Category: Weblog

Something for my Apple loving readers

My co-worker, Cyril, mentioned that Telestream, a company we use at work has just released a FREE WMV for Mac Quicktime Plug-in.
I know that many Mac users are faced with trouble when they want to view WMV files, hopefully this solves the problem.
Telestream is known for fairly good codecs and transcoding, so the plug-in shoudl work great. Apple users, please let me know how it works…

Best newspaper headline of the day

I was reading the LA Times this morning and saw this headline in the food section:
Have we gone blog wild?
Link should be registration free, at least for a while.
The story is about food blogs, but I found the headline funny. From their nice list of links I did find the interesting WhiteTrashBBQ link. Conspicuously absent from the list is LA Foodblogging and A Full Belly.

Sony sneak attack

I recieved this in an email from Amazon tonight.

Greetings from Amazon.com.
We have recently learned that Sony announced a security vulnerability
issue with CDs that have SunnComm copy protection technology. Sony has
made a software upgrade and uninstall option available on their
website to correct the security issue. Affected items include the
following:
——————————————————–
Artist: My Morning Jacket
Title: Z

I went out to Michele’s car and got the CD and brought it inside. I flipped it over, and sure enough it’s got the evilness on it.


Holy crap, I’ve been haxxored by Sony.
Of course Dear Reader, I haven’t really been rootkitted, I never run that software that comes on the CDs.
Now here’s the funny part. The whole reason that Sony put this malicious software on the CD was to prevent people from ripping it to files, right?

Without know the My Morning Jacket CD was ‘protected’ in any way, I did what I do to all my CDs, I ripped it to MP3. I still use Musicmatch Jukebox to rip CDs and I did it again. The music ripped fine, and the MP3s are already on Michele’s beloved MPIO player.
So I have to ask Sony, what was the point of all this if I was still able to rip the CD without noticing any of the ‘protection’ until I got an email tonight?
Anyone know if I can exchange my infected CD for a clean CD?

Red Envelope, California Style

In the chinese tradition, it is common to give red envelopes with money inside as gifts. This is especially big on the New Year. Being part of a Chinese family, these envelopes are well known to us.


My father decided to get into the action this year. He came to our house yesterday and told me to come outside with him. In the trunk of his car was a large red bag. He told me to carry it in. It was very heavy and I asked him what was inside. “You’ll see.” is all he would say.

He told the girls that this was his version of a New Year’s red envelope for them. They opened the lid to find it full of quarters. Thousands of quarters…

For years my father has kept the quarters from his daily change. He had drawers with quarters kept neatly in 35mm film canisters. As you may remember, he also collects Victorinox Swiss Army Classic Knives. He now uses the metal boxes from the knives to hold film canister quarters. It’s all very tidy and organized in my father’s world.

He wants the quarters to go to the girls, so I’ll cash them and deposit them into a savings account for the girls. The girls will take a few canisters to the video arcade, but most are going into their college funds.
I don’t know how I’m going to cash them, but I’ll figure something out.
I wanted to know how much all the quarters added up to, so I did a few quick calculations. I weighed the quarters and they are roughly 68 pounds. 5 quarters weigh 1 oz.
68 pounds * 16 oz/pound = 1,088 oz of quarters
1,088 oz of quarters * 5 quarters/oz = 5,440 quarters
1,088 oz of quarters * $1.25/oz of quarters = $1,360
Holy crap. One thousand, three hundred and sixty dollars in quarters. That’s a lot of saving.
Once I get the quarters counted for real, I’ll update you all with the actual count.

Corporate Gifts

As some of you may know, I work in a large corporation and get to make some of the decisions. People that sell things to us, know this and try to curry favor. Typically, this is done with gifts.
In some businesses and in politics, this gift giving is taken to extremes. As you might expect, this gift giving does affect how people make decisions. People that say that it doesn’t effect their decision making are lying.
My company limits gifts to $75 and no more. Personally, I think this a great idea. I get to make decisions that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and sometimes millions. Being a normal person, if someone gave me a big gift like a laptop or other expensive item, I would feel indebted in some way.
In the entertainment field this gift giving gets a little crazy at places where there are no company limites. I’ve heard of watches, iPods, and other costly items being doled out like candy to even minor players in Hollywood. The vendors that deal with us know the limits and try to stay within it. If it goes above $75, I have to turn it in to the company.
Each year I get a number of gifts at Christmas. Here’s this years list:
Two bottles of red wine (split with my assistant)
Zagat 2006 Guide (gave to Michele)
Basket of Muffins (put out for co-workers to eat)
Box of Godiva Chocolates (eaten by guests watching football)
Frosted cookies (put out for co-workers to eat)
Ms. Beasley teacakes (fed to family at Christmas – my personal favorite)
Pair for good earbud headphones (gave to Michele)
If vendors really wanted to curry favor with execs, they would focus more on the assistants and second-in-commands with gifts as well. These people protect and control access to decision makers. They are often not given the respect they deserve. Without these support people modern business would grind to halt and no deals would get done.

LED bulb swap

I was out shopping yesterday at REI. (Yes, I got off my ass and bought something not online for once.) At REI, I saw an LED replacement kit for mini-Maglites. I had read about these before, where you swap out the halogen bulb in a Maglite flashlight and install an LED bulb into it.
The kit was $8 so I decided to give it a try. I knew it wasn’t going to be the same as the new trend of seriously hardcore flashlights, but it could be neat anyways. I had already burned out one halogen bulb and was on the spare. Replacement halogen bulbs are $3-4 per pair.


This version consisted of 3 LEDs to replace the single halogen bulb. It took longer to hack through the plastic packaging than it did to do the actual bulb swap. I really hate the trend toward this fortress-like packaging these days.

Here you can see the old bulb and reflector about the flashight before I put it all back together.
Pros:
The light color is more white and not yellowish at all.
Longer battery life
All the cool kids are doing it
Cons:
You lose the focusing control of the Maglite.
Not noticeably brighter
My wife thinks it’s ‘another stupid blog thing, right?’
Tonight I’ll take it outside and look for possums with the dog…