Best album ever

I'm sitting here - admittedly half drunk - listening to one of the best albums ever recorded. I am a huge Kiss fan. I don't think that anybody reading this (assuming you know me) would deny this fact. However, it has been a long while since I have sat down and queued up a Kiss album. Well, tonight I decided that I should give "Alive!" a listen. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. The album simply rocks. If you're not a Kiss fan, you should promptly download this album, or visit your local CD store and procure a copy. You will quickly realize that you should have been a member of the Kiss Army for years, and feel shame for not realizing that fact before tonight. If you are already a member, then you know what I'm talking about...

Fortune Cookie

I received this "fortune" in my cookie today at a local Chinese-ish restaurant:

You should stop procrastinating - starting tomorrow.

The Sword

I recently discovered a very cool new band called The Sword (visit their MySpace site, which has more content than their official site). They're from right here in Austin. Check 'em out. They sound a lot like Black Sabbath from back in the day. My only complaint is that most of their songs are very similar in style - but they still rock. I hope to see them the next time they're back in town.

Update on Amazon S3 Backup Software

I'm getting close to releasing a beta version of my backup software. I have a rather crude version that I've used to back up a few hundred MB of data, but I don't think it's ready for any kind of public use. The UI still needs some major re-work, and I need to add much better exception management. I'll probably have something in about a week.

Tony awards

They take place tonight. Does anybody give a rat's ass?

Amazon S3

Amazon recently announced their S3 web service. S3 stands for "Simple Storage Service", and enables a very cost-effective way to store large amounts of data. The cost structure is pretty simple: $0.15 per GB of storage used, plus $0.20 per GB transferred. I currently have about 6GB of photos on my HD, making the total cost to back it up a meager $1.20 to upload the data, plus $0.90 each month thereafter. That is dirt cheap (compared to other online storage sites).

I plan to write a little application to do this, and I'll be happy to share it with anybody who wants to use S3 for storage.

More Beer

I'm going to try my hand and brewing some beer again today. My last batch was quite successful (at least I thought it was). Today's beer should be a nice refreshing beer for the hot months ahead. It's a Bavarian Hefeweizen, with a pretty simple ingredients list:

• Grain (1/2 lb of German Pilsner and 1/2 lb of Carapils)
• Wheat extract (7 lbs)
• Hops (1 oz Hallertau)
• Yeast (Hefeweizen ale yeast)
• Water

Of course, these are the main ingredients for all beers, but this one is about as simple as it gets as far as the variety of grains and hops go. If all goes well, it should be ready to consume in about 5 weeks. I'll keep you posted.

30-second update

Hello faithful readers (all 3 of you). It's been a while. I don't feel like writing much, so here's what's new:

1. With the help of Heidi's dad, I managed to get the Blazer running quite well. We replaced the intake manifold and carburetor. It now stays at idle pretty well (albeit a somewhat rough idle), and no longer spews nasty black exhaust. It's been my daily-driver for the past couple of weeks. It's quite a fuel hog though.
2. I went to England for work - and unfortunately I worked the whole time. I did drink a couple of warm pints of ale and saw Big Ben, but not much beyond that. I'll post some pics when I'm feeling less lazy.
3. I bought an Xbox 360 on the weekend (I finally used some gift certificates that have been burning holes in my pockets since Christmas). It's very cool, but I haven't had much time to use it. I spent a couple of nights playing Ghost Recon, which is awesome (I really suck). Aside from its gaming capabilities, it integrates nicely with any PC on your network that contains music and pictures. It is also a Media Center extender, but I haven't tried that feature yet.

That's all for now. Ciao.

Worst Superbowl™ Commercials Ever?

I think so. In my opinion, Budweiser had the two best:

1. The Clydesdale foal, trying to pull the cart
2. The crowd at a stadium, simulating beer pouring into a glass by holding colored cards over their heads

There were obviously a whole bunch of commercials that I can't remember, which means that they just didn't work. And then there was the worst: The Burger King song and dance (wtf!?)

Since I can actually remember the BK commercial, I suppose it could be considered a success. It was so bad though, that it really makes me want avoid Burger King, rather than eat there.

You can see all the commercials at ifilm.com.

Please don't do this...

I flew recently. I noticed something that really, really, really annoyed me when flying.

Why do some people find it absolutely necessary to turn on their cell phone and call somebody the second the plane hits the ground!? Argh... it drives me nuts! Can they not wait 5 more minutes until they're in the terminal? Are they so important that they must call somebody, just to say, "Look at me! I have my cell phone! We just landed and I'll call you again in a few minutes when I get off the plane!"

Worst fortune cookie fortune ever...

I received this fortune from the Fire Bowl Cafe in Round Rock yesterday:

You will receive a fortune. (cookie)

How lame is that!? At least it came true.

Awesome PC Specs

My parents sent us some Christmas gifts this week, and they packaged them in an old box from storage in their house. It so happens that the box in which they sent the gifts was originally used to package an 80286 PC that we used to own when I was a kid. The specs are still written on the box, and I couldn't help but laugh when I read them.

Here are some specs:

Brand: GoldStar

Model: GT212 Slim Size 286-12MHz AT Compatible

Features:

• IBM PC/AT compatible
• 1MB of RAM standard, expandable to 4MB high speed memory on motherboard
• High Performance 16-bit VGA built-in with 640x480 VGA mode
• 3 expansion slots for optional Modem or game port adapters
• Serial, parallel and mouse ports
• 30MB Hard disk
  
• MS DOS 4.01 (User friendly DOS Shell is included) / GW BASIC

Some promotional text:
GT212 is a slim size 16-bit 80286 based AT that runs either at 12MHz or 6.25MHz clock speed. This AT-compatible system features 1MB RAM (expands to 4MB), a 1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive, and a built-in hard disk interface (IDE).

GT212 is pretested at an elevated temperature to assure greater reliability.

Canadian Election

Canadian voters will be heading to the polls, likely sometime in January, after the opposition brought down the minority government in a no-confidence vote Monday evening.

The election has been set for January 23rd. You can learn all about it here.

INXS

I downloaded their latest album with their new singer - the guy who won the TV contest. It sucks.

Normally, I wouldn't have downloaded it since I'm a moderate INXS fan at best. But since the new singer was from Nova Scotia, I figured it was worth a shot. Too bad. I really wanted to like it.

I'm quite surprised that the album has been released already. I can only guess that INXS had all the songs in the bag and just needed someone to sing the lyrics. I think it's obvious that Michael Hutchence was the musical force behind the old INXS. Unfortunately, he used a leather belt for more than holding up his pants, and that was the end of that.

Covariance

Covariance is a concept in object oriented programming. That's all you need to know for the context of this post.

Here is a quote from an article where the author attempts to explain a type of covariance. If you weren't already confused...

Covariant return types on method overrides make this explicit, allowing the use of a type that is derived from the return type of the method being overridden as the return type of the method doing the overriding.

What a mouthful!

Ride for the Roses

The Lance Armstrong Foundation's Ride for the Roses was today. 100.55 miles (162.2 km). 5 hours, 20 minutes. Blustering wind. And now, legs as wobbly as a newborn giraffe.

I have a certain sense of satisfaction having setting myself a goal of riding 100 miles, and finishing in a faster time than I expected. My friends Scott and Peter also rode with me today, so congratulations to them.

You can get all the stats for our ride, collected by my GPS unit, here.

Fun Project

Now that I have a Bluetooth-enabled device that can store over 1GB of music (see previous post), an idea occurred to me. Wouldn't it be cool if I could sit down in my car and have the music from my phone start playing through my car stereo?

The problem doesn't seem that difficult to solve, if you don't mind dropping about $100 on some new hardware. There are a few manufacturers out there that now make Bluetooth headphones. Conceivably, you could buy these and splice the analog lines between the Bluetooth transceiver (or internal amplifier, if the headphones have one) and redirect the analog signal to an auxiliary input of a stereo. Then, simply by pairing the phone and the "headphones", and allowing the devices to connect automatically, I should be able to get in the car, hit "Play" on the phone, and enjoy. I'm not quite to ready to drop the $100 just yet, but I'll document and blog the project if I ever decide to give it a shot.

No iPod Required

My Motorola cell phone really sucks. I came to this conclusion after being frustrated time and time again with its poor reception quality and its absolutely horrible software. I even took it to a Cingular store in hopes that the firmware could be flashed to a newer version (a coworker had his phone updated - but it was a slightly newer version of the same phone). According to the Cingular guy, Motorola says the firmware is fine - no flashing required.

I decided to search for a new phone - specifically a used AT&T GSM phone (since my SIM card was from AT&T, I could just stick it in the phone and voila!), or an unlocked GSM phone that could accept my AT&T SIM card. I did some research, and decided that the phone I wanted was the Audiovox SMT5600. After a few days of looking, an unlocked phone appeared on eBay and I grabbed it.

It finally arrived a couple of days ago, and I must admit - it rocks. I'm not going to list off all the features - you can read about them for yourself. The one feature that I will talk about a little is the Windows Media Player 10 Mobile.

As I discussed in a previous post, I subscribe to Yahoo's Music Unlimited service. Each track downloaded from this service contains DRM, so I can't just copy them to any device and listen. I first copied a track to the phone using Windows Explorer, and when I attempted to listen, the phone told me that it needed to acquire a license for the track, and that it needed to connect to the Internet to get it. I let it try, but it didn't quite work. That pissed me off a bit, but the fact that the phone tried to play it and knew what it needed to do to play it was encouraging. I then tried to synchronize some tracks using Windows Media Player on my PC, hoping that the license might be acquired by Windows Media Player and transferred. Success! I can now listen to all my subscription tracks on my cell phone. So, I promptly bought a 1GB miniSD card to give me quite a few hours of audio. I have most of the album art for my library on my HD and Windows Media Player copied those to my phone too, so when tracks are playing, the phone displays the album cover on the screen. Very cool.

New Domain Name

Not sure what I'll do with this yet, but I registered the following domain:

Technoblogic.com

At the moment, I'm hosting it on my server at home. I think I might set up some kind of technology blog. Crazy I am. Any other suggestions?

John Madden

Is he senile, or what!? I truly believe he is losing his mind. He is so nonsensical, it's hard to listen to him.