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My Almost-daily Journal |
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| About I love trying out new things, especially when it comes to internet technology. I never really kept a journal, but it's something that I've always wanted to do. Now, everybody will get a chance to look inside my twisted, and somewhat-warped mind.
I've also subscribed to Audio Blog, so a few times a week, I'll leave actual voice blogs. Very cool!XML Newsfeed  |
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Met the Motley Crue! It's funny how the mind works when stereotyping. Until you meet someone one-on-one, your mind will create a fictional character based on the miniscule information you have acquired: written word, spoken word, or second-hand info. Case-in-point: Adrian and Arejay. I never met them until yesterday's impromtu dinner at PF Changs in Somerset. Adrian: my mind created a reclusive, pompous character that directed his energy in assertive written word. I almost dreaded meeting him in person for fear that he would tear me apart with his dry, philosophical melancholy. Arejay: my mind created another gun-toting, reclusive, messy-haired, introvert that donned fatigues, "I Love the NRA and Michigan Militia" apparel, and only ate MRE's (GI meals-ready-to-eat). I was quite mistaken. As a matter of fact, I anticipated the bewilderment. When has my mind EVER correctly stereotyped anybody? Never, really. It's my way of providing personal amusement for myself: creating fictional stereotypes only to prove myself wrong in the end. The real Adrian: he had quite a bubbly personality and was full of almost-child-like vigor. He's definitely someone that could turn a spiralling-abyss-depressed mental patient into someone giddy with laughter. For sure, he's someone that I'd like to know. The real Arejay: he was an extremely clean-cut, sport coat-n-tie, dapper fellow that everybody wishes was the father they meet on a first date. He was eminating integrity and stature, and it would be surprising if he wasn't a CEO for some large corporation. He's definitely someone that I'd like to know and have as a neighbor. And that's it! Adrian is in town for about ten days, and he heads north to Calgary to hook up with another set of family and/or friends. So we'll definitely try to get as much of a dose of him as possible before the U.S. excommunicates him back to Australia. I'll personally have to test his skills against some games like GTA Vice City, just to make sure he's on the up-n-up. We'll probably hit a movie or two in the few days that he's here, and I'll have to show him how The Matix was intended to be watched/enjoyed via my home theater. Poor guy has no car, and is shacked up with Dan Glovak, who has no telephone, no TV, no computer and no internet access. Damn. Sounds like solitary confinement to me. No internet? No computer? No TV? So cliche. :) Just kidding. posted by Dino at 1:53 AM (permanent link) Monday, October 27, 2003
Failure is Never an Option for Me! After spending COUNTLESS hours scouring all the DVD XCopy forums, it appears that there's definitely an issue that 321 Studios are aware of: that their newest release DOESN'T finalize the DVD's. Their solution was to use Nero to finalize the session AFTER you unsuccessfully burned a full DVD. I don't have Nero. I hate Nero. Solution? DVD Decrypter! It was a free download. I finalized the track, then the session, and the DVD finally played fine on my computer. Unfortunately, it wouldn't play on my 1985 Panasonic DVD player in the basement. :( That thing is a relic. I've been DYING for a reason to run it over with my Jeep (I've had several issues with it skipping and NOT reading DVD rentals). I ran the DVD on Josh's DVD player and it worked! However, I wasn't completely satisfied with the playback on his DVD player, because it forces "EZ View", which tries to make a widescreen movie fit in as much of the screen as possible. The movie was "squashed" a bit, but I ran some of his other movies and ran across the same problems. I couldn't disable "EZ View" for some reason. At least I know I can now copy DVD's even though it does take two seperate steps. Unfortunately, I was so pissed, I completely uninstalled the program from my computer. I'll wait for the next release that comes out where they have most of their flakiness resolved. I'm wondering about the QA at 321 Studios... if there even IS one. posted by Dino at 2:43 AM (permanent link) DVD XCopy Sucks! Well, I wasted another f***'ing DVD+R trying to copy a movie. Oh well. Live and learn. I guess DVD XCopy doesn't work. I'm going to burn a $10 bill tomorrow just for fun. DVD+R's aren't cheap. What a f***'ing waste. posted by Dino at 12:31 AM (permanent link) Sunday, October 26, 2003
Newsgroups Mania! One of the biggest kept secrets of the internet is newsgroups... a remnant from the late 80's of the embryonic internet, and a part of today's UUNet. I posted a whole article on the history of newsgroups here. It's a good read. Of course, as of late, my favorites are alt.binaries.cd.image, alt.binaries.cd.image.games, alt.binaries.cd.image.clonecd, and alt.binaries.multimedia. ...umm... kinda rhymns with Veronica. How sick has my newsgroup downloading become? Take a look at my download history: Period Start Period End Days Bytes GB 06/12/2002 07/12/2002 29.05 458,477,741 0.46 07/12/2002 08/12/2002 31.00 0 0.00 08/12/2002 09/12/2002 31.00 3,106,554,185 3.11 09/12/2002 10/12/2002 29.99 6,300,000,000 6.30 10/12/2002 11/12/2002 31.04 2,740,893,977 2.74 11/12/2002 12/12/2002 30.00 6,300,000,000 6.30 12/12/2002 01/12/2003 31.00 1,999,983,305 2.00 01/12/2003 02/12/2003 31.00 4,295,714,359 4.30 02/12/2003 03/12/2003 28.00 4,363,286,388 4.36 03/12/2003 04/12/2003 30.96 4,859,794,429 4.86 04/12/2003 05/12/2003 30.00 6,300,000,000 6.30 05/12/2003 06/12/2003 31.00 2,799,791,907 2.80 06/12/2003 07/12/2003 30.00 6,300,000,000 6.30 07/12/2003 08/12/2003 31.00 1,940,182,436 1.94 08/12/2003 09/12/2003 31.00 4,278,709,513 4.28 09/12/2003 10/02/2003 20.75 6,300,000,000 6.30 10/02/2003 10/04/2003 2.01 6,300,000,000 6.30 10/04/2003 10/20/2003 15.65 6,300,000,000 6.30 10/20/2003 10/21/2003 1.24 6,300,000,000 6.30 10/21/2003 10/22/2003 1.01 6,300,000,000 6.30 10/22/2003 10/24/2003 2.10 6,300,000,000 6.30 10/24/2003 10/26/2003 1.75 6,300,000,000 6.30 10/26/2003 10/26/2003 0.47 179,739,180 0.18 To interpret that mess, my download average per month was about 5 GB of data. If you look at the last few days, I'm hitting 6.3GB every two days. Movies, songs, games, and apps... you name it. It's out there for the taking. It's not cut-n-dry like P2P filesharing with Kazzaa, Limewire, or old-Napster, but it's definitely do-able. And the beauty of the current newsgroup binary trends is that people also create parity files that actually FIX parts of a binary that were incomplete or missing. You just GOTTA love the ambition of pirates. DVD XCopy I finally downloaded DVD XCopy to fully utililze my brand new Plextor DVD burner. Unfortunately I wasted a brand new DVD+R. I tried making a backup copy of Black Hawk Down, spent 20 minutes reading it, and five minutes writing it, and it never played on any DVD player in my house. Checking the DVD XCopy forums (fora, forums, who knows), people were complaining about the newest version of DVD XCopy Xpress v 3.0.5. Basically everybody complaining about it said the same thing: the disk never closed the session and the DVD was unreadable. Everybody said that v 3.0.2 worked fine. But how does a layman get their hands on v 3.0.2 if you can't download it from the DVD XCopy site? Answer: Newsgroups (see above)! So I uninstalled v 3.0.5 and installed v 3.0.2. I'm reading Black Hawk Down into my file buffer as I write this blog. I'm a little reluctant to try another shot at this since DVD+R's cost $2.50 each. I should probably use a DVD+RW, but some people seemed to have problems reading that type of DVD in their players from what I gathered in the forums. My next mission (I always seem to have missions), is to see if I can copy my Laser Discs and burn them onto one DVD. I have a pretty huge collection. Only problem is that the audio is only encoded in Dolby Pro Logic. Current DVD's are encoded in Dolby Digital or DTS (which is killer). Anyway, I just want to remove my Laser Disc player from my rack and throw the Laser Discs up in the attic. Better yet, I'd like to sell the whole package on ebay. I'm not sure what idiot would want to buy a Laser Disc player and Laser Discs. But then again, I know plenty of idiots that buy Atari 2600 game consoles. Hmmm. I'd probably buy one. posted by Dino at 11:56 PM (permanent link) Friday, October 24, 2003
Yesterday Was a Weird Day Yesterday was a weird, and somewhat frustrating day for me. First off, the traffic: will it ever end? The current road infrastructure does support the amount of roads today. How bad will it be when the population doubles? Right now, it normally takes me 45 minutes to go 8.6 miles. If that's not sick, please show me something worse. Secondly, construction: is this a legalized version of organized crime? I mean, get real! Cement trucks, gravel trains, and a handful of other construction-type trucks are the ones that are travelling overweighted and BEYOND the roads' designed specifications. I've even heard rumors (apparantly they are facts) that semi-trucks entering Michigan from Ohio usually come in and grab more "goods" since they are allowed to haul twice as much more in Michigan. It's a funny situation... the construction companies are the one driving overweighted and damaging the roads, and then they're the ones that are contracted to fix them. Someone needs to look into this heinous situation. The guy that invents roads and concrete that last 50+ years will win the Nobel Peace Prize. Traffic caused by construction just makes driving on Michigan roads even more disgusting. Third issue: I-75. Try taking I-75 south in Detroit. Bring a lunch, unless you plan on leaving your house at 5AM. It's ridiculous. Something I'd like to pass into law: if you close down lanes on an Interstate, there better be people working on that road/bridge, round-the-clock, 24/7. Half the time, there are cones and barrels up, but no workers. Are they all out to lunch? Fourth weird thing, but not a gripe: I was at Pearson Int'l Airport in Toronto yesterday. I bought a Fruitopia strawberry drink. I opened it, took a sip, then entered the line to pay. I was up next. I was simply screwing on the top to the container, so I could get out my money, and the entire bottle split around the perimeter of the bottle, halfway down. Glass and shrapnel were everywhere, and juice was all over my shirt, jacket, pants and shoes. The cashier looked at me as if I wronged him somehow, even though he saw the whole thing. After a little deliberation, I managed to get a new one. I was so pissed, that he was even CONSIDERING an argument, that I almost threw the bottle in his face. Fifth weird thing, and the most tragic... I was driving in Windsor, heading toward the tunnel. I was listening to some Blues Traveller when out of my peripheral vision, I saw a sleek, but large cat jump out in front of me about 20 yrds. It was booking across five lanes of heavy traffic. I slowed down drastically to give it some room. It made it by lane one, lane two, middle lane, lane three, then it entered lane five, where a car was also travelling normal to the cat's vector. The car didn't bother to slow down. I think it actually sped up. I saw the cat go under the car, but did not see it make it across. Actually, I didn't even see ever again. I was haunted with grief. I was so pissed I almost turned around to pull the driver out of his car through his rolled-up window. It affected me for the rest of the night. I even felt guilt for not turning around to go pummel the driver, and see if I could somehow rescue the cat. The only reason I didn't is because I have an unpaid speeding ticket in Toronto I got while visiting Peter back in the early 90's. I ripped up the ticket and wiped my ass with it. Now, I'm probably a fugitive in Canada. I kind of like it. Finally, on my way home, an ambulance was completely stopped at a 7-11 driveway. Lights were off, and it wasn't moving. I was approaching an intersection where I was greeted by a red light, so I started to slow down. Immediately, the light turned green, so I pressed on the gas. At that instant, the ambulance driver turned on his lights, and his sirens. I had to make a decision to make a screeching halt while veering to the left, or gun it and while veering left. I opted for the second one. It was the right decision because he ended up doing a U-turn without even looking. He missed me by about 0.17 inches. Quite the day. posted by Dino at 3:50 PM (permanent link) Monday, October 20, 2003
Photo Album Disorder: The Torture Test I toiled through the mundane process of scanning another photo album tonight (this morning). I say "mundane" because it's a mindless, repetitive process of placing photos on a platen, setting a boundry, and clicking the scan button. To add to the misery of monotony, I'm also cursed with dealing with careless disorder. My mom's photo albums may appear to be in some sort of order, but in reality, they are not. For instance, at the end of the last album (1984), we celebrated Gina's birthday and Easter, and then we had the honor of seeing my parents vacation in the Bahamas. In the current album I scanned, we celebrated summer '84, went in reverse and celebrated Gina's birthday and Easter again, and also saw my parents go to the Bahamas again. Then we fast-forward to summer in Alpena, skip the entire autumn, and hit Christmas and New Years. To add to my torture, the next album has the Bahamas AGAIN, along with ANOTHER take of Christmas '84. And who knows what else I might discover. We may get another encore of Easter ' 83. Disorder really pisses me off. Go figure... and I have Josh as a housemate... reality has a sick sense of irony. Photo & Video Archiving... Why? I'm sitting here semi-pissed at the disorder and the mental torture that I go through in scanning these pictures and TRYING to put them in some sort of order, when I just realized something... The only people that really care one iota about these pictures are probably Gina, Peter, and I. Sure, some people might flip through them if they have nothing else better to do (perhaps a convict doing a life sentence), but really nobody cares about these pictures. This isn't an epiphany for me. I knew this already. I didn't take on this life-long task for social accolades. However, I did come to a conclusion as to WHY I spend ALL this time scanning: to give my offspring an opportunity to see WHO I am/was, WHAT I think/thought about, WHAT I do/did, WHERE I go/went, WHY I do/did anything. You wanna know what would be the WORST and MOST DISAPPOINTING thing to EVER happen to me? Answer: if I died before I had children. All of this scanning and archiving of pictures, videos, and even BB dialogues would be for naught, if I never did have offspring. That really would be the worst thing to happen to me. Maybe I should concentrate more on carrying on my lineage and HAVING offspring and dwelling a little less on the past. Epiphany. This is probably the first time since I've been aware of my existence, that I actually DON'T feel immortal. For 34.5 years, I always thought I was. posted by Dino at 2:01 AM (permanent link) Thursday, October 16, 2003
The Life of an Archivist Being a genealogist as well as a photo and video archivist IS an under-appreciated job. Sure, I get props and kudos from my siblings, parents, and a wink from a distant cousin, but that's not what lights MY fire. A nudge is as good as a wink to a blind man. My unborn progeny's progeny is the reason that I toil over family trees and capturing history. And what are the chances that an offspring of mine (or my brother's or sister's) will actually be interested in history, genetics, traits, behaviors, or even genealogy? I'd say I have a 10% chance that someone in the future will actually look at ALL THIS CRAP. But, I have faith, that some day, some one, will actually find all this stuff interesting. The Perpetual PC Upgrading Continues Other than my first Commodore Vic-20 or Commodore 64, I don't think that I've ever bought a brand new computer, or ever began with a "fresh start". My computers have always been in some sort up "upgrade flux". For instance, last year, I had a stick of memory go bad. It fried my OS and left me for dead. I was able to backup most of my info, so I wasn't totally dead-in-the-water. Did I start from scratch? Hell no. I scavanged almost every component I possibly could from my working computer and put it toward "the new computer". The only thing that I really bought was a mobo, cpu and RAM. Everything else was carryover. As a matter of fact, all my computers sitting in my house (I have at least five that are functional and on 24/7) are just leftover remnants of what should really be in a landfill. I just can't throw away working equipment. And even funnier, one of my computers, I actually picked out of Peter's garbage. Go figure. It's probably the 2nd or 3rd best computer I have. So what went into my latest upgrade fetish? Since my computer was turning off on its own, I figured I needed a new power supply. What really was the culprit was a dirty-as-hell switch that was neither on nor off. After a while, the switch overheated and shorted, and turned the computer off, while sucking the life out of my UPS. So now I have an Antec True Blue 480W power supply with an additional $10 silencer kit that is nothing more than a rubber grommet to dampen the fan noise. It actually sounds wonderfully sweet and quiet, unlike my $10 gookanese PS. Can you say DVD burner? I purchased the Plextor PX-708A which burns DVD's at 8X (fastest burner out there now), as well as CD's at 40X... which is amazing to me, considering I've been burning at 16X for almost two years. Now I can safely backup my cherished photograph and video archives, and actually not lose sleep at night worrying about some phantom power surge or virus wiping out my life. I CAN'T WAIT to start copying DVD movies! RIAA and Co., come and get me! Then I decided to go big, but smart on a high-capacity special edition hard drive. Western Digital's Special Edition drives are packed with an 8MB cache, which makes the drive incredibly fast. I've already noticed a 33% increase in performance. Of course, that's just perception. I was struggling between 120 GB and 250 GB, and ended up compromising and settling with the 180 GB drive. At about $1/GB, I couldn't pass up that deal. PLUS, I purchased it at Microcenter to satisfy my impulse-buying urge. So why stop there? My main OS drive was down to about 10 GB free, and it was getting to the tail end of its useful life. I already started getting bad sectors, so I figure I might as well take the plunge since I have my case cracked open. I settled with just an 80 GB Western Digital Special Edition drive. I probably should have went a little higher, but I couldn't pass up the deal from Newegg.com for $75. The drive even came with Data Lifeguard that allowed me to copy my main drive, boot sector and all, to the new drive. The ability to do that made life sooooo much easier for me. After copying the contents of the old drive to the new drive, I swapped out the cables and jumpers, and I was back in business. And it's such a treat to have an SE drive as the OS drive. I immediately saw a perceived 33% improvement in performance. So what's next? I think I'm going to wait a while, but I've been drooling over an Abit IC7-Max3 or Asus P4C800-E motherboard, powered by a 3.0 Ghz P4, with a gig of Corsair XMS memory. Of course, with that powerhouse, I would be selling myself short without two Western Digital Raptor 36 GB SATA 10K RPM drives running at RAID 0. Just to be the king of this hill would cost me a grand, and that's carrying over my ATI 9800 Pro video card and 180 GB data drive. Encoding videos would take seconds instead of minutes, and Photoshop would function like ACDSee Lite. Ahhh... to dream. Perhaps it'll give me good reason to wait, since Wester Digital is coming out with 72 GB Raptors in a few months. posted by Dino at 11:40 PM (permanent link) Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Corporate Shakedown The more things change, the more they stay the same... I never understood that that meant. Decoma is changing... the entire infrastructure is changing. Both of the two main product and operational VP's have either been promoted (personally, I wouldn't classify it as a promotion) or shipped overseas. It will be interesting to see what comes out of all of this. One thing that I do know: the majority of my focus was supporting the manufacturing IT needs of our startup assembly and sequencing center in Alabama. As of yesterday, that plant no longer falls under our group. What does this mean? My workload is now down to 50% and falling. What does that mean? Depending on which way the wind is blowing, it could be good or bad. Bad: Who needs me? I'm no longer added value. Fired. Good: I could move back into product and/or program management. I could go back to the development center and program/project manage over there. At the end of the day: there are going to be big changes in my life the next few days/weeks/months. Some have already started. Welcome to my brave, new world. posted by Dino at 2:32 PM (permanent link) Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Computers and the Never-ending Storage Issue Originally sent this to Peter: I'm running out of disk space. I have 60GB drive and a 40GB drive. I have about 7GB free on drive C and 10GB free on drive D. Of course, I have many games loaded that take up 2GB of space on the C drive. I can uninstall them and things can be better. I also use the C drive to backup My Documents, which actually lives on the D drive (a remnant of when the C drive was an active webserver, and I didn't want to keep sensitive files on that drive). Also on the C drive is the newsgroup app, Agent. The dat file alone takes up a few gigs for headers, binaries, RAR's and PAR's. Those RAR's and PAR's then get moved to the D drive, which is basically just my "data" drive. I also had to off-load most of my raw encoded video data onto CD. This worries me a little since I read a startling article on degradation of CD quality over time (as little as a year). Come to think of it, one of my CD's with zips was actually unreadable after three years. Questions and concerns: 1) I'm thinking about getting bigger drives. Mainly the WD 120GB Special Edition. I'm actually thinking about getting two of them, to replace both drives, for a total of 240GB. Or a 120GB for the C and a 250GB for the D. 2) Is there a way to transfer the data, OS, registry, etc (the whole drive) of my C drive onto the larger 120GB drive? Don't some hard drives come with software on a CD to do this? CloneCD, Norton Ghost, etc. Is this something that's actually feasible and successful? I don't want to start fresh, since there's way too many apps that are loaded. 3) I've been "virtual window shopping" on Newegg.com. It's almost as exciting as walking around Microcenter, Best Buy, Craftsman store or Home Depot. While I'm not ready to jump into an 800Mhz FSB mobo with the 875 chipset just yet (soon, though... very soon), I'm thinking about getting a card with USB 2.0 and firewire ($29 from Newegg... not bad... nice to have firewire). I need USB 2.0 for my idea on #4 and #5. 4) Maxtor 120GB USB 2.0 backup external drive. I have way too much data that would cripple me as a human being if it was ever destroyed. I put way too much work into scanning pictures and negatives, and way too much work encoding home videos. I would be crippled mentally, emotionally, physically, meta-physically, non-physically and socio-economically if that data ever got destroyed. I also need to backup all my websites at least once a month (even though CIHost claims they run backups. I don't trust them. If CIHost ever went belly up, I'd be wasted, since I really don't have backups, especially with df.com. Having a backup drive would be pretty nice. They're a whopping $183. I'm not broke, so why shouldn't I get one? They also have a button to backup on the fly, though I'd probably do monthly full backups and daily incrementals with the built-in Veritas solution provided by Win 2000. WD also has an external backup drive. Perhaps I should stick with WD. 5) DVD Burner. No regrets on this one. I want to get the best one. Either the Plextor top-o-the-line ($230-ish) or the Pioneer ($180-ish). Of course, those are internal drive prices. What I'd really like is an external USB 2.0 drive. Or do I want external? What is the difference in speed for IDE channel vs. USB 2.0? I'd have to swap out my current Plextor CD writer if I went with an internal one. I'd want to use the DVD burner to 1) incorporate my 100's of CD's of backups of zips, files, pics, movies, etc., onto just a few DVD's, 2) make backups of the data that's on the backup drive listed in #4, 3) copy DVD's (oh no... DMCA come and get me), and 4) create video DVD's as opposed to nasty VCD's (CD's with video... lower quality). 6) Power supply. I think my gookanese power supply is giving out. Whenever I set up Agent to download overnight, there's a 50% chance that my computer AND UPS 1000 Pro (power backup) will be turned off... basically a minor power meltdown. It's either a UPS battery backup problem (though the UPS seems to tell me that all systems are go... strong battery on the one downstairs), or a computer power supply problem. I think it's the power supply, since my whole case only cost $99 for the case, window kit, neon tube, and power supply. 7) Finally, if I didn't buy the USB 2.0 card for $30, I could obviously put that money toward a new 875 Asus mobo. But I'd need to spend money on a new processor and memory. I'd have to go with at least a 3.0 - 800, since I currently am running a 2.4 - 400 (I know the PC133 memory is a crippling bottleneck). The problem I have is I really don't want to spend the time to "start fresh" right now. If I upgraded, there's no way I could just swap in the drives, since I'm running window 2000, and Win 2000 "looks" for specific mobo configurations for security reasons (keeps people from ripping off sensitive date by yanking out hard drives and putting them in other computers). It's a nice security feature built-in to Win 2000, but for me, it's more of a hinderance. Then again, who am I kidding? I'll probably not buy anything. I still drive a 1994 Jeep. I don't spend money. I collect and roll my change. I'm trying to be frugal for our two up-and-coming big-ticket items: wedding and a new house. Somewhere after those, I need to get a new vehicle. posted by Dino at 3:06 AM (permanent link) |