Happy Halloween!
Here’s a Halloween joke that Tammy and I have been telling everyone today:
“What do you get when you goose a ghost?”
“A handful of sheet!”
Archive for October, 2003
LikeMy non-computer-geek dad is really interested in getting an mp3 player for himself, so I’ve been doing some research into what’s good.
What really amazes me and even makes me a little mad is that people are still making mp3 players that don’t use hard drives. It’s like…”Wow. 256 megs. That’ll hold like…4 albums. But it’s 50 bucks cheaper than this 30 GB player that holds 500 albums.” TOUGH CHOICE THERE, MY FRIEND!
Anyway, I’ve narrowed the playing field down to three players, in order of preference:
1- Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra
2- Apple iPod
3- iRiver iHP-120
The iPod would have been #1, but it’s too expensive. A 40 GB iPod is $500. A 40 GB Zen Xtra is $350. The Zen also wins on battery life – 14 hours on a single charge vs the iPod’s 8.
The iRiver is a sweet little player, but it’s got a whole bunch of features that I don’t think my dad would use. It also costs as much as an iPod. If I had a use for an mp3 player, I’d probably want an iRiver for myself.
The Zen Xtra wins!
Mac users can rock it with eDonkey too! Macdonkey is cool, but you have to create an account before it lets you see the interesting stuff.
For example, a link to grab OSX 10.3 off the network is right here.
If you’d like to stay up to date on the fires burning throughout Southern California without having to rely on the media, Tracy Justus over at Freq Of Nature has a whole bunch of fire frequencies up on the front page of his site. Bust out the scanner and tune in!
Apple Juice is nature’s cruel little trick on me.
It tastes oh so very good when you drink it. However, you can expect the rest of your day to be filled with bad breath and lots of farting. The apple juice is to blame.
The past few days at my house have been like a nuclear winter. There’s so much crap in the air from the fires burning in and around LA that everything outside is covered in ash, the little sunlight that is able to reach us is reddish-yellow, and the sun itself looks like a huge red fireball.
The closest fire is 40 miles away, but you’d think it was a whole lot closer if you looked outside. I guess the one good thing about this is that the 95+ degree temperatures that were supposed to reach us this weekend never happened. The ash is keeping the air temperature down in the upper 70s.
Active Fire Maps are cool to look at.
Some random computerish tidbits-
I just updated my Firebird installation to 0.7. The ‘automatic bookmark update checker’ thing actually works now. Hoo-ray.
I ditched iTunes for Winamp5 the other day, and I feel all warm inside. The media library puts 3.x’s to shame, and it’s a heck of a lot faster than iTunes.
Microsoft’s running a big developer’s conference next week in Los Angeles, and they’re going to be revealing a lot more info about the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn. Longhornblogs.com is a bunch of blogs worth reading in the next few days. I mostly only care about Avalon, the super secret new GUI which will be revealed for the first time at the conference. It could either be really cool, or it could just be some stupid rehashing of the Start menu like they’ve been doing for the past 7 years. We’ll see.
We went to Ralph’s this weekend to do our grocery shopping despite the strike. None of the strikers tried to hassle us or anything.
In fact, I can’t remember having a better time shopping on a weekend. The store was loaded with food, the new employees were friendly, they gave us crazy coupons when we walked in, and they had a two-for-one sale on ice cream!
AND there were practically no other shoppers in the store – on a Saturday afternoon! I hope this strike lasts forever, because it’s saving me a lot of time and money!
I bought a new router over the weekend.
My BEFSR41 from Linksys had proven to be a solid performer for the many years that I’d owned it. Unfortunately, I recently found an application that brings it to its knees. Something about peer-to-peer network traffic caused by systems like Overnet would lock up the router after only a few minutes in operation, requiring a hard reset to get it up and running again.
Overnet is quickly becoming a program that I use on a regular basis, especially with excellent sites like ShareReactor.com being out there, so this problem – unresolved by any firmware upgrade or downgrade I tried over the course of a month – was unacceptable!
The solution was to wipe the slate clean and ditch the heretofore rock-solid router and replace it with something from Linksys’ main competitor, D-Link.
The D-Link DI-624 now sits next to my DSL modem and has worked perfectly since I plugged it in. It also does 802.11b and .11g, so if I ever go wireless that’ll be nice. Apparently they’ve even figured out a way to double throughput on the 802.11g side of things for a max theoretical speed of 108mbps. That’s faster than plain ol’ cat5 ethernet!
I’m hanging on to the receipt and I’m not going to mail the rebate right away until I’ve had a chance to really put this thing through its paces, but the first 12 hours of its operation have been pretty good so far!
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