Silverdoesn’tworkonPPCMacsandsucksanywayLight?
February 28th, 2008Microsoft’s “Silverlight” is sponsoring SXSW. That’s adorable.
Whenever I go downtown, I feel like an Ex-Con casing the joint
Multicast out with your modem out
February 24th, 2008AT&T’s TV offering is called U-Verse. I just now learned the details of it.
It’s H.264 MPEG-4 video over a multicast IP Fiber Optic network. No one else is doing this. Not even Verizon with FIOS. This sounds super-cool and since detractors say it’s impossible to scale, I say go with it, at&t. I doubt I’ll subscribe to pay tv anytime in the near future, but this is the way to go. Keep on truckin, SBC … I mean AT&T.
I got a huge new TV so fuck you
February 24th, 2008I consider myself at the forefront of technology. I have an iPhone, which I adore. I have several relatively modern Mac computers running the very latest operating system (including Vista! Ugh). I have the fastest DSL that “at&t” will provide. I have … an iPod shuffle. Uhh shit, is that it?
Maybe it is because my favorite new gadget is my new TV.
Let me tell you about my new TV. It’s silver plastic. It has stereo speakers. It weighs a hundred pounds. It has like three inputs, maybe four.
It’s a Sony KV-27FS100.
State of the fucking art.
In 2002.
Holland’s friend at work got a new plasma screen (or whatever — it’s flat) from his parents so with a small house and a big heart, he was willing to give away his old tv, which was only a gift to begin with. Props to you, Mister well I don’t know your last name. So there I was in South Austin (what a trek) loading this heavy bastard of plastic and glass into my back seat.
For nearly the past two years Holland and I have been watching most of our TV on my 20 inch iMac, downloading it from, well it must be from something. That wire plugs into the wall and I imagine it goes somewhere. We sure do get a lot of shows and movies from … somewhere. And no commercials either. I subscribe to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on iTunes and the rest, well I’m a big slut for hard drives and let’s leave it at that.
We have had a television, a 12 inch model from some abandoned room in Holland’s mom’s house. It’s very cute and easy to pick up with one hand. Back in NJ after I failed to convince Verizon that I only wanted DSL and not a telephone, then I subscribed to Comcast and got HBO by lucky accident, it got more use than I expected. But since moving to Texas the rabbit ears don’t pick up much worth watching. It’s kind of nice since you’ll turn on the tv when you know there’s something you must watch (mainly the Superbowl and the Simpsons). Otherwise it’s off.
It surprises me what a difference a big TV makes. There’s still literally nothing worth watching. With some sophisticated RCA rabbit ears bought only 2 years ago at Target, we get only 6 stations in English (but I’m debating my decision to delete the Spanish channels, since they offer an incredible level of enthusiasm). As far as I can tell, TV is a government franchised method to advertise pickup trucks.
But these 27 bright diagonal inches of nothing entice me. Only a little bigger (and less widescreen) than my iMac, which holds literally over 600GB of entertainment offerings, I’m watching CSI Miami reruns on TV. I like CSI: Miami because Horatio cares about the children.
Maybe this will pass.
About the time this TV was manufactured in late 2004, I bought a Nintendo GameCube. I hooked it up via trickery to an old Apple computer monitor. Recently Holland and I have enjoyed Paper Mario on the Game Cube and wish there were more GameCube games worth playing. Sadly there are not.
After so much time where the excuse not to buy a Wii was that our TV was the same size as the controller, now what is our excuse?
The excuse is you can’t fucking buy a Wii, even a year and a half after its debut. It’s just as well, because the next time I go to Target to pick up prescription drugs, expired meat, and beer, if they have a Wii on the shelf then it’s mine.
Obama Rally at Texas State Capitol
February 23rd, 2008
I enjoyed seeing Barack in person, and even saw the motorcade race by shortly afterward on Guadalupe. (Jeez they go fast; no wonder that cop bit it in Dallas)
On the downside, standing in a crowd, trying to hold your place for 3 hours is not much fun. I did get fairly close, though. There were tons of people all down 11th Street and Congress Ave. The crowd was incredibly diverse by race, age, even type of person. Nearly everyone had cell phones and cameras. Soooo many iPhones!
Stickers
February 5th, 2008Austin is a strange town and if you were asked to find a city less representative of Texas as a whole, then you really ought to consider the State Capital.
Still, I’ve never been Behind Red State Lines during a major election so this is what I see now regarding signs and stickers for Presidential Candidates.
In my walks around my neighborhood in North Austin I’ve seen only two bumper stickers. One, weeks ago, was for Huckabee (I assume it might still be on that vehicle although I’ve passed that house several times lately and not seen it again). Another showed up just a few days ago for Romney. The Huckabee sticker was on a “working” pickup truck with one of those tops over the bed in the back. The Romney sticker was on a luxury 2-door import. These two people are just around the corner from each other although Tobin likes to poop in the latter’s yard.
Considering I walk my dog between 1.5 and 4 miles every day through many neighborhoods, this is a shocking level of political indifference. If there were any more stickers or signs I would definitely notice.
No one in my apartment complex has any stickers. Except a red Civic and a blue Maxima that Obama tagged. I happen to know the drivers very well.
Driving up and down MoPac you’ll see some Ron Paul signs, although since they’re in someone’s yard a bit of a distance off the highway. And I have a feeling they’re getting less prevalent since early December.
All of a sudden last week I saw an Obama sticker to match the one on my car. Today I saw two more!
I also saw a sticker promoting Will Wynn, the Democrat mayor of Austin. It was on a car containing two heavily tattooed and pierced girls who were making out during the stop-and-go traffic. Among all the other stickers on the car, my attention fixed on the large serif W. Must be for a college.
Even in my recent drives up through Round Rock (for nefarious purposes, I assure you) I have never seen any Hillary or McCain signs or stickers. I don’t even know what they look like. The Texas primary isn’t for another month but it might matter in the Democratic race, at least. I’ll keep updating ‘em as I see ‘em. So far, an amazing bit of apathy.
I’ve got you
February 5th, 2008Now that I’ve installed Windows Vista on a second partition, I realize how Mac OS X can lend itself to certain abuses that would not be tempting on another platform.
Let’s imagine I IM my brother a link to a certain set of pictures on Flickr.
He says he already sent me that link yesterday.
I say get the hell out of here.
He says yeah he did, dammit.
How can a little brother be allowed to be correct? I do a quick Spotlight search in the Finder for logged iChat conversations in the past month whose filename contains my brother’s name and whose contents contain flickr.com.
Surprising to me, there is a hit. I had sent him a link to an Obama rally in Idaho.
As soon as I send the IM describing this incident, another logfile shows up in the search. It’s the log of my current IM. Wow, OS X doesn’t screw around.
No, says my brother, I sent you a link at digg.com. I change the search terms, discover he’s right, and begin to beat him violently. Too bad it’s all in my head since he’s 1,100 miles away.
Incredibly accurate instant search can lead to mild shame when it turns out you are wrong. Just keep an eye out.
Whew
February 4th, 2008I guess the moral of the story is: store your drinks away from valuable computers. And if you must spill, spill purified water. The MacBookPro works fine again. And compared to a full refund, I’m very pleased.