Archived News starting from 02-09-2009 and earlier
BlogWith my gutters overflowing and spewing water onto my front porch (which subsequently freezes in winter) I decided it was time to call in professional help, after my initial gutter guard installation proved useless in the face of maple keys. 3 weeks ago I put down a $300 deposit on my $800 gutter upgrade and was starting to think they took my money and ran. Tonight I arrived home with gutter gunk spattered on the ground and my gutters repaired with aluminum gutter guard without a single visible footprint. If I wasn't able to
review it on the
Gnome Cam I'd have a tough time believing it wasn't magic. Only time will tell if the gutter ninjas succeeded where I failed in assuring proper roof water routing.
With
Autorama less than a month away, and my
Cougar stored with a full tank of gas, the strictly enforced requirement of 1/4 tank or less of gas in the vehicle during the show was becoming a problem. Rather than trying to burn off gas doing circles around Cobo in what is sure to be crappy weather, I decided to create a
gas transfer device out of an
old fuel pump, 10ft of hose, and a quick fuel line disconnect. Now all I have to do is disconnect the fuel filter and plug in my pump to get out the gas. After the
initial hookup and having run the line
to my pickup, it only took 30 minutes to drain my Cougar to 1/4 tank and almost completely fill my pickup. Handy not only for car shows, but also when the power is out and my generator runs out of gas, since the whole thing runs off my motorcycle battery. Yet another step complete in surviving the coming zombie apocalypse.
This is easily the best story of the year so far:
Zombie Road Signs. I can only wish I was cool enough to hack roadside signs.
The Xbox 360 hard drive has 4 separate partitions: game cache/updates, system, xbox compatibility, and finally the one you actually store things to. This should help to explain why a formatted 20GB HDD only has ~ 18GB free. You can only directly modify the last partition, but today I learned a way to "clean up" the first partition. Why is this useful? Well beyond the obvious nerd satisfaction of having a clean partition, if a game update gets botched you can use the following key combination to start over, saving a call to support. It's also been reported to fix random freezes that may happen when loading games. If you're an achievement whore such as myself, you can use it to remove any updates that make getting the points more difficult. To perform the maintenance, highlight your hard drive under "Memory" in "System Settings." Then just press
,
,
,
,
,
,
and confirm you want to wipe out your game cache (does NOT affect your savegames/content). It effectively wipes the partition clean, which means the next time you start a game it will more than likely prompt you to update (unless it's a game the developer didn't care enough to provide updates). I'm on the hunt for more hidden key combos now that I know they exist, it's like discovering the infamous
Konami code in Contra all over again.
A brief love affair with
Windows 7 ended after just days of trying out the beta. I took
extensive screen shots of the updated Media Center screens focusing on the improvements which included obfuscating the channel you want to record a series on. Instead of selecting a specific channel, you can now only choose
SD or HD preferred. While I can see this might be less confusing, the problem arises when you have
4 of the same channel. The guide tells me my satellite receiver is in fact providing an HD signal despite that being impossible over an s-video connection. The recorder then decides to record all shows via satellite and labels them HD. This wouldn't be so bad in itself, and after simply turning off the satellite versions of HD channels in the guide I removed the option entirely. However, my
fully recognized dual HD tuners for some reason were interpreted as only one,
preventing two shows to record simultaneously. After viewing an hour of blank screen that was supposed to be "Knight Rider" (satellite didn't support that channel) and missing "Lost" entirely it was time to switch back to Vista. My fear is these problems are not limited to the beta status, but a problem inherent with the new "simplified" version of media center.
NAIAS 2009 was as exciting as could be expected given the state of the automotive industry. Mitsubishi's
entire presence consisted of 6 cars in a 500ft by 500ft square, while Porsche and Nissan didn't even bother to show. Highlights included taking photos of covered cars, the
Volt, and
factory sequential taillights. An actual shock and surprise occurred when we headed downstairs expecting an empty space and were instead greeted by an overpowering pine scent alluding to the transformation into a pseudo forest. Designed for romps in the various hybrid vehicles available for the public to try out, why nobody had yet obliterated the whole thing in a crazed hybrid driving experience was beyond me. With
Stavos' mono pod successfully deployed for 80% of his photos, we counted the trip a success if for no other reason than that we actually went through with it.
Back in 2007, I thought it was
pretty cold outside when it was -2.2ºF. Today was 3.8ºF colder at -6ºF (or less if you're like
EternalOne and don't trust my hippie
weather station). I prefer to think of it as 251.9ºKelvin and use it as yet another piece of evidence as to why Lisa needs to allow a move to Florida. Until then I'm carrying a lighter to unfreeze my nose hairs when I step outside.
| -6 °F at 08:50 on 16 January |
Two feet of snow was not enough to keep this years
special guest from the Jan LAN.
Stavos,
Excelcier, Chris and Tom rounded out the attendee list for a surprisingly enjoyable mix of 3 on 3 games. Chris was even able to get Left 4 Dead working on the PC successfully. A few games of Starcraft made for a nice break. As I'm sure you're just itching to have them, here is the
LAN Video from the
LAN CAM. Excelcier also had the foresight to bring his camera for some
embarrassing photos.
As someone who grew up obsessed with the
original Knight Rider series, I'm forced to watch the
new incarnation simply because they say a sufficient number of buzzwords such as "Knight Foundation" and "KITT" and "talking car." I say forced because it's physically painful for me to watch it. Instead of the Hoff as a lone gunman serving up justice in too-tight pants, they have a doofus with 50 some odd support people running around in circles at what looks like an abandoned aircraft hangar. The "one man can make a difference" mantra that made Knight Rider so great has been replaced with "many dorks accidentally solve problems." Worse yet, the constantly changing plot points and unbelievable chain of events makes me dizzy. It's like they're trying to cram 2 hours of unrelated none sense into an hour of unrelated nonsense. I'd like to say KITT is the one redeeming factor, and the eye candy is smack on, but the execution is all wrong.
Too often KITT is conveniently flawed for a useless plot development that I'm left wondering what it accomplished. Fortunately there is a
live blog written by someone who feels exactly the same way, and if you watch the episodes it's hilarious (click on each one for the synopsis). I think everyone who is a fan of the original series secretly hopes it will return to the lone gunman format, but as the creators have stressed many times it's targeted at a new audience and not supposed to be a remake so I can only assume we'll all be suffering for the remainder of it's existance.
A recent email from
Myrn prompted a trip to the vending machine for what I initially thought was counterfeit dew. The
official mountain dew site mentions nothing about the new logo, but a Google search reveals a
logo makeover in the works. It's
not limited to dew either, and there's already some
great parodies on the new Pepsi logo. The change can only be interpreted as another step closer to
Idiocracy.
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