Paul's profileTao of PaulPhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
September 30 Foo Springs EternalIt seems I have been misled. In the previous post I wrote "Life springs eternal, as they say". Well, apparently people other than me do say it, as a search on Google produces about 3,500 results for the full phrase "life springs eternal" (including the quotation marks), but it appears to be inaccurate - a corruption of a line in a poem by one Alexander Pope, about 300 years ago. It reads "Hope springs eternal."
I occasionally stop and consider where phrases like this come from. Most all phrases, which have entered modern speech, originally came from some author, poet, etc. But nobody realizes this, most of the time. I bet you will be as surprised as I was, when you see what other phrases in common everyday usage in modern society actually came from Mr. Pope, written about 1711:
Such phrases do sometimes tend to be misqoted or become corrupted or twisted over the years, and it appears as if I am unwittingly perpetuating this "life springs eternal" misquotation. I hope this mea culpa will be a small step to keeping Mr. Pope's quotes as he intended. Fall colorsIt's amazing but, having been out of town for just 9 days, there is a huge difference in the trees all around where I live. Fall is definitely here. I'm really surprised how quickly the change has happened. Yellows and Reds abound, contrasted against the green of the evergreen trees. Some trees are in transition, with a single tree having green, yellow and red leaves. I hope we get the opportunity to photograph them against a clear blue sky before the wind and rain accelerate the leaves dropping.
Some say that Fall is their favorite season because of the tree colors, and it is indeed attractive. But for the record, Spring is my favorite season. For all the appeal of the Fall tree colors, I see it as the season of death and decay. That's why I choose Spring - full of birth and rebirth. Life springs eternal, as they say. back to a chilling realityWe returned from Maui and Kaua'i on Friday morning at around 6am. It was quite a jolt, having left temperatures in the mid-80s and humid, to arrive somewhere 30+ degrees
The thought has occurred to me, of course, that things are not going to get any better. In fact, it's very likely not going to be this warm in Seattle again until April, and we have no more vacations to look forward to. I am not looking forward to the next 6 months of weather... September 18 Heading to Hawaii We're heading to Maui tomorrow, so I may not be updating this blog quite as often in the next couple of weeks. I am bringing a laptop though, so you never know... I might be filling these pages with stories of luxury and tranquility, possibly boring you all or making you jealous, or both.
 Localization Standards site not localized?Blogamundo recently noticed that the website of the Swiss-based Localization Industry Standards Association, is not itself localized into any language other than English. Considering the business they are in, and their tagline "Erasing borders. Respecting boundaries", this seems pretty ironic to me. September 17 Windows Live ID PAINI've complained about this before, but it's back in my mind again this morning, so bear with me while I vent.
After 10+ years using the same Hotmail account I was getting huge volumes of spam daily. I couldn't stand it anymore so I created a new email account and asked all my buddies to start using that new email address instead of the old one. Worked out great - to this day around one year later, I still haven't received a single spam email at the new account because I am careful to never use it at sites which will sell my email address to spammers. I still use the old spam-laden account for that.
The pain aspect comes in now: All
This causes me a lot of pain for two primary reasons:
It just sucks, let me tell you. This is not the way it should be done. There are certainly benefits from using an integrated set of products from Microsoft - between Windows Live and Xbox Live there are some really great integrations between email, messenger, spaces and gamertag, but it's so inflexibly tied to your email address as the unique identifier. I just wish someone would work on fixing it. September 15 Google.com's 10th birthday today!According to Neowin, Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the domain name "google.com" 10 years ago today, September 15th, 1997.
Google didn't become an incorporated company until a year later, and I'm not really sure whether incorporating a company or registering a domain name is a more significant birthday, but happy birthday nonetheless :-) September 14 Halo 3 Spaces ThemesToday I actually clicked on an AD BANNER, on purpose! I think it's maybe the first time in my life that I've done such a thing. But the ad was actually useful and wasn't trying to sell me anything. It was a Microsoft in-house ad, advertising the new Halo 3 themes that are now available to skin our Spaces, for free. Of the two themes available, I prefer this one - the other is too dark, IMHO. There is also an Xbox360 theme available (but who the hell cares about that!).
Here is the link to the themes, in case you want to add them to your Space.
12 days to go to Halo 3 launch! To be honest, this is not the most important event coming up in my life, there is one event even more important a few days earlier. But my big day on the beach won't quite make the headlines in the same way Halo 3 will. At least one analyst has predicted the game will generate, in just the first 24 hours, $200 million in sales. $200 million in 24 hours... that's $8.33 million per hour, or almost $139,000 per minute! ($138,888 to be precise.)
Since I've been on vacation for the past few days, I've gone back to playing Halo 2 multi-player on Xbox Live. It's still fun, but after playing Halo 3 in beta, and in Microsoft internal testing, I do feel v3 is a worthwhile upgrade. The game is fundamentally the same, which is to be expected since it's a continuation of the story, but everything has been improved. There have been enough public reviews of the game at this point that I don't mind mentioning a few - the graphics are better, the surround sound is awesome, the balance of the game play and weapons/grenages/melee is really improved - you'll do a lot less dual-wielding, trust me.
I'll be back online on the 28th, eager to teabag some n00bs. September 13 MS-DOS 5 Rap!Back when all computers came in the same beige color, MS-DOS 5 was unleashed upon the world.
It's benefits included the graphical shell, freeing up 45Kb of memory, undelete, and this awful, awful, white-guys-can't-rap video. Cringeworthy!
September 10 Windows Live Translator is LiveCheck it out - Windows Live Translator, powered by Systran. I like the clean UI, but I am getting a bunch of 500 errors for some tasks. Babelfish, which has been around since the dawn of the internet, or so it seems, is also powered by Systran. It's about time that MSN/Windows Live had something like this, but I would hope that we could deliver something significantly better than Babelfish. Out of curiosity, I ran a few quick tests to see if there was any difference in the accuracy of the translations. Here are the results: Japanese to English:
You might like to try your own tests to see which one you think is more accurate. At least for JA-EN translations, you can certainly find much better alternatives, such as WWWJDIC. September 09 91-3Ouch. I bet the Japan team are feeling bruised today - not only their bodies but their egos too.
September 05 So where's the JesusPod?
(Segue: I'm mad as all hell that Jobsy cut the price of the iPhone 8Gb by $200, thanks a lot, you absolute tosser!) Well, here is one disappointed fanboy. Yes, Apple has updated the entire iPod range, and yes, they have a iPod touch now, but it's not the iPod I want. None of them are what I want. I'm holding out for the iPod Classic + iPod touch merger. I want to take my entire collection with me in the car. I want to listen to any song I have at any time. I don't want to have to choose a playlist du jour to listen to. That's just annoying. (I got rid of my XM satellite radio for much the same reason - I need absolute control of what to listen to at any given moment.) There has to be one at some point, right? All Apple needs to do is take the iPod Classic's 80/160Gb HDD and stick it in the iPod touch, and throw out that lame 16Gb flash memory. Now that, my friends, is something that will be worthy of the JesusPod title. Apple, give me what I want or I swear I'll consider buying a Zune 2... maybe. Oh and WiFi = cool, but that Starbucks deal? YAWN. I don't go to Starbucks. I don't even like coffee. Double yawn! summer: game overWell, here we are, Labor Day came and went with a bang, of the thunder and lightning sort, and the day after was very wet and rather gray. Summer is not officially over until the 21st, but it sure feels like it is. Looking at the remaining holidays for the year - Thanksgiving in November, and Christmas, seem to confirm the fact. Game over. September 03 Samsung SH-S203B SATA ODD I just ordered this, online. t's the Samsung SH-S203B, a 20x speed, SATA (Serial ATA) optical disk drive. It's getting pretty good reviews - including a 9/Kickass award from Maximum PC magazine, where I first heard of it.I'm looking forward to taking the old optical disk drive out and getting rid of that nasty old Parallel ATA cable (you know, those 40-pin industrial gray thin-but-wide cables). I've been running SATA HDD's for some time now, and the only parallel cable left in the machine is for the ODD drive. I guess SATA cables are to PCs what HDMI cables are to audio and video components: thin and sexy.
 I only have one SATA port left on my motherboard, which will be taken up by this new Samsung ODD. The other three ports are occupied by my 2x150Gb drives in RAID 0 and by a 500Gb monster.
20x... that's for DVD-R and DVD+R. CD-R is 48x. Wow, it won't be easy to find media rated to support burning DVDs that fast! Word "on the street" is Taiyo Yuden is the best there is, and they just go up to 16x for DVD writing. Unfortunately, the brand is a little hard to find and a bit expensive.
Do I have anything negative to say? Only that Samsung's website is a mess. Having read about the drive in Maximum PC, I went to Samsung.com to check out the drive. The Samsung US site can't find it at all! The drive seems to not exist. All I could find was the user manual in PDF format. Fortunately the good geeks at CDFreaks.com have a thread on this ODD. Seems it's not for sale in the US, but Canada and other countries do have it. With that info, I was able to find info on the drive on Samsung's Canada website. Also via the CDFreaks forum, I found a link to samsungodd.com, where I can find firmware downloads, etc. The quality of English on this site is pretty bad. I also found a US reseller with drives in stock, so hopefully it will arrive soon. But anti-kudoes to Samsung US for pretending the drive didn't even exist, even after being reviewed so positively in a US magazine! September 02 Of Beds, Mattresses, Meetings and Cellphone receptionI try to make my life as uncomplicated as possible, but sometimes it just doesn't work out that way.
First, we bought a new bed from Crate and Barrell. They pulled up their available delivery dates and asked, "what about 9/4". I didn't have my cell phone, which contains a copy of my work calendar, as it was plugged into the wall, charging the battery. I thought about it for a second and said "sure, 9/4 sounds fine." Much later I realized that I had an important meeting on 9/4 morning. D'oh! #1.
OK, I said to myself, I just need to wait for them to call me with their 2-hour delivery window. (They were to call me 2 days before the delivery date to tell me what 2 hour period I needed to be at home.) There was still a chance that, if they were coming in the afternoon, I could still make my important morning meeting, which is at 10am. 9/4, a Tuesday, comes after a holiday weekend in the US, so Monday is a holiday.
Friday came and went with no call from them, and finally on Saturday afternoon, they called. At the moment of the call, I was in Macy's home store, in the basement of Bellevue Square Mall, lying on a mattress. You see, buying a new bed necessitates a new mattress as well, since we are moving from a queen to a king-size bed. Unfortunately, the reception was really poor in the basement of the mall. It was strong enough that the phone rang, but when I answered all that I heard was "...speak to Paul..." and "...two-hour window...". I couldn't hear anything else, including what the time of the 2-hour windows was going to be! I called back as soon as I had a signal, but nobody answered the phone even though I called multiple times. D'oh! #2.
Now I am in a predicament. I can't find out whether I can make it to my important meeting on Tuesday morning or not, and likely that because of the holiday on Monday, I won't be able to find out until around 9am Tuesday. Then I need to either high-tail it into the office in a hurry or else cancel the meeting at short notice, which won't impress anyone.
Well, I guess the moral of the story is that cellphones suck, since cellphone battery or reception has been the cause of all of this complexity that I would really like to avoid. In any event, I find myself stuck in the office over the holiday weekend preparing my slides for the meeting, just in case I can actually show up for it.
Never mind the fact that a new bed requires a large number of hidden anciliary purchases - new mattress which costs more than the bed did, new sheets, new pillows and pillow cases, new duvet and duvet cover, new lamps to go with the new night-tables on each side of the bed. Never let anyone tell you that buying a new bed is a simple purchase. Oh no, my friends, it is just the tip of the iceberg. D'oh! #3.
Bah, humbug. September 01 Tommy Boy I don't pay much attention to clothes, in general. Yesterday, without realizing it, I got dressed completely in Tommy Hilfiger clothes.  I had on a Tommy polo shirt on top of a Tommy t-shirt, with Tommy shorts. And to add the final touch, I even had on Tommy socks!
When I realized it much later, I was a bit embarrassed, but fortunately I don't think anyone noticed!
 I might have to pay more attention to getting dressed in future... |
I was anxiously looking forward to today's Apple-y announcements given all the rumors floating around about iPod updates. I was even pretty sure that I would go out and buy one if they added the iPhone's (AKA JesusPhone) multi-touch interface. I bought a jPhone for my fiancée and I adore the interface.|
|
