Bernie fall down, go boom.

Today was a very interesting day. At approximately 2:30am this morning, Asha, our older girl cat was up to no good, trying to peer out the blinds in our room. This usually wakes me up, and today was no exception. I managed to scare her away, and then proceeded to get up and go to the bathroom. In the bathroom, taking a leak, my heart started pounding really really hard. I was dead tired, but I just remember my heart pounding away in my chest, like I'd just run a mile in 5 minutes (This is impossible for me, and my heart would probably explode. But, I digress...). The next thing I know, I'm laying in the tub, head against the wall, ass in the tub, and legs hanging out towards the toilet. I'd apparently blacked out, and fallen straight backwards. Nicole's over me yelling, "Oh my God, Bernie... Oh my God!" And I said something to Nicole like, "I'm just laying down..." and, "I'm really tired..." Really, I was. I probably would have just slept in the tub for a couple hours. Sad thing is, once I went back to bed, I couldn't sleep. Neither could Nicole.

Long story short, I'm going in for a physical on March 18th. I hope this isn't a sign of diabetes. Needless to say, I did a little extra working out at the gym tonight. No more slacking off from Atkins, either. Time to buckle down and start burning some fat away. Bye bye sugar. I'll miss you :-(

The Qwest is soon to end...

Bye bye landline, how we won't miss you...

Now that the TiVo has been converted over to using broadband for updates, our phone line is going away... on Friday. Woo hoo! The TiVo's been working pretty well since the conversion, and this weekend I managed to enable serial control of my Motorola DCT-2000 cable box. Bye bye, IR blaster, too!

Other than playing around with the TiVo, not a whole lot else has been happening around here. It's been a little boring, to tell the truth. There aren't anymore three-day weekends until Memorial Day. I might need to take a personal day between now and then. Wee...

I just got done reading this interesting story about what the last moments of the Columbia might have been like. Somewhat chilling stuff.

Well, off to go finish working my way thru my NetNewsWire queue.

Currently playing on my iMac:

More Than Words by Extreme

More fun with the TiVo

Today was a productive day. I'm am pleased with what I have accomplished.

I borrowed a PC from work yesterday so that I could take the A drive out of my TiVo and enable telnet and ftp access to it. By following these handy instructions, I managed to get both telnet and ftp access going within an hour. After that, I installed Tivo Web and obtained the ability to see a whole bunch of information from a Webserver running directly on the TiVo.

But, I was not about to stop there. Last week, I saw this and decided I'd figure out how to get programs off of the TiVo. I followed the instructions, and soon was uploading a file off of the TiVo and onto my iMac. And wouldn't ya know it, VideoLAN plays those MPEG-2 files very well. But, in my travels looking for TiVo software, I found an even better program for getting video off of the TiVo. And now, I'm saving myself quite a bit of time.

Even still, I wanted to take that video, and compress it down into something a little bit easier to distribute. No... I'm not going to start distributing South Park again, but I did want to know the general process of how things work on OS X. So, after some more searching, I found that I'll use bbdemux to split the MPEG-2 audio and video streams apart, DiVa to convert the video stream to Quicktime, and Mad to convert the audio stream to AIFF. After that, I use Quicktime Pro to join the audio and video together, and sync-hole to fix any audio sync problems. After that, it's a matter of exporting the final product into a smaller file. I like MPEG-4 so far, because it offers a really decent picture, sound, and framerate. And, it's a format that can be shared across platforms pretty well.

The only TiVo hacking project I'd like to complete is adding another 80GB of hard drive space. Soon.... very soon.

Ugh. American TV at its best...

Alright, so it's popular TV, and maybe a bit trashy, but I like American Idol. Last season's competition was pretty damn good, with some great singers. This year's been the same, although I'd say the singers are far better this year. But, from the boneheads at 19 TV Ltd (producers of the show) have banished Frenchie Davis from the show for working for an adult web site four years ago. Fucking ridiculous. This woman was probably one of the strongest singers on the show, and because she did this so she could stay in school, they fire her. Fucking ridiculous. I might stop watching American Idol altogether as a result of this. I doubt many others will follow suit, though. They might wonder months from now what ever happened to Frenchie, but the show will go on. How sad.

Boo ya, Grandma, boo ya.

Ya know that feeling of euphoria and adrenalin you feel in your chest when you complete a task that you were really worried about? I have it right now. I just got done installing a TurboNet adapter in my Philips 20hr. TiVo. It went very very well, and my test call succeeded the first time through. Rad.

By far, the hardest part was getting the cover off the TiVo. It's really seated on there well, but I guess that's just one way to keep people from screwing around with their TiVos. I guess I can understand that. It's a little funky having an Ethernet cable hanging out the back of the TiVo, but hell, it works. I'll give this about a week to burn in, and then I'll start making preparations to get rid of our phone line. There won't be any use for it anymore.

Now that I've opened up the TiVo, I know I'm going to upgrade the hard drive, sooner or later. After seeing this, I'm going to start archiving shows off of the TiVo. Hopefully this week will go well with the TiVo. Too bad I don't have a PC. It's going to be a little tricky to get FTP/Telnet turned without one.

Reviews of reviews of reviews of reviews, and so forth...

Nicole sent me this link. It's funny. You'll laugh, if you like seeing people rip on other people. Funny is good, especially after the crappy Friday I had at work.

We got another cat on Friday. His name's Ari. No, we did not name him after Ari Fleischer, Dubya's press secretary. I picked the name after seeing Ari Vatanen kick a little butt in this year's Dakar Rally. I'm a rally nut, what can I say? Asha's not too happy to have another cat in the house. It's going to take a while for them to get along. Ari couldn't care less that Asha's here... he's a pretty cool cat.

Currently playing on my iMac:

My Bologna by Weird Al Yankovic

Ding! Your PowerBook's done!

This story begs the question.... why would you ever put a PowerBook in the oven?!

Columbia wing damage shown very clearly in this video

Woah. Someone posted a reply to a recent Columbia discussion. Take a look at the link the user posted to. You can clearly see some damage in what looks like a wing on Columbia. Yes, it's in Spanish, and yes you have to log in, but it's very very interesting video. Muy interesante!

Update, 11:52 PST - Here's a UPI story that claims the crew was concerned about damage to the wing.

Sex, Drugs, and Webcams

A coworker of mine tipped me off to this story, which was in The Times yesterday. Looks like The Times requires a account for accessing stories after they've been archived, so that link goes to The Statesman. It appears to have a little bit more information than the original article I read. It talks about Brandon Vedas, aka “ripper”, who ended his life online after overdosing in front of a Webcam, while other users watched.

In any case, I thought it was kind of interesting. Any chance the other Webcam watchers could be implicated in his death? The Times story said that police weren't going to press charges. I'm on the fence about what they should or shouldn't do.

What a sad weekend.

I just got done reading this article about a bunch of the Columbia articles and discussion across the Net right now. I stopped to view the comparison of cartoons between major publications. I had to take pause at them, as some of them were incredibly moving.

I awoke at about 10:30am Saturday morning, and true to form, I logged onto my computer and checked my e-mail. I saw I had two breaking news alerts from CNN, and I didn't really pay much attention to them at first, but I was shocked when I read them. I haven't vocally freaked out like that in a long time. The Columbia accident might not have the same effect on me as the Challenger accident, but its effects will haunt me for years to come. First, seeing the pictures of the Columbia, in pieces, coming down to Earth, and then learning about some of the circumstances of its disintegration. I remember wondering, and I still wonder, did the crew die quickly or did they suffer? I know that communication from the shuttle to NASA was abruptly cut off, but I can only wonder what went through the crew's minds. Did they know beforehand? Did NASA's discussion with them about the piece of foam that detached from the external fuel tank put a damper on their optimism? I hate having these morbid thoughts, but it's hard not to, in times like these.

When Challenger exploded, I read that there was a chance that the crew was alive for a while after the explosion, as the crew module stayed mostly intact, and continued to ascend into the atmosphere, until ultimately falling back to earth. There's little more than that possibility that scares me.

What's in store for the future of space travel? I don't know. I hope that NASA will continue research on shuttle replacements, giving us a more economical space plane (a TRUE space plane) that will bring space travel to more humans. I hope that we'll continue to branch out into our solar system in the coming decades, starting with some sort of permanent outpost on the moon. I hope that the remaining shuttles will continue to serve for at most for another ten years, with a capable replacement taking over duty for them. I don't see the point in building another shuttle, like we did with Endeavour.... the shuttle is far too costly for us to use to make large inroads into space.

Anyway, I'm going to try to chill a bit, and maybe not read anything else that puts morbid thoughts in my head.

iPhoto = iCrash

Okay, so Apple released iLife today. I've been looking forward to some of the features of iPhoto, as I use it a lot. It's done me pretty well for quite some time. I use iTunes every day, and it's by far one of the best MP3 players I've ever used (smart playlists rule!). I don't use iMovie because I have no DV camcorder.

Anyway....

I installed iPhoto on my PowerBook. The install went great, and iPhoto was able to convert my iPhoto v1 library over to the new iPhoto v2 format. I get home this evening and try to do the same on my iMac. The installer completes successfully, but I can't get iPhoto to launch. It starts to launch, then shows the iPhoto window, and then crashes. Every time. I tried rebooting. I tried repairing disk permissions. I even tried using the backup of my iPhoto library I had made. No luck.

My final solution was to copy over the converted iPhoto library from the PowerBook to the iMac. This library wasn't synched up entirely with the iMac, so I had to manually import three older albums from the original iPhoto library I had on the iMac. Needless to say, I wasn't happy at the hassle I had to go through.

iPhoto 2 is not much faster than iPhoto 1. I do notice it shuts down a bit quicker, but scrolling and picture saving (i.e. after you change the title of the photo) still take a while. And what's worse is that if you have a very large iTunes music database, be prepared to wait a while for the preferences window to open. Oh, and I couldn't get a slideshow to work with a song in my iTunes database. It hung with the spinning beachball of death.

God, I hope there's an iPhoto 2.0.1 update coming soon. iPhoto 2.0 is nothing but shit in my book.

And another thing, Apple - for the love of God, please work on window resizing. Jesus H. Christ!! Your users have only been bitching about this since the beginning of OS X. You'd think that by now you'd have been able to do more about it than you have! (As an aside, window resizing speed is worse for brushed metal apps. It's a tad better for normal Aqua apps.)

Rant mode is off... for now.