job, but if things keep going like they have been that won’t be the case for long.

So basically what I’m saying is we all need to call the Arizona Department of Health Services on this and tell them to knock it off. They may be trying to help, but at this point they are doing more harm then good.

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…

Freedom of Choice is what you’ve got…

Checking the old Google analytics for the blog the other night I found the following entry for properties of network visitors

I don’t know which I should more worried about… that the “man” has read this 3 times in the last month or that 2 of the larger healthcare companies in North America are stalking me.

I’m probably on a no fly list now…

Chuck waits… You wait…

A week into the whole Mac transition and it’s been way more painless then I thought. I’ve had more consternation about what to do with my music and photo’s more then anything else. (two copies at the moment). It has not been all smooth sailing I have run into issues getting some web apps work. Don’t worry it’s all related to my work and that is why Steve Jobs gave us BootCamp.

Of course what Steve giveth Bill really fouls up….

I of course loaded boot camp and windows on to the Mac. And Windows runs great, I just have to boot into the Windows side to use it. I’m going to be honest I’ve never been big on booting between operating systems. So I’ve been checking out virtualization for OS X. The good news is there are some really excellent options out there. The bad news is that Microsoft has some really fucked up licensing.

This one has me a little ticked off so if you don’t want to read about Microsoft and Apple for the rest of this post I would just go some place else if I were you.

I decided to load XP, you know since it’s stable been out for forever and a day, and way cheaper then Vista. See now you can get two versions of XP full… OEM and Retail. The difference is OEM instantly gets tied to your hardware set. Meanwhile retail has some flexibility built in to help with those pesky hardware upgrades. Turns out that you can virtualize a retail version of XP but not a OEM copy unless you install the OEM copy directly into the VM. (This is really good info for anyone thinking about doing this).

So where does this leave me? Well for the time being I don’t know I haven’t landed on a virtualization setup that I really like. I would like to just do it and move on. At the same time though I still have my work laptop that I bring home and my desktop that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Honestly for me the best solution would be a VM type appliance that contained I.E. and access to Java in the VM. After that I could really care less about Windows.

So other then the whole I need I.E. to do some legacy web stuff for work that I can do on another computer just as easily I think I could recommend a Mac as your next computer.

Unless you Curtis or Clint… there is just no talking any sense into those two.

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.

The musings of a back porch….

You know I think I can really get used to this whole back porch thing… It’s February and I’m sitting on my back porch with a beer, laptop, and iPod. Just taking in the whole serenity of the evening.

I find that having a bit of alone time is good every now and again. I’m talking serious alone time 24 to 36 hours of the stuff. It’s good for finding a center of your being, it’s almost zen like. Well as zen as one can be with out being either a Buddhist monk or a Novel Netware Admin.

I live in the East valley… now I’m not that far out in the East valley, but it’s only 10 minutes in 2 diffrent directions to hit open deseret. (south and south east by freeway). I never noticed before but the clouds at night absorb the light of the city and glow reddish. It’s kind of strange but at the same time cool.

The album of choice is “Mezzanine” by Massive Attack. Everyone should check it out.

So with the brief winter that Phoenix experinces now over we are into the part of year that I like to call “Why we live here weather”. Let’s face it folks no one in their right mind lives in a place where it gets 120 in the summer and has 100+ days of 100+ degree heat. No I don’t count I moved here willingly and love it. I’m also a PACS administrator. If you ever meet another PACS administrator they will tell you anybody who does that job willingly is either stupid or crazy. I’m going to have to go with crazy people for $100 Alex.

I’ve come to the realization that everyone is beautiful on myspace. Which is why I use a comic for my picture (and here too). It’s not what the author looks like it’s what they have to say. Now I’m fine with the fact that this is page is a cesspool of incessant rambling and talking about things only I care about (for the record I haven’t talked about Linux in like 3 months). Myspace just feels like the sewer system of internet. Everyone goes there, but no one I know freely admits to going there on a regular basis. Actually let me rephrase that… people I call my friends admit they go there, they however have mostly moved to becoming flickr and blogger whores (welcome my brothers and sisters). So why have the myspace? I don’t know… part of me wants to be able to reconnect with my past… the other part of me doesn’t want to look back. I keep the myspace to keep the part of me that wants to look back happy. I keep this to keep the part of me that wants to look forward happy.

The most cruel time of year….

Yes it’s tax time.

I have spent the better part of the last 3 hours preparing my tax prep packet to take to my Tax Guy Who Walks On Water (TG-WOW). Every year I go through this sadistic ritual and every year I want to curl up into the fetal position and cry.

How do I know I’m not getting screwed? Easy. I also do my taxes using online versions of your favorite tax prep software (mine is TurboTax). I fill the online forms to best of my ability and it normally takes me 2.5 to 3.5 hours. Yes I’m that slow… Yes I think about it that hard… Yes I try to be that meticulous.

That has been my ritual for the last 3 or 4 years now. And every year on the first Wed in February I go to my tax appointment with TG-WOW and normally double what the TurboTax told me my refund would be, the last two years I’ve tripled the amount. And in one of the few areas other then computers I beat the pants off of anyone else in my family is in the size of my Tax Refund… yes some people gloat about their athletic ability… me computers and my tax refund.

OK now it’s time for me to get on my “Soap Box of Doom” tm

I’m 27 years old, I can’t tell you how many of my friends do not have a tax guy… much less a TG-WOW. If you don’t have a tax guy and you have any thing more then house intrest and a W2 for taxes get a tax guy. Ask your friends, family, single friend who blogs about his TG-WOW. Ask everybody you know just just get a tax pro.

Now when I say Tax Pro I don’t mean goto H&R Block… that is a great way to really screw up your day. I mean get a Tax Accountant or a CPA who also does income taxes. Check out your tax guy ask them if there is anything you need to do to prep. My TG-WOW sends out a packet that I fill out ahead of time with all of the info he needs.

Check your tax pro’s policy on what happens when you get audited. Mine will go with me to court. I checked out others and they may not. Your tax guy could very well vary.

The first hit is sometimes free… My tax guy doesn’t charge the filer who comes through his doors for the first time. Well at least he didn’t used to I don’t know about 2007. Follow my system if you don’t do so hot with the tax guy then nothing lost if you got a fat refund from the tax guy then bonus!

In closing… get a tax pro may or may not cost you in the short term and may or may not get you great gains in the short term. You have nothing to lose… maybe.