Archived News starting from 03-10-2007 and earlier
BlogAt the request of the
Morlock, I've added a "Your Website" field for comments. If you fill it out, your name shows up as a link to that site in the comment list. Naturally, the first thing you'll want to do is type in
http://www.zombo.com, but once you get tired of that, you can put in your real website. Apparently this interlinking of blogs makes for a lot of good search engine balley-hoo according to the Morlock, and that's good eats. I've also removed the HTML restrictions on the comments by popular demand (and since the image validator works so well), so you can post up your porn links and improve your rating even further.
Unbeknownst to me, Farmington Hills was ranked
29th Best Place To Live last year in
Money magazine back in July of 2006. This comes as a welcome surprise and offers me some hope that my home value won't hemorrhage as fast as my
Redford house currently is. I'm not holding my breath for 2007. Especially when you notice there were only 66 clear days reported vs. the average of 107, clearly the most important factor of any statistic available.
Unbeknowenst to me, Lisa can draw. She created
Lucky the Leprechaun for the March birthdays at her work and it looks pretty good. Especially to someone who has no analog drawing skills himself. Don't stare at it too long, the shading will scare you.
Lisa had become dissatisfied with both the quality of my HDTV signal, and her ability to watch TV reliably in the bedroom. She threatened to find a man who could deliver a multipath interference free 1080i HDTV signal along with a reliable network connection that I was obviously not providing for her. My relationship on the line, I had to fix both. I relocated my
HDTV antenna to my attic and ran the antenna wire and a network cable to the TV. After adjusting the antennas until Lisa was satisfied with the signal strength, I ran the network cable down to my laundry room. With the attic work done, the
Morlock got Sam
good and hyper with some catnip in preparation for his cable run. Unlike
last time, there was only a mild freakout while he got into his
PETA approved harness. Once he was in the joist space he took off
like a pro and greeted the Morlock at the other end with the cable on the first try. After the Morlock
calmed him down he was more relaxed than when we began. My cat is officially a trained cable runner, and with a wired media center and a strong HDTV signal, my relationship is once again safe from disaster.
Lisa called me around noon today and informed it was "acceptable" to visit her at work today since her unit (labor and delivery) had no patients. Apparently this mornings ice storm wasn't good weather for having babies. I know I certainly wouldn't want to be born in this ice storm, or this cold weather, or anywhere in Michigan for that matter. After a few spinouts on I-96 I arrived at the hospital and finally saw
what Lisa does all day. Unfortunately my request for a photo of me in stirrups while giving birth to a pillow was denied for sanitary reasons, I know that's what everyone was hoping for so at least I tried. I successfully embarrassed her in front of each co-worker and learned all about the birthing process. It was edutainment at it's finest. I'm sure I'll never be allowed back, but at least I'll always have the memories.
Playing
Battlefield 2142 isn't always enjoyable, but you keep playing for those times that it is. It's like a bad drung you just can't kick because the highs are so good you forget the lows. Well today I hit bottom. After being knifed in the back 5 times in a row, I
snapped my keyboard in half over my leg. Needless to say, my anger was released but my game time was over. $20 later I've decided to take a break from playing for awhile. The keyboard was flimsy to begin with so my hulk powers aren't that great, it just looks that way.
Over the last few months, my
referrer logs have been showing my increasing role as a
Myspace image provider. Most people would be thrilled to have the honor of serving up bandwidth to the millions of 1995-era web pages hosted there, but unfortunately in 1995 the principle design rule was cramming as many enormous images and animated gifs you could onto a page. This translates into significant bandwidth demands on my server, so my desire for a usable website won out. A quick Google search found
LeechBlocker, which was exactly what I needed. Happy to install random ISAPI dlls into my server, I was instantly free of Myspace traffic. As an added bonus, the filter formats my entire C: drive when someone requests "bah-weep-graaagnah-wheep-ni-ni-bong.html". So nobody make that particular request.
My recent TV purchase brought my total number of required remote controls to four. Previously my receiver remote could at least turn on my TV and I only needed three. Feeling crowded, I decided to research media center 2005 compatible universal remotes. Since my TV and DVD player are both Philips, I quickly found
exactly what I wanted, but it was either never manufactured, or is no longer in production. Even eBay didn't help. Disappointed, I found the
Logitech Harmony line of universal remotes to be my next best choice. Unwilling to spend over $100 on a remote, the best bang-for-the-buck turns out to be the
Xbox 360 Remote (even though I don't own an Xbox 360). After TigerDirect's instant ground shipping delivered it to my door, I set it up for my TV, DVD and receiver by entering their model numbers. There was no option for "custom built media center" so I picked a random HP media center model for the media center support. I then configured the "xbox buttons" as Guide, Recorded TV, Start and Live TV respectively. Not quite my comforting green windows logo button on my regular remote, but at least the green button did the same thing. I then set up "Activities" like "Watch Recorded TV" which turns on the TV, receiver, and displays my list of recorded TV. After I had everything configured in the interface, I clicked "Update Remote" and waited for over a minute while it uploaded whatever configuration was required. Once it was done, I pressed the "Watch Recorded TV" activity and sure enough everything turned on as expected. It's important to note that during my demonstration to Lisa, none of the activities worked properly, but she did understand the "Devices" button and how to switch between them all, so it passed the fiance test. However, her increasing nerd factor may make her an unsuitable baseline comparison. A review I read mentioned how the channel/volume/directional buttons "click" when pressed, which is slightly annoying. I also had to manually set volume up/down for each device to my receiver volume up/down, but this may have been me missing a configuration option.
After doing my taxes and discovering a significant return (thanks to four mortgage payments)
this deal on a
50" Plasma TV begged me to blow my money on it immediately. It satisfied my need for a good deal and was larger than any of my friends digital flat panel TVs. (Yes Ron, your projector is 158" but I did say digital flat panel!). With primary goals met, a quick check that my entertainment center would hold the TV (after a circular saw modification) was all I needed to click the BUY button. Today it finally arrived and
barely fits, a beacon of consumerism in full 1080i glory. After discovering 480p DVD's now look crappy, I switched to on-air HDTV for the same breathtaking video my
42" Plasma displays, but with 8 more inches of it. What next?
Upgrade the firmware naturally, and add an
HD Tuner to my
media pc, which now connects via HDMI. Apparently all those upgrades were too much for the
Morlock to take, so he
rammed his car into a curb and called for a
tow.
Since
Battlefield 2142 was a no go during the
Jan LAN, the pansies (
IronDan and
Leinnintiger) decided to organize an exclusive one that was
held today. They were joined by
Mindkill,
EternalOne,
LordJudson,
Odyssvs,
Cheffords and of course,
me. Various combinations of bots and us on different teams took place with the clear conclusion that even at full skill the bots suck. Despite the lack of challenging enemies, we still managed to teamkill each other plenty to stay amused. Event video from
Gnome Cam is
here.
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