Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

I went to see the movie Winged Migration tonight. The movie is absolutely wonderful. I can’t wait to take the girls. Jacques Perrin, the director, also made the movie Microcosmos about insects.
The film is the story of the bi-annual migrations that birds make to avoid winter. The cinematography is spectacular. Through various methods there are constant shots of birds in flight as if you are with them flying alongside. It’s hard to describe, watch the trailer.
They show many dangers the birds face along the way and you will be surprisd with what you see. The small audience I was with actually clapped for the bird at several points. The next time you see birds overhead you will think about it differently. Go see it.
Spam Filter for Outlook
I’ve tried several anti-spam solutions and found this one recently:
SpamBayes Outlook Addin

The software only works for Outlook, but it works well.
The ‘bayesian’ software learns what you consider spam and sorts it better and better the more you train it. I am quite impressed with it’s performance.
Geekage
I pulled the trigger and bought the DVD burner this morning. Woot me.
Weblogs
Mr. P fought a chair and lost.
My brother new Flash banner rocks.
Griff continues to be funny.

If you start packing an two story house into a moving van at 6PM, you will probably spend the next eight hours packing it. Packing a moving van at night is not a good idea.
The next day you will feel tired, sore, and your eye’s will hurt.

Today was supposed to be a restful day in preparation for Michele and girls trip to North Carolina. I suppose it was, but I got several things done. Not exactly what I wanted, but good stuff.
Computing
First, I began to rewire the house network. For various geeky reasons, I wanted to have my main PC see the internet with a static IP, not behind a firewall and also see into the network behind my firewall into the the other computer. This requires the install of a second network card and faith in my firewall software not to bridge the networks.
Don’t tell me I should be behind the hardware firewall, I wants what I wants…
While monkeying around in the box to install the card I did a bit of cable maintenance and other tidying up.
I got the networks up and running and everything worked great, without issue and I could hit the Tivo from my main computer.
I went and did some other things like take the kids to the game store and lunch.
When we returned home I began to try to extract some video from the Tivo. The transfer started, and for some reason the computer blue-screened and rebooted. Windows XP never does this to me. Like OS X and linux, the OS is fairly rock solid with apps crashing, but rarely the OS dumping.
It keep happening and I looked up the specific error code. Ram Problems. Ram Problem? WTF? The RAM must have been knocked loose earlier int eh day I guessed. I reopened the case and reached in. The RAM was hot, almost too hot to touch. Something was wrong. The RAM I use has a frigging heatsink on it.
I touched the elaborate heat sink for the CPU and it was even hotter. Uh-oh. I checked the main CPU fan, and indeed, I had unknowingly unplugged the fan while doing my maintenance. I plugged it back in and rebooted. Everything was fine. It does make me happy that the comput can run half the day with no fan at all and the case closed. All my effort to put in good heat sinks was worth it.
Tivo
The Tivo is now completely hacked. I’ve installed both TyStudio and TivoWeb.
With TyStudio I can extract video directly from the Tivo and convert it to usable video formats. This afternoon I turned an episode of Good Eats into an SVCD and an episode of Da Ali G Show into a DVD file.
With TivoWeb I can control my Tivo from a web interface. There’s pretty much nothing I can’t control with the TivoWeb interface.
All I need is the DVD burner and I’ll be in heaven…
Geekage
Michele needed a specific audio clip from a film. It was only available as a streaming RealAudio clip. In case you find yourself in a similar situation, you may need:
RealAudio to WAV Converter
WAV to MP3 Converter

The last few days have been busy with work and home activity. Michele has been more in volved with her quilt guild and got installed last night as one of th aofficers and is going to play a major role in next year’s Glendale Quilt Show. I’m quite proud of her to get involved. She’s always seem to shy away from these kind of things and is now jumping in with both feet.
Martin’s still waiting for money from the house sale, and is still hanging out with us. Last night he made pizzas. He’s a pro, and it shows. I’ve gotten him to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein. At first he dabbled, then I set him up on Michele’s computer. Wednesday he played for 4 hours straight and yesterday about the same. I’ve got him practicing circle strafing and switching weapons via keyboard. He’s avoided the bad habits like mouse-wheeling, mainly because I haven’t told him about them.
It was fun to play back to back on the same server. I’ve never really been to a LAN, but I saw how being in the same room with a teammate can make a difference. I can only hope he will continue to play in Kansas City and we can meet up online when he moves.
Last night I installed the TurboNet card inthe Tivo and tested it out. It was simple and easy. I need to do a little rearranging of my home network to make things work the way I want going forward. I’ll be buying a 100 baseT hub and running the Cat5 under the house before I’m done. I considered using WiFi, but James convinced me that if I’m going to do video extraction, I need 100 baseT. He’s right.
OK, time to get ready for work. Have a good day.

I folded a ton of laundry tonight. While doing that, I watched the movie Mean Machine. I didn’t know a thing about the film when it started. Turns out it’s a British remake of The Longest Yard.
Nothing spectacular, but a fun movie to kill some time. The crew of folks I like from the Guy Ritchie films were in this and did a good job of playing the various roles.
I was confused on one point. There is some significance to wearing a brown leather jacket with sheepskin lining in Britain. The head mobster wore it in a important scene and the characters reacted to him wearing it. I’m not sure what it means though.
Any Brits care to explain?
The TurboNet card for my Tivo arrived today. Due to the laundry, I didn’t have time to install it. Hopefully tomorrow.
I have an early meeting tomorrow at 7AM so it’s goodnight for now.

I bow down to Griff over at Ultramicroscopic.
He is the dad-blogger I aspire to be. His latest post puts into graphics & words the experience of being a father of young children, while desperately trying to remain 25 and hip.
I had the chance to drink a few beers with him at SXSW and he’s just as funny in person. Except when he got his bike stolen, at which point he was a bit sad and ready to kill someone.

Southern California is having yet another grey day as the clouds linger overhead.
Last night’s adventure in spyware removal was successful. I ran AdAware several times to purge the computers of the problem. What a pain in the ass.
Yesterday on my way back from the library I stopped by a new video store in town. Videotheque in South Pasadena is a DVD rental place specializing in “Foreign – Classic – Independent – Alternative – Rare Cinema“. I was pretty impressed. The first thing you notice is that most of the store has the films organized by Director. How f*iing cool is that. The rest of the DVDs are organized by very specific genres. There was a British Crime area and a War area. I highly recommend checking it out.
Work today should be a little busy. We’ve got the Apple WWDC keynote this morning coming down via satellite and plenty of more work to do on the budgets. I hope Michele wins the lotto soon.

I’m at my mother’s house doing maintenance on the computers here.
I look into the Program Files and see GAIN. GAIN is Gator Advertising Information Network. Spyware.
Now I need to run the anti-spyware stuff to clean out the computers.
Spyware delenda est.

It’s Saturday morning and there is a light drizzle outside. In a few hours I’m heading off to Dodgers Stadium to watch the boys in blue beat the world champion Angels. It should be a good game and I get a chance to eat Dodger Dogs and drink big plastic cups of beer.
I finished up two books recently that I hadn’t got around to reviewing yet.
In the Hall of the Martian King – John Barnes
The third book in the Jak Jinnaka series, this novel started off similar to the previous novels with Jak almost stumbling through the advenutre with little initiative and many pushes from outside. In the middle of the book, this changes where Jak actually takes charge and starts making things happen of his own accord. The first real tragedy of series occurs and the tone of the book changes dramatically. In the second half, the novel becomes a bit more philisophical and touches on the issue of the effect on society when long held truths are found to be false.
A good fast read, worth the paperback price. It will be interesting to see where the next novel takes us.
Promised Land – Cynthia Felice & Connie Willis
I’ve enjoyed Connie Willis’s books in the past and found this book in a used book store for cheap. The story is really a romance in a sci-fi wrapper. Not that I dislike romances, but I’m used to sci-fi stories with different kinds of issues the characters are trying to resolve.
You’ll find yourself at first angry with the protaganist, Delanna, and then excited as she changes her ways. The world they live in doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it’s believeable enough for the stories purposes.
The book is out of print, but if you see it at the library or a used book store it’s worth putting on the shelf as an ’emergency reserve’.
Gaming
I’ve been playing Planetside a bit and am really enjoying it. There is a new feature that allows for autogeneration of a stat picture of your character. Check it out.

The Planetside site generates the image nightly and once you put in the link, the image remains constant. They even have an XML feed of your stats so you can create whatever you want from the data. Looks like I’m gunna have to learn XML feeds one of these days.

I’m sitting in Lucky Baldwin’s waiting for anyone from the Weblog Meetup to show up.
Martin has been delayed by the people buying the house and is still trying to get here. I’m sitting here drinking by myself, waiting.
Why can’t it be a little easier to do this kinda thing…