Month: November 2008

High Def – Scam or Saviour?

I know the world is going to high definition TVs.  I know it!  But I’ve been refusing to capitulate to the capitalistic calls – so far.  But my strength is waning …

My issue is that buying a HD TV means I then have to get some HD content.  That means a new digital box from my cable company, or hacking some antenna together to try to capture some of the HD channels floating over the air.  I’d also want to get a HD disc player, which means Blu-Ray.  And then there’s the expensive cables, etc.  All in all, moving to HD means a completely new television ecosystem within the house – not a cheap proposition.

But then there are soothing, affirming articles such as this one at PC World, that claims that 1 in 5 of those HD television watchers can’t actually tell the difference betwen high def and standard def.  Now that just warms my cockles.

Take that Capitalism!

Open Source Can Help You Too

Here’s a great example of how Open Source software can be leveraged, even in the health care field, to provide a quality product.  This breast ultrasound device uses a modified version of Ubuntu to provide an interface for the user.  The team even sent an email to the development team to thank them for their work – nice touch (and great advertising – I immediately went to the career section of their website).

My question now is did they choose to release any modifications or enhancements they’ve written back into the community?  Taking is only part of the equation (the easiest part, but still only part of it).

Quickies

OK, before they escape my mind, a few things I wanted to post but couldn’t during october because of the downtime.

  1. Not a single response to my federal election email asking for comments from all candidates.  Not a single peep.
  2. My creativity goals have been challenging – I not only can’t play guitar yet, but I’ve actually forgotten the one chord I did know.  I have, however, drawn a lot more this year.  Here’s a quick sketch I drew in the spring for a super hero: “The Kegler Elf”.  For those of you who don’t get the name, go read wikipedia.  The unicycle is his hero vehicle, as his special power is that he can claps things in his inner thighs really tightly – super tightly.  So he can do cool things like … hang upside down from helicopters and … ride unicycles like a crazed chicken elf.

Well That Was Fun … Disaster Recovery For All!

Imagine if you will a Thanksgiving that kept on giving for weeks after the day’s events wound down.  I’m not talking about leftover turkey either – I’m talking some serious giving …. or is that more likely spelled ‘givin’?

Thanksgiving, around 1 hour before our big family dinner, the power went out.  Over the next 3 hours the power went out two more times.  Now, we managed the dinner just fine with a little “gravy on the BBQ” action.  But my server?  Ah, it did not do so well.  Sure, the surge protector did its job and protected my precious from the surges, but it couldn’t help the silly hard drive and its silly reading head from somehow crashing into a platter.  What’s it all mean, you ask?  Unbootable hard disk, and immediate disaster recovery.

But that was weeks ago, you say!  True, true.  It has taken me this long to finally piece back together the various aspects of my blog and image gallery.  I did manage to pull back all the data from the toasted hard disk, as you can probably tell (it’s all here, right?).  The real bottleneck has been those crazy things in real life that take up my time.  Two in particular: Marley and Cohen.

So expect a few picture albums going up by Alisa very soon.  Look for a few updates from the blog, all that good stuff.  It looks to be back to business as usual.  I still have a large degree of work to do to get things back to where they were before the crash, but I’m working through it in priority sequence, as it were.

So forgive me for going dark for almost a month.  I know you’ve all been going through withdrawal and all that.  So let’s get back to business here, shall we?  Let’s start with a new theme – this one looks like it will do!