OK we missed the most recent episode of Desparate Housewives while we were in Hawaii. I hadn’t kept up to date on bittorrent in the last couple months so time to try again.

Went to download Azureus. Oops, needed the SUN JRE first. Installed the JRE, then Azureus. Both pretty painless tho the Sun website has way too much info on it.

Then off to http://www.torrents.co.uk which is a great source of TV torrents. Found the Desparate Housewives episode which aired on 12/20, and started up the download. Very painless, full HDTV quality, no commercials.

And once done, it played perfectly in the Divx player that I already had installed, so I didn’t have to hunt around for one of these, tho there seem to be a number of alternatives out there.

OK so now I could play this great looking show in my office, but I really wanted it down in the family room, and i don’t have a media center pc yet. So I thought gee, I’ll just burn it onto a DVD and go!

This is where everything turned to crap. First off, i tried a bunch of different DVD burning tools that I had on my machines – most of them bundleware with DVD burners. Ulead, sonic mydvd were a couple of them. None of them could parse the downloaded show. So I googled around and downloaded a few more – HT Burn, DVD Lab Pro. Nope they couldn’t import the show either.

Figuring I had some strange codec problem i downloaded Videoinspector, this was pretty helpful. Analyzed the show, and claimed I didn’t have the necessary xvid codec (tho how did the divx player play the show then???) and took me right to a download site. Ok so i installed but I still had trouble getting any DVD authoring software to consume the file. tmpgenc seemed to be able to crack the file thought to what end I am not sure. DVD lab pro hung hard.

After the hard hang i updated my sony dvd burner firmware and checked my bios and scsi/sata firmware, all ok. Still I could never coerce anything into burning a dvd, ht burn got the furthest and actually burnt the video but no audio.

So I gave up. We all watched the show in my office.

What have I learned? The last time I tried to burn DVDs in earnest was about 6 months ago. The software sucked then. It still sucks now. And the other learning is – get a media center PC.

Wow, just a total ass-kicking by the Buckeyes. Zwick and Ross played like they had something to prove, they did. Nugent finished an incredible career. The defense was smothering. The team played like it is excited about next year already.

Sportsline’s grading of the game…Cfnews stream of consciousness…SI’s coverage…

I got one of these power/fm transmitter thingies for christmas, and plugged a thumbdrive into it with a bunch of directories of mp3s. It is a very nice little solution, the sound quality actually seems better than my ipod/itrip combo. A couple of reflections:

* Man I wish there was a “bring your own storage” ipod. I’d love to be able to plug arbitrary storage into my ipod headend for a couple reasons – one the ability to upgrade my storage as i see fit (at much better prices than apple supports), two the ability to sync using normal file tools – the syncing in itunes is the worst part of the experience – slow and gets confused at times. * this seems like a better podcasting solution than an ipod. I don’t plug my ipod into my pc every night, i sync it infrequently (probably because syncing is such a pain). I could easily stick my thumbdrive into the pc every night tho, especially if i could then use regular file utilities to create my syncing solution.

So a gift for Christmas was sent by FedEx Ground to my work address on December 17. It arrived at the local FedEx distribution center in Auburn and was put on a truck on December 23 for delivery. However, it was not delivered, and on the tracking website over the weekend a posting was made that said that FedEx was waiting for an address correction from the recipient, me. FedEx did not call the sender, did not call me, did not leave a notice at my workplace, they just put this notice up.

Well actually that is not all they did. They also sent a postcard via US Mail to the apparently incorrect address asking for an address correction. Said postcard arrived today.

I have no idea how FedEx holds this idea in their head. Either the address is correct and they can deliver the package, or it is incorrect and sending a postcard is not going to help. As it turns out the street address was fine but the zipcode was off in the last digit – not a problem for the USPS but apparently something that brings FedEx to a crashing halt. Not a problem for UPS either since they do address verication at time of shipping (or at least they do everytime I ship).

I’ll use UPS and USPS, thanks.

Traded mail with Phil yesterday who is in Sri Lanka I believe for the holidays – says he and his family are OK – great news amidst all the general bad news.

UPDATE: Phil says that Unicef and the local Lions club seem to be doing great efforts at relief, if anyone needs ideas for what charities to support.

The Dispatch has the full story today (paid sub required) on the booster who gave Troy money and other benefits, resulting in Troy’s suspension. Pretty ugly picture of this booster, Robert Baker of Springfield.

So as a result of the actions of this booster: Troy is suspended; everyone else on the team and the coaching staff is directly affected due to the loss of Troy; and nothing happens officially to the booster (though he has departed from his company, sounds like there may be more general ethics problems with this guy). Gee this seems like justice.

As I’ve said before, college football is broken until more of the money generated by the sport starts going directly to the players. With the millions of dollars floating around a big program like Ohio State, it is just wrong not to give some of that largesse to the players who are directly responsible for generating the cash, it is wrong for adults associated with the program to make big salaries when players make nothing, and it is impossible to prevent 18- and 19-year-olds (who are cash-poor) from being swayed by a couple hundred or couple thousand dollars.

This holiday season, we particularly wanted to help out the families of servicemen and servicewomen who have made or are making significant sacrifices for all of us. We gave to three organizations:

* Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund – “The Fund provides unrestricted grants to the families of military personnel who have given their lives in the current operations in defense of our country. The gifts, $10,000 to each dependent family and an additional $5,000 per child, are intended to help these families through any immediate or long-term financial difficulties they may face.” * Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund – “On May 18, 2004, a small group of concerned Marine Corps spouses founded the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund to provide financial grants and other assistance to the Marines, sailors, and families of those injured serving our nation.” * Army Emergency Relief – “AER funds are made available to commanders having AER Sections to provide emergency financial assistance to soldiers - active & retired - and their dependents when there is a valid need.”

Thanks again to Winds of Change for maintaining this great list of pointers for ways to help the troops.

From the blackberry blog, 4.0 software for attws devices available now. I’ve installed, seemed to go ok. I enabled the certificate manager feature which may have been a mistake, like all certificate software I’ve ever used, it presents me with an enormously complex UI with no clear value.

Spent the last week in Hawaii – while on the beach:

* “Amnesia Moon”:amazon by Lethem. In the philip dick vein. Intersting core thesis about fracturing of reality as a response to an external threat. And I am sure that this is the only book I’ve ever read with a blurb by “mc 900 foot jesus”:amazon. How many people on the planet own cds by mc 900 foot jesus and have read this book? * “Snowfall”:amazon, “Kingdom River”:amazon by Mitchell Smith. Decent post apocalyptic yarn. In this case, set in north america sometime after a new ice age, and society has become much more primitive. In the first book, the action is paced well, and the unhappy endings for many of the ?good? protagonists creates a level of reality and pathos that tales of this sort normally don’t attain. The second book falls off quite a bit – pacing not as good and the hero is a bit too invincible. * “A frolic of his own”:amazon by Gaddis. Ok I hate to give up on a book part way thru. I feel like I am wasting the time I’ve already invested in the book, and I feel like I am letting the author defeat me in some strange intellectual contest. But I have to put this down after about 75 pages. I have no idea where the author is headed, I am not intrigued by the characters. The writing style is particularly annoying – we have perfectly good ways to punctuate conversation, why invent new ones which obscure meaning? I assume the author is making a point with this style, perhaps it ties back to the theme (a critique of our litigious culture per one of the jacket blurbs) but it is tiring. One of the jacket blurbs, from richard lacayo of Time magazine, says ?Practically rebuilds the Tower of Babel from the sounds and furies of the late 20th century.?. I have no idea what this means, I can’t make any sense of it, and so I guess it is a very fitting description of this book. * “Icarus”:amazon by Russell Andrews. Like mary higgins clark, only longer. And a bit dull at times. Length kind of beat some of the suspense out. * “Democracy in America”:amazon. I can see why this remains on so many recommended reading lists after 150 years; it is still a very relevant discussion of American politics and history. I am only partway thru but finding this very readable. When you’ve grown up in a particular system, you take so much of it for granted, it is fascinating to see it through someone else’s eyes. A great rehash of inheritance and estates early on that reminds me why estate taxes are not such a bad thing. * “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”:amazon. A trendy choice that I expected to dislike, but thia is a very good tale. Thematicallly like “tim powers”:amazon but with very deep characters. Like all stories of this ilk, the metaphysical windup is a bit mushy and nonsensical, but this is no worse than most. I found norrell’s transformation at the end a bit unbelievable, I’d like to have seen deeper development throughout the book of his guilt around introducing the main antagonist into the world, as I think this guilt was the motivator for him to eventually transform himself. Without this development, his transformation seemed a little pat. I’d give it an a- lots of loose ends, but I hope the author avoids doing a sequel as I don’t think wrapping up the loose ends will improve the story.

Rich is looking at solutions to go all voip at home.

Rich some things to look at:

* Mega list of sip products up at pulver.com * Another at Sipcenter * open source pbx – asterisk

The problem I struggle with is this – I have a lot of cheap handsets around the house connected by cat5 back to my wiring closet to my existing pbx. If i replace this pbx – what hardware bridges out to all these analog handsets? Or do I replace them (at great cost) with sip handsets – are there any really cheap sip handsets?

Some great posts I’ve found on the disaggregation of the PC in the home – we aren’t moving to bigger and bigger PCs in the home, but to elements of the computing environment spread all around:

* Furrygoat summary and his external storage box. His main point is all about pulling storage out of individual PCs and making it a household-wide resource. * From decafbad, these gumstix are very cool concepts, it would be nice if assembling computing at home was as easy as throwing a couple of these together. * A more general post from decafbad about single purpose devices in the home.

All the most aggressive users of technology I talk to are moving to disaggregation of storage in the home, despite the current designs of pcs which generally don’t encourage this disaggregation.

* Olivier notes the problems you face when building a new SATA-based PC. Over the next 6 months this stupid problem is going to cause more floppy drives to sell out of Fry’s than any other reason. And many of them will be returned after one use. I’ve had to deal with this 3 times now, pain in the a&$. * Crap I’ve had my ATI x800 installed for like a month now, and I am obsolete, I need the 850. * The Falcon NW fragbox 2 looks like the perform form factor – a lot smaller than your standard mini-tower, but enough space to force in the latest video cards and some storage alternatives. * $19 for 7.1 audio. Basically the soundcard market is almost dead, it is so cheap to get an amazing card now, and soon the processing will just get sucked back onto the main processor. Unlike video cards, we just don’t seem to have an inexhaustible need for ever better audio * Miniprojectors. Certainly the projector market would benefit from technology introduction and price competition. * ok getting odder and odder – this little rf adapter for wireless remotes seems cool – fits in where a battery normally goes – does it work?? * Interesting phone for outdoorsy types – walkie talkie and gps functionality

So, with Yahoo’s inevitable announcement of Yahoo desktop search – just how many freakin’ indexers are we all going to have to run on our machines? I am going to need a multicore proc and dedicate one of the cores to running the google indexer, the yahoo indexer, the lookout/msn indexer, the winxp indexing service. and then of course all the media player and photo indexers that come built into all these apps.

Longhorn was purportedly going to solve this but now winfs may not even be in the release after longhorn, at least that is how I read this article.

So the market for fs value-add utilities will be strong for the rest of the decade – not just indexers, but replicators and synchers like unison, software raid and other lower level solutions, etc. We all have way too much free disk space at our disposal, software will spring up to use it for reliability, performance, ease of use.

From this slashdot entry, lots of great board game sites:

* The Morning News game guide * Funagain Games for all your buying * Boardgamegeek for enthusiasts * SeattleSpiel for Seattle board gamers

It is kind of a holiday tradition of ours to spend a few nights playing some board games…lots of good ideas for this year in the above links.

For some reason, about two weeks ago, my IIS server (that this site resides on) quit being able to resolve DNS names. I’ve tried changing my DNS servers, no avail. I’ve tried turning off and turning on the DNS Client Resolver, no avail. The only config change I have made recently is to turn on the WebDAV extension in IIS, I turned that off, no avail.

This happened to me when I first installed XP Server 2003 and it was due to a 3rd-party socket filter that i had to remove. Going to investigate that next. Also going to look at ways to log the traffic at the IP level as i try to hit a named site to see what is happening.

Static pages on the site work fine obviously, but any kind of dynamic page tends to fall over.

Maybe it is time to move to a hosted solution. Not really having fun chasing this crap down.

UPDATE: used the Network Monitor utility in XP to see that, for whatever reason, the DNS servers I had been using were returning “name not found” to all my requests. Further dug in and found that our ISP had provided us new DNS servers to use for our DMZ boxes a couple weeks ago. All fixed up now. Don’t really understand why the old DNS servers were still operational and still responding to DNS requests at all, but onward and upward.