Tuesday, January 31, 2006

I read an article that mentioned a company with an interesting idea. Apparently, there are areas in the south, mainly Texas, that have no communication signal, mainly cell phone. So this company (I would link to their page, but it's disgusting and goes offline a lot) sends up weather balloons with signal relays. After 24 hours, the balloons drift out of their dedicated range and drop to the ground. This company doesn't want to hire full time people to go retrieve these, so they reach out to geocachers to go find them. If you bring it in, they pay $60. I think the closest they get to Minnesota is Missouri. Otherwise I'd be out there right now.

Monday, January 30, 2006

What an absinthe day! I received a shipment of six new bottles, all different brands. I'd have to say that some time is put into the bottling and labeling. I can't wait to try them all. Also, a set of four prints came today, all absinthe related. I'm surprised that I got the go-ahead to hang them in the main sitting room. Now I need to get them framed, hopefully cheap. I think I've spent my allowance for the next few months.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

I stopped by Target and Best Buy tonight to see if they had any older PSP's. Neither did. I then went to Circuit City and they were sold out. Luckily, the guy was willing to see if they had any in the warehouse. The warehouse guy called back and said he found some underneath a bunch of boxes. He brought them out and two of them were actually firmware 1.5. I almost bought both of them and sold the extra on eBay. So, now that I once again have a PSP, I have to figure out the whole PSP hack scene. I realize that Fanjita has developed the EBOOT loader for all firmwares, but he hasn't ported the ISO Loader to anything other than 1.5. This means I'll be able to play copied UMD ISO's. I will have to find out if that includes the newer games needing 2.0+ firmwares, like GTA.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

I just realized that I haven't used my two free in-store rentals from Blockbuster in about 3 months. That's what I call brain overload. I suppose it doesn't really matter since I haven't gamed in that long. Also, my temporary storage is almost maxed out, so it would be difficult to find room for any new games.

Karl's been trying to install Linux on a machine, so he has about 11 distros on various discs. I'm sure there's one I could use.

Friday, January 27, 2006

I went over to Karl's tonight to do some routine maintenance on the Maxima. I think I got over there sometime before 3:00 and I don't think we got done until around 7:00. Of course the actual work took about 45 minutes. I still find it amazing how easy it is for side projects to spring up. For example, I think we spent 40 minutes trying to open a stroller. If only I could remove sleep from my day. Or eating.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Because I've been sitting on two movies from Blockbuster and only rotating one, I've noticed that the time from returning the one until the next one arrives is very short. A few days ago, another disc of 24 came and I watched all four episodes and returned it the next day. I just realized that it took a day longer to get the replacement disc. While not very scientific, it does show evidence towards throttling, both of which Netflix and Blockbuster have admitted to doing.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

There's two movies that I can't convert to DivX, Fantastic Four and Polar Express. I'm working on two theories. Either they have better DRM than other DVD's, or my DivX Convert is confused. Before I returned my PSP, I hooked it up to Construct to transfer some files. However, the PSP needed to be mapped to the E drive. The E drive housed my media files, including having Convert installed on it. When I remapped the media drive to F so the PSP could have E, Convert stopped working. After removing the PSP and remapping, Convert just hasn't worked right.

This has given me some motivation to get the server back up.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

The past few years, I've been getting increasingly involved in the Saint Paul Medallion hunt. I was eagerly awaiting the start of the carnival this year. Well, I found out today that it's the third day of the hunt. I read the first three clues and have an idea of where it might be. I wish I had time to post the clues and my thoughts.

Monday, January 23, 2006

In a weird twist of fate, Karl got a message from our absinthe connection offering an incredible deal if we buy at least 6 bottles. Because Karl just bought a minivan, it turns out to be my turn in financing this shipment. I'm currently awaiting further instructions from our friend Andy.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

It's official. I've completed the web-based flashcard program. It was quite the project. I'm a bit scared to let 40 users access it. I really haven't done any real testing to try to break it. Also, I'm not sure how the server, hosted by GoDaddy, will handle it. Theoretically it shouldn't be a problem. Worst case scenario, the MySQL database will be queried every 30 seconds. I should really be more concerned if my work will block the site due to the possible excessive page requests. But each request is only 4K worth of data. Maybe I'll start by only allowing a few people access and build up my confidence that way. We'll see.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

I was watching Brainiac. It's a show that performs comedic science. They did a little experiment to see if they could quantify the phenomenon of beer goggles. This got me to thinking. I could create a web application with my new found knowledge that could scientifically quantify beer goggles. Now, to gather images for the database ...

Friday, January 20, 2006

Karl and I went up to Duluth to get his damn minivan. A total of 330 miles. It was cold. Found a cache. Drank a beer. Time for bed.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

I'm getting the absinthe bug again. It's unfortunate for the pocket book that it costs so much per bottle. But I guess that indicates the quality (and perhaps the illegality). I've got to remember to talk to Knapper before he goes to London. Maybe he can do some price checking for me. I recently watched an episode of The Thirsty Traveler dedicated to absinthe showing places to check out in Europe. I must go.

Monday, January 16, 2006

It seems like every week I say that I'm so close in finishing the online flashcard application. I literally only have a few minor tweaks to do. I haven't really exhaustively tested it. I probably should before I let others use it.

My dreams have turned from coding on a computer to actual computer code. I only see the code now.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

There's nothing like spending $25,000 in a single sitting. I don't understand how buying a car from a dealer needs to take so long. If I ever buy from a dealer again, I'm going to come in with the cash and say to the salesman that he has 30 minutes to give me the vehicle. If they don't make it, I'm going to walk out. Seriously, they've sold cars before. Their process should be at maximum efficiency by now. I better end this post now.

Friday, January 13, 2006

The food shipment arrived today. Unfortunately, with 28 lbs of hamburger, 32 pizzas, and various other dead animals, it won't all fit in the freezer. Looks like I might have to lease some freezer space somewhere.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

The infamous Fanjita cracked the PSP 2.6 firmware today. Man, it'd be nice to be 14 again and have all that time.

I still need a network name for the PSP.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

I had a 3K meeting tonight. It's unfortunate they're getting fewer and further in between. And that it's winter. The usual meeting area was a bit too cold. Plus with Karl's rental car and other mechanical gadgetry, the usual activities of sounds and underhanded takedowns were not revealed. We did get the discussions going though.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

I'm having some problems with Construct, the production home computer running XP. I had to change some of the drive letters in order to correctly hook the PSP up to it. My PSP needs to have the E drive reserved, which was currently the temporary media directory. After remapping the drives and successfully installing the PSP, I was getting errors from many applications, either because they were running from or backing up to the E drive. Norton, MS Money, SmartRipper, and DivX were a few victims. I think I got everything back up, except DivX. I need to manually change some registry entries and the movie I'm backing up, Fantastic Four, might have advanced encryption that is giving me troubles. Either way, I have to figure this out.

Monday, January 9, 2006

Every day I see Google's share price go up, and I do nothing to benefit. For all the glorifying I do of this company, you'd think that I'd buy a stake in it. It's currently at $464 and it'll be no problem for it to go to $500. It'll be interesting at that point to see if it continues to go higher due to human nature to like round numbers. My guess is that it'll hover around $500 for a few weeks and start its climb back up.

By the way, when is Google Calendar going live?

Sunday, January 8, 2006

I updated the PSP firmware to 2.00. The immediate benefit was the integrated browser. The rendering is a bit weird due to the screen size. It seems to render images full size, as opposed to scaled for the small screen. I can't complain though. My only problem is deciding whether to surf the net or play GTA.

Saturday, January 7, 2006

I went to a close friend's dad's funeral. It was incredible to hear the people talk about him. It sure makes one think.

Friday, January 6, 2006

I had time to watch another movie: Birth. Some of the scenes were a little too long, but the cinematography was quite brilliant. The same guy did Se7en, and also Illuminata which was directed by John Turturro. I haven't seen it and heard mixed reviews, but it's on the list. And no, it's not about the Illuminati.

Thursday, January 5, 2006

I've been doing a lot of coding for the web-based flashcard application. I really enjoy coding and debugging. Like playing video games, I could probably do it without a break for several days. I currently have the main functionality in place, along with the interface. I still need to code some of the extra functionality. I also want to build a "demo" for those that are interested in learning about it but don't want to invest any time checking it out.

I'll have to write up the full specs when I'm done.

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

I received the 1 GB Memory Stick Duo Pro for my PSP. That enabled me to start the hacking. Not hacking at all, I started small by converting a DivX movie to the MP4 format the PSP wants. I used a program by Videora, which I'll have to take a look at in more depth for use with the Tivo and Palm, and eventually the 360. It worked flawlessly. This program doesn't down-rez for the PSP during conversion, so I'll have to down-rez prior to Videora's program. Time for some more testing.

Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Well, it's a new year, no more vacation to use up, everybody's back at work, and the study season should begin shortly. Bah humbug.

Monday, January 2, 2006

I watched Saw this past weekend. I expected it to be the usual horror film, showing nothing new and very predictable. But I was pleasantly surprised. I think if I ever became insane and started killing people, I would do it in a similar fashion as the movie.

Maybe more importantly, I watched the converted DivX file over XBMC on the 55". I think I need to tweak the sound settings since I had to have the receiver cranked up pretty high. I still would like to find a compression scheme that was a bit better. The playback was obviously compressed, but still watchable.

Sunday, January 1, 2006

New Year's Eve was a blast ... from what I remember. We did the annual fondue with my mom and uncle, but included a few other family members. Karl was there, which probably explains why I don't remember much. Uncle Shane, Karl, and I were in the kitchen for the entire night, trying to find Shane's drink.

But now I have to go get rid of this headache.