Shouzer

The thought seems to be that getting an iPhone is going to require camping out and standing in line.  I’ll be honest, if that’s what it takes, I’ll just get a Blackjack and be on my way.  If Apple can’t get out enough phones in the initial shipment, that’s ridiculous.  Don’t get me wrong, I want one.  I want one bad.  But I don’t feel like I should have to stand around in line with a bunch of god damn zealots.  As much as I like my MacBook Pro, I still really don’t like many of the Apple fanboys.

Got the cable phone modem at the house on Wednesday. It works really, really well and is quite a bit cheaper than going with a land line through Verizon. I still get about 6000Kbps download speed when plugged into my router, and about 2000Kbps on wireless. Jared came over yesterday. He brought his MacBook in and proceeded to test at 7500Kbps over the wireless. So it must be a problem with my pos laptop. I just updated the drivers, but to no avail.

So, we pay Insight every month for something. I’m not sure what that something is, but I know we do, because Kyle comes down to my room occasionally asking for a check. Honestly, for all I know, he’s sequestering that money for himself–I’d say I’m rather credulous when it comes to my friends. My trust is starting to wane, though.

I guess our cable TV service is decent, but honestly it’s not like I’ve ever had bad cable, so I expect it to work as it does. We get digital cable, which is to say that we get a few more channels, but we need an ugly box in our living room to view them. I guess this thing wields some occult power, as we can only watch the channels through the magic box. Perhaps there are mini Jack Hannas or Steve Irwins inside who wrestle the otherwise untamed digital signal into something our feeble TV can handle? Whatever the case, the service is thus relegated to something less than what it could be. Moreover, the “special” channels that flow through the thing can’t easily be recorded by the Media Center.

With that out of the way, I come to the crux of our (read: my) complaint against Insight. To put it bluntly, our internet service is typically pathetic and, at times, altogether useless. They claim it’s “fastester”, but unless that means something other than what it should (who the hell knows anyway?), it’s an outright lie. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had to bear 56k, but from what I recollect, it wasn’t much worse than this.

If I want to watch a clip on YouTube, the steps are typically something like this:

1. Open YouTube in Firefox
2. Wait 2-3 minutes
3. Search for video
4. Wait 2-3 minutes, AGAIN
5. Click on video
6. Go to bathroom, likely even take a shower
7. THEN, wait 15 damn minutes
8. Watch video halfway through
9. Wait another 15 god damn minutes
10. Though I’ve lost interest by this time, finish watching the video
11. Rinse
12. Repeat

I can only conjecture that somebody at Insight is using all the bandwidth to bolster his private porn collection. Or, perhaps more likely, he’s spreading his porn across the web like some kind of p2p professional. I guess in that case it could be construed as “sharing”, which intimates that at least he’s congenial. But, honestly, how much porn does this guy have to give? Naively, I guess, I thought at some point he’d grow weary of the long hours he spends staring at his porn and give it up in pursuit of something more constructive.

Well, it certainly hasn’t happened yet. This guy’s got some fortitude.

Today I’m passing out a few free links to whoever wants them.

First up is an interesting article right here about a portable generator that produces its power from waste. It really doesn’t say what type of waste it accepts, but it’s cool nonetheless. It makes me think of the “Mr. Fusion” that the Doc had on the Delorean at the end of the first Back to the Future.

Next is a bit of a strange story from /.. Found here, it’s about Gorbachev apparently asking Bill Gates to step in on the side of a headmaster being charged with piracy. Apparently, if the unlucky headmaster is convicted, he could be sent to a Siberian prison camp. It seems more than a little disproportionate.

Third on the list of links is this link to the current rankings in college basketball. SIU has managed to make it into the top 20 in the coach’s poll. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that they have all five of their starters back from last year. Still, it’s nice to see them getting some respect. Hopefully they can keep playing the way they have lately, because they did have some dumb losses early on.

Up last is something I’m pretty happy about. For those of you that don’t remember, I’ve posted more than once about my belief that the Real ID Act was a bogus piece of shit (a fact exemplified by its being attached as a rider to a supplemental spending bill for the war in Iraq). Well, you can read here about a number of states that have basically said they won’t do it. Hurray for some states standing up for their citizens when the federal government won’t.

On that note, I also read over the weekend that minimum wage is being raised by about $2. It’s about time, but apparently it took the Democrats coming into power to make something like that happen.

I suppose with my recent update about the iPhone, I should also spread the love for my future employer. As most people know, I’ve become a recent Apple fan, but that hasn’t stopped me from loving up some of the recent Microsoft products. I’ve been a huge fan of their gaming platform ever since the Xbox was released. After modding that sucker, there was simply nothing that could beat it. For the record, it wasn’t at all about the piracy capabilities–Xbox Media Center blew everything else away (I still use it to stream media from my PC to my TV), and I owned something like 29 games. I also already own 11 games for the 360 (which is, in itself, a great product).

I recently reformatted my sister’s computer with Windows Vista, which she acquired freely and legally from her school, as she’s also a CS major. So far, I love it, and I think it’s a huge step above XP. Now, I do realize there are a bunch of silly DRM restrictions, but I haven’t run into them yet, so I can’t speak about them. As a user experience, though, I’ve really enjoyed it.

So, on to the new product. During his keynote at CES, Bill Gates announced Windows Home Server (I’ll refer to it as WHS from hereon out). As far as I’m concerned (at least from what I’ve read and seen), this is a must-have product. It’s the setup I intended to give myself once I started making some real world money and had a house/apartment of my own, albeit in a roundabout fashion.

From what I understand, Microsoft intends this OS to run on a computer that you’ll literally store in your closet. It’ll be headless, which means there’s no keyboard, monitor, or mouse attached. All you’ll give it is power and ethernet. So what’s it actually do? Well, first and foremost, this is where you’ll store your media. Anybody with a 360 (admittedly not a huge crowd) should know the strength of being able to stream your entire music collection to your system while you’re playing any and every game. Imagine having all your media in one place and easily being able to stream it to all your PCs. (Sure, you can do it now, but the point is that WHS makes this easy for you and has other benefits I’ll get to).

On top of this, it keeps your data safe with RAID-like system. Microsoft says this system allows for easier addition and removal of drives, with built-in redundancy. One of the smartest ideas, to me, is that it does away with drive letters (at least as far as the user is concerned). You throw in another drive, and you didn’t add a D: drive, you’ve just given the system more space. There is no user-level concept of drive levels. I say “user-level concept”, because my understanding is that the drive letters are still there for the OS, but you’ll never know it. Want to upgrade a drive? Great, it’s basically hot-swappable, because of the way the redundancy works. Replace a 60gb drive with a 200gb drive and you’ve simply got 140gb more than before. Your redundancy will be rebuilt automatically. Brilliant, especially for a consumer product.

Another benefit is that this data will be accessible remotely. You’ll log into your server thrown a Windows Live-allocated IP (or something like that), and you’ll have instant access to everything on the WHS system. Perfect if you’re visiting family and want to share a photo from your latest vacation (and you don’t have it already loaded on your iPhone, hehe). In addition, you can then open a remote desktop to any of the PCs on your network. They’re not directly exposed to the internet that way, as WHS acts as a proxy.

Another great feature is that WHS backs up all your networked PCs once a day. This isn’t some wimpy backup of your Documents folder, but a complete system backup. How can it handle all the data? Simply, it uses intelligent backups. If you’re backing up two system, it doesn’t store two copies of identical files, just one. Great idea there. The backups also store every copy of a file you’ve had, but does it through a revision-based system (think CVS or SVN). Basically, if you’re writing a paper, you’ll be able to grab the copy of the paper from two weeks ago if you want. Why? Because instead of overwriting the original backup with the current edition, it’ll store only the changes you’ve made in (what I assume is) a DB-like format. So if you only changed a word, it only keeps track of that word. It saves space, but it’s also a much more powerful backup.

What this backup also means is that you’ve got a complete working copy of every system on your network in case something goes wrong. Your hard drive crashed? No big deal, throw a new on in there, and restore your system from the WHS backups. No need to reformat and reinstall all your programs. It just works. Nice.

The media and data sharing is available to any system on the network, be it Windows, OS X, or Linux-based. Obviously it can’t backup an entire OS X system the same way it can a Windows system, but I read that Microsoft claims it makes a great location for Apple’s upcoming Time Machine. So, in theory, it should give you the same power on a Mac, though probably not as easily. Still, the ability is there.

I’m sure there’s features I’m leaving out, but that’s all I can remember right now. All told, this early January has left me wanting quite a few new products. Who knows what they’ll be like when they’re released, but there’s a lot of potential out there.

Well, as Kyle assumed, an Apple post was bound to be coming from me. I began to love the Apple brand about a year ago, when they announced the MacBook Pros (of which I’m an owner). It’s a great product, and with the switch to Intel, I’d recommend a Mac to just about anyone.

Today, Apple unveiled the iPhone (I’d really recommend checking out some of the videos they have on the website). From everything I’ve seen and read, it looks like it’ll be my phone of choice when it is released this summer. On the front, there’s only one button. Why? Because the rest of it is a monster touchscreen. The idea is that every app you use might want a different UI, so why limit you to a set number of buttons that just take up permanent real estate?

They’ve really done some great things with the touchscreen UI, which you’d really just have to see for yourself to appreciate. If you’re looking at a picture, put two fingers on the screen and spread them apart, it zooms in; bring them closer together, and it zooms out. Let’s say you’re looking at a list of songs on it (oh, that’s right–it’s also an iPod, hehe), you just scroll your finger down the screen and it scrolls. Then tap on a song, and it’s playing. Tilt the phone horizontally while it’s playing a video, and it flips the video to play widescreen. Nice.

The phone’s OS is actually OS X (the Mac operating system), so it includes a full-features browser, mail app, and supports all kinds of widgets. It has built-in support for Google search, Google Maps, Yahoo! mail, and more. During his keynote as Macworld, Steve Jobs demoed the use of Google Maps, and it was very impressive. He searched for a Starbucks in his area, clicked on it, and it began to dial the specific location. It also has built-in WiFi, so that these features are much faster when you’re around an open network. That’s a great idea, IMO.

Now as excited as I am about the phone, it does have a few issues. First, it’s Cingular only. Boo. I’ll be willing to make the switch, I’m sure, but still… Secondly, Time reported that although the device has Bluetooth and WiFi, you can’t sync it wirelessly with a computer. That’s ridiculous. The ability to sync your phone through a Bluetooth connection is a standard features nowadays. As of yet, there’s also no mention of games. My personal hunch is that they’ll be there. If it’s running OS X, there’s no reason they couldn’t be. Still, it leaves a bit to be desired when they don’t explicitly mention it.

Finally, it is rather pricey. For 4gb, it’s $499. For 8gb, it’s $599. That’s with a two year contract. Yikes. On the other hand, it’s basically a Nano and a smartphone in one. A nano will run you $200 for 4gb, and right now Verizon is telling me a Treo 700w will cost you a clean $400 with a 2-year contract. The math is pretty simple. That doesn’t even take into account that the technology difference between a Treo and the iPhone’s touchscreen.

[Update:] I figured I’d throw in a link right here to the Time article I got a bit of my info from.

We’re heading up to North Dakota today to visit some family over Christmas.  It’s pretty long drive, but it’s always nice to see everybody, so it’s really no big deal.  The major downside to is pretty much the difference in weather between here and there.  Sure it’s cold here, but it’s a hell of a lot colder up in North Dakota.

When I think about it, it’s really amazing what technology has done for us.  Seriously, before everybody had cars, I really doubt anybody would have been planning week-long trips to somewhere that’s like 1000 miles away, especially in the middle of winter.  For the most part, too, you don’t even have to worry about the cold when you’re in the car, because you should have working heat.  It’s great.

Good word, newsages. I found three stories this morning on /. that I happened to like. The first, right here, is about how the US is actually going to begin pulling troops out of Iraq. That’s great news, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know what sort of ramifications it’ll have on the new government there, but it’s time for us to quit wasting American lives on it.

The next story, located here, is a bit more recently relevant to me. On the way back home from the cruise, American Airlines tore up one of our bags. The pulling handle was actually broken in half and the metal on it was bent up all crazy. They claim they don’t cover it, because it’s an “external attachment”, but that’s fucking bullshit. Those handles retract, and we sure as shit didn’t leave it out when we gave it to them. So somebody took it out and then fucked it up.

Anyway, the story is about the Sydney Airport using RFID tags to better track their bags. The part that caught my attention was this sentence: “Industry experts say that baggage mishandling costs the industry globally $US1.7 billion each year”. Oh boo-hoo. If the god damn airlines were just more careful with that shit, it wouldn’t happen. Morons.

The third and final story, which can be found here, is apparently about the Antikythera. It’s an analog computer that was developed almost 2000 years ago to map the positions of the sun and moon, and to map the lunar phases. It’s pretty cool, when you get right down to it.

iTunes 7 is seriously one of the biggest piles of shit I’ve ever used in my life.  I decided to switch from Winamp to iTunes recently, because 7 had just come out and it’s what I use on my Mac (as expected).  Unfortunately, I made the switch before I found out how horrible it is.  It likes to eat my RAM (219 mb right now).  When a new song starts, it pegs my CPU for about 5-10 seconds, so my computer is about worthless for that period.  Seriously, wtf is that?

IE7 is a masterpiece.

Well, I’m sitting in the Champaign airport right now, as my flight has been delayed for a while. Apparently there were strong winds and ice all day in Chicago, and it’s slowing everything down. I figured it was about time to give an update.

As I mentioned a couple (few?) weeks ago, this semester has been crazy for me. I’ve had interviews like you wouldn’t believe, and a lot of that has meant me having to fly out of the state for a few days at a time. The interviews themselves are bad enough, but then I’ve got homework I need to catch up and exams I need to study for. It’s been hectic, to say the least.

This should more or less be the final interview trip I go on, though. After that, my schedule actually lightens up quite a bit. Hopefully once that happens I should be able to get back in the swing of posting.

So, what’s new? Well, not too much really. School is school, and work is work. I have recently switched over to using Google Reader for my RSS love and to Google Calendar for my schedule info. The reader just got a big upgrade a few days ago, and it flies like a native app now. I liked it when it originally came out, but it was always too slow for me to give it any real use. When the calendar went public over the summer, it didn’t have support for Safari, and that kept me away from it. They’ve since added that support, and it’s worth checking it out if you have any interest in a calendar app.

That’s it for now.

There is a new fully electric sports car created by a company in Silicon Valley.  Here’s a story.  I’m not a huge fan of electric-only vehicles because the batteries have not been good enough up to this point to make them viable.  However, high capacity Lithium Ion batteries are starting to find use in the automotive sector.  We actually tried to get one for the car we built.  I could see electric only vehicles finding a place in the auto market, especially as a commuter vehicle.  Having an insanely quick sports car that was all electric like this one would just be awesome.

This was passed along to me by Jordy after I’d seen a similar, shorter version posted on /..  It’s pretty damn funny…and pretty damn sad.

The ChallengeX competition finished up last Thursday. We ended up getting 10th overall which I was pretty happy with considering we didn’t have our first test until 3am the night before it shipped. We had a few little Dur-Dee-Dur’s that cost us some pretty big points as well, but I really didn’t care how well we finished. The biggest mistake was when someone forgot to put the fuse back in for the engine cooling fan which resulted in our engine overheating in two of the major events. We also had some major problems with our transmission leaking and breaking down. On the up side though, we did well enough that GM is going to give us a new transmission-electric motor combo so we shouldn’t have those problems next year. The thing they are giving us is pretty sweet. It has two electric motors and a transmission to tie them together with the engine. Plus, it has a 2 speed transmission in it as well, so it sort of has 2 transmissions. It’s kind of hard to explain without getting into some major jargon. Basically though, it will replace our 2 electric motors and our homemade transmission plus give us two speeds instead of one. All of this in a package about the size of one of our current electric motors. Oh, and I forgot to mention that is has more power than our current setup. They originally did not want to give it to us because they thought it would give us too much of advantage over other teams, but I guess we got enough people pulling strings for us that it finally went through.

I had to give three presentations on the last day of the competition. The control strategy presentation, given by me and one other guy, was the biggest point event of the competition. They had 13 corporate big-wigs in this room trying to rip holes in our presentation. I felt pretty exhausted afterward, but I guess we did decently because we got 6th place in that. I also gave 2 presentations for sponsor awards, National Instruments and Freescale. I gave the NI talk basically myself although there was a short demo by another guy, and the prof wrote a paper that we had to submit beforehand. We got 2nd place and $750 for that. I was pretty happy with that. The Freescale award was a disaster. We tried to Captain Planet it by having 4-5 guys talk about different stuff. They were not impressed, but to be honest I don’t even know why we tried to do it. We hardly used there stuff at all. So they ripped us a new one.

I started my new job in Detroit last Monday. I finally got a computer on Friday afternoon. I have yet to get a GM user/pass or the software I need to do the work they want me to do. I didn’t do any real work until Thursday at which point I started assisting the guy I’m going to work with. I basically just made some cables and connectors. That was good because I did not know how to do any of that stuff, and he taught me some good tricks. I was transferred to a new position the week before I came here, and they did not tell me until I got here. Honestly though, what I am doing now sounds basically like what they said I would be doing. I am working in a different location than I thought I would be though, Pontiac instead of Warren.

I am going to be working on a controller for a piece of equipment that tests seat belt anchorages. It sounds like a pretty decent assignment. The department where they do the testing is pretty cool. They have a bunch of hydraulic machines set up to do tests like that on various parts of the car. For instance, there is a machine that slams the doors on the car repeatedly to test the latches. They had big machines that shake the chassis, powertrain, suspension, etc. to see how they will hold up under road conditions. The idea is they take the car out on the test track and get real drive cycles, and then they bring the parts into this lab to test them under the same drive cycle to get repeatable test conditions.

My apartment is really nice. It is a 2 bedroom/2 bath with walk in closets in both rooms, huge overstuffed suede couches, fully furnished kitchen including dishwasher, and washer/dryer. My roommates are pretty cool as well. They thought I was coming in about 3 weeks ago so they were pretty shocked when I showed up. Two of them were gone home last weekend, and the other one came in about 3:30am Saturday night to find me sleeping in his bedroom in the spare bed. I guess he was a little freaked out. The area around the apartment is pretty upscale as well so it should work out well.

We are into day three of the competition, and we finished qualifying for the main events.  We are one of only 6 teams to do so.  Qualifying was supposed to end tonight at 6, but they extended it until tomorow afternoon because so few teams have finished.  We had to pass a tech inspection to make sure our vehicle was road worthy.  Then we did weigh in, braking and handling, acceleration, and low traction tests.
We have had to overcome lots of challenges and hurdles so far.  They made us move our gas tank during the tech inspection after the competition sponsors had OKed the position a few months ago.  We were not happy, but we got it done.  Then, we went out to weigh, and we were 200lbs over the weight limit.  We shed that in about 20 minutes.  Myself and a few other guys also had to get the ABS and power steering working.  We were having some communication problems with them.

I’m pretty happy with how we are doing so far.  I’ll try to keep you updated.