The Daily Diversion Archive For July, 2001

Saturday August 25, 2001

Not a lot to say today.

Friday August 24, 2001

From Saturday August 25 to Tuesday September 2 I'll not be posting. I'm taking a week and change off. Since we've decided to move (as in move house, demenager, or whatever), we're going to be working like dogs to get the house ship-shape to show. We're also going to be packing like madmen to get the clutter down to a manageable level. Every house we've gone to see has been spic and span right down to the baseboards. No dust. Anywhere. Personally, I think we're the dustiest family since the dust bowl years in the '30s. From what our house looks like, I swear it's true.

The real reason, of course, is that we both put in long hours at work and we have a dog that sheds a whole dog every week. Before Brutus, we would go through a vacuum bag every couple of months. Since Brutus, it's about once every time we turn the vacuum on. Incredible.

I've sold the bike in exchange for handyman work, so the Kawasaki 440 is officially off the market. It's nice to be able to barter when you haven't much money. It'll be nice to not have to move it when we move the rest of our stuff. Speaking of the rest of our stuff, I'm getting rid of a pair of Suzuki GS850G bikes. One's an '81 and the other's a '79. They're near basket cases, but you should be able to put a decent runner together out of both. They're both shafties and both have titles. No reasonable offer will be refused. I'll get back to you after Labor Day if I'm interested in your offer.

I also have a largish passive solar panel that used to be on the roof of our house. It hasn't been hooked up for about 4 years, but the unit and it's roof enclosure are still serviceable. I think. It's been on our garage roof for about 3 years. I meant to hook it up to heat the garage, but I just didn't do it, and now I'm not going to do it. By passive solar, I mean that it's a large metal enclosure that you push air through and it heats up. There's no electricity being generated, nor are there any other controls. Just hook up a duct from one room or area, put a fan in the line some where, and hook the other duct up somewhere you'd like heat. Turn on the fan on a sunny day and you'll get warm air. At least in theory. As it's been sitting outside unhooked for a long time, I can't guarantee that a pack of wild mice or squirrels haven't taken up residence in it. If you're interested in having a look at it, send me an email. I'll get back to you after Labor Day. You'll have to come pick it up as the idea is to reduce the number of problems I'm dealing with before we move.

If anyone is interested in a rose-colored tub, I have one boxed in the basement. It came with the house. I think it's a right-hand drain, but since it's sealed in a box, I couldn't tell you for sure. I think that's what it says on the box. Once again, send me an email if you're interested, and I'll get back to you after Labor Day.

I've also managed to find in my dejunking a bunch of stuff from my high school days. Stillwater High, class of 1985. It's been a long time. Most of these items were things from the time period from my senior year through the first couple of years out of high school. There were a bunch of touristy stuff from my trip to DC in '87, a bunch of things like my PSAT, ASVAB and SAT scores (behold, the boy genius...), and a bunch of other things pertaining to my dabbling in running sound and recording sound for bands with my pals Nick, and Barry. There were speaker designs, Thiele specs for drivers, frequency response curves for cassette decks, old equipment manuals and various HiFi leaflets. I even found the manual for my old Harman Kardon HK330i receiver. Neat. I still have the sales slip from Schaak Electronics. What for I'll never know.

I also came face to face with my models. My plastic model cars I put together during high school. Yes, I was a geek back then as well. I found a '66 Impala kit that was unopened. I know why, too. It was molded in red plastic. How the hell was I supposed to paint that?!? The put-together ones I found were a '66 Plymouth Fury III, a Chevelle (probably '69) and a '65 El Camino. All three were pretty crudely finished, and all three were damaged beyond any reasonable means of repair. I didn't want to toss them, but what was I going to do with them? It will probably be years before I see them again as I was just going to pack them away in a box to be gone through the next time we move. There was no real reason to keep them, yet to throw them away really tore the guts out of me. They were serving no real purpose except taking up space, yet I could hardly bear to throw them out. What the hell his wrong with me? I ended up tossing them in the bin. Well, toss is such a harsh word. Truth be told, I lowered them to the bottom by hand and set them on a soft rag. They were treated with respect, just like a dead pet. These were bookmarks from my youth, and I gave them up with great reluctance. Broken, yes, but still meaningful far beyond their physical form.

As I stood up from finally letting them go, A wave of regret an guilt washed over me. I felt myself reaching down into the bin for them. As my hand descended into the bin, I fought with myself saying that these were broken models that needed to be tossed. I countered myself saying that I gave these objects their final form and adornments and, therefore, they're my artifacts--part of me. I'm throwing myself out. The battle raged as I reached the models. Finally, after waiting there a few breaths, I covered them with a piece of paper as if to make them comfortable on their way to their destination. It was a bargain I came up with in my head. I slowly stood up. I turned my back and went back to sorting through my stuff.

If this was the toughest thing I do in our upcoming move, I will truly be thankful. You've no idea.

Or maybe you do.

Tuesday August 20, 2001

I went to the drive-in with my wife on Saturday night. The drive-in is usually good for some fun people-watching and bad movie viewing. My wife and I are big Jackie Chan fans, and since one of our local drive-ins was showing Rush Hour 2, we decided that it was time to go.

Drive-in movies are odd things. First, if you go during the late part of June and stay for all three flicks (on weekends this particular place shows a triple feature), you will see the dawn. I guarantee it. Earlier in the spring and later in the summer (like now) it's far easier to see more than just one movie and be home at a somewhat reasonable hour. We saw Rush Hour 2 and Jurassic Park 3 (I think it's 3). Both were perfect drive-in fare: Loud, action-packed and fun. Rush Hour 2 was very much like the first one. Pretty much a steady stream of ass-kicking. The stunts were cool and pretty much on line with the rest of Chan's flicks. Chris Tucker is his abrasive self, but the two of them seem to have some kind of chemistry as buddies in a buddy flick. They couldn't be more opposites, but they both seem to be making big efforts not to suck in the other's area of expertise.

Nobody would mistake Chris Tucker for Jackie Chan, but he held his own in the fight scenes. His awkwardness really played in his physical humor, and he took his punches well. Chan is limited by his English skills, but he practices his lines (it shows--he's getting much more easy with his lines) and it really pays off. He also plays the fact that he's not a native English speaker into yet another comedic angle.

Plot wise, the movie was thin, but we weren't expecting Kubrick here. There wasn't too much character development, but that's fine in a movie such as this. If you want more along these lines, see the first movie. The movie hung together pretty well and was just what the doctor ordered for a drive-in.

Jurassic Park 3 was another run-from-the-monster movie from the franchise. It didn't suck, however, it did suffer from the reverse-empathy problem I often find in these flicks. You came to see people get gobbled, but the right people never get gobbled. Tia Carrere's plays a woman who, by the end of the flick, you just want dead. Her yelling betrays the location of the party too many times, she's the last in the line of fleeing meat bags almost every time and you wonder just how they manage to escape as many times as they do. William H. Macy's character is quite good and he pulls it off very well. You just know when he's forced to battle the big lizard, he's gonna win because he had a new skill he acquired before the incident that started the film started. Characters with new skills always survive. Characters with old skills (Shelley Winter's character in the Poseidon Adventure) always die. The rest of the cast from the precocious boy survivor to the Indy Jones anthropologist, to the misguided college kid were pretty much cardboard cutouts. You don't care if they get eaten. Oh, and yes, there was a black guy that got eaten early in the picture.

Man, if I was black and found myself in a thriller or horror movie, I'd just start preparing to die.

Monday August 20, 2001

We went house hunting Sunday, and learned a lot. We learned that we need to find a realtor. Most of the really desirable properties we looked at had sold before their open houses. We learned that we need to get our act together before we get serious about tendering offers. Most importantly, we learned what we need to do at our house to get it ready to sell.

Boy, do we have work to do.

There was a real sense of foreboding to this. I'm not much for home improvement projects--having lived in one throughout my childhood. We're going to have to hire some contractors to do a lot of the work we need to have done. That means spending money we really don't have. It's funny, but we really are going to have to spend money to make money. We're really going to have to get busy on these projects to get this place ship shape. That means not doing much else. I'll be concentrating on selling off my sellable bikes and getting the house done for the next couple of months. If you're a regular reader, check me about once a week for a while. I'll try to post stuff fairly regularly, but there probably won't be a lot of stuff during the week. Sorry, but this is the way it must be.

Stay cool everyone.

Wednesday August 15, 2001

And here I thought we were pariahs.

All of you who have been reading my rants here for the past year and change have probably noticed a few common threads running through my rants. I don't like it when I don't feel well. I don't like it when I feel like other folks aren't playing by the rules. I don't like credit card companies. These are rational dislikes and I'm OK with them. However, I do bubble over with rage a bit too often.

We've thought this out and we've decided that we're going to be moving. I love our house. It's beautiful. However, my neighbors drive me fucking nuts. I just love it when an "inner-city youth" on foot deliberately slows his/her walking speed down when crossing the street in front of me when I'm driving down the street in my car. Passive aggression. It wouldn't be worth killing this idiot, as I'd lose everything even though this moron would have richly deserved to feel my Fury (actually, my pickup truck) caress his/her body with chrome. Mmmm. Flying idiot. Running idiot down would make me feel good and would be the right thing to do if common sense were the law of the land (and I was judge, jury and executioner), but I'd probably feel guilty about it later, and I really don't look good in front of TV cameras.

I digress...

We went to someone who helped us decipher our credit report and found that we are good little consumers who pay their bills on time. We found out that we could get decent terms and that would help us pull the ejection seat on our neighborhood.

I really hate to do this, as we're very well set up here. However, the constant parade of boom cars and the swarms of unsupervised children are getting to be too much to bear.

We're not leaving right away, but we might. It all depends on where our priorities are. We need to get our act together and find out what needs to be done, where we may want to live, how much we want to spend and how much junk we'll need to throw out before our household is movable. If I gave odds, I'd say there is a nearly 100% chance we'll be gone in 12 months. I think there's a 75% chance we'll be gone before next May and a 50% chance we'll be gone before Christmas.

In the meantime, we think.

Or perhaps we should chuck the whole idea and go sign up for "Camp Jeep." Here's another silly ad campaign. Jeep is trying to reclaim a rough and ready image for themselves. They've redesigned their SUV thing and now they want to blow the trumpet a bit to tell everyone that wanted to buy an new Jeep that it's still OK to do so. They're still Jeeps. They just go to camp, now.

Barf.

Tuesday August 14, 2001

DEVO has a tune called Love Without Anger and there's a great line in it. It goes, "He was young and in love, And he just couldn't see, and it compelled him to ask, "Are you kidding me? You must be kidding me."...

I've used "Are you kidding me? You must be kidding me." in several situations. There's the tragic hotel in Pennsylvania that I just couldn't believe when I saw it. There was an early crush who said, "If you don't know what's wrong, I'm not going to tell you!" No kidding. She really said that. There was the time I dropped my motorcycle on someone's car in a parking lot. And although I didn't say it out loud, I sure was thinking it when at 29 years of age, I found out my father wasn't my biological father.

Anyway, there I was, watching some TV this evening, trying to unwind from my vacation and a tough day at work. A commercial came on. It was from The Olive Garden. It was trying to entice me into snapping into some kind of overjoyed zombie state and drive immediately to one of their numerous and oh so convenient stores to try out a dish called "Chicken con Broccoli."

Chicken con Broccoli

Are you kidding me?

You must be kidding me.

I'm laughing so hard right now, I can hardly type. Tears are running down my face and I'm having a hard time seeing the screen.

Chicken con Broccoli

Who writes this shit? It's hard to put my finger on exactly what's wrong with this description of this dish because there's so much wrong with it. This is just wrong. It's tripe. Well, actually it's chicken and broccoli. The Olive Garden (TOG) is the sort of place that people go when they want "good" Italian food that's not too "Italian." It's bland enough to not be offensive to anyone's palate except someone who was expecting their food to taste like something. I've eaten there several times and I came to realize that one of our local restaurants, The Modern, had infinitely better food for just a bit more money. We haven't been back to TOG since, except for meeting other people.

TOG is "Italian" food for people who've never eaten in a real "Italian" restaurant. TOG knows this and tries to mold their image through their insipid ads. Their Italian family ads are offensive. Their slogan is, "When you're here, you're family." If this were really true, they would booze me up and then call a cab while covering the check and flipping me the cab fare in cash.

The only people I know who willingly go to TOG are people who are hooked on their never-ending salad and bread sticks. That TOG is pushing a specific entree is absurd. Nobody I know goes there for a specific entree. They're a corporation. If you have a favorite dish, they'll be discontinuing it within a few months when another, new fad in "Italian" food comes along. TOG is driven by market research to appeal to the lowest common denominator, not to the discerning restaurateur, nor to someone who goes there for Chicken con Broccoli because it's his/her favorite dish.

Chicken con Broccoli is an insult to most peoples' intelligence. Most folks realize that Italian restaurants generally call their dishes by their Italian names. I think most folks realize that "Chicken" is not the Italian word for chicken. Furthermore, I think that the Italian word for chicken, "pollo," is recognizable to about 90% of the population due to the popularity of Mexican restaurants.

Obviously, the word "con" is recognizable enough to include in this dish's moniker. Con gives just a titch of "Italian" authenticity to their chicken breast, broccoli and MSG sauce entree. I'd also say that it's the least recognizable word of the three, but it's in a position to suggest the word "with" or even "and." Either way it works.

The last word, "Broccoli" is patently ridiculous. The Italian word for broccoli is broculi. Boy, that's quite a stretch. I don't think I could have translated Pollo con Broculi to Chicken with Broccoli. Sheesh, those TOG folks must really know what they're doing. I'm putting my shoes on right now to head on down to TOG for a big plate of Chicken con Broccoli. With a name like that, you know it has to be good. Besides, they're family. With that in mind, I think I'll hit up the manager for $30.00 for some more RAM for my PC. He's/She's family and he/she should know I'm good for it.

Monday August 14, 2001

I've had two people come and look at the Kawasaki I have for sale. The first guy didn't seem like he was in a buying mood. The second guy lowballed me something fierce. I'm going to have to counter-offer because I think I could get much more for it. Anyway, I should have it sold soon. Good.

My old pal Dave turned me on to a cool website at the party we were at this weekend. Another site that asks the question, "Are you a serial killer?" is good for a laugh. Your intrepid author scored a 7. Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you...

The party I went to this weekend was great. I didn't drink nearly as many Gin and Tonics as I hoped I would, but the weekend's alcohol intake was strongly attenuated by the fact my head felt like it was going to explode. I have a sinus infection again. This is the third year in a row I've gotten sick at this party and I can only conclude that I'm allergic to something in the lake. It gives me great comfort to know that I'm not going to feel like this for the next year's party. That's good.

I saw a bunch of people at that party that I hadn't seen in quite a while. The aforementioned Dave is doing pretty much the same and was great to talk to. Talking to him made me want to go listen to tons of tunes and do cool things on my computer. The best thing about Dave is that he always has something interesting to say about just about anything. Smart folks are like that.

I'd like to thank everyone who put up with me this weekend, including our hosts, Karah and Jason, my wife Sarah, and everyone who was at the party. I'd also like to say that it was great talking to Dave, Pat, Katie, Mike and Sonja. Stay cool. Congratulations also go to Angela.

My lunch hour is drawing to a close so I gotta get.

We went away for a weekend and had a blast. Unfortunately for me I did what I usually do when I go on a vacation. I got sick. Boo hoo hoo for me, but it really is tiring to almost know I'm gonna be sick as a dog upon my return from just about anywhere. Blech.

I'll be back with some good stuff from the weekend as soon as I feel better.

Thursday August 9, 2001

We went to one of the local malls the other night to escape the heat. My wife had some shopping to do, so once we got inside, we agreed to meet back at our entrance point in about 90 minutes.

It had been a long time since I'd been in a mall. I guess one could argue that downtown Minneapolis is one big mall with skyways connecting the blocks together, but it doesn't have the cohesion of a "real" mall. A mall nestled inside a sea of blacktop for cars to park on. People in downtown's skyways during the day are almost always taking a break from work. You get a very diverse mix of people downtown and almost all are dressed in business clothes. The suburban mall we went to was a bit different.

The first thing I noticed is that it's apparently all the rage to spray-paint your top on if you're a woman. I use the term woman here as a catch-all term that encompasses just about any female able to get to the mall via her own conveyance. The next thing I noticed upon looking at the list of shops in the mall, was there were exactly 2 shops I had any interest in whatsoever: Radio Shack and B. Dalton's. Just about every other shop was some specialty accessory shop, women's' clothier, or trendy knick-knack shop. I did not want to buy a watch, sunglasses, a cell phone or women's clothing. Because of this, about 90% of the shops in this mall held no interest for me. I ended up kicking around in the Radio Shack and the B. Dalton's for a while. I did pop into one of the watch shops and was unmoved by the trendy, pricey and probably flimsy watches. The knife shop was closed for a 15 minute break, the sunglass center was full of loud noise and people looking to add their 5th pair of sunglasses to their wardrobe.

I kinda felt like I was on a different planet. Perhaps I'm behind the times. I didn't notice any stereo shops. The record store wanted $18.00 for a CD, There were a couple of chain stores, but I just didn't want to go looking inside for things I didn't need.

Shopping is a real drag when you don't want anything.

Tuesday August 7, 2001

How much cocaine was consumed during the many taping sessions of The Match Game? My guess is quite a lot. I figure about a ton of snow disappeared during the show's 6 year run. The contestants always seem rather lost--as if they don't get the joke. I've watched a ton of this show on cable and it always seems that the levity on the show is a bit forced. Most of the contestants are assigned the role of the straight man and the rest of the cast cuts up like they're Henny Youngman. True, the job of the stars is to be entertaining, but their behavior during the show reminds me of a bunch of people passing around a joint.

I've decided that I'm boring. I've read through a bunch of my archived rants and for the most part, I'm full of angst, I'm not funny and I'm preoccupied with computers. I must be a real drag at parties.

"Oh shit, here comes that guy Tim." "Man, I hope doesn't start talking about his web server." "Yeah, MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over)."

"Hey fellas, boy am I getting a ton of error messages in my error log from servers infected with the code red virus..." drones Tim ad infinitum.

OK, I'm dull. The thing is, I don't know of too many people who are doing what I'm doing. Most folks who do this stuff are either way creative, deeply disturbed web designers, or performers. I'm just a guy who digs computers and motorcycles. The design of this joint should tell you that I'm not making tons of cash designing for a living. I'm certainly not blessed with tons of time to create great content, and I'm really just trying not to suck here.

When I started this whole thing, it was a way to get back into writing. I'd been out of school for quite some time and I felt my writing skills deteriorating. I didn't want my writing to go the same way my French has, and I figured this was a way to make learning about web stuff fun. It's true that there's a synergy here in the opposite way that drinking beer and riding a motorcycle work for me. I love beer. I love motorcycles. Combine the two and neither is any fun. I love computers, I love to write and I love to learn stuff. Putting up a web site is the best of all possible worlds.

At least it is for me.

The problem is when I want to write, but I can't think of anything to write about. The simplest thing is to write about what's bugging me at the present moment (heat, boom cars, rap music, other peoples' kids), but that's getting old. It's really easy, but so is shooting your mouth off after a couple of beers. It takes quality time to sit and think to grind out something that's worth reading. I just don't have much time or attention span to do a whole lot of that. Which makes writing in this style of journal a lot like going to the gym and doing one exercise every day because you don't like to do the others. There goes Tim with huge arm muscles because he likes to work out on the bench. Too bad he can't run 100yds without hurting himself because he never works his legs. So here I sit in the living room with the laptop updating the site (for that is what I'm doing) and waiting for the time to go to bed.

Boy, am I pathetic.

Self-loathing aside, I think I'll be taking some time off in the coming weeks. I will try to update as often as I can, but I think I'll either just post a few lines with some links (blog-style), or if I've been particularly creative, I'll post the good stuff. Vacation is coming up soon and I may have some guest writers in as well. I know Nick will enjoy the Bully Pulpit in my absence.

Monday August 6, 2001

It's hot, but I'm so sick of the heat, I'm not even going to mention it. Oops. Damn.

For all the kvetching I've done in forums away from this site about the coming Windows XP, I just had to have a sneak peek at it. I've installed it on a couple of machines and I have this to say about the first beta release: It's cool. I wouldn't recommend it for the way legacy machines I have laying around. Even though the minimum requirements are 233MHz with 64Mb of RAM, they recommend 300MHz with 128Mb RAM. I haven't stuck it on the minimum required machine (sometime this week I will), however I have stuck it on a PII400 and a PIII800. The verdict: The faster machine was much better all around, but the slower machine with 128Mb RAM did do fairly well. I didn't notice a ton of disk cache hits, nor were the apps particularly slow. Naturally, the faster machine was far smoother.

Smoother is the operative word here. XP has tons of "improvements" to the user interface. There is tons more fading, scrolling and generally slick stuff going on in the UI, and this stuff just sucks up the processing power. The machine I did the install on had on-board video so I'm sure the quality of the interface suffered a bit. However, it didn't seem blocky, nor choppy. Smoooth.

I didn't get to use it a ton, but the rest of the user experience was pretty remote. With Windows NT and, to a certain extent, Windows 95, it feels as though you're not far away from the "action." The command line is near enough to grab like a can of brew in the beer fridge. 95 runs on top of it, and NT makes peace with it and both feel kinda raw and comfortable to the "Power User"/adminhead like me. Things began to change somewhat in 98/ME. The user interface got much more slick and the machine's settings and control panel were a bit farther away. Windows 2000 made things even more slick with a ton of improvements and stability that was needed. For the hands-on user, 2000 made the machine feel more like an appliance--something to use and not fiddle with. You don't hear too many people souping up their toaster, do you? In the same vein, I feel that it's harder to tweak with 2000 than it is with M$ previous OSes.

Windows XP just seems to embrace and extend this trend. The UI is very hands off and shiny and the control panel controls are at least one step further buried in sub folders. That M$ has chosen to make their flagship convergence product more user-friendly, more auto-configuring and less tweakable shouldn't surprise. I believe that their goal is to make the whole .NET thing the way we all compute. To take all the stuff that's inside the PC and move it to the outside of the PC (where it can be billed for by usage) isn't something a regular user is going to tolerate. Making the machine as user-friendly as possible is just one way to soften this blow.

The other way is in the way M$ bundles apps in with the OS. Yes, they got in deep shit doing this with the web browser, but they haven't yet been explicitly prohibited from doing it with the browser and they're now extending their bundled apps to include a media player, a cd burner instant messaging and a whole bunch of other services.

I'm tired of being asked to set up a hotmail account whenever I set up a machine, yet the opportunity is there. Netscape does it as well, but the kick is that Netscape isn't bundled with XP. IE6 is. Through the combined services of Passport/Hailstorm/Hotmail/IM M$ wants to be your online interface service provider. Just about anything you can do on the web, you can do with a M$ product. This is a plus for the average user, but it's an overall minus for competition, innovation and freedom. I use IM, Outlook, IE, and Hotmail not because they're the best, but because they were available and free. If I made shitloads of money, I'd use Opera for a web browser, run a different mail client, probably do without Hotmail and it's nearly continuous spam, and avoid like the plague all the Hailstorm security features. I don't trust M$. That's the long and short of it. However, since all that stuff is free and since it all works together, it's really hard to not use it. M$ knows this, likes this, has purposefully worked towards this as a goal, and if they didn't have the opportunity to do this, perhaps other stuff would have come along by now that was better.

Right now, there is an insane amount of processing power on your desktop right now. In the average PC, there's probably more computing power than existed in the whole world prior to 1970. Most of that power is wasted--either in idle cycles, or in not using the PC to it's fullest potential. M$, with XP and Intel are going to drive the next wave of computer sales (you need more processing power than your Pentium Classic to run this OS), but where from there? It's gotten to the point now that you can pick up a Gigahertz machine without a monitor for less than $500.00. If M$ has it's way, .NET is going to turn our need for bigtime power on the desktop to a bigtime need for broadband connectivity. If I were Intel, I might start developing chips for broadband connectivity equipment or for dumb terminal/thin client applications. It's going to be very hard to convince Joe Average that he needs a new machine (again) because he/she has bought three new machines in the past 10 years.

An upgrade in I/O would be nice, but I don't see that happening cheaply soon. What I do see is the demand for broadband brought on by new OSes like XP go right through the roof. I also see M$ and others trying to phase out the traditional PC and replacing it with something else. Thin clients make sense at work, but they aren't practical at home. Internet appliances sucked on modems and weren't that much better on a broadband connection. Neither of these machines had the sex appeal/fun factor needed to drive huge sales. There is one thing that does, though. Game systems. Bet the farm that M$'s upcoming Xbox will not only have the ability to be connected to the internet, but have some way to interface with it as well. I bet all these new game boxes have USB ports. I bet they all have the ability to surf the internet, what a perfect way to access .NET services on the internet. A proprietary box with a browser cartridge/CDROM and no or not much permanent storage. Could this be a better setup for M$? Better yet, companies who are developing cartridges/games for these new boxes have to pay for a license to use the boxes from the manufacture. Revenue streamola. I have to tip my virtual hat to M$ for taking advantage of this and steering the whole of the internet into a form factor that they can control.

It's good business, but perhaps here is where they'll have to play nice. Sure, they will try to price the competition out of the market, bundle their stuff with their box and pull all the other crap they did in the past, but now they've got the money to buy and pay for all the political help they're going to need to get this through. I figure that during the next 4 years or so they will have to make their move.

So, back to XP. Is it cool? Yep. Does it do my laundry? Nope. Will it compel everyone and their dog to buy a new box? Nope. It will set the table for computer "consumers" to be herded into the whole .NET scheme. Other folks will probably either head for Mac, Linux or perhaps something else.

Thursday August 2, 2001

Let's see...

Generic excuses for being a slacker...

Tired? Nope. Used that one recently.

Heat? Nope. Used that one all last month.

Guests? Hmmm. Haven't used that one in a while.

Ah. Here we go. Neighborhood shootings. That's good. That'll do.

Sorry folks for not writing for a while. There's been a shooting about a block-and-a-half away. No, I didn't get hurt. No, I wasn't involved. Yes, it pissed me off.

Actually, all of the above excuses apply. We even have a sick dog so we're constantly fluttering about trying to make him as comfortable as possible. We're driving ourselves nuts in the process, too. Fun.

I promise, something decent for next week. Either that or I'm going to take a week off.