Random Musings

I really don't know how people have lived here and remained sane.  Maybe they haven't, which is why this area produces more serial killers than anywhere else.  Here is what I do know: the weather people in the Puget Sound area should just go do other stuff and they shouldn't bother trying.

A mere five hours ago, we were due 4" of snow with the possibility of rain by morning.  So the kids stayed up a little longer, we felt pretty confident of a late start in the morning, we watched a movie with them, etc. 

Insert now: whoops, boy were we wrong folks, no snow at all. In fact, it's going to rain and by morning everything will be gone.  We're sorry.  Our bad.  "But it's really hard to tell the weather here, folks."  Then don't bother.

I'm used to living in two different regions of the country.  The Bay Area, where I grew up, was pretty steady.  It was either going to be sunny, or it was going to rain.  And they were hardly ever wrong.  You got rain if they said it, and you got the sun if they said it.

Then in Boston or upstate NY, you may not get all the snow they said you were going to, but you got it.  And you could tell when thunderstorms were coming, and you knew when it was going to be sunny.

This area?  No.  We had a summer that wasn't a summer at all.  We are now having yet another maddening winter of "nobody can tell you what is going to happen."  It's the weather lottery, and you just have to be used to not knowing ever what is going on.

Insane.  I've lived here six years now and I can't wait to leave.

I just recently discovered a show that I found fantastic.  The show just finished it's second season, but you can get them on DVD and/or iTunes, etc.

The premise of the show is that Dexter is a serial killer who's cop father raised to only take out bad guys.  He works for the police as a forensics expert.

Michael Hall, who was awesome on Six Feet Under, is the main character and he should get an Emmy for this show.

Check it out, see how you like it.  Warning: based on the subject matter, there are some "disturbing" scenes, so if you are squeamish, find another show.

 

Okay, so after a lot of dinking around, I got the Blackjack II working better.  It seems to have needed to completely drain, then charge back up and suddenly I was getting massive battery life.  I thought we were past those days, but apparently we are not.  So goodness on the Blackjack front.

I have my second Xbox 360 dying on me.  Of course this comes on the heels of making the switch from Tivo to MCE, so it's more painful as it's the only way to watch recorded shows in the family room.  *sigh*  We turned it on this weekend and got 3 rings of red.  I reset the box, but now it's randomly freezing.  *sigh*  Can't win for losing.  I won't buy another XBOX 360 (two failed units is enough for me), so now I have to wait for extenders to come out.  They are late.

 

Growing up as a young boy, who could have known that one TV show could impact not only my love of comics (I am a Batman fan, after all), but my taste in women? 

Julie, meow back at you.

Remember though, she wasn't the only woman to have played Catwoman.  Do you know the rest?

*sigh*

Okay, so today here is the situation with my Windows solutions.  I have a 1 month old new ThinkPad Tablet (X61) which I really enjoy.  However, many times a week I will go to put it to sleep and it will turn off the LCD, but never sleep.  The only way to get it back is to force shut down and deal with the data loss. Come on, really?  My MacBook Pro closes and opens all of the time with none of these problems.  Dammit -- I want our stuff to work!  So now I have to rebuild some stuff on my laptop.

And so we move on to my brand new 1 day old Blackjack II.  Ah, yes, good times with that as well.  I decided to sell my iPhone and move back to the Blackjack, not only to stick with Microsoft solutions, but to have my calendar, etc.  So I pick up the BJ II yesterday.  I charged it overnight and set out today with it.  At around 10, I plugged it into my computer to install some stuff.  It sat there on the power of USB.  I go to a meeting with it and by 3 PM -- low battery alert!  WTF?  I charge it again another 1.5 hours.  1 hour later, low battery alert.  Come on, really?  No bluetooth enabled, just push Exchange, and you can't last 1 flipping day?

*sigh*

So, let's review.  Nice Thinkpad X61, can't sleep.  MacBook Pro, sleeps just fine and wakes up in like 2 seconds.  My iPhone ran for 2 days and that was me doing heavy surfing.  My BJII, not so much.

Shoot me.

It is no secret that I really detest DRM and find it reprehensible.  I don't like it in our products that require PIDS to install them, and I don't like DRM when it stops me from doing a perfectly reasonable thing.

It makes makes no sense that the music I buy from iTunes is DRM'd, but a higher quality file I get off of the CD I have isn't. 

My latest venture into this was deciding to try to take my house "All Microsoft" and give up my Tivo Series 3 for a Windows Vista Media Center PC that costs 4 times as much.  Yeah, I know, but I'm trying to be a good guy and I felt I could have one system where all of my content comes in and I could then get to it from every tv in the house as well as dump shows to my iPod (nee, Zune) and such.  So after a week of fighting with comcast and getting some great help from the MCE team, I got my nice system with cable card readers all working.

So pretty cool, right?  Well, not exactly.  I then went this morning to dump a few shows to my iPod.  Hmmm, the video convert isn't working.

Want to know why?

DRM.  Turns out that Microsoft bent over for the cablecard people and wrapped every file in DRM even if the show itself isn't DRM'd.  So as an example, if I record something off of KCTS, a PUBLIC station over clear QAM in beautiful HD -- that is fine.  No problem. But if I record the exact same show over the cablecard reader, no dice. We encrypt it and you can't touch it. 

Note that Tivo Series 3, which also uses cablecards, does not have this limitation.  So, once again, my attempt to embrace the Microsoft ecosystem bites me in the butt.  Now I have to implement some other tuner hack to just get unencrypted recordings so that I can put them on a device for the kids to watch on long trips.

Really, I don't understand why we embrace Hollywood's deep desires around DRM more than any other company on the planet.  If Tivo was able to ship with the ability to download and share unprotected content, why wasn't Microsoft allowed the same thing?

I hope the MCE thing works out long term. Otherwise, it was an interesting experiment. 

Note to the Tivo lovers: if Tivo had been smart and implemented multiroom viewing via streaming, I would have just bought a second TivoHD and called it a day.  It would have cost me $300 (a lot cheaper than an MCE pc) and I could still download content to my computer and save to my devices.  But they don't do the smart thing here either.

*sigh*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YuD9kYK9I 'nuff said