Friday, November 09, 2007

colin's new blog

Colin has started a new website dedicated to gaming.

Obsessed with Gaming

Thursday, September 20, 2007

the social

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070920-launched-too-zune-patent-reveals-whereabouts-of-the-social.html

It looks like microsoft has patented some of the ideas that I put on this blog when I first created it. Feel free to look back through the archives to see a partial description of what it means to be "the social".

If only Microsoft had waited and actually built some of these features into the product the Zune might have been worth half the money they spent marketing it.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

If only we'd spent another week on testing...

I don't blog very often... I feel as though I've lost my blogging ways.... there's only so much technology to complain about. Or at least, complaining about it doesn't help much.

I want an iphone. The iphone would mean I'm no longer using my Treo 700. That would make me happy.

My Treo makes me unhappy. I recently updated the firmware, which only took about 2 days to finally get figured out (4 hours to complete the update, 8 more to figure out what to reset to fix all the remaining issues). I found myself wondering why all technology is broken.

I told Gwen that someday we will destroy ourselves... not because of global warming, or the energy crisis or something so complicated. Someday we will hook something up. Something broken... and we'll hook it up to something important... and that important thing will do something we don't expect. Maybe it will launch a nuclear device. Maybe it will shut something important down. I'm not sure what exactly will happen. But I'm convinced that someday we'll say...

If only we'd spent another week on testing, we wouldn't have destroyed humanity.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Traveling blues...

I've been traveling since 8:00am PST. I'm about to get on a plane to Toronto, CA. I think this is a short flight... which is nice because I've spent more time in airports than on airplanes, and I wouldn't want to break that streak.

overheard at the airport

This morning while I was getting breakfast at Sea-tac, I overheard somebody next to me talking about their daughter. It seems she is selling crack to children... apparently though, it's like beer to them, so it's ok. And plus it's probably better for them than alcohol...

What made it extra strange was that the man telling the story was probably in his late 50s, and looked rather respectable... I wouldn't have expected him to be so open to juvenile crack addiction...

I must've mis-heard something...

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Recording Perfection...

I did a presentation at work today. It was intended to give people a look at the second release of a product that I've invested the last couple years into bringing to fruition, MITS Report.

About 50 or so people attended the presentation (which was hosted over the internet) and it was recorded for posterity. Unfortunately, the recording had a few problems and didn't end up coming out as cleanly as we would have liked.

I'm now faced with the same dilemma that faces many artists. How much polish is enough polish to release the recording? Since we're no longer stuck in "live" mode (the presentation is technically over), how scripted should it be? Should we do multiple takes and edit together the best snippets?

I can almost guarantee that the recorded version will not have the energy of the live version, but at the same time, it will be "better"... or perhaps more "polished".

Is polished better? We certainly experience a lot of polish in our lives... on TV, on the Radio, at Church, on the Internet. How much polish is too much polish. Isn't there something appealing about the ephemeralness and rawness of a live performance?

On thursday night I will be performing as part of Lacey Brown's band at the High Dive in Fremont. There will certainly be mistakes, and there will likely be some awkward pauses as the guitar player retunes... but that makes part of the experience doesn't it?

iTunes Plus

I've been purchasing music from iTunes plus for the last few weeks. The first couple of days had some hiccups as Apple struggled to keep up with the demand, but now things are working pretty smoothly, and I'm pretty happy. I've bought more music in the past 3 weeks than I have in the past 3 months.

I don't mind using iTunes to buy music, as I don't much care about the associated album art. It's nice to flip through, and then it gets filed away in some box somewhere, only to be retrieved when I decide to rerip the album at a higher bitrate.

Speaking of bitrates, 256kbps AAC definitely sounds better than 128kbps. I was djing a party and was asked to play a few songs I did not posses. There was an internet connection so I loaded up iTunes and purchased them... in the old-skool format. To me the older tracks sound "flat" and boring compared to their high-bit-rate cousins. Could be the particular tracks, and I haven't done any proper A/B comparisons, but I think it sounds better, and that's good enough for me.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

definition of a niche

Something that seems like an awful idea to most people, and an awesome idea to a few people.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

MySpace- finally rewarding its users

I have an inkling.

Now that myspace is actually getting its act together as far as user-interface goes, I have a feeling that people will be spending a lot less time on it. I say this simply because it will now take one step rather than 15 (or whatever) to delete comments, approve/deny/send messages, look through people's pictures, etc. That and I haven't had any kind of spam to delete or report for like 4 days and it's been glorious.

Since they made these adjustments, I've already won back hours. I know it sounds pathetic, but I have seriously spent way less time on myspace this last week or so.

What am I going to do with all my extra time now??

:D

It makes me happy.


I can't wait to see how much time we'll all save when they finally fix their search process. (Making it possible to search for a specific friend from among your friends, rather than having to search the whole FRAKKING SYSTEM. Gahhh that grinds my gears.) I hope they fix that someday.

- Gwen

Monday, June 04, 2007

and might I just add...

technology has been more frustrating than helpful to me over the last 3 weeks or so. On top of everything Gary has posted about recently, here's what has decided to declare war against me:

- Our DVR, of course. Constantly non-responsive to the remote control, continues fast-forwarding long after you've hit play, etc.
- I struggled with getting Finale 7 installed on my computer. Mostly because I am slow at that stuff, but it was still an annoyingly complicated process that called for 2 calls to customer service.
- We had to reinstall OS X on my mac. FOR WHATEVER REASON! It just wouldn't reboot one day.
- After that reinstallation, ProTools would no longer open. Had to reinstall that. It took about 6 tries, but I finally got it on there again.
- Every time I try to open Firefox, my computer isn't connecting to the internet right away. It's only a little hold-up, but it's still ANNOYING.
- And now for no apparent reason at all, Firefox just decided to hang my computer altogether. I went to restart, and it allllmost got all booted up. But not quite. So I had to restart it again.

And to top it all off, I'm just tired of typing to communicate and am letting emails pile up without replying. It's daunting.

- Gwen

boxing hand wraps

I finally found a good illustrative guide to wrapping your hands for boxing. I can start hitting my bag again without as much worry about damaging my hands.

http://www.ringside.com/WrapYourHands.aspx

Sunday, June 03, 2007

xbox issues

XBox360 just hung while pausing an HD movie that I downloaded. Earlier today the HD version of the Matrix wouldn't play the first couple times I tired.

Why does technology always have to fail?

Thursday, May 31, 2007

more itunes issues

I still can't get all my music downloaded. I hope this issue gets the better soon.

Lots of noise on the apple forums. No official response from Apple yet.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

itunes music store

I bought my first couple of tracks on the itunes music store tonight. I figured I would give it a shot since some are now DRM free.

Performance of the music store sucks though. I'm trying to download my second album and I'm getting about 2kbps through the store. After years, I'm finally willing to give this a try, and the performance issues are stopping me from finding and buying more music. Honestly, I bet the pirate music networks are faster and easier. Maybe that's what I should do tonight instead... buy the music on itunes, and then just download pirated mp3s so I can actually listen to them.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

starcraft 2

I just got done watching the gameplay demo for starcraft 2. Which could also be titled, "how we unbalanced the protoss".

I'm looking forward to seeing how they have buffed the other races to even out the gameplay.

Monday, May 21, 2007

macbook revisited

I got OS X reinstalled on Gwen's Macbook Pro last night. The good news is that reinstalling OS X is easier than reinstalling windows. The only rub was that I had to manually reinstall the fonts that Finale uses. Oh and I bet I'll have to reinstall the printer drivers.

I'll find out after today whether it was really that simple.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Gwen's Macbook

Gwen's Macbook pro wont boot into OS X. Funny enough I can boot it into windows XP. Gwen installed some updates from Apple's Software Update, which prompted her to reboot the machine, and now it's hosed. I'm currently copying everything off the HD to another external hard drive before I try reinstalling OS X. Maybe those "geniuses" down at the Apple Store will be required.

I hate software.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Wordpress

Brian has inspired me to get wordpress setup on a new domain. This may pave the way for a blog shift. I'll keep y'all posted.

Apple Rebuttal

Disclaimer: I like apple. I like them a lot. Most of my new hardware these days is apple. That said, I think Apple can do much better in it's criticisms of Microsoft, and in the efforts of its marketing campaign in general. So I'm going to catalog a few rebuttals to their ads.

http://www.apple.com/getamac/

Choose a Vista: Microsoft is doing something called anytime upgrade to handle upgrading. This is to answer the "get stuck with one that doesn't do very much at all" part of the apple commercial. I do appreciate the simplicity of purchasing OS X.

Party is Over: Yeah ok, there's a lot of truth in this one. Microsoft dropped the ball on the vista schedule. And older hardware is supposedly much harder to get working. I could point out the System 9 -> OS X platform switch and what it did to apple hardware. Or perhaps the PPC -> Intel transition and what it did to apple software support. That doesn't really reduce the validity of the criticism though. I would wager however that windows is more friendly to old software than OS X. A lot of the cruft in windows comes from the effort they expend supporting old software.

Genius: Perhaps I should take my mac to the apple genius bar so they can tell me why aperture keeps crashing with this error all the time.

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000000

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90810125 CFRetain + 56
1 com.apple.Foundation 0x92893a9d _NSKeyValueObservationInfoCreateByRemoving + 444
2 com.apple.Foundation 0x92893888 -[NSObject(NSKeyValueObserverRegistration) _removeObserver:forProperty:] + 56
3 com.apple.Foundation 0x92893800 -[NSObject(NSKeyValueObserverRegistration) removeObserver:forKeyPath:] + 554
4 com.apple.Aperture 0x002279e2 0x1000 + 2255330
5 com.apple.Aperture 0x00229888 0x1000 + 2263176
6 com.apple.AppKit 0x9335ad88 -[NSApplication sendAction:to:from:] + 107

Sunday, May 06, 2007

first 10k race

I just finished my first organized run. It was loosely organized, and a lot of fun. Here is what my Garmin forerunner recorded:

Distance: 6.3 miles
Elapsed Time: 1:06:53
Avg Pace: 10:37/mile
Avg Speed: 5.7 mph
Max Speed: 12.0 mph
Calories: 832

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

writing

I don't think I'm a good writer. I can write technical specifications pretty well, and I can contribute to marketing messaging and brainstorming, but I don't feel particularly skilled at crafting a blog post that is interesting.

Maybe I should switch to twitter...

Monday, April 30, 2007

Also....

Vista is the new hotness and OS X is old and busted. Hurry up with Leopard, or whichever cat comes next.

Apple hubris

"No other operating system, Vista included, offers the rich features and simplicity of Mac OS X. And just as Vista tries to get closer (emphasis on “tries”), Mac OS X Leopard is right around the corner — ready to leap even farther ahead."

*sigh* I love apple. I have 2 mac book pros. You could officially call me a switcher. But stuff like this makes me want to switch back.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Shared items

I added a shared items widget to my blog so y'all can see some of the stuff I'm finding via google reader.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Motorbike

I got my yamaha 650 running today. All it took was some new spark plugs. $5.58 later and it's time to go for a ride.

I'm going to have to find time for a ride this week. I wonder what the weather will be like.

Vista on the Macbook Pro

I loaded up vista yesterday. So far it's working pretty well. Aero is nice. And the macbook pro can handle all the bells and whistles. I haven't done any serious work on it, but so far it's pretty. I could see switching my work computer to be vista in the next month or two. Once I can verify that all my apps will work.

I still have a slight preference for OS X at this point, although I'm more anxious waiting for Leopard. OS X is old and grey... Vista is new and shiny.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Blizzard update

Turns out it was my internet connection that was broken. I called up speakeasy and they fixed it right away. That is why I'm their customer. When I call up and tell them I have a problem, they say, "you sure do, let me fix that for you". 9 minutes later we're off the phone and everything is running great. No escalation paths, just fixed problems.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Blizzard and Bittorrent

So it's interesting that Blizzard is distributing World of Warcraft via bittorrent. Interesting in a "it doesn't really work" sort of way. After waiting half an hour to download 13 megs of 3.6 gigs I thought... hmm, maybe this isn't working so well.

I guess I'll just get a physical copy instead of waiting for the massive download.

If they have given me some tweakability I could've setup the bittorrent client to some known good settings. As is I was uploading more than I was downloading, which is fine and all, except I don't really feel like paying for Blizzard's distribution costs.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

casting

Colin and I are considering starting a podcast.

How long should it be?
What topics should we discuss?
Would anybody listen?

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

the park pub

Gwen and I have adopted the park pub.

I'm thinking of recommending 2 things to the park pub.

1) Let Matt dj at least one saturday per month so I can put together a dance following.
2) Institute "Clinton's Pick" which is whatever new beer is on tap that Clinton thinks people should try and why. He knows a lot about beer, and always has good recommendations.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

more comcast woes

"Your cable box cannot tune to On Demand right now. Please try again in a few minutes"
"Your cable box cannot tune to On Demand right now. Please try again in a few minutes"
"Your cable box cannot tune to On Demand right now. Please try again in a few minutes"

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

comcast dvr

So far my favorite feature is when the unit stops responding to input and fast forwards through half of the TV show you were trying to watch.

My second favorite feature is when it stutters during HD playback.