I can't get to sleep
I think about the implications
Of diving in too deep
And possibly the complications
Especially at night
I worry over situations
I know will be alright
Perhaps it's just imagination

Day after day it reappears
Night after night my heartbeat shows the fear
Ghosts appear and fade away

I can't get get to sleep
It only beings exasperation
It's time to walk the streets
Smell the desperation
At least there's pretty lights
And though there's little variation
It nullifies the night
From overkill

I can't get to sleep
I think about the implications
Of diving in too deep
And possibly the complications
Especially at night
I worry over situations
That I know will be alright
It's just overkill

Been feeling a lot like this lately. Overwhelmed, worried about the future and finances. But today I’m strangely at peace with it all. Just thought I’d share.

Maybe I’m just in a weird mood, but the above comment I found on The Consumerist blog is hilarious. The article is about how Comcast/DirectTV/etc. installers are usually hackjobs who really cause damage to your home.

NinjaCast indeed!

I’m selling my XBox 360 Premium kit. Here’s the Craigslist post, or if you’re too lazy to look there, here’s the specs:

I have an XBox360 premium console, won from the Mountain Dew contest (came out before people could officially buy the XBox360!) Works great, hardly played, and in excellent condition. I've added onto the system over the years. Here is a complete breakdown:

1 XBox360 Premium Console
1 Wireless Controller
2 Play & Charge Kits (lets you recharge your controllers)
1 Wireless Network Adapter
1 HD-DVD Player/Drive
1 XBox 360 VGA Cable
1 Game, Halo
1 Game, Halo 2
1 Game, Gears of War
1 Game, Kameo
1 Game, Perfect Dark Zero
1 Game, Need for Speed: Most Wanted
1 Game, Fable
1 HDDVD, Phantom of the Opera
1 HDDVD, King Kong
1 HDDVD, Serenity
1 HDDVD, The Last Samurai

If you bought all of these things brand new, you'd easily be spending around $1100. I'm selling it for $800, or best offer.

If you purchase the system, you are buying it as-is. I don't believe that Microsoft's warranty covers it now, since it's a launch unit. I haven't had any problems, though. Make sure you have adequate cooling!

If you need photos, I can provide. I will only accept cash, no checks.

I'm asking for $800, or whatever the best offer is. If you know anyone interested, please have them send me an e-mail at iransofaraway AT gmail DOT com. Thanks!

Update: I actually decided to put it all up on eBay. Click here to check out the listings.

I was dumb many moons ago and purchased my laptop and a desktop computer from Dell. My main monitor at the time also died, so I decided to purchase another one. Long story short, I spent around $4k on equipment, and like a dummy, signed up for Dell’s Preferred Account. It’s Dell’s line of credit, like a credit card, except you can’t put anything but Dell stuff on it. Insanely high interest rate, but since I had a good credit score, they offered 18 months no interest. I took it.

Fast forward to June 7^th of this year. I finally have the money to pay off my Dell bill in full, so I call the automated phone system. No operators available, so I use the phone system to pay my bill. There’s a $9.95 convienience fee to do this. Why, I have no idea. Just another way to stiff you of money. Whatever, I want it done, so I pay it off completely.

I get an invoice today, saying I still owe $592.19. Looking at it, I see my promotion (interest-free) ended on 06/01/07. A whole six days before I paid my account in full (and paid what the automated phone system was saying as the payoff amount.) So since the promotion ended, they charged me all the back-interest.

I wasn’t very happy. True, I was late, but not THAT late, and the fact that I going from near-minimum payments to finally paying off the bill should’ve been good enough for them, right? I called up Dell, got an Indian* with a clearly fake American-sounding name. He explained that he couldn’t do anything, it was late, etc… I told him I wasn’t sastisfied, and wanted him to check further. He put me on hold and came back about a minute later, saying his supervisor would allow him to take $30 off of the total bill. Whoopie.

Lessons learned:

1. Don’t fall for interest-free enticements unless you’re going to for-sure be able to fufill the requirements before the due date.
2. Don’t sign up for credit lines with insane interest rates to begin with.
3. Save up money to pay for computers. They depreciate so fast, it’s not worth placing them on a credit account/card.

* I am not racist. I just hate hate hate speaking to someone who can’t clearly speak the English language. That goes for any race, color, nationality. If you’re in the business of speaking with someone on the phone all day, you should have a good and clear voice.

Found this over on TVSquad— all of the LOST “plane crash” events spliced together to run semi-cohesively. Pretty sweet, and gets me all excited for next season. If you’ve never watched LOST, this will either be a really interesting clip to you, or really boring. Whatever!

This is hilarious. But the Bobba Fett / Han Solo scene is a little disturbing

Worth Watching - June 16: First 3:10 to Yuma Trailer « FirstShowing.net.

Worth Watching has a great trailer up for “3:10 to Yuma” (a remake of the 1957 film.) Looks like a pretty interesting Western, and with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale as leading actors, how can it go wrong?

Bill Gates Goes to College

The Microsoft bigwig teamed up with Napoleon Dynamite in this spoof video from PDC 2005. The camera's a little shaky, but you get the idea.

This is embarassing. I like Amy Winehouse’s CD… I’m guessing she wasn’t drunk when she recorded it, unlike this clip from the Charlotte Church show.

Via Gizmodo. ‘nuff said.

Lots of people are trolling Microsoft lately, after their announcement and demo of their new Surface platform. I don’t get it, really. It’s pretty darn slick. But people are saying it’s a rip-off of this, a rip-off of that, and naming Michael Bay’s film, “The Island” as one of the precursors. Turns out, this actually was the “Surface” device, in a very early state!

There’s a follow-up post at the same IStartedSomething blog with a video clip of the scene in question. Worth checking out if you’ve never seen The Island. Yes, I know, they obviously jazzed up the interface and did some art work to it, but you have to admit it’s pretty cool that they used an actual prototype for the film, and we’ve been oblivious this whole time.

I was actually thinking about him the other day, wondering whatever happened to him. Turns out, he kept doing what he loved until the very end.

Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) was probably the main driving force behind me getting interested in science and technology. I’m sure he also touched countless others. He will be greatly missed.

David at The Hot Blog has written two articles recently about the movie “Hostel 2” that came out this past Friday. His first one was a direct shot at “horror porn” as he so effectively puts it. After reading that entire article, I wanted to e-mail him and tell him how much I agree, and that we sometimes go too far. I just never got around to it. But last Friday he posted a followed up message, regarding feedback he’s received on his original post. Both articles are well worth your time to read.

I’ve never seen Hostel or Hostel 2, but I have no desire to. The concept and the execution of that concept are enough to keep me away. However, I’m game for most any “horror” flick. For example, I think Saw is brilliant, and it’s got a little gore in it, but I am able to rationalize/deal with that as part of the storyline. The gore isn’t there just to take the story “over the top”. The story is what’s totally messing with you. Hostel, it seems (and perhaps Eli Roth) is trying to use the gore element to make the audience happy. This is one thing that majorly turned me off about Saw 2 and Saw 3. There was just too much gore for the sake of gore, too much nudity for the sake of nudity, etc… and the story sucked for it.

I’m all for the first amendment, but there’s obviously a line/filter that each of us determine in our own minds as to what’s “okay” and what’s “crossing the line”. Christians would call it the Holy Spirit. Others can call it morality or humanity. But it does exist in most people. Do we really want this sort of entertainment advertised and pushed to thousands of movie theatres across the country? I sure don’t. I cringe at the thought of teens seeing this film. And it doesn’t matter if you’re not 18. You and I know it’s easy to get into rated R movies at an early age, thanks to movie theatres who don’t voluntarily enforce the MPAA ratings. It isn’t required by law, after all.

But this is garbage that shouldn’t be viewed at any age. I can’t imagine someone who would actually enjoy or defend watching something like that. Ugh.

This just pisses me off.

I recently had to reinstall Vista on my work machine. Upon finishing the reinstallation, I went to activate Vista online (with Dell’s OEM key.) Vista claims the key is invalid. So I have to call Microsoft’s automated activation line.

If you’ve never had to call this line, consider yourself lucky. Granted, it’s as simple as they could make it, but it’s just a pain. You have to read off six or so groups of numbers, each group containing six numbers themselves. In return, you get the same amount of numbers back to type in and verify the installation. If the automated process fails, you get transferred to Microsoft’s Indian tech. support center (apparently) to manually get the return codes.

Anyhow, after the call, and speaking to a live person, I was activated and ready to go. Until the next day, at least, when a dialog popped up and said my copy of Vista was no longer activated, and I had three days to re-activate. Yet another call to Microsoft’s automated activation line. Yet another group of numbers to type in. Valid again, yay.

I thought that would be the end of it, but today on my home machine, I got the dialog in the middle of programming. What? I purchased an OEM copy of Vista Ultimate for my home machine months ago, and have been running it without fail since then (activated it online originally.) Whatever. I try the online activation, but get a different dialog back, saying that my product key is in use on another computer. No, dummy, it’s not. Yet another call to Microsoft’s activation line. More numbers read off and returned, and finally I’m activated again.

I never had this problem under XP. Ugh. Methinks they clamped down on the product activation a bit too much. Meanwhile, I’m sure pirates and such are enjoying Vista for free regardless.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Vista, and recommend it for everyone. But this is just silly.

Okay, I totally knew about this, but forgot until recently. In HTML/CSS, you can actually specify more than one class name inside of the “class” tag. For example:

Go ahead, try it yourself.

Windows-Now.com has an excellent write-up on how to reset the view settings under Vista. It is not exactly the same as it was in XP! In XP, the “Reset All Folders” button worked literally for every folder. Under Vista, it only resets the current “type” of folder you’re looking at. For example, you could be in a “picture” type folder, and will only be resetting all folders that Vista determines contains pictures.

Also, if you want to get rid of the auto-type-sensing functionality altogether, they have another article on how to do just that.

Found a flickr account with this photo from inside Microsoft’s Zune department, of an “Amnesty” bucket with some iPods in it. Reading the comments is hilarious.

I love how Apple supporters are so defensive. God forbid there should be competition in the marketplace! Or that the Zune team should poke fun at Apple. Because Apple never does that.

<sarcasm>Yes, we should all own an iPod and do the exact same thing. Clearly iTunes is the best software out there.</sarcasm>

Ugh. This is the sort of fanboy-ism that I hate. It’s the same thing that drives Mac vs. PC debates. Look, use whatever OS/platform you want. I don’t care. What’s ironic is that Apple totally advertises that you can run Windows on your Mac, yet makes fun of Windows/PCs constantly. Which is it, Apple?

If you follow my blog, you know I sold my iPod a while back and bought a Zune. I did this because I was fed up with iTunes being a complete performance joke. Argue with me all you want, but plenty of other people are running into similiar problems with iTunes on Windows. I really like my Zune, but it isn’t without its faults. I wish the Zune team was a little more “open” to communication about their software, as there are some fairly simple tweaks they could make that would help immensely (see my post for some examples.) I have even more bulletpoint items that I don’t like about the Zune, but overall, I’m more happy with it than I was with my iPod.

And one thing I noticed when I first listened to my Zune was how crisp/fuller songs sounded. These were the same format (AAC) being played on my iPod and my Zune.. and the Zune would almost always sound better. According to this YouTube video and this forum post, maybe I’m not crazy. It appears the Zune does have better sound quality in general than the iPod. Yay Zune.

I am looking forward to what the future holds for both Zune and iPod… competition can only be a good thing in this area. Do you really only want Apple-based digital audio players out there on the market? (And before someone mentions Creative and the other companies with DAPs… yeah, right, like they’re even in the same league as iPod/Zune.)

Now playing: Tom Petty - Yer So Bad

Please please please don’t read this if you don’t want to know how this season is going to end.

With that said, the season’s finale sounds like a winner. I can’t wait to actually watch it. And what a mind-trip of an ending!

AKA, JCPenney has it all figured out and no one else does.

This past weekend, Heather and I decided to do our gift registries for our wedding. We chose to file at JCPenney, Sears and Bed Bath & Beyond. Our experiences are below:

• JCPenney, Easily the most “organized” of the wedding registry systems. As far as scanning goes, the kiosk appears to be custom made, with barcode scanners “locked” in the right hand side, and a printer/keyboard underneath the touch-screen monitor. The interface was really easy to control, and within minutes we had unlocked the barcode scanner (it’s a “gun” type scanner) and was shown a quick video on how to use the scanner (such as changing quantities, colors, etc.) Items were easy to scan, and the barcode scanner could show your entire list thus far, with options to edit or delete items if necessary, right on the scanner. Bringing it back to the kiosk and docking it downloaded our items, and we were done. JCPenney has a special deal where if you register for XX items (I believe it’s 15?) you get a free wedding planning book, which sounds cheesy, but is actually pretty spiffy. It’s a hard-cover binder that includes a compact three-hole punch, calculator, paper, business card holders, and folders for every aspect of your wedding, to make it easy to file away say, your catering contract. Nice!
• Sears, The worst, hands down. Their kiosk is an old CRT monitor, a laser printer, and a keyboard. The interface is basically Sears’ own web site (on a slow connection, at least at our location.) We tried repeatedly to log in, but kept getting invalid password errors. Turns out the keyboard’s caps lock was pressed in. Ugh. Made us print out a sheet to take to the nearest customer counter, to pick up our scanner. Went over to the counter where an elderly gentleman (God bless him!) honestly had no idea what to do for wedding registries. So he tried to page someone who would. We waited around for about five minutes, until someone else came over, who also didn’t know what they were doing, but she was able to at least get the scanner working. The scanner was a glorified Palm-pilot, with barcode scanner on top. The barcode scanner would often not work, and I’d have to press other buttons, and then the scan button, in order to get it to scan. After we were done, there’s no “docking” involved, I guess it’s all realtime. So we laid the scanner back on the counter and left.
• Bed Bath & Beyond, Could have been terrible, but was redeemed by excellent customer service. We met with someone at the front counter who asked for our names. My bride to be gave her name, and the woman asked if the wedding date was 7/14… we told her no, it’s 10/13. She thought for a moment and did something else, then issued us a scanner. This one was also flat (like Sears) but had a hand strap on the back, making it much more comfortable to use. The display was very basic, only listing the brief descripton and quantity. There was no way to delete a just-scanned item or previously-scanned item via the controls by itself. There was however a “oops” barcode you could scan on the sheet they provide in order to undo the last item you scanned. We spend about an hour and a half or more scanning items, then returned to the counter to see what we had chosen. Another employee helped us this time. Upon printing out the registry, it was completely blank. He had no explanation, and couldn’t figure out why. He promised to take our information and call us back on Monday. Monday came, and no phone call. So Heather called and got in touch with another employee at that location. They apologized profusely, and promised they would look into it and get back within the hour. They did call back this time, and explained that they cannot find our scans at all, and promised a gift card for our troubles. We decided to come back down Monday night and re-scan our items. Sure enough, we got a $50 gift card out of it, and our items scanned in correctly this time. Big points to BB&B’s customer service here. However, I can’t help but feel that this whole thing would have been avoided if the first employee had just double-checked our wedding information (we couldn’t see her monitor, and she never offered.)

So there you have it. If you’re getting married soon, might be some helpful advice in there. Just stay away from Sears. Unless you like pain?

Some of you may know that I recently purchased a 2007 Nissan Altima 3.5SL, fully loaded, including a navigation system. In general I like the navigation system, but there is definitely some spots that are lacking. Here’s my likes/dislikes so far:

• Con, I’ll start with the biggest con of all, and the one thing that has frustrated me the most with this unit. You can’t use most of the buttons on the screen while the vehicle is moving! Forget the fact that a passenger may be sitting next to you, perfectly capable of programming the unit while you drive. No way. Can’t do it. You must stop the car to enter a new address, etc. 98% of the functionality is just disabled when your car starts moving. My previous navigation system, a Magellan Roadmate 700, did not have this behavior, nor does my mother’s TomTom navigation unit. I asked the dealership if this “feature” could be disabled, but they firmly said no, it’s for my own safety. Gee, thanks. Luckily there are people (such as a fellow named gtcompscientist) who have figured out what wire leading to the back of the unit provides this functionality, and have shown simple switch-workarounds for it. I’m tempted to do it on my own car..
• Pro, The screen is large, and bright enough during the daytime to easily see. The car has an “auto” light setting, for my headlamps, and it ties into the navigation system to dim my display when it’s night time.
• Pro, I really dig the “3D” view that the system offers. It also can switch to the traditional 2D view if necessary, but I hardly find myself doing that.
• Con, The screen updates “slowly”. I’d say once every second or so. In 3D mode, this feels like an eternity, where I’m spoiled by redraw rates on other devices, such as my computer. There also is considerable jaggie-ness going on. Some antialiasing wouldn’t have hurt…
• Pro, The system comes with quite a few points of interest pre-loaded. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s found nearly 90% of the random places I’ve thrown at it. There are some newer developments (built in the past 2 years) that it doesn’t know about yet, but I’m sure a newer DVD will come out.
• Con, The system doesn’t do text-to-speech at all. Just provides the turn signals.
• Pro, The turn signals are excellent, and the screen even shows a preview of what the upcoming off-ramp, intersection, turn, etc. will look like. Pretty darn accurate, too. Helpful for those times where you need to get off the freeway, but stay in the left lane on the off-ramp, etc.
• Pro, XM traffic integration. If you drive through traffic every day, you owe it to yourself to get a system that has traffic integration. I’ve routed around slow traffic at least four times so far, and avoided an accident scene because of it. Whew.

And that’s just what I thought of right now. More to come as time progresses…

This is targeted mainly towards server administrators running IIS, but if you’re just an internet user, you may find it of some value too.

Jeff Atwood, over at his Coding Horror blog, briefly touched on HTTP compression a while back, following it up with a post involving IIS 6.0 and compression, and later a post regarding using a .NET HttpModule to handle compression in ASP.Net sites. You should definitely read these posts if you have no idea what HTTP compression is. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Back? Good.

I had been using the HttpModule approach for a while, with the well-made (and free) blowery HttpCompressionModule. I have run into some problems, though. There are some redirect actions that can cause the module to fail, as well as other documented problems. Plus, the module does nothing to compress non ASP.Net content, such as ASP pages, style sheets and javascript files.

In doing more researching, I came across IISXpress, another free (for personal use only, not on a server) HTTP compression program. This one hooks into ISAPI, which means that any content that IIS serves wil be passed through this program for compression. IISXpress allows you to define content types you wish to include/exclude, as well as directories.

I really liked how IISXpress showed a history of every file it compressed, and what the savings were. There’s no guessing on my side if it’s working or not. I know it is from the history’s output. I liked the program so much that I decided to buy it almost immediately. $50 well spent!

If you run a web server, you owe it to yourself to research HTTP compression. It will allow you to serve the same content, but using less bandwidth in the process. And your end-users won’t need to do anything special!

After getting numerous power bills at my old place that were making my eyes bug out, I decided to take some action during the move to my new place, and build a brand new server from scratch, with the mindset of saving as much power as possible, but not sacrificing performance too much.

I was able to pull it off for about $300 worth of parts from NewEgg. Here’s what I chose and why:

• PC Chips V21G VIA motherboard. Features a CPU soldered right onto the motherboard (no upgrades.) The CPU is a VIA C7, a low power alternative to Intel/AMD chips. It also comes with onboard video and sound, always a bonus for server applications. It looks like NewEgg isn’t selling this particular C7 board anymore, but you can find others.
• Corsair ValueSelect 1 gigabyte (2 x 512MB) 240–pin DDR2 SDRAM. Cheap RAM that works great. It’s not ECC, but I’ve never really needed ECC anyway. Not for this sort of thing.
• Rosewill RV200 SFX 200 watt power supply. It doesn’t fit in a standard ATX case (it’s smaller) but my custom duct-tape solution to hold it up works fine. Very efficient. It’s getting harder to find lower-wattage power supplies… but really, do we need 700+ watt power supplies yet?
• Two Seagate Barracude 7200.9 120 gigabyte, 7200 RPM drives. At the time, these were the best bargain for space vs. cost. Not sure what would be a better buy now. I have mirrored them via software RAID (in Windows 2003 Server) and they work great.

My old server was AMD-based, and would use approximately 200 watts while “idle”. My new server? 55 watts. Wow. Now it’s going to cost me the same as leaving a 60 watt light bulb on all month, which is just a couple of dollars, compared to tens of dollars I was spending before.

Another side benefit to lower wattage is less heat being output by the power supply/CPU itself. My home office space is considerably cooler than it was before.

And the speed? I notice a slight difference compared to my AMD, but nothing really to complain about. My server’s hosting internal project files, as well as public websites, such as my journal.

Not bad at all. Let me know if you have any questions.

Selling a picture of a cell phone, and not an actual phone? Judy won’t take that.

Best parts:

“You’re an idiot! And a scammer!”

“Why don’t you get a job?!”

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
  - Michael Crichton

Now playing: Barenaked Ladies - One Week (Radio Paradise - DJ-mixed modern & classic rock, world, electronica & more - info: www.radioparadise.com)

Scott Hanselman wrote another article about thumbnails disappearing from Windows Explorer under Vista. I had this same problem happen to me a short while ago, and ended up giving up on the solution, since I was going to reformat my system in a few days anyhow. Kinda lame that Windows doesn’t automatically repair itself when this happens, but anyways…

He’s offering a registry patch to try and fix the problem. It appears to boil down to a ShellEx registry key value, as well as potentially a PerceivedTypes registry key, found under each file type’s extension.

He recommends downloading the CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) to handle almost all video/audio codecs you’d ever stumble across. I’m usually apprehensive about codec packs, since they tend to be overzealous and do more harm than good, but the CCCP seems well-rounded and thought through.