25. August 2010 by Frank.

I removed Windows Media Center from my computer when I discovered that it has a networking component that eats up a lot of memory even when it’s not being used.   I use VLC to play movies and things anyway.  WMC’s internet television feature is pathetic so I really had no use for it.  It’s quite unbelievable how much of a performance hit WMC was causing.  My boot up and shut down times have been significantly reduced.

Since having to move my office to my bedroom my big screen TV is now much closer to the computer so I hooked it up last night to see how OBLIVION with Qarl’s III texture pack looks on my 46” HDTV.  In a word(or two or three) absolutely freaking awesome.  Still have a problem with sound getting distorted.

I survived a week without the internet while moving all my stuff.  I don’t care to repeat that anytime soon.

The weather has finally gotten tolerable.  Temps maxing out at 80 and humidity way down.

My job still sucks.

I’m feeling sick again but I’m not sure what’s really wrong.

I was pleasantly surprised when I hooked up the TV.  The computer adapted to the different resolution on its own, I didn’t have to change any settings.  I have a two monitor set up but one is a 25” and the other is 17” so it requires some screwy settings to look right.  Interestingly enough, it switched back on its own when I reconnected the 17”.  That’s exactly what I wanted it to do but how often does that happen?

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24. July 2010 by Frank.

Inexplicably, my wonderful company, whose greatest asset is its employees, decided to deliver raises for everybody on this week’s check regardless of their anniversary dates.  Raises of 8 cents, 9 cents, & 12 cents whether you needed it or not.  Raises regardless if you’ve had your annual review or not.  No way to know if you’re being punished, insulted, or just told to go fuck yourself.

Personally, I know what they’re telling me and it ain’t very nice.

For you percentage freaks, we’re talking .5% to 1.12% raises.  Which means you don’t even get enough to buy a Happy Meal for lunch once a week.  That’s just bad.  And wrong.

I would rather they just came in and said, “Our profits suck so bad this year we aren’t giving out any raises.”  It would still suck and everyone would still be unhappy but, at least, I could accept that as an honest admission.  But, instead, they dish out a few pennies as if that made a difference to anyone.  The least they could have done is had an extra-large tub of Vaseline available.

At this rate it will be another 5 to 6 years before I’m finally making as much as I did 12 years ago at the factory.

In the meantime, I have discovered yet another blunder by management in not following a new procedure which will get us in more trouble with loss prevention now that I’m involved.  Since I ship everything out to vendors and the DC, eventually the paperwork comes down to me.  That’s usually when I discover the latest blunder because no one has done any of the stuff that has to be done before the product can be returned.  It’s also usually when I find out no one bothered to inform me of the change, either.  This is beyond stupid.

It’s ineptitude of the first degree.

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14. July 2010 by Frank.

Woo hoo!

I had to take a certification test at work in case I want to become the new tech guru after the current tech guru quits in August.  6 other guys already took it before it was ever mentioned to me.  Needless to say (because I already gave it away in the title) I got the best score in the store.

Which surprised the daylights out of me because I was using the SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) method to answer most of the questions.  An example: You are connecting the Framistat Valve to the BTX motherboard.  Which wire do you connect to “Pin #1”?  (a) the green wire (b) the green wire with the white stripe (c) the red wire (d) that thing that looks like your uncle’s spleen?

The problem with all this is simply that it offers no pay advantage whatsoever.  The only thing it would do is get me away from doing some of the same old things that I am getting sick and tired of doing all the time.  Repetitively.  Day in and day out.  Over and over.  Again and again.  Redundantly.

I’m still totally broke, as in several hundred behind on my bills broke.  But INCEPTION is on this weekend.  This is the only must see movie for me for the entire Summer.  It’s pop bottle redemption time.  Frankly, this has been one of the (if not THE) worst movie years in recent memory.  There hasn’t been anything screaming “Watch Me!” at all.

Warehouse 13 and Eureka are finally back for new Summer seasons.  Both of them have seasons that are way too short and way too far apart (8 or 9 months to a year).  Warehouse 13 is even goofier than it was first season but it does have some cool ideas such as; HG Wells is a smoking hot evil woman!  Eureka started off with a well done time travel/alternate universe episode which I think bodes well.

I’m afraid I have to admit that I have become completely addicted to Cougar Town.  Talk about smoking hot women; Courtney Cox and Lisa Miller.  The whole idea of having a small but totally wacky circle of friends who spend all their time either having or talking about having sex really appeals to me.  The main guy even runs his own bar.  Oh yeah, it’s got everything.  Except robots or lasers or space ships or science fiction. 

Sometimes you just have to take a break from all your normal stuff.

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28. June 2010 by Frank.

I’m not completely back yet but this weekend we did try to run the Futuremark benchtests on my computer.  After getting some 1 to 2 FPS results even after turning down the resolution and setting everything to entry level, the program eventually crashed the computer.  I can run OBLIVION with everything cranked up quite smoothly so I can’t explain such dismal results.  It was depressing.

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20. June 2010 by Frank.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in the hospital the last few weeks.  My dad had 95% blockage of his carotid artery and had to have a stent put in.  He’s ok now but it took an inordinate amount of testing between some really distressing episodes that resembled heart attacks and stroke.  In fact, I found out he did have a minor heart attack that he didn’t tell anyone about.  Hopefully, things are now back to normal enough that I can start paying attention again.

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31. May 2010 by Frank.

My review of the series finale of LOST is here.

I put it on the other blog because of the religious themes.  And, well, they’re my blogs, I can do what I want.

I just watched the finale of LEGEND OF THE SEEKER and it was fun but a bit too rushed.  They could easily have stretched it out a few more episodes.  Multiple alternate universe story lines crammed into 45 minutes tends to be a bit too much to work well.  Unfortunately the series is cancelled so even though they had some setup scenes for another season, it will never get to play out.

But out least they went out with a bang.

Our heroes saved the world, achieved true love, killed each other, and resurrected themselves and left the principal bad guys intact for more merry shenanigans.  Really, what more could you ask of an epic fantasy?

I think I’m going to have to try to read the books it was based on.  I haven’t read a novel in a couple of years now.  I’m not sure I can stay focused enough to do it.  Which really pains me, I used to read 2 or 3 novels a week.  Wonderful what a stroke can do to your brain.

Which reminds me.  Totally off topic but there have been some celebrity stroke cases recently.  All the PR says they’re doing nicely and making a full recovery.  Right back to work like nothing happened.  I call bullshit.

You don’t recover from massive brain hemorrhage and stroke without any major ill effects.  Brain damage alters your life in ways you can’t imagine.  I don’t care if you can afford better medical treatment than I got.

Sorry, pet peeve of mine.

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22. May 2010 by Frank.

My inner sci-fi geek completely geeked out yesterday with the two part season finale of FRINGE.  I love that show.  John Noble is especially good as Walter Bishop, you don’t normally get acting that good on television.  But, somewhat surprisingly, Anna Torv got to show off her chops as well playing two versions of her character.  Aside from the smoking hot change of hair color, she literally seemed to be two different people with similarities; subtle and blatant at the same time.  Very good performance.   The alternate universe version of New York was also quite interesting complete with the World Trade Center.  There were quite a few minute details that were fun but what got me were the scenes of desolation caused by fringe events and the quarantined area with bodies frozen in place.

Of course, this means nothing until next fall which is why I hate these short TV seasons.

I’m convinced tomorrow night’s finale of LOST is going to be incredible.  The build up has been great, I can’t believe they would blow it at the end.

It helps that I’ve been able to watch to entire run of the series in a few months instead of a few years.  It would be too easy to get completely lost with the huge seasonal gaps.

According to all the fanboy comments on Hulu, LEGEND OF THE SEEKER has been cancelled.  I don’t know if that’s true but I hope it isn’t.  I love fantasy.  This show really hit its stride this season.  I suppose I could easily find out if it was really canceled but there are some things I’d rather not know.

My only hope for Summer is WAREHOUSE 13 and EUREKA which are both starting up soon.

I’m still severely broke so no movies for me yet.

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15. May 2010 by Frank.

I am not happy with Windows Media Center in Windows 7; the Internet TV part in particular makes me feel like I’ve returned to the days of 56K.  I consider the offerings very limited at best but the stuttering, stopping, and horrible load times are appalling.  It took a half hour to download a 5 minute tech show last weekend.  It was like QuickTime 1.0 back in the 80’s.

So I tried XBMC, an open source media center that has some good reviews.  I like the way it looks and it seems to function fairly well.  The control system is quite wonky, however.  It took some effort to get it to play a DVD but when it did, it did a good job.  It played a music CD with song titles and cover art easily enough but it still took much too long to get it to do that.  I messed with enough of the program to decide it was worth the effort to master.

I also decided it might be what I needed to get the same sort of thing on my Ubuntu setup.  You have to download and install it through the terminal which is proving quite interesting.  In some ways I prefer that to downloading and installing in Windows.  It’s definitely different.

Unfortunately, wonky doesn’t begin to describe how unstable XBMC is on my Ubuntu setup.  So far not a good combination at all.  Video spasms, unresponsive mouse, flashing screens of total chaos, you name it.  I may have missed something important but it will be fun to see if I can figure it out and get it to work.

Meanwhile, I have some serious geek envy of my son-in-law’s new Alienware Area 51 monstrosity.  That has to be the biggest case I’ve ever seen (not to mention the coolest.)  It can play Crysis with everything cranked up.  Nerdgasm.

I’m broke literally so no movie excursions.  I want to see Iron Man 2 but Robin Hood is looking less and less interesting but at the rate I’m going I may not see either or anything for quite awhile.  I will take my pop bottles back so I can afford to go see Inception however.

Finally, a weekend without rain.  I will be out walking.  Doesn’t cost a cent and it’s a lot of fun.

Technorati Tags: XBMC,Ubuntu,Windows 7,Alienware,movies,walking,no money

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1. May 2010 by Frank.

So I spent most of yesterday installing and playing with the new Long Term Support release of Ubuntu 10.04.

The install took only 25 minutes and probably could have been shortened to less than 15 if I had pressed the SKIP button that kept popping up while language packs were being installed.  Somehow, pressing SKIP while installing an operating system just doesn’t seem wise no matter what you might be skipping.

I must say Ubuntu 10.04 starts up incredibly fast.

A welcome surprise was that there was only a couple of updates which took just a few seconds to download and install.  Compared to the 2 to 3 hours it took Windows 7 to update (this was a week before it was even officially released!)  Kudos to Ubuntu.

The only other absolute necessity was getting the proprietary driver for my ATI video card. This took maybe ten minutes.  Unfortunately, it took an hour or so of screwing around to figure out how to get it to manage two monitors the way I wanted it to.   It doesn’t help that my monitors are different sizes.  But eventually I got them configured with different resolutions with each one supporting 4 workspaces (which can go even higher).  All the controls are on both monitors so it’s quite easy to open what you want where you want it.  And then instantly switch between them.

Several games are no longer included, nor is GIMP.  They’re all still readily available, you just have to download them.  It’s not too big a deal unless you really liked something in particular.  Getting new software for Ubuntu is very easy.

Firefox is the default and only browser included and it connects instantly.  It does need a Flash plug-in if you go to sites that use Flash (like HULU).  Watching shows on HULU was slightly glitchy, the picture wasn’t always stable and it frequently dropped out of fullscreen mode.  I also downloaded the Chromium Browser and tried it on the same shows.  Same glitches which makes me think the plug-in is at fault.

RhythmBox will play music CDs but there’s nothing to play a DVD movie of the Hollywood variety.  There’s an Ubuntu One music store but a brief look didn’t impress me.  They apparently have never heard of the new age genre.  I tried several artists that I enjoy and it could find nothing by any of them.  There’s a few online radio stations which came in quite clear but I didn’t try Pandora yet (which is also Flash based.)

Something that takes some getting used to is the window control buttons, (close, maximize, minimize), are on the left now.  They can be moved back to the right but I hate sticking with the familiar just because it’s familiar.

The new photo organizer program has some basic editing functions.  It conveniently autosaves the original so it never gets altered.  Which is a good thing because there isn’t any UNDO command.  That’s a bit of a nuisance.  I did download GIMP but I’ve always found it to be overkill for a simple touchup job.

I didn’t need to download anything for PDF printing nor was anything required to get my HP printer to work.  Everything else plugged into the computer was all properly identified and ready for use including the sound card.

All in all, I’d say Ubuntu 10.04 is quite impressive on first look.

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25. April 2010 by Frank.

I scored AVATAR on Blu-Ray for my 55th birthday last Friday.  I’ve watched it twice already.  Here’s my impressions:

This is easily the best looking Blu-Ray disc I have seen yet.  The colors are eye popping.  Really shows off the HDTV very well. 

While I was enamored with the 3D version at the theatre I have to admit 2D is just as good.  There is far more visual detail to sort through than I realized – I think the 3D effects captured so much of my attention that I missed a lot of background detail.  Maybe in a few years this will be justification for a 3D HDTV but I can’t see it being ready for primetime yet.  The early adopters can sit around with their plastic glasses but I will wait.  If I had tons of disposable income I doubt I would do it now.  You’ve got to let this tech mature for awhile.

I think the criticisms about the story being too simplistic were very misguided.  This movie is so overwhelming to look at that a complicated plot would have been lost on most of the audience.  A visit to another world that looks “real” as Pandora does is awe-inspiring all by itself.

This is a must have Blu-Ray for anyone with an HDTV.

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