Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Lack of posts lately, I’m in Las Vegas for the NAB convention. Not a lot of time to blog here.
A few quick tips if you come to NAB.
1) Bring lip balm
2) Never allow yourself to be pulled into a meeting in a room on the floor
3) Drink a glass of water for every glass of booze
4) Flash your business card and continue walking into the parties, don’t wait for them to check your name
5) If you like cookies, take the whole tray to the table
Time for breakfast. More when I have time.

After a week of meetings and work I finally have a day to rest before launching off again. Next week, I’ll be in Las Vegas for the NAB convention. I’ve been going since 1990, only missing two years, so this will be my 11th trip to NAB. Nevertheless, I am still a bit excited. The changes in technology and inside Disney promise to make for interesting times ahead.
At the office, I was in a meeting with Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems. He said a lot of interesting stuff. He’s definitely not afraid to think differently. He did make an good point. He said that companies shouldn’t use open source software directly. He means you shouldn’t download source and compile it yourself. Let others handle it for you. Why have a linux kernel expert on staff when you can pay for the expertise instead? The advantage to the company is that the price charged for software with equivalent open source software can never get too high. If Sun was to charge too much for StarOffice, a company could easily switch to OpenOffice. You get the benefit of price control without the headache of software management. It’s a very valid point for larger businesses.
Gaming
I’ve been playing Shadowbane and even got into the beta for Planetside. I don’t have time to go into the details, but I will later.
Weblogs
I’ve been a little out of the loop this week. Between no time at work for surfing and all the tech troubles at home, my blogrolling page is scrolling by unmonitored. I’ll catch up, but I think I’d rather spend time with my daughters than reading weblogs for a bit.
Later.

I should have known better than to mess with Apple on April Fool’s.
Tech troubles continue. Michele told me on my way home from work that her computer was not working. When I got home and took a look, she mentioned that earlier in the day, there was a strong ‘hot electrical’ smell coming from the computer.
I feared the worse, but pulled off the heatsink anyway…

That’s a burned up CPU. The brains of the computer to you non-geek types. An AMD 1700+ XP processor to be exact.
All the computers in the house use AMD chips so I pulled the chip from the kids computer and put it in Michele’s so she could check her email.
A new CPU is on the way from Newegg, so we are down to only 4 computers in the house until it arrives.
I’ll never mock Steve Jobs again.

I’m sure that in some sort of karmic revenge for my joke about the Mac, I spent a bunch of time working on tech issues at home.
Michele’s CD-ROM had been acting up and she had complained that her CD burner wasn’t fast enough (8x). I ordered a pair of matching black Lite-On drives. They arrived yesterday and I began the install after the kids went to bed.
As expected, after booting with the new drives installed, the BIOS hung during POST and didn’t recognize the drives. First, I reflashed the BIOS. No luck. then I swapped out the IDE cable with a new one. (How nerdly am I for having spare IDE cables lying around?) That got them working. The DVD playback software and Nero burning software installed smoothly. Getting a copy of Nero included with the drives was a great deal.
I copied a mix CD at 48x speed to test things out. Three minutes to burn a CD. Nice. As I type, Zoolander is playing on her computer.
On the girls computer, the mouse stopped moving left and right. I popped it open and found a small ecosystem of dust bunnies inside. I cleaned it out and it still didn’t work well. The girls took the mousepad into the bathroom and washed it with soap in an attmept to help.
I opened the mouse and had to realign the IR sensor to get things working well.
Most importantly, last night Shadowbane broke.
Shadowbane downloaded a patch and afterwards the program would crash when I tried to enter the world. After some research, I had to rollback Nvidia drivers from 43.45 to 41.09. Finally, the precious had returned to me.
I powerleveled from 6 to 11 last night. If not for all the tech issues, I could have been level 15 easy…
Time for work. Have a good day.

UPDATE: This post was an April Fool’s Day joke. Settle down.
I declared victory and made a decision. After asking many people about how to best do this video capture/DVD burning thing, decided to go for what they suggested.

I’m playing around with the DVD thing again at home.
It’s just not working well. If I get the drive connected well, the software hangs. If the software is working well, the drive isn’t ready of the DVD+RW is fubarred.
I need to figure a better way out to do this.

Feet
First of all, here’s the big news: Audrey Diggs is walking! Yes, the stubborn one has made the leap to walking. Go check out the dramatic movie footage. Mrs. Diggs doesn’t have perma links, so look for the Sunday, March 30 post. Woo hoo!
Friends
On Saturday, Len and Monique threw a huge Crawfish Boil party. There was over 150 pounds of crawfish.

For those that haven’t been to a crawfish boil before, it’s a ton of fun. Once the crawfish are dumped on the table, everyone rips them apart with their bare hands.
I took a bunch of pictures and made a quick slideshow.
Food
Today was a recovery day from the party. Michele was on Day 5 of the Glendale Quilt Show and the girls needed a break. They played with the neighbor’s kids and had fun in a wading pool. We had five ripe bananas, so I decided to make Banana Bread.

Mira helped me with mashing the bananas and eggs together. Here’s the recipe.
Ali G DVD
I spent some time today trying to record episodes of the Ali G show into the computer. After several false starts, reading of manuals, and test recordings, I was finally able to get some decent work done. I ended up using the Ulead DVD Workshop program. It’s got a 30 day trial, so I can see if it works for me before I buy it. The program costs a lot, but may be worth it if I can make a DVD of our home movies.
Once I get the process down, I think it will be easy to turn video into DVDs. There’s a lot to learn about the technique, but the current tools make it simpler.

Thanks to James at ConsolationChamps, I’m messing about with Blogshares.

It treats weblogs like traded company stock based on linkage or something. I’m still checking it out. Go claim your blog and most importantly, link back to me that you found out about it here. (evil grin)
As of today, Cruft is worth $1402.26
I’m going to try to manipulate the market: Bloggus Caesari, 8 Bit Joystick, Crookdimwit

Today the Kansas Jayhawks play the Arizone Lusers. I am very much hoping that Kansas wins. The Diggs are huge Kansas fans and winning would make them very happy. In addition, if Kansas wins, it gives me a very good shot at winning a NCAA tourney pool.
So please, dear Cruft readers, send your win mojo toward the Kansas players today.

Most people love bubbles. People love to give bubbles to kids. There isn’t a birthday party in America when one of the goodie bag gifts is a small bottle of bubbles.
Everyone seems to think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread.
‘Cept me. I hate them.
Bubbles are always a mess. Kids spill them everywhere. Cleaning up soap is pain, it just makes more soap. I have declared them an ‘outside toy’.
Today, Mira walks up to me in the study with an open bottle of bubbles in her hands. She asks for a bubble wand. I tell her to take the bubbles outside and I’ll get the wand for her. She says, “NO Daddy! I play with bubbles inside at school! I’ll be careful.” I again tell her to take them outside. She begins to get angry and yell, but I am firm in my insistance she go outside. She gets angrier.
Then she drops the full bottle of bubbles on the floor. It spills everywhere. She looks down, looks up and me, and says, “Sorry Daddy.” and runs off.
Did I mention I hate bubbles?