Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Zoe finished the single player game of Super Smash Brothers today.

Zoe & Mira in front of the ‘Congrats’ screen

I’ve got 22 minutes to write this up before leaving to pick up Michele at the airport.
Here are a few photos from Christmas Eve. We had a small party for our friends with children to help pass the time until bed for the children.

I just read an interesting article about the future of the Apple Mac OS.
The Mac OS on a x86 platform would surely put some competition into the computer industry.
Time for me to begin cleaning the house. Michele’s plane lands at 5ish in 8 short hours. Last night I was working on some text and pictures and I accidently hit the reset button on the case. Ouch. You’ll have to wait for later to see it all.

It’s about 6:15 and I’m sitting on the couch with the laptop. Zoe is playing on the new Gamecube and Mira is watching, eating cookies. We had a busy day with lunch at Philipe’s downtown and the afternoon at the Natural History Museum. Mom, Dad, and Matt met us for lunch and were with us for the rest of the day. The girls have been here recently, but we saw a few new exhibits at the museum. There were special exhibits on Dogs and Baseball. We also checked out the regular animals and history of California halls.
The girls had a great time, but all the walking took it out of them and they both fell asleep in the car as I drove home.
I haven’t updated in a while. The party on Christmas Eve, Christmas, and Michele’s trip have made my free time a scarce thing. Michele went on a short trip to Cincinnati for her 20th high school reunion and she left on Dec. 26th at 6AM. I’ve been with the girls since.
I did get away for a bit while the girls were with my parents and Matt, Martin, and I went to go see LotR: The Two Towers at the Cineramadome. We even enjoyed Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles for dinner afterwards. I made my first visit to Amoeba Records. Pretty cool place. I picked up a Flaming Lips CD and a Fatboy Slim CD.
Gotta go, Zoe says it’s my turn on the Gamecube. More later.

The presents are open, I’m drinking coffee, Michele is wearing her new watch, and the kids are eating chocolate and playing with their toys.
Merry Christmas to all. Even if you are not religious, please enjoy the spirit of love & giving.
I’ve got to scoot now, I’ve got to review the Fry’s ad for tomorrow’s big sale.

In two hours I need to get the turkey for tonight’s dinner in the oven. Michele is in here now trying to keep me out. Doesn’t she understand I need to get my cooking groove on?
I’m attempting to cook the turkey & ham in the same oven. 27 pounds of meat to be ready by 4 o’clock….
Hurry up!

Today I announce a new word, Rantosphere. The word ‘blogosphere’ is tired and old. Rantosphere will take the reins of the internet meme buzzword train for a while.
It must be a new word since Google has zero hits for it and thinks I mean rotosphere.
The rantosphere is the collective group of web sites and weblogs that mainly focus on ranting about various issues.
Bow down before my intellectual prowess.
Since am the inventor of this word, I can choose the licensing of my word.
I hereby declare that this work, Rantosphere, is licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License.

I was reading about Lessig’s Challenge on geekandproud. While I like the idea of increasing support to groups that fight for the civil liberties, I’m not sure this one is clearly thought out.
These kind of campaigns tend to have some sort of goal or end. Even the kings of money raising, public radio, don’t raise money around the clock.
I don’t see a end or limit to this challenge. Are people really choosing to double the effective cost of of all audio-visual media, telecommunications, and internet access? Are they willing to do this forever or is there an end in sight? The repeal of the DCMA? The repeal of the Sonny Bono copyright extension act? The collapse of the RIAA/MPAA?
Let’s look at the size of a monthly commitment to Lessig’s Challenge in my case:
$80 – internet access
$50 – home phone
$80 – mobile phones
$20 – Netflix
$30 – (2) CDs
$20 – (1) DVD
$30 – Set of movie tickets
$35 – DirecTV
There’s probably more, but let’s add this up. It totals $345. That’s a lot of money I just don’t don’t see people being able to follow through with this kind of spending forever. It sure would nice for the EFF, but I think it is unrealistic.
What’s the right level of giving? I dunno. I should probably think on it a bit more. I’m going to go watch the Lessig presentation before commenting more.

I’m in the bathroom watching the girls take a bath. I’m sitting with the laptop on a small stool while the girls jabber on.
Yesterday while at Fry’s I saw two pieces of software that I had to have. The first was a copy of Railroad Tycoon for linux. It was $4.99. $4.99. Even though WinXP is my main gaming platform, I couldn’t resist having the game for five bucks. There were several other games there for linux, all cheap, but I thought this one would be the most fun.
The second thing I saw was DVD X Copy. Supposedly, this software can make a duplicate of a DVD, even if it is a dual layer disc. All you need is a DVD-ROM and a DVD burner.
It’s no big secret that my employer doesn’t like this type of thing. They have filed many, many lawsuits to stop this kind of software.
A while ago, I played with various DVD rippers to see exactly how easy of difficult it was to rip a DVD. The process generally was three parts. First was the actual rip where the MPEG data was pulled of the disc and placed on a hard drive. At the time, the 4-10 GB of space needed to store a DVD was costly. You had to devote a significant portion of your hard drive to storing the files.
The next part was converting the high quality MPEG to a lower quality MPEG for storage purposes. A program like TPMG could crush a full DVD into two 600 MB files. 600 MB files would fit on a CD-R or be used to create a VCD. The conversion process was long, usually several hours long. In my tests, I’d start the conversion at night, leave the computer on, and by morning the conversion was complete.
The visual quality was a little less than a VHS tape. The final step of burning the file to a CD-R as a VCD took time and resulted in two discs for each movie. All in all, you were probably talking about a 6-10 hour process to go from a DVD to a workable low quality duplicate. I felt that the general public wouldn’t take to this. It simply took too long and required several technical choices. I could tell that someday, the process would be simple.
[break while I get the kids out of the bath]
It appears that someday is today. The DVD X Copy software says that they can *copy* a DVD in less than an hour. Technically, all the pieces are there and it should work that quickly. With DVD burners now going for < $200 and blank DVDs going for around a dollar the opportunity for individuals to copy DVDs is here. I haven't tried a burn yet since I don't have a DVD burner yet. I'm waiting for the post-Xmas sales. I'll post here when I give it a try. My industry is going to have to deal with the reality of this situation. The genie is out of the bottle. For years, people have been able to copy VHS tapes, but it hasn't killed the VHS market, because most people don't want to take the trouble to copy something. I don't think this will lead to widespread copying either, but there are some people that will do it. I read somewhere else a comment about the idea that people won't buy things they can get for free, the writer says that if this was true then public libraries would have killed off book publishing long ago. Enough for now. I have work tomorrow and I've got a few things to do tonight.

No great news today. I spent the day with my father-in-law and my wife’s cousin. We did a little shopping at Fry’s. OK, I did a lot of shopping at Fry’s today. Just a couple more things and I’m done.
I was hoping to squeeze in a geocache, but no luck. The rain came down before we had a good chance to get out there.
We made gingerbread houses at the Diggs tonight. The kids and adults all had a good time. Pictures when I get a chance.
Last night I watched two new shows Conquest and Mail Call on the History Channel. They were actually both very good. I’ve got Season passes for them now.
I’m yawning now, so I’m going to post this and go wrap presents.