Just another useless personal blog
Ouch. I just paid the biggest power bill I’ve ever had, at $73.84. It wasn’t that long ago that I was only paying around $30-35, and I don’t think I’ve ever even had one in the $60-70 range, it just shot straight up from the mid-50s. According to the little graphs they include, my usage hasn’t really changed, it’s just that the rate keeps on climbing.
Maybe I should unplug my DVD player, so the LED clock on the front doesn’t waste all that power… :P
Alright, I give up. For a very long time I’ve been wary of specialized, often proprietary programs for organizing my data. Keeping a sensible directory structure always seemed to be good enough, without having to worry about programs becoming obsolete, incompatible metadata formats, licensing changes, platform restrictions, data-corrupting bugs, and so on.
But, I’ve reached the breaking point. There are some things that have just become too unwieldy to manage with my ‘old school’ ways, or features I’m missing out on that I can’t easily replicate myself, so I guess it’s time to start giving these programs a chance.
And first up, of all things, is passwords…
Continue reading “Uncle!”
I just got my first spam message where the subject line was structured like a bug report. Not the same bug reporting system we use in our office, and the name wasn’t familiar, but I still had to open it anyway just in case it was from some auxiliary office or channel partner or sales liaison or whatever, some of whom have their own systems. Sigh.
It was the same old ‘hot stock tip!’ body though, and I’m surprised the filters aren’t doing a better job of catching those, since a lot of the phraseology and keywords are often similar.
I was going to play more of Halo 2 tonight, but before I could do so I got distracted by a coding challenge link someone posted and wound up working on that all evening instead.
I’m relatively weak on theory, so I went for the fairly simple brute-force depth-first tree search solution. It’s fun to see some of the titles it generates, though, like “3 NINJAS KICK BACK STAGE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST FROM 20000 FATHOMS”! I’m just not sure it’ll finish before the heat death of the universe occurs…
The longest chain it’s found so far is 231 movie titles long, and looks more like the junk text you see in spam messages nowadays.
As time marches on, a lot of my gaming memories blur together a bit. I’ve started more closely tracking what I play on a day-to-day basis and my thoughts on it, for my own archives if nothing else. It probably won’t be too interesting to most people though, and I don’t want it to crowd out other entries and become the main focus of this site, so instead I’ll be writing it over here.
Enjoy! Or not.
Well, the free ride has ended: as of the start of this month, Zap2It no longer provides free TV listings data for programs like MythTV. It’s disappointing, but it’s also hard to complain about something that you didn’t have to pay for in the first place.
Zap2It doesn’t seem to want to have to deal with individuals, so Schedules Direct has been set up as an alternative provider to resell the data instead. There’s a recurring fee now, but I’ve found it too useful to go without, and it’s been set up as a non-profit company so they can try to bring the cost down as much as possible. Switching over wasn’t too painful; I just had to get a newer version of MythTV from the ‘proposed’ repository, add a new listings source, and rerun ‘mythfilldatabase’ to get the new listings.
And, now that I’m paying for it, I can now legitimately complain about all the minor little annoyances! ;)
With the announcement that the stock of 60GB PS3s will be running out soon, I’ve been waffling back and forth on whether to get one or not.
On the one hand, this will be my last chance to get a model with the hardware-level PS2 compatibility, and I’ve still got a lot of unfinished PS2 games that would benefit from the upscaling and faster loading (the 80GB models use a software emulator that’s not nearly as compatible). And, being the gaming whore that I am, I’d probably wind up eventually getting one anyway. And it can run Linux and things like the MythTV frontend, which always tickles my inner geek.
But on the other hand, the thing is freaking expensive. It’s better now, at only $50 more than I paid for my 360, but that’s still a lot for something that’ll largely be used as a glorified PS2 in the short term. Which leads to the next problem, the lack of games. There are a couple that look interesting, like Resistance and Warhawk, but they’re not really compelling by themselves, since they’re not really my preferred genres. A bunch of others are turning out to be disappointments (i.e., Lair), and most of the rest are also available for the 360 anyway, where I’d prefer to get them for things like the Achievements and better online integration. And it won’t even work with my LCD monitor (damn HDCP), so I’d be stuck using it on S-video until I get a proper HDTV. And I don’t really need the backwards compatibility since I already have a PS2; it would just be a convenience.
The PS2 library did have a lot of games I liked, and hopefully the PS3’s library will eventually turn out the same way, but is that hope that it’ll live up to that potential enough to balance out the immediate hit to the wallet…
I got a virus alert when I went to start a game tonight, which led me to do a quick Google search. It seemed to be a false positive, but I wanted to be sure, which led to burning a Linux rescue disk so I could do an offline scan with a different program. The rescue disk was having trouble detecting the hard drive, which led me to wonder why I had put it on the non-standard tertiary IDE port on the motherboard, which led to me cracking open the case. Looking at the wiring mess led me to an “Oh yeah, that was why…” realization, which led me to wonder if I could do any better, and after finding new batteries for my maglite, moving the drive around, and some recabling, it’s now back on the primary IDE interface. Which led to problems with the boot order when it was powered back up, but that was easily fixed and I can boot off the rescue disk and do the virus scan now.
Which led me to wonder why I didn’t just buy the 360 version of the game…
I was thinking of upgrading to a DS Lite for a while now, and Picross DS pulled me out of a stretch of neglecting my old one, so I picked up this bundle today. It’s a pretty good deal at only $20 more than the regular DS for both Brain Age 2 and a carrying case. The store threw in a free copy of Monster Trucks DS too, which I’m sure is a terrible abomination that they would have charged me more not to take.
The red is a fairly dark metallic crimson which complements the black nicely, and otherwise it’s a regular old DS Lite. I’m a bit wary of the controls at the moment, as it seems like I have to push up and down a lot harder before they register, but maybe I just have to get used to them.
Brain Age 2 is garbage, and I’m just saying that because after the first test it immediately told me my brain age is 80. Let’s just say that “scissors” is the new “blue”. Really, it’s exactly like the original, just with a different set of tests and some more new sudoku puzzles. The tests seem to be a bit harder too, with things like being trickier with concealing information (in one it asks a series of addition problems, but covers up one of the digits and reuses it in the next problem, so you have to remember what it was), making you play musical sequences, and more memorization (e.g., a grid of 25 numbers).
The case is a bit unusual in that it just wraps around the two flat sides, and there are a few bands to hold the DS in place. That makes putting it in the case take a bit more effort, but it looks really classy, at least.
It’s only a little over three months after building my new systems, including the heavily-upgraded MythTV box, and it’s already at 97% full on the video recording partition. Yikes!
Fortunately it’s just because I’ve been careless, and I can free up a lot of space, I just have to get around to working on it. There’s some backup data I was temporarily keeping on there that can be removed now, which would free up around 180 gigs. I can still try to use LVM to join it with another unused partition (the ‘extra’ space on the unexpectedly-larger refurb drive I got that couldn’t be added to the RAID set), which would add another 250 gigs. I can start transcoding shows into MPEG-4 now that there’s a more powerful processor in there and it won’t take all day to do so, which would halve the space used by recordings.
Or I could get around to actually watching these shows. I think I’m about 13 episodes behind on Lost now…
Oh well, at least it happened late enough that the replacements going out now should have the overheating fixes in place.
And finally, getting to see some of the city itself:
And now, the main event:
Unfortunately by this point I was running low on space on my memory card, since I couldn’t get the video off of the camera without special software I didn’t have on me and that Canon wouldn’t let me download, so I didn’t get as many post-race shots as I wanted.
Fewer pics this day, since things start to get redundant after a bit:
Better late than never:
…the peelination has begun. And I’ve discovered that on at least one day my shirt was porous enough for my unprotected back to get some exposure. I hate sunburns.
See, that’s what happens when you force geeks to go outside! The fiery ball, it burnses us!
Just got back from the race, and it was nuts. Alonso’s failed first-corner stunt and subsequent off-track excursions, Kubica’s horrible crash (thankfully he’s okay), Trulli crashing during a safety car period (before fully making it out of pit lane, even), Trulli and Rosberg spinning simultaneously without even touching, Wurz holding on for third despite a broken rear wing most of the race, a groundhog on the track, more safety cars than you can shake a stick at, Sato passing both Raikkonen and Alonso…
People had been complaining that the races so far this year had been too boring, but I think this one was trying to make up for all of those others.
I have tons of photos, including the support races and other sessions, but it’ll probably take *days* to sort and postprocess them all… (Update: Photos from all three days are now available here.)
Thuderstorm season is upon us here, and we just had a slight bit of flooding. This was the worst storm I’ve ever seen here. No hail for a change, but there was seemingly non-stop thunder and lightning for quite a while, and the rain fell furiously.
This was the first time that the water reached right up to the edge of the building and I was genuinely afraid that the water might actually seep into my apartment, so I spent a lot of time just running around, checking the edges of the walls and carpet for dampness. Luckily I escaped unscathed, but the condos across the street from me were not so lucky — their basement suites and underground parkade got flooded badly.
And worst of all, the lightning caused a power glitch that reset my 360 while I was in the middle of an endurance race!
(I’ll have some video too, once I get around to editing it together.)
What’s the one thing I forgot to do with my newly-upgraded server that handles multiple time-sensitive scheduled tasks? Go into the BIOS options and adjust the power behaviour, so that it automatically restarts after a power outage. Like the one we apparently had the day after I left on vacation…
I am having the worst luck with travel arrangements…
Calgary Transit workers are thinking of striking, but haven’t walked off the job yet. If they do it’ll be annoying, but I can at least still walk to and from work.
The Greyhound bus workers are headed towards a strike and service has been shut down already, though. That’s how I usually get to Edmonton, so it looks like I’ll be flying instead this time.
But now the Montreal transit workers are planning on walking out next week. If that’s still in effect when I get there, I’m royally boned, since I chose a hotel that’s fairly far from downtown but near a Metro station. Hopefully they’ll work out a deal before then though, as I can’t see them letting a strike continue on through a huge tourism event weekend.
