What Is This ‘Bud-get’ You Speak Of?

Reminded by a recent comment, I went and looked at my financial records in Quicken, and the last time I updated it was about three months ago…

I seem to go through a pattern when it comes to Quicken. I realize that I really should keep better track of my spending, so I start up a new Quicken database and enter my latest balances and updates. Then, for a while I’ll meticulously keep track of all of my bank account and credit card transactions at the end of the day. Then I realize that I’m not really learning much about how I spend my money, since a lot of it is in cash transactions, so I set up a ‘cash’ account and start keeping track of every little cash payment, too. Then I get busy or distracted, so I just leave the receipts near the computer and enter the updates whenever I have free time, using the monthly statements to fill in any holes I may have forgotten about. And then I suddenly realize that I haven’t updated it in three months and it’s just way too behind now…

Then, a couple years later, I start the whole process over again, swearing that I’ll do a better job this time.

Oh well, maybe in 2006…

It’s Spam Time Again

Subject: New Drug Store Kenny

Oh my God, they overdosed Kenny! You bastards!

Subject: The crocodile's best weapon against infection Ann

I didn’t know Typhoid Mary had a sister. Those crocodiles better watch out…

Subject: re : painfull appointment tuesday at 22-00

I think I might skip this appointment.

Subject: scan your PC for free Andy

No thanks, I’ve already got all the Andy I need.

Subject: Earth is not round! It's dirty!

Hey, round things can be dirty…

Subject: FAt sluts get DIRTY!

See!

Subject: i haerd you borke into a huose last ngiht

This is just fun to say with a mock-Swedish accent.

Subject: can Joaquin come over and watch?

Sure, he can sit there enthralled while I fix up compiler warnings, validate type safety after adjusting interfaces, fill out work schedule estimates…

Subject: assist your husband with his pain

Things You Didn’t Know About Yourself Part #1: Your gay spouse.

Subject: why does your wife spy on you

Things You Didn’t Know About Yourself Part #2: And apparently I’m a polygamist.

Subject: help your daughter with her pain

Things You Didn’t Know About Yourself Part #3: With a presumably adopted or bastard daughter.

Subject: Please confirm everything,. Mon, 01 Nov 2004

Gee, I don’t know if I have the authority to confirm *everything*…

Wintertime And The Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy

As if I didn’t have enough distractions already, I picked up one of the new slimmer PS2s yesterday and wow, this thing is *tiny*:
Slim PS2
(That white blob is my way-overexposed hand.)

This is actually the first real console I’ve had since the original NES. I know the Xbox has technically better specs and graphics and so forth, but in the console world the raw performance specs have never really seemed to matter all that much. Video game history is littered with systems that were technically superior spec-wise, but still colossal failures. It’s more a matter of what titles there are to choose from and what style of games you enjoy, and the PS2 library will fit me better, I think.

And I also picked up a handful of games, of course. Gran Turismo 3, since I haven’t played a decent driving game since Pod. Katamari Damacy, which proves that the Japanese have been smoking something pretty potent lately. FFX and the first .hack to check out the current console RPG scene.

And of course, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Because life isn’t complete until you’ve beaten an enemy gang member to death with a giant purple dildo.

The Final Piece

I also finally got the replacement video card I had been waiting for, and now I can say that the PVR is truly complete. The TV-Out works fine, with no colour problems, and there was even an unexpected performance boost. The old card didn’t support the XvMC library for the Nvidia drivers but this one does, and CPU usage during playback dropped from 80-90% down to 45-60%, making playback smooth even with other stuff going on in the background.

Now at last I can just sit back in the easy chair with the remote and treat it like just another appliance, and not just a tacked-on feature of the computer. Even if it really is…

No Photos Please

The new iPods are out and…I don’t particularly care. I don’t really feel the need to carry a ton of photos around, and although the black look of the U2 edition *sounded* intriguing, the red click wheel is just too horribly ugly to me.

This now makes me even more tempted to pick up one of the regular 4G iPods though, now that I know it’s not likely to be imminently obsoleted by something vastly better. It’s down to either that or the iRiver hard drive player, and although the iRiver has a couple more features, it’s still slightly more expensive and the iPod/iTunes integration is a big plus and iTMS will be coming to Canada soon…

Not Yet Feeling The Burn

Yay, my DVD burner drive arrived today. Except that I don’t have any videos properly DVD formatted for burning yet. Or any discs to burn them to. Or any software to burn them with, since it’s an OEM drive… I think I was expecting to do my burning in Linux, like I did with all my CD burning, but then I wiped the system and didn’t reinstall Linux…

Oh well, it’ll get sorted out in time, and I needed a new CD drive anyway. My old HP 9900ci was getting flaky — it couldn’t even reinstall Battlefield 1942 without randomly failing partway through, so I had to mount the discs on the Linux server, copy the files over, and install them all straight from the hard drive.

I wound up getting a dual-layer-burning drive anyway, even though I wasn’t specifically holding out for one. The dual-layer media’s still expensive right now but should hopefully drop, this drive got great reviews, and it was still dirt cheap at just over $100 CDN, so what the hell.

And I don’t even have enough space for my existing DVD collection… :-P

Forgot About The Brakes

When I went to upgrade my server to the 2.6.9 kernel (which it turns out I can’t use at the moment anyway for other reasons), I discovered that I still had some debugging options enabled in my current kernel config, from a problem I had over a year ago. OOPS.

I wouldn’t have expected it to make *that* much of a difference, but after recompiling 2.6.7 without them set I can now play back recordings in MythTV at full speed, using around 80% CPU. It still stutters slightly whenever something else kicks in, like a web server hit, but it’s still a vast improvement.

Now I just have to solve the frigging B&W video problem. Hopefully a new-but-cheap GeForce 4 that’s on the way will fix that…

The Obscurity Of Fame

“In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.”

An interesting interview with Neal Stephenson. I’m working my way through Cryptonomicon, and although it’s slow going, it’s still pretty interesting. It’s not really so much about cryptography itself (there are no silly “oh no, he’s only 13 bits away from breaking the asymmetric vault key on the RS/6000!” scenes) as it is about scenarios where it’s a subtle influencing factor, in wartime and business, and the kinds of people (proto-geeks, if you will) you might find involved.