Sunday, January 25, 2009

Long time, No Post

Random Braindump because I haven't posted in a while.

Work:
The new job is doing well so far but still learning workflow and systems. I'm the on-call at the moment which has proved highly interesting. I am enjoying things so far and as an added bonus it's raised my interest level in actually participating in FOSS again.

Food:
Made baked eggs to go with corned beef hash last weekend. I overcooked the eggs a tad but they were still tasty as well as easy. I have no idea why I haven't done this before. I'm going to try to work that into menu again this week, or possibly upgrade to huevos rancheros.

Made Chile Verde again on Friday too. Still damn tasty.

Linux:
Work has given me a Dell Dimension E6400c. It's very nice looking. Linux doesn't work on it well due to hardware newness. I'm running F10 on it now and the i915 and ALPS drivers cause major pain (OOPSes, video IRQ gets disabled, random noise in the input stream for the trackpad generates clicks and repositions the pointer). I'm hoping to punt back to CentOS 5.3 when it comes out which should work but have less "features" -- 5.2 didn't have any knowledge about the ICH8 chipset in this thing so no wired or wireless networking.

I also got roped into giving a presentation on SELinux at the Milwaukee LUG meeting in February. If you're in the neighborhood, drop by!

TeeVee:
I've been using First Gen Intel Core Duo 20" iMac with Elgato EyeTV as the primary TV lately so I can watch a few channels in HD. It's been a 50/50 experience so far. I like having HD, I like some of the timeshifting features, and I like the program guide. It's a much more pleasant experience than Time Warner's Mystro cable box which has a painfully slow program guide, takes 5 minutes to boot, and crashes weekly. How they can make something without a hard drive take 5 minutes to boot is truly beyond me.

On the downside, the Elgato doesn't have twin tuners, so you can only watch/record one thing at a time and there's a enough of a delay that it makes using the Wii very hard. Also, the provided remote sucks and on-screen controls when using the Apple Remote (which Jess has dubbed "The Tic-Tac") are a tad clunky.

All in all it's made me just hate television providers even more. All I want is about 30-odd ClearQAM channels in unencrypted form and I'm willing to pay for the service, why is that so hard for cable companies to provide?

I'm still waiting for the HD TV market to settle down a bit. There's a glut of cheapo 720p displays out there but 1080p displays are starting to become more prevalent and similar at the feature base. My back-of-the-envelope trending makes me think sometime this summer will be the time to buy. Then I can re-evaluate the media situation again.

Loving 24 so far, waiting for Heroes to return. Somehow I missed out on BSG, which makes me think I need to Netflix the whole thing.

Random:
  • TabKit is a wonderful, wonderful thing. If you use a lot of tabs in Firefox: get this now.
  • identi.ca upgraded to Laconia 0.7 this week. It's got some bugs but overall is very nice (groups, Twitter OMB integration, and a new look).
  • Super happy to have a smart president again.
  • Craving Nutty Bars, can't have them thanks to the poison peanut pandemic.
  • I derive an unhealthy amount of pleasure from Passive Aggressive Notes
  • Milwaukee is cold in the winter. I knew it would be, but damn, I can't wait for spring.

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