I have not been able to spend much time on the computers this weekend. I was able to sit down and watch the Niners beat the Bucs though. That was absolutely amazing! It just goes to show you that any team can beat any other team in the NFL. While I am not a fan of parity, it certainly makes for interesting games.
I think the reason the Niners won were three fold. One, it appeared that the Bucs were just flat. They seemed to be slow off the ball and didn't seem to 'bring it' on tackles. Two, it seemed that the Buscs are starting to compile quite a list of injuries to key players like Lynch and Rice. Three, the breaks seemed to finally be going the Niners way. It has been much too long since the Niners were recipients of good fortune.
Now, I don't want to take anything away from the Niner defense. They played outstanding! As for the Niner offense, well T.O. made another three drops but had one good run. Maybe the threat of trading him to Washington last week made him think a little. Lastly, the Niner special teams were what you would expect from a Bill Walsh team, but they should have played much better due to the increased emphasis placed on them by Dennis Erickson.
Oh well, at least they won!
I have a cable modem and use Comcast for my ISP. Today around 7:30 AM my connection went down. I happen to have other coworkers that also use Comcast and they went down as well. It did not come up until 5:00 PM.
While I had other things that I could do that were not related to the Internet, it was quite amazing how much of an impact having no Internet access caused.
What was the temperature outside? What was going on in the world? (See below) Hell, how do you look up anything in MSDN or the MS Knowledgebase? Also, communicating with coworkers had to be done via the telephone instead of IM or EMail.
Lastly, when I finally came back up I had 40 Emails to go through.
Today, while I did not have Internet access, Apple announced the iTunes product for Windows. I will be downloading it this evening!
I hear that iTunes will be released for the Windows platform this week, probably on Thursday. Supposedly, Apple has a major announcement on that day.
Now that I am getting into the whole digital music concept and have downloaded some songs from MusicMatch, I am a little concerned that I may have conflicting music formats. I plan on waiting until iTunes allows music to be downloaded and then join and download a couple of songs and determine for myself what the issues will be.
In a similar vein, my understanding is that regardless of where you downloaded the DRM encrypted music you can bypass the copy protection. You do this by burning the music to a CD and then ripping the music back to a high bit rate MP3. Supposedly, even though you end up compressing the music information twice, you can not discern a difference in the music quality. We will see.
I envision an environment where all music is stored digitally and I carry around an iPod that I plug into a playing device at whatever location I am at.
As you can imagine, I am looking at a 20GB iPod in the not so distant future. I will also purchase the FM transmitter accessory from Belkin. This product allows me to wirelessly connect the iPod to any FM receiver. This receiver is only $30.
That went a lot easier than I thought it would. I had no problems at all installing linux. The majority of the time was spent downloading three full CDs worth of information from the Mandrake site. I then had to burn the ISOs to CD and lastly proceed through the installation process.
I am still working through my Perl book and plan on moving my Perl development over to the linux box tomorrow. Once the Perl book is completed I will pick up a book or two on linux and start playing.
I have decided to load Mandrake Linux this evening.
I spent some time at Fry's this afternoon checking out the KVMs. I currently have a four port Linksys model that does not support audio. I was hoping to find a six port model with audio. It seems that the KVMs go from two port, to four port, to eight port and then you can piggy back them from there.
Fry's no longer carries LinkSys KVMs and the only first tier company that carries KVMs with audio is Belkin. Their eight port model was $300 and I suspect that I would have to get different cables.
I only need to add a fifth machine to the mix and was thinking a six port would give me an additional port for expansion. I can't justify spending that much money so I decided to take a different path.
I will take one of the existing machines and repartition it to allow a small 10GB - 20GB partition for linux. This machine will dual boot using WinXP Pro as the default, for now...
I choose Mandrake because I have heard that it is a more user-friendly iso than most. I have some experience with unix from a year or so with an SGI on my desk. My understanding is that Mandrake is also one of the more powerful iso's as well.
I am downloading the three CD iso now. I had to get them from the Mandrake site since LinuxISO had maxed out their FTP connections.
I am getting Mandrake version 9.1 knowing that 9.2 will be out shortly. I figure that about the time I understand what I should have done, I'll be ready to reinstall Mandrake using the new version.
I realize that you are probably the most poplar home networking company today. I realize that you probably have a difficult time keeping your products on the shelves because people are buying them as soon as they are available. I realize that you have to do whatever you can to ensure those shelves remain populated with products, but...
YOUR PRODUCTS ARE STARTING TO TURN TO CRAP!
I am on my fourth router in about five months. Admittedly, the first router lasted a couple of years, but when it died one day back in June, little did I know how much trouble I would be in for.
The router I purchased to replace it was a straight swap. It was simply a router that connected to my network. (My network consists of five desktop machines, three laptops, one network laser printer and one shared inkjet attached to a desktop machine)
The new router did not seem to work and I was having a difficult time determining if the problem was with the router or the existing cable modem. I went out and purchased a LinkSys cable modem to force the finger pointing inside of one company. Ultimately, it was determined that the second router arrived DOA.
I purchased the third router toward the end of June. Instead of a straight swap, I purchased an integrated router/WAP. I plugged it in and it worked immediately. I performed all of the standard wireless security steps:
1. I changed the password to connect to the router.
2. I turned off the SSID broadcasting
3. I turned on 128-bit WEP
4. I restricted access to only the MAC addresses of my laptops.
Everything was running fine until last night. The router died again. It was only three and a half months old.
I have now installed my fourth router. It has been setup and secured. I seriously considered purchasing a different brand, but thought I would give LinkSys one more chance. I also thought about upgrading to .11g but have hear horror stories about a mixed .11 network and am not yet willing to upgrade all of my cards to .11g. Lastly, I like to try and keep all of my network components coming from a single company. It does make technical support a little easier.
Now that I have this blog up and running, I thought that I would turn my attention to the coding behind it. My understanding is that most of the configuration files and templates are written in Perl.
I picked up the "Teach yourself Perl in 21 days" book by Sams. So far I have gone through the first three days and it doesn't seem too tough. I'm hoping to be through the book in another week or so.
Once I have the Perl language under my belt, I may decide to reconfigure the look and feel of the blog. I anticipate learning PHP and MySQL in the near future as well.
After watching the game yesterday, I'm thinking that T.O. is hiding an injury.
Where is his explosiveness off of the ball? Where is his extra gear once the ball is in the air? Most importantly, where is his physical dominance once he has caught the ball?
It used to be that T.O. was like a man among boys. Like he looks like Jerry Rice did in his final year as a 49er. He is good, but not great.
I've heard that maybe his achilles is hurt. That might explain some of the explosiveness issues but what about the physical dominance? Could it be that the hit from Aeneas Williams of the Rams hurt more than we know? Is this more than a physical problem?
Also, while this may be hard to see from the TV vantage point, being at the game, it is obvious by Terrill's actions at the line when he is part of the play and when he is not. Back in the day, when Jerry Rice and John Taylor lined up, they played as hard on a running play as they did on a passing play. This was regardless of whether the ball was heading their way or not. T.O. should watch some old game film and learn.
While this rant is not specifically about football, the last straw this week was the combination of Rush Linbaugh's comments on ESPN and the groping by Arnold over the last 15 to 20 years.
It seems to me that only a fool would choose to live in the public eye.
There needs to be some repercussions. My personal take on the Rush incident is that Rush voiced his opinion. That is what he was paid to do. In no way were his remarks made in a racist manner. It seems to me that the people who are looking for any excuse, capitalized on his comments.
Now on to Arnold. There should be a statute of limitations on what can be said about someone running for public office. How can groping effect someone's ability to lead? Especially over a decade ago. My opinion is that the people who brought up these allegations should be punished. We should also find out who put these women up to this. They should also be punished.
Bottom line, until we can offer some punitive solutions to these frivolous accusations, the best people will not be coming out into the public eye.
The two issues I mentioned earlier where pretty simpe to fix. But, I had the opportunity to delve into the archiving portion of Multiple Type and now have a better understanding of how things work.
This weekend, I hope to spend some time on learning about the TrackBack concept. I do not understand what that functionality is supposed to accomplish.
I have come across my first set of issues with this site. As we all know, fixing the problems is when we really start to learn things.
Right now, if you click on the previous month's link or even on one of the category links you will receive a page not found. From what I can tell right now, it appears that my archive code is not creating the html properly for the pages outside of the main index page.
Time to go digging!
One of the many things that I want to experience is downloading music. In the past, I would either listen to the radio, purchase a CD, or listen to the music feed on my satellite dish. As CD prices increased, I chose not to purchase them as the cost was not justifiable. Bottom line, as a consumer, the music industry lost my money years ago.
I have been watching the Napster/KaZaA /Grokster/etc. situation unfold for several years. TechTV even had a special show that had all of the parties represented in an open discussion forum. My opinion is that downloading music is a lot like prohibition. You can not stop it. You have to figure out a way to make it legal.
It was with some interest that I learned about and investigated the Apple iTunes service. I am primarily a PC guy and this capability almost had me buying a Mac. (I may still do this, but the necessity has been lessened.) I think that paying for each song makes a lot of sense. It puts a certain amount of responsibility on the artist to produce quality music for the entire CD. It also seems reasonable to pay less than a dollar for a song. I don't yet understand the copying restrictions, media formats/quality, and MP3 players. More on that in a later entry.
Earlier this week, I heard about the new MusicMatch service that is similar to the Apple iTunes service. Last night, I signed up for the service and downloaded my first track. The track was Sammy Hagar's "I can't drive 55". I downloaded it at 160kbps and listened to it and was disappointed in the quality of the track. I am reserving my final opinion until I put it on a quality machine though. I downloaded it on my three year old laptop and listened to it through my headphones and the internal sound card. Hopefully, when I move it over to my latest PC with a SoundBlaster Audigy2 card and THX speakers, the quality will be better.
I still need to figure out the copying rules before I do that. I think I only have three copies available. Also my playlist seemed to be a component of this requirement. If I make a change to my playlist, I think I get an additional set of copies available. Also, do I want MP3, WMA, or ?.
Time will tell.