So, I’ve decided to try out a new header image. Last one was a bit too girly. The new one’s not quite as “artsy,” but it’s definitely a bit manly-er (is that even a word?) and a whole lot geekier.
Monthly Archive for October, 2004
So I’ve been drooling over new MP3 players recently. There’s been all sorts of activity in iPod-land. You’ve got the 4th gen iPods that bump battery life up to ~12 hours per charge. You’ve got the U2 Special Edition iPod that comes in a snazzy black color scheme with a sharply contrasting red click-wheel, band member autographs engraved on the back, and a $50 iTunes coupon good toward the purchase of “The Complete U2″ (I’m guessing that only partially covers the price of admission, and isn’t all that great a deal since they’ve bumped up the price of the unit by $50). And they’ve just announced the iPod Photo that includes a color display and the ability to view jpegs for an extra $100. Oh, and the HP-branded iPods can be had at Staples for a substantial discount (I’ve seen discounts close to $100 off retail). But they still haven’t dealt with the battery issue to my satisfaction (ie not intended to be replaced by the user).
But what I’m really curious about is the Archos Gmini400. In the same size/price range as an iPod Photo, but it’ll play MPEG-4 video and even includes a Compact Flash slot for off-loading pictures from your digital camera. You can do that on an iPod with a Belkin Media Reader, but it’s kinda cool that it’s integrated.
Eh, my need for a portable player is not as pressing now that I’m driving to work instead of busing it, and I can actually play mp3s on my computer at work after my recent Linux upgrade… it’s still fun to drool though.
Hypo-allergenic cats! That’s awesome! Too bad the kittens won’t hit market till 2007 and they’re going to start out at $3500. Yay for creepy science!
Saw an interesting CPU-related post over at /.. There’s a good article over at Anandtech summarizing what’s currently known about near-term dual-core CPUs, along with some of their predictions.
Ok. Ran across this weird site this morning when I was perusing suprnova. The link is howtodogirls.com. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Some sort of perverse instructional site. Well, you’d be right, but it’s probably not exactly what you’ve got in mind. Apparently, they’ve got a few bikini models who will do a variety of instructional videos (the episode that’s currently available is titled “Intro to Bikini Calculus”). So it’s really more of a bunch of girls doing “how-to (do)” videos instead of “how-to-do-girls” videos… Weird.
So it seems some of the spammers have picked up on my blog for some reason. I’ve started receiving a lot of very spammy comments as of recent (ie one “person” slowly iterating over all blog posts starting at #1, each post being largely nonsense but containing a gambling link in the homepage section). So I’ve turned on comment moderation for anything phishy. With any luck this will at least prevent anything from ever showing up on the blog itself, but it still means I’ll get alerts about them (which I may eventually turn off if it grows to frequent) and have to go through and clear them out every so often. Isn’t the internet grand?
Got some more info on all of yesterday’s hub-bub. Apparently, one of the Lieberts (air conditioners) blew up in the server room yesterday, spraying cold water everywhere. The admins spent all day yesterday cleaning up the mess (disassembling the servers, cleaning them out, drying everying, testing them, etc). The main servers are all back up as of this morning, so email, home directories, and the firewall are all available again. The bad news is our group fileserver was directly in front of the Liebert when it blew up. Both power supplies are toast, but it sounds like the hard drives might be ok (they started to spin up during testing shortly before the second power supply failed). Replacements have been dispatched from the company that made it, so with any luck it’ll be back up and running by the end of the day tomorrow. As such, it’s going to be interesting getting much work done until then. For example, if I accidently try to do a directory listing in Linux, it’ll choke since it can’t talk to our NFS server and I’ll basically have to close that terminal.
Just saw a trailer for The Grudge with SMG. Looks excellently creepy! Man. I’m gonna have to go see that. Makes me want to go watch The Ring, another creepy Japanese movie remake (haven’t actually gotten around to seeing it yet, just heard about it).
I got an unexpected day off today. Things were all hunky dorey this morning, but then around 11 something happened. I’m not entirely clear on what. Sounded like someone was doing some sort of maintenance work down in the basement, something went boom, and several fire sprinklers went off in the machine room. Needless to say, the admins quickly shut everything down and went about cleaning up the mess, drying out all the computers and trying to get everything shifted over to another room. Since all the network hardware, mail server, group file servers, etc were housed in that room, it was absolutely impossible for me to do any more work today. Since I can’t do anything there, I might as well go work on the house. 
So everyone’s been raving about this del.icio.us thing. Essentially, it’s a big online, social bookmarking site. You set up an account, add your bookmarks to it, and categorize them with tags of your choosing (i.e. instead of simple folders, you can associate a link with tags “programming” and “C” so that you can access it when you click on either the programming or C categories). Social aspect comes into play when you look at who else has posted a given bookmark, or who else has posted stuff in a given category, or what the most popular links of the day are, etc etc etc. Anyway, I’ve started using it and have my bookmarks set up here.
Recent Comments