Yup, that’s right.  She is a talentless hack, and every time I hear her obnoxious voice on tv, it makes me want to change the channel.  Seriously… she is not funny, she is annoying, and usually offensive.

I can’t wait for Fox to cancel what will surely be one of the worst shows to ever air on Fox.

I don’t have much else to say about this other then most people across the country seem to feel the same way

Apparently Hulu will begin charging for it’s content in 2010
Hulu has done all it can to push away viewers of it’s service and it looks like it is going to deliver the final blow.
Why does Hulu think they can charge for their mediocre-quality streaming service that locks people in to their site and their ads… when anyone can download high quality HD rips of the shows WITH OUT ads for free?
I just can’t grasp where they are getting the idea that this will actually be a successful pay-for service.
News Corp (who owns Hulu) issued a statement saying “It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online.”

Hahaha, wow… what a bunch of pompous pricks. Good luck with that News Corp.  You make it sound like you deserve money for streaming media online.  Sorry, that is not how the internet works.

As I stated in my other article, I think you’ll find that people will do 1 of 2 things when you start charging for service. 1) They will simply go with out. People use it because it is free. Charging for that isn’t going to instantly create a group of people willing to pay for it. Or 2) People will use alternative methods to download shows and watch them.

So lately I have been bombarded with these “Wirelessly Charge Your Shit!” ads from Best Buy for a product called “Powermat”.  So I did some looking in to it and decided it is one big ass bucket of fail.  They claim it to be convenient, an energy-saving, and neater.

First off, lets take a look at convenience.  They say this because you won’t have to plug in your devices.  You just set them on the mat, and it charges via electromagnetic induction.  Well, that may be true, except they leave out this fact in the commercial… there are only Powermat cases that attach to devices for 8 devices.  Yup… unless you own 1 of those 8 devices, you get to use the Powermat “Tip”.  The “tip” is a white hunk of plastic that you plug in to your device’s USB port when you want to charge it.  Wait… what?   So you still have to plug in your phone to charge it?!  Oh, and it must remain perfectly seated ON the powermat, WHILE it is plugged in?  SERIOUSLY?!?!  What kind of fail is this?  So let me make sure I have this right.  To use the powermat with my HTC Fuze, I would have to plug in the “tip” and set my phone on the mat, and leave it there.  That means I can’t pick my phone up and use it while it is charging.  How the fuck is that convenient?  That sounds like a pain in my ass to me!  I frequently use my phone while it is plugged in and charging, whether it is playing games, watching videos, surfing the web, or talking on it.  The powermat would prevent me from doing any of those things.

Next, they claimed it saves energy by shutting off when you’re not using it.

I quote from this YouTube video:

“…you’re also using a lot of power especially when the products are not being charged, you know, nobody really unplugs their stuff “

Ole Ron claim that leaving your chargers plugged in is using energy.  Well, this claim sounded like pure bullshit to me, so I tested it.  Here is a picture of my HTC Fuze charger plugged in to a Kill-a-Watt power meter, showing how much energy is being used when my phone is not plugged in to it.  Get ready for this… it may surprise you:

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This weekend my girlfriend and I had the pleasure of seeing The Phantom of the Opera at Fox Theater in St. Louis.  It was an amazing performance.  This was the 2nd time I have seen it, and the first time for her.  I got us seats as front and center as possible, and really they were fantastic seats (row M of the Orchestra area).  When the organ music first hits your chest and the chandelier comes back to life, it is just an overwhelming feeling.  The entire performance was wonderful.  I can’t say I have a single complaint about it, other then the fact that it ended.

Before heading over to the Fox, we went by a local Italian restaurant called Vito’s Sicilian Pizza and Restaurant per recommendation of my sister and her fiance.  I have to give this place my highest recommendations.  I had originally made reservations for 5:30, but due to unforeseen events (I forgot the tickets at home when we were already on the road… can’t believe I did that), we were running very late.  I called and pushed the reservations back to 6.  We still didn’t get there until 6:15, but they still had our table reserved, so on a very busy night (any time a show is at the Fox, they are busy because they are only a few blocks from the Fox), we had zero wait time and were able to get right in and sit down.  Service was excellent and their food was delicious.  I had the Spinach and Ricotta Manicotti with Meat Sauce, while Heather had Bacon Wrapped Scallops with grilled Asparagus.  Both dishes were great.

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Whew, what a day!  Got home around 7 this evening.  Overall the ride was mostly good… Except for Mike’s bike breaking down.

The weather could not have been more perfect.  The ride to Alton was a blast and Fast Eddie’s was awesome.  It was probably the busiest I have ever seen it!  Even though they were busy it only took 30 minutes to get out food, which isn’t bad… and even better considering for $6 and some change I got a dozen shrimp, a cheeseburger, and fries.

The River Road was gorgeous as it always is in the Fall and Perre Marquette was beautiful as well.  Here the ride took a detour though.  At the top of Perre Marquette when we went to turn around Mike’s Ducati suddenly died.  We spent an hour and  a half working on it and couldn’t get the bike to fire back up.  We checked everything we could have and couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with it that wouldn’t require more time and tools then we had available to us at the top of the park.  Unfortunately Mike had to stay behind and wait 2 hours for his brother from Decatur to come pick him up with his trailer.  That really sucks 🙁

After the now 3 of us got back on the road, the rest of the ride went off with out a hitch, but it was a somber ride home as we all worried about our stranded buddy.  Here are some shots I took during our 280 mile trip.

What’s a Gravatar you ask?

Simply: it’s a universial avatar.  A service that gives your email the same avatar any where you post (that supports Gravatars of course).

I’ve known about them for a while but never really bothered messing with it.

I must admit, the Gravatar Website is ridiculously easy to use.  I mean seriously, stupid easy.  It took me less then 3 minutes to set up an account, upload my image, and crop and size it how I wanted on their site.

Since I figured I have an account, I should use them some how, right?

All comments on all posts now support Gravatars, so if you have one, we’ll get to see it now.

If you don’t have one, you seriously have no excuse not to if you comment on here or other sites a lot.  It is too easy to NOT have one.  Bravo to the Gravatar people.  They put together a nice easy-to-use service.

Today at work I needed some data off a DVD-R from about 3 years ago.  I shuffled through my stack of discs and located the one I needed.  Upon first glance I could tell it was aging because while other discs were still nice and silver, this once-silver disc was very very yellowed and gold-looking.  I didn’t think much of it until we tried to read the disc.

Nothing, nadda, zip, zero, zilch.  We tried 3 different machines and none of them would read the aged disc.

I’m a bit disappointed in Philips’ quality here.  This disc was only around 3 years old, and in my opinion was way too new to have gone bad already!  What a let-down from the Philips brand name.  I can’t say I have bought any of their discs since then, and I’m glad.  I’ll be sure to avoid their media products from now on.  I have other memorex discs from approximately the same era, and they were still perfectly fine.

Below is a picture showing the bad Philips DVD on the right next to a nice good silver disc on the left.

Luckily the data on the disc was unimportant and archived else where, but never the less there is an important lesson to be learned here.

Never use recordable disc media for archival purposes.  This disc was not mistreated, and was not left out in the sunlight.  It was stored in a stack of ~15 other discs.  Recordable media is a great way to transport or play your files, but it should never be used for archiving or backups.  Besides, with how filthy dirt cheap hard drives are, there is no good reason not to use hard drives as your backup medium.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Microsoft was artificially crippling “lesser” versions of Windows.

Blocking you from running software you have a right to use, simply because you didn’t buy their more expensive version.

Well, it looks like the Free Software Foundation is launching an attack against Microsoft, pointing out just that…

“Microsoft is up to their usual tricks again — only this time, they’re also inserting artificial restrictions into the operating system itself. While not the first time they’ve done this, this is the first release of Windows that can magically remove limitations instantly upon purchasing a more expensive version from Microsoft.”

I for one am glad to see this.  This mentality over at Microsoft of “we wrote your OS, so we control everything on your computer” needs to stop.  Unfortunately Microsoft has done this shit since the early days of Windows… they always want to control what you can and can’t do on your own machine and it seems like a constant fight with Microsoft and Windows just to be able to do what you want on your machine.

They’re pushing Linux based software of course, and I wouldn’t be opposed to switching to such a platform if it weren’t for one major issue, which is gaming.  A lot of my home PC use is gaming, of which almost none of the modern games run on Linux platforms.

Maybe in time Linux will mature enough and get a large enough market share that developers will pay more attention to it.  If this would happen we could finally switch off of Microsoft and their bullshit strangle hold on our machines.