So, for whatever reason, the girlfriend and I lost our minds and decided to go purchase a fancy shmancy laptop (on which I'm typing right now). For the time being, it's mostly a toy although it'll be used to take to client sites for both of us later on in life (hopefully). We got what could be considered a pretty ridiculous laptop from the Toshiba Satellite P25 series (the newish p25s477 to be exact). These guys have 17" WXGA screens, Pentium 4s and Nvidia GFG 5200s in 'em (which a lot of people seem to think is junk, seems fine to me). Everything about it is great except for what's apparently a horrendous battery life (~4 - 4.5 hours by my guess). Oh yeah, and it weighs on the order of just under 10 pounds. We looked at a few other smaller models, including a similarly spec'd Sony and Compaq, but in the end just couldn't resist the beast.

The first thing I did with my turn on it? Loaded up a copy of mame and played Burgertime. Oh yeah. The things I'm having the hardest time dealing with? Lack of a scroll button (or the whole touchpad thing in general), picking it up and being afraid of dropping it. All things I will get used to in due time I'm sure. Neatest thing? My first exposure to 802.11 technology/autodiscovery. Cooooool.

http://torrents.nexornet.com/torrents/rotk_768-mov.torrent

A little jittery, but it's something.

Edit: Supposedly better quality.

Ripped from an article at ign:

As its CPU, PSP will make use of twin MIPS R4000 32 bit processors running at max 333 Megahertz. One of these units is referred to as the Media Engine, and is to be used for sound, movies and I/O management. In addition, the system will include a so-called VFPU floating point vector unit with calculation capability of up to 2.6 Gigaflops. This latter unit is meant for assisting the CPU in 3D calculations.

Memory for the system is divided into two areas. In all, the system is expected to feature 8 Megabytes main memory with bandwidth of 2.6 Gigabytes per second along with two megabytes of sub-memory, also at 2.6 Gigabytes per second, which will be used by the Media Engine.

Outside of the CPU and main memory, the system will of course include a graphics processing unit (GPU). The GPU is made up of a Rendering Engine and a Surface Engine and has access to 2 Megabytes of VRAM with a bandwidth of 5.3 Gigabytes per second. The hardware will include support for traditional polygons as well as curved surface primitives along with such things as clipping, morphing and more, freeing up software from having to deal with these. Sony claims a theoretical polygon performance of 33 million polygons per second.

The system's UMD (Universal Media Disc) optical disk format has also been clarified a bit. A UMD is a 60 millimeter dual layered disk that can store up to 1.8 Gigabytes of data. Transfer rate for the reader unit is 11 Megabits per second, which is twice the transfer rate of a standard DVD system. Sony is also promising the highest level of copy protection for these discs using DiscID and AES encoding technology.

Multimedia support is big for the system. Sony announced MPEG4 support at E3, and now they've gotten a bit clearer, revealing that the PSP will use the AVC decoder, which has a high encoding rate. This will allow the UMD to store up to two hours of DVD quality video. Sound is also taking a high place on the system's feature list. The PSP will feature reconfigurable DSPs which can be rewritten allowing for support for the latest sound technology. Sony announced today compatibility with the ATRAC3 plus format along with AAC and mp3. In addition, the system will support playback of 3D and 7.1 channel sound.

On top of all this is Wireless Lan. The system will include as standard IEEE802.11 wireless LAN. Sony had originally intended to make this an option, but game creators were pretty adamant about its inclusion. Sony revealed no further details about the system's networking features, unfortunately.

The PSP will, of course, play games as well. Sony will be tapping into its PlayStation heritage and including the familiar triangle, circle, X, square, start, select, L1 and R1 buttons on the system. These will be digital. In addition, the system will include a single analogue thumb pad.

I'm trying to figure out how to f$extract a filename from a flat text file and then run it as a .com procedure. If I take the variable I assigned to it i.e.:

$ task = f$extract(24,100,"''file'")

which returns something like my$disk:[some_dir.hp]comfile.com and then try to run it within the script in any fashion such as:

@''task'

it tries to run task.com instead of comfile.com. If I use @"''task'" it outputs the correct filename but puts quote around it making it invalid (" is an invalid character in a VMS filename). There must be a way (and hopefully an easy one at that) around this. Anyone?

Edit: Ok, had someone explain to me that it would just require one single quote in front of it (i.e. @'task), but was told that it would be better to spawn the tasks off anyways. *shrug*

Note: This journal entry is not interesting. I'm just having an off work day.

I work as one of four 24/7 operators[1] for a laboratory in the midwest. The hours are decent[2] if not odd (4 days a week, two 12 hours shifts, two 8s). Basically it entails babysitting servers and doing batch work/random other work. Having 12 hours on a Sunday to find something to do can come in quite handy - I actually got to learn PHP on the company dime to write an online document creation/tracking system (which they were planning on promptly replacing with QualTrax - why they decided not to tell me this is a mystery).

So anyways, they fired my boss about a month ago. I liked him a lot and miss having him around, but he got a fat severence(sp?) package and what sounds like a better job, so good for him. The good part of this, according to our new superiors, is that we are supposed to have our monkey-typing-on-a-keyboard jobs automated and we would get some schooling/training to be able to do desktop/server support type stuff. I thought this sounded nice since my Windows server skills are really, really weak, but I can be kind of naive and trusting. It's currently not looking too promising - the more likely outcome is that they'll automate our job (but it'll take at least another 12 months) and fire us. I'm willing to wait it out because I do like working here (and I have no degree or experience outside of the 2+ years I've been doing this and the 15+ years I've done it at home), but I'm finding it harder and harder to work at a small, friendly private company that has gotten on this streak of deceiving their good employees (my boss was the third or fourth in the past few months that had been fired without warning) and putting a positive spin on it.

Anyhoo, I'm working right now (which has thus far consisted of replacing 6 toner cartridges, trying to reboot a web server but discovering my permissions had been removed, running a few database backups, trying to find a good way to parse the subpar logfiles that Legato produces, breaking a Nextel phone, and fighting with a VMS[3] lockup from hell) and I just missed my window to run a backup, so I should probably stop.

Know what? With the exception of the past couple days, the KC Royals are playing pretty damn good. Yay.

[1] In a lot of companies "operator" is synonymous with "try and keep awake and play around on the internet a lot". I guess that's why they changed our job title to IT Support, then to Technical Support Specialist, then back to IT support, then to something else which I can't even remember now. And neutered our web access with Websense, which supposedly has a filter setting for abortion related sites. Most people just think of us as "The Helpdesk", so the title game is pretty ridiculous. I think it's just a tool to try and keep us complacent instead of wanting more out of our jobs.

[2] Except for this week since someone has gone on vacation and it's my turn to cover. That means working 96 hours over a span of 9 days.

[3] I love VMS.

Nine people.

That is the total number of people (besides bar employees and other bands) that attended the two shows we played this week. It was just one of those reality check kinda weeks. At least it got me out of town and away from a volitile workplace for a couple days.

I decided to shell out for a DVD burner (all that worked overtime has to go towards something fun. I think that's a law or something). It'll be nice to offload a lot of the disk space hungry stuff (like episodes of the great Home Movies). Maybe put together a little SNES Station disc to play in the 'ol PS2. It'd be nice to find a decent little mastering/menu making program for DVDs to play with, but I'm so freaked out by the media cost that I think it would take me a month to make sure everythings perfect, and then another month to muster the balls to start burning it.

That's it, really. Nothing interesting to say, I just felt like typing something to kill the last few minutes of a very boring workday. Hope everyone's having a decent weekend.

Does anyone know of a place to purchase LCD encasements or (even better) a good place to purchase a metallic aluminum type substance that I could cut to make my own? I got an LCD from Crystalfontz a while back and basically covered it in poorly cut cardboard. Now that the jukebox is actually done (short of lirc troubles), I'm ready to start concentrating on aesthetics.

MythTV 0.10 was released yesterday if you're into that sort of thing. The new menu setup and configurations have made the whole program substantially snappier, especially yanking files over the network. Yay!

Micro Center appears to have an iMac 600MHZ G3 for 500 bucks ($649 - $150 rebate). Is that worth buying for that price? Seems ok. Opinions welcome. Other MC deals include a Daewoo 17" flat panel for $300 and a 200GB Maxtor HDD for $159 (all after rebates). Plus they've usually got some fun networking stuff on the floor (I got a couple pieces of low level Cisco equipment for very cheap from them). Just what I needed - I hadn't pre-spent my paycheck for next week yet. Good thing this ad showed up today. I'm a consumer whore!

You know, sometimes I think every interesting site I've ever seen on the internet I found because of Penny Arcade. My main reason for visiting them is not for their insight on video games and the culture that surrounds it (which in and of itself is pretty entertaining), but rather for the myriad of random links they spit out in the course of that dialog.

Today's interesting link, for instance, led to the World Rock Paper Scissors Society, which includes, but is not limited to, this advanced strategy guide. I never realized RPS was so deep. I think they also introduced me to My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, Achewood, Homestarrunner and everyone's favorite: The Official Ninja Webpage. What a fun and bizarre place the internet is.

Anyone have some interesting links they'd like to share with the class?

I found a couple Brisco County Jr. episodes floating around the P2P networks over the past couple weeks and started watching them today. You know what? That show was really very good. Good action, excellent scenery/props/costumes (think Firefly with a little more effort put into it), a nice orchestral score, great acting - not to mention f'ing Bruce Campbell - and some hilarious dialogue. Oh yeah, and a plot. Really, this show had it all. Go check it out if you haven't before.

So without any intentional notions one way or the other, I managed to go a full 7 years without purchasing music at any major retailer. It wasn't on purpose, that's just how things worked out.

I purchased some music from online stores, some direct from labels, some at the local indie record store (with asswipe music snobs and all - "Hm. I didn't bother listening to that CD. They're not doing _anything_ interesting. I'm listening to this [insert 60's throwback that plays in straight 4 with too many effects here] CD. It's fuckin' mind blowing."), some directly from artists. I didn't really think much about it. Then the other day a friend of mine told me that the new Radiohead album was available on the cheap up at Best Buy. So I went up there and bought it on a whim. The weird part is that I did feel distinctly out of place. It was easy enough to find what I was looking for (they only had a billion copies of it), and the checkout was painless, but I couldn't help but feel like I appeared to be a 24 year old trapped in a 40 year old uncool father's body who is trying to buy a gift for his hip teenage son.

When I got home, I realized the streak that I'd broken. I thought I'd be upset by this fact not being a particular fan of the great music cartel or Best Buy, but I wasn't. I decided it was more important that I continue listening to, watching, and supporting what I enjoy. I guess I'm not as much of an idealist as I thought I'd be. Go figure.

For the record, the CD - Radiohead's Hail to the Thief - ain't half bad. Pretty sedate. I was pleasantly surprised after being relatively non-plussed by the Kid A/Amnesiac one-two combo. Maybe I should give those two another run.

---====---
On a similar note, if you haven't seen the inexplicable drama that's going on over at Ain't It Cool News, you should really go watch if you have some time to kill. Unfortunately they yanked the original article which was, to put it lightly, amusing. There are a great deal of links to the original if you're really bored, but to sum it up - Moriarty chastised the internet community for downloading movies (the pre-release copy of The Hulk was the subject of choice) even saying "Shame on you", then the rabid AICN community rained down a day long flamewar of truely ridiculous proportions citing "hypocrisy" as the main course (since AICN thrives off of getting access to pre-release movies they are hypocrites to speak out against it). I don't think either side is completely right, but I do think it's very funny when an internet community absolutely gets crushed beneath the weight of it's own self-importance.

Enjoy your weekend, folks.

Please tell me I'm not just imagining this.

Nothing was happening for me, but then I loaded it on my girlfriend's Windows computer and lo and behold, it works as advertised. Found as the first link on pointlesssites.com.

function animate_shit(time)
{
sy = sy0 + vel_y * time + acc_y * Math.pow(time,2) / 2;
sx = sx0 + vel_x * time;
shit.style.top=sy;
shit.style.left=sx;
the_wheel();
}

Edit: The new location supports Mozilla. Hooray!

I've been using CVS for a couple days, and this is quite an improvement over 0.8 - I even got the TV module working just how I want with my plain 'ol TV card - make sure you get a recent version of xmltv. The new MythVideo module works great, even though it's geared towards movies. MythMusic supports playlists and a more sensible menu layout, plus it looks a lot better. Just need to figure out remote support.

No announcement on the webpage yet, but everything is downloadable.

MythTV 0.9 Direct Link

Replace "mythtv" with the module name for module downloads (i.e. mythmusic-0.9.tar.bz2). This'll probably hit slashdot proper within the next 24 hours, so get 'em now.

Edit: Ten minutes later, announcement up.

Ah, this oughta take care of my jonesing (do people still say that?) for a Final Fantasy Tactics type game.

http://ps2.ign.com/articles/422/422353p1.html

... if it weren't for all the drama.

So, what's the deal with car interiors these days? I mean, did an airline go out of business and liquidate all of their fabric to the auto industry? Does Toyota think that I like light pink and blue stripes accenting a grey crosshatched seat? Does it make it more comfortable? I mean, come on! Who came up with this? Did some high-paid powerful executive one day come in to the office and say, "Ya know, business is stagnent. Clearly the culprit is the plain fabric we currently use in cars. What we need to do is make the interior of a car as much like a waiting room as possible so people feel more like they're about to get dental surgery and less like they're enjoying their automotive driving experience."? Have you heard of solid colors?
</seinfeld>

No, I don't know why I wrote this.