Not So Famous…

For those who are longtime readers of TheDow, you will remember this post. (Link opens in a new window.)

Anyway, when switching to a new blog theme, I had to fix the same problem.  I don’t know why so many theme makers use ’siteurl’ when they really need to be using ‘home’.  Anyway, since it was the same problem, and I used the same fix, it should work now.  :)  I’ll test on this post.

One of the really nice things about running Wordpress as my blog software is the simplicity with which I can change the look and feel of the site.  The current theme is a Windows Vista-inspired one with customizable backgrounds that I implemented in honor of the disappointing launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007 yesterday. Click on the squares above to check out the backgrounds I have currently available.

Windows Vista was expected to draw huge crowds, and I think retailers were thoroughly underwhelmed after the raging console demand that is ongoing in their stores.  News to retailers: Video Games are far “hotter” than Operating Systems.

Those of us who talk incessantly about IT and other assorted Geeky stuff knew that Vista wouldn’t be the large launch product that everyone was thinking it would be. No one I spoke with knew much about Vista despite the widely available free beta testing that was going on. Nearly everyone expressed fears of bugs, stability and security holes despite the fact that the media has been factually reporting that this release of Windows would be the most bug-free yet.  I could get into why I feel this is accurate, but no one wants to watch me pontificate.  :)

At any rate, feel free to leave me some comments on the new design.  Love it?  Hate it?  Don’t much care?  Let me know.

I wax poetic.
Turn off the flame; I’m melting.

Thursday night, Kim and I went out to dinner with my grandmother, and we then went to Gottschalk’s to get Kim some towels that she had wanted for Christmas.  When we got home, we were treated to a cold house with a note on the door saying that PG&E had paid us a visit.  OH JOY!

Turns out that our neighbors in the apartment behind us had smelled some gas coming from under the house.  They called PG&E, who came out and spot-checked the meters.  They discovered a LOT of movement on our meter, and shut us off, letting me know that the leak was PROBABLY from our floor furnace, as it’s the only gas appliance that is under the house. Great.

My day was REALLY made when I started calling around asking who could help me with the furnace and people were pretty RUDE when they found out that I had a floor furnace, saying things like:

“If it’s a floor furnace, I don’t even want to see it!”

Thanks for nothing, pal.

Turns out no one works on these things anymore.  However, my landlord, who was in Missouri when this all went down on Friday, got a hold of someone who would come out and look.  This guy had the problem nailed in no time flat on Saturday and had it fixed within the hour.  I called PG&E, who came out that evening to turn our gas back on once he was satisfied it wasn’t leaking from somewhere else.  :)  WOO!!!  So we have gas.

We also blew our circuit breaker this weekend, which wasn’t so fun.  The sad thing about our house is that the entire house is wired to one circuit, so we can’t have too much on at once or else we lose all power, and have to go out to the panel to flip the stupid things again.  This happened Friday night.  I love walking in tall grass at night near gas meters and circuit breakers.  I hear most arachnophobes feel the same way…  bleh.

Everything is back to normal at TheDow household.  :)  And we are still enjoying the Wii.

In other news, my diet is going well.  I know I’ve lost at least a little weight, as my range of motion is much more than a couple weeks ago.  Various activities have gotten easier, and I’m looking forward to the next year or so.  :)

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-01/26/content_5658311.htm

Now, what is interesting about this story is not that the News Channel for the Wii is being launched on Saturday, though I’ve been waiting for this channel for almost a week now.  I’ll mention the interesting bit a little l8er.

For those who don’t know, Nintendo’s new console is weirdly named “Wii”. It’s got a revolutionary control system relying on the remote control’s motion-sensing ability for pointing, swinging, thrusting, etc.  This provides a far more intuitive control experience, especially for those who aren’t big gamers, like my wife.  :)  There aren’t many buttons to deal with on the basic games, with the remote’s ability to sense up, down, left, right, and even forward and back motion providing most of the controls. Furthermore, the remote’s rotation/tilt-sensing abilities are way cool.

The Wii’s main menu consists of a grid with the various boxes containing pictures indicating the program that is stored to each box. These boxes are called “channels”, mimicking television channels - again trying to reflect Nintendo’s aim to get more non-gamers involved in gaming. The News channel has been inoperative since I got my Wii last weekend, and I’ve been wondering when it would go live. (Looks like this Sunday is the live date for the Nes Channel.)

However, the really interesting part of this article was when the writer said:

“The Wii has been a surprise hit for Nintendo in its competition with Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 consoles.”

First off, the XBox 360 retails for $399.99. The Playstation 3 retails for $499.99 for the lower model and $599.99 for the higher model.  The Wii? $249.99….Yeah, price alone argues for the success of the Wii.  Why the higher cost for the other consoles?

See, there has been a trend in the Video Game Console industry to go with the BIGGEST and the BEST guts in each console.  The consoles have continually pushed the limits of what was possible in a console at each iteration of new console.  However, there has been a parallel industry in the PC market with PC manufacturers trying to miniaturize powerful components such as graphic cards, processors, power supplies, etc.  Most of this has been aimed at the laptop submarket of the PC industry, but the Console manufacturers have been keeping an eye on it, apparently.

All of this brings us to the present, where Microsoft (situated in a unique nexus where they can see the PC market mature as well as the console market advancing) creates the first of the next-gen consoles, the Xbox 360. They packed a LOT of components that were ultimately derived from their PC counterparts into the box of the 360.  I LIKE what I see with the 360, but $400 is a little steep for me, considering that I already have a very decent computer.

However, Sony is who made this whole situation STUPID. Sony decided that if an advanced console is rad, an UBER-ADVANCED CONSOLE WILL BE EVEN MORE RADDEREST!!!!  So they pack their little black box to the gills with advanced components.  An unintended consequence of this idiocy is the fact that the lower-end console costs $500!!!!! The high end goes for $600, and for that you get a FIXED COMPONENT mini-computer. However, what you do NOT get is the ability to upgrade the video card when the existing one becomes obsolete. You can’t upgrade the hard drive when you begin running out of space. You can’t change the processor and motherboard to give yourself more capabilities in a couple years when it becomes worthless. Basically, you’ve bought a very limited-purpose un-upgradeable computer.

People have been saying that the PS3 will be viable for years to come.  Those who say that obviously haven’t spent much time around computers.  The actual guts of the PS3 will be outdated in months, and obsolete in a couple years.  In 2 years, my computer will be far more powerful,  and be able to play far better games than the PS3. We’re on the cusp of DirectX10-capable cards.  NVidia just released their DX10 cards, which are awesome, and ATI is bound to answer with some great stuff.  NVidia’s uber-setup utilizes 2 graphics cards for parallel processing of graphics for an excellent framerate along with a 3rd graphics card dedicated to physics rendering.  I don’t care how much the PS3 costs, it can’t compare to that.  And it will never have that capability, because you can’t upgrade it.  Sure, right now those NVidia cards cost a ridiculous amount, but that won’t always be the case, and you can buy them one at a time, if you like.  Anyway, for a console, $600 is just stupid.

Having said all that, the Wii is cool enough to be well worth the $249.99 price of admission.  The games that exist already are cool, and I’ve seen trailers for games that will be released, and I’m looking forward to how developers use the unique control capabilities the Wii provides.  But anyone who is honest shouldn’t be surprised at the excellent retail performance of the Wii.  The cost is far less prohibitive than either of its “competitors”, and it is a great deal of fun for all ages.

Sony is pricing itself out of the market, and from what I’ve read, they lose around $250 on each console they sell. This means that the console is ACTUALLY worth $850 for the high-end model. I’m sure there’s an intelligent reason for it, but it sounds like the bell is tolling for Sony.

I know many of you have seen the blockbuster movie, Minority Report. I won’t get into it here, but if you’ve not seen it, and are in the least interested in science fiction, you’ll want to check it out.

Ultimately, the coolest tech in that movie from a Techie perspective was not the automatic pilot cars. It was not the device that could see into the future to detect crimes that had not yet happened. It wasn’t the eyeball transplant surgeries. It definitely wasn’t the retinal scan targeted advertising all over the city. All of these things are cool, but the “WOW!” tech from my point of view was the amazing computer interface that Tom Cruise’s character used.

If you saw the movie, you saw Tom Cruise reaching out and interacting with files, windows, and movies using his hands, and making very intuitive gestures that allowed him to interact with the computer on which he was working. Now, when I saw this, I asked myself, “How long until we have this? When will we be able to grab things with our hands and drag them around?”

Well, this video isn’t the be-all-end-all solution, but I would be very satisfied if I could get my hands on one of these:

http://www.flixxy.com/minority-report-interface.htm

I am posting this from my new toy… Anyone care to guess what it is? :) I’ll give you a hint: It’s white, glowy, and fun… Good luck. ;)

Billy Connolly is a funny, funny, comedian. It helps that he’s Scottish, of course, but I find him to be quite funny. I HAVE heard some profanity from him, though, so listener discretion is advised. This song is safe, though. :) (He never actually says the implied swear word in the last verse.) If you can lay ears on a recording of this song, I highly recommend it. I am prefacing the song will Billy’s pre-song comments that he said on the recording I heard. (I warn you that this has been written trying to imitate his accent, so it might be a bit hard to read if you’re not used to reading a Scots (Glaswegian) accent.) :)

======================

“I’d like now to sing a song about Scottish Highland national dress…Wellington boots. Did you think it was the kilt? Edinburgh’s the only place you see kilts, really. Teuchters wear wellies. And the welly is a great, great form of clothing. It used to be the great mark of poverty in Partick: wellies in the summer.

“And when you’re lying on the beach in Spain trying to let on you’re a millionaire… wi’ a four bob cigar an a seven bob bottle of champaign. You’re found oot to be working class cause you’ve got welly marks on yer legs. Two rings of No Confidence.”

(Teuchters = stranger, or in this case, highlanders.
Partick = Working-class neighborhood in Glasgow)

The Welly Boot Song

(Chorus)
If it wasna’ for your wellies where would you be?
You’d be in the hospital or infirmary,
Cause you would have a dose of the flu or even pluracy,
If you didna have your feet in your wellies!

Wellies they are wonderful, oh wellies they are swell,
Cause they keep oot the water, an’ they keep in the smell,
An’ when yer sittin in a room, you can always tell,
When some bugger takes off his wellies.

(chorus)

But when yer oot walking, in the country way about
An yer strolling over fields just like a fairmer’s herd.
And somebody shouts “Keep aff the grass,” and you think “How absurd;”
And, squelch, you find why fairmers a’ wear wellies.

(chorus)

There’s fishermen and firemen, there’s farmers an a’,
Men oot digging ditches an’ working in the snaw;
This country it would grind tae a halt and no’ a thing would graw
If it wasna for the workers in their wellies.

(chorus)

Noo Edward Heath and Wilson, they havna’ made a hit,
They’re ruining this country, mair than just a bit,
If they keep on the way they are goin’, we’ll all be in the sh..,
So you’d be’er ge(t) your feet in your wellies.

(chorus)

That’s right, I’m on the South Beach Diet. I’m not trying to lose a phenomenal amount of weight in a short amount of time. What I am doing is attempting to eat healthier so that in the long term, my blood chemistry will remain good. Weight loss is desired, of course, but I’m not going to gauge the effectiveness of my diet based on the weight I lose. Rather, I’m hoping to feel better. I have no doubts I’ll lose some weight…I don’t think it’s possible for me to be much healthier than I am now without losing some weight. So that’s the plan. :)

The nice thing about the South Beach Diet is that in the long term, it’s not a fad…it’s a change of habits to eat healthier. It’s a “doable” diet…It’s something I think I can live on for the long term, and that’s what a diet is all about. Losing weight in the here-and-now is great, but if you can’t stay on the diet, what’s the point?

Phase 1 of the South Beach diet is the most strict phase, with no sugars, and no carbohydrates, complex or otherwise. However, there are a LOT of vegetables, lean meats, etc. So far, I’ve been very pleased with the foods I’ve been able to eat, though I look forward to phase 2 when I can have oatmeal, brown rice, etc. :) Nothing I’m missing terribly, but something I AM missing.

The saddest thing for me about the South Beach diet is the lack of beer on this diet. Last night, I gave away all of my beer to Gabe. It’s going to be awhile before I can drink it here and there, so why have it in the house? :) I’ve drunk plenty of his beer, so I think we’re even. :)

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be posting much about the diet after this unless it’s interesting: Discovery of a new food/recipe, cooking mishap, etc. :) Diets are interesting to people at first, but they lose interest. I’m not a “convert” to this diet…I’m not saying everyone in the world should be on this diet. It’s something I want to try, and I’ll be happy if I can achieve my goals with it.

And yes, I’ll be working out as regularly as possible. Any diet that does not include regular exercise is not going to be as healthy for you as it could.

Well, not as long as some of my friends neglect their blogs, but long enough to make me miss it.  And very long for me.  :)

It’s not that I’ve not wanted to write…it’s that I’ve been quite busy of late.  What’s going on, you ask?  Well, I’ll tell you…

To begin with, Kim and I have been doing various projects around the house.  We begun the project frenzy when Kim got off work for Christmas vacation.  We decided we were going to put up shelves to proudly display my beer bottle collection. Our plan was to put the shelves up quite high so that they are out of the way, but still displayed prominently in the room.  As I posted earlier, we had quite a few problems with this little project. To begin with, our walls are plaster and lath.  However, in some cases I ended up drilling into a stud.  In these cases, we just used the screws that came with the shelves rather than the molly bolts we got. However, in at least three cases, it was not so cut and dry.

In one case, I drilled through the plaster and encountered…nothing.  No lath, no stud, just the air inside the wall.  In these cases, Kim and I were a little hesitant to hang the shelf on the wall, lest we pull down some of the plaster.  We used the molly bolts here and hoped for the best.  It is holding quite well.

In another instance, we would be drilling through the lath…or at least, we were trying to.  However, I had to lean on the drill to get anywhere at all.  I’m sure those of you who are more knowledgeable of these types of projects know exactly what happened.  The drill busted through the plaster and the part of the drill that grabs on to the bit busted through the plaster, creating a hole that was FAR too large to hope that a molly bolt would stick to the outside of the wall.  When this happened, we used a different sized shelf and tried again…the holes we drilled would be in a different place, we’d patch up the holes we made, and off we go.

However, the new shelf was going right into a stud, and when trying to get into the stud with the drill, I busted one of my grandfather’s drill bits trying to get in there.  At this point, I was ready to throw in the towel and stay with the 2 shelves we’d already put up instead of the 4 we had planned.  Kim, at this point,  had a brilliant idea.  Why not put up the shelves on the opposite wall?  GREAT IDEA, HON!  (No sarcasm there, really!)  The shelves look even better than how we originally planned, and they’re solidly up.  WOO!

The second home improvement project was to get a safe for our pistols as well as our important documents like passports, etc.  We planned on bolting it to a very immovable piece of our house, and this worked well for us.  However, I was unable to get the drill into the area we needed to drill.  I took out some drawers, and was able to get the drill in from the bottom of the area, but I couldn’t mark the bottom of the area for drilling.  I finally had to create a template that I could drill on either side, and tape that to the bottom of the area.  It’s bolted down, and contains what we need.  WOO FOR SECURITY!

After that, it’s been work that has been sucking away my time.  I’ve been trying to get a free VPN solution up that will link my remote offices to the main one as though they were just in a different room instead of a different town!  This has required a lot of work from home, so I’ve been too busy to write in my blog.

In addition to this, I have been placed on the Request for Proposal Review team to train me in putting together our proposals to possible clients when we’re bidding for projects.  This is a way cool chance for me to show my company that I’m management material.  It also helps me to learn more about the business that I work in, which helps me propose IT solutions that actually help my company get the job done.  It’s a win-win solution for me, but it definitely requires more work.  No problem, really, as this place is still the best place I’ve ever worked, but it means I have less time at home to write in my blog.

I’ll still write…fer sure.  But it might be a little less while I’m learning the ropes around here.  :)  And I’m still looking at everyone’s blogs, so keep writing.  :)  Megan, I’ve really enjoyed that you’ve been posting in your blog lately, even though I’ve not had time to comment.  I read your essay this morning, and read about your trip recently as well as looked at the pics you posted.  :)  I’ll comment this week, I promise.  :)

I’ve also started a new diet.  I’m not weighing in or anything, so I won’t be posting updates, but I’ll talk about the diet a little this week as I get used to it.  :)

See you all l8er.