Category: Technology

Pirates & poison

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Check out this Movie Blog post about a new Warner Brothers pricing scheme (which they found at Gizmodo). Frustrated with the popularity of $3 pirated DVDs in some Asian markets, they now plan to sell legal copies for $1.50. So can someone explain to me why I’m getting charged $25+ per disc? I know, I know, they charge what the market can bear, blah blah etc. That’s fine. But don’t turn around and bitch to me about how online piracy — which might…might…account for a 5% downturn in business — puts the poor stuntmen and set designers out of business and then turn around and mark your product down 94%.

Apparently if we were to download 19 movies and pay full price for the 20th, Warner Brothers could bear it. Makes it hard to feel sorry for all their whining…

.:.

This doesn’t make me happy: Toronto Star: 2,4-D said to cause cancer. Growing up on a farm I was around 2,4-D all the time, but my dad was licensed to use it commercially and watered it down. I suppose it freaks me out more than a whole army of suburbanites obsessed with the color of their lawns have been able to buy it off the shelf for years now and dump it into their front yards and patio plants with abandon.

By the way, it’s the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown.

Sunny days

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The weather forecast for the upcoming long weekend: 17 degrees, 16 degrees and 15 degrees. It might rain a bit tomorrow, but it should be mostly sunny Saturday and Sunday. It’s even supposed to be 20 degrees today. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.

.:.

Looks like Google Calendar is finally out. Pretty much; it’s a little clogged right now as all the geeks pile on for inspection. It’s pretty cool though; the quick add feature (where you just type something like “Movie with Fred at the Paramount on April 28th” and it puts the entry in the right spot) is nice.

Hoping for a tagalong

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The schedule is up for the mesh conference. Interesting people and topics; I’m hoping Andrew Baron convinces Amanda Congdon to come along. So that I may drool upon her.

.:.

Another game, another win for the Canadiens. That puts the streak at eight wins in a row. Last night they beat up on the first-placed Senators (who, admittedly, are pretty short-handed right now) to keep pace with Jersey in the east. Tomorrow night’s game: looking bigger and bigger.

.:.

Anybody have any suggestions about what to do in Montreal? We’re staying in Vieux Montreal and are sans auto. We’re getting in too late to do much tonight, and we have the game tomorrow evening…other than that, we’re free.

86.3%

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For the second meal in a row, we couldn’t bear the thought of the cafeteria food (our choices were veal, lamb, fish and leek soup) so eight of us ordered pizza and just finished scarfing it down. They even brought us some free pop so I snagged a dp on my way out. Score. I’m just settling in to do some more pseudo-studying and listen to the Canadiens game on streaming radio.

.:.

The Modern Mod (or WineBoffin, as he’s sometimes known) points out Slingbox’s announcement that they’ll bring their product to Canada. Sweet.

24.3%

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Day two: down. Just finished most of my “homework”. Will probably get something to eat, finish the rest, review some other stuff and maybe watch 24 before heading to the bar to see who’s out and about. No exercise tonight: it’s yoga and volleyball in the gym.

.:.

Have been having weird computer problems all day. Half the time my laptop can’t find an IP address on this network, but it only seems to be my laptop. The tech support guy thinks it might be a security policy that was pushed down last week and is causing some problems for me now. All I know is, it seems to come and go randomly, so…argh.

False alarm

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Fire alarms when you’re trying to relax on a Friday night are a pain in the butt. Especially when you have to carry the cats up and down flights of stairs (can’t wait for that cat diet to kick in). There was no fire, obviously, but the boys were plenty annoyed at being stuffed in their carriers.

.:.

The new Google Talk for the Blackberry is pretty sweet. It uses the same contact list as the full web version of Gmail, and works almost exactly the same way. I was pretty impressed.

.:.

The two songs that Ted Leo posted on his site are both really, really good. I’m looking forward to the new disc. Speaking of music, the new Neko Case is, indeed, excellent. The new Mogwai is also good, but we all knew that already. Their May concert is looking like it’s fo sho now: M2 is in.

Low-tech

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Now that I have a short reprieve from economics, and I seem to have kicked my magazine habit, I’m enjoying reading an actual (gasp) book again. Not that I’ve strayed far from my school work; I decided to finally read Freakonomics.

.:.

After my work computer mishap last week a colleague sent me a utility from Intel that would tell me whether my CPU was running hot. That’s handy, I thought, and brought it home. I installed it on my machine. Didn’t run it, mind you, just installed it. Some message flashed across my screen about “Now checking…” and then my screen went blank. The computer just froze up, and I couldn’t get it to come back. I believe the Intel utility may have given my BIOS the black plague. Sigh. I should’ve known better. And right now, I’m just disgusted enough with computers that I don’t even give a shit. I’ll fix it tomorrow; it’s sunny outside, so I’m going for a walk once the Raptors finish coughing up this game to the Nets.

[UPDATE: unplugging the computer for a minute and getting rid of the charge seemed to do the trick. Booted right up after that.]

I'm having a thermal event

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No, not a hot flash.

The test server (read: unauthorized blog server) we use at work had a bit of a meltdown this morning. It seems that it’s fallen prey to a common affliction for this particular Dell configuration. This morning I noticed that it wasn’t running; when I tried to start it up it told me that the previous shutdown had been because of a “thermal event.” I’ve been around computers for a while, but that one was new to me. Anyway, as that link points out, it’s a faulty motherboard capacitor problem, not a problem with the hard drive as I thought initially, so there’s not much to be done about it. Luckily a replacement was already on the way.

.:.

Check out preview.local.live.com (in IE); it looks pretty but doesn’t seem to serve any functional purpose. Like Paris Hilton or my appendix.

Actually, come to that, both of those things are pretty fucking ugly.