Shouzer

I happened to catch this clip the other day, and it seemed worth posting.  Over the years of watching SportsCenter, I’ve sort of come to the decision that I like Hockey highlights the best.  There’s just something about them that keeps ‘em unique–most baseball highlights look the same to me (you can only dive in so many directions to catch a ball), for instance.  Anyway, enjoy.

There are certain things I have around my apartment that just make my life way better. I think I would have to start with the dishwasher. If this isn’t a dream appliance, I don’t know what is. Washing plates by hand is for suckers.

Next is my electric blanket. This guy is a must have for any cooler climate. I haven’t turned my heat on yet despite the fact that the temperature outside is dropping below freezing already, and the electric blanket is a big part of that. Watching TV is just so much better when I’m wrapped up in this thing. I have been sick this week, and I put one on my bed when I was feverish and freezing. It warmed my buns right up, and at 180W, I could run it all night for pennies. I couldn’t do that though because it just does too good of a job of heating me. I would roast in the bed if I left it on all night.

The electric space heater comes in right behind the electric blanket. The big problem with my heat being off is in the morning trying to get ready for work. Going from warm bed to 50 degree bathroom is not a pleasant trip at 6:45. Having that thing blowing hot air on me while I brush my teeth helps a lot. This morning was the first time I used it in there, and it got so hot during my shower, I started feeling woozy and tired. I had to crack the door and let some cool air in from the rest of the apartment while I got dressed so I wouldn’t pass out in the sauna I created. It does run a bit steep on the electricity at 1500W, but I only use it for 20 minutes a day. Plus, you can’t put a price tag on that kind of luxury.

Steve Jobs announced iPhone 3G.  It’s pretty well exactly what I was hoping for the last time around, too.  It’s thinner, slicker, has 3G support, built-in GPS, 3rd party app support, and enterprise support.  What more could you honestly hope for out of a phone?

A price cut, that’s what.  And, fortunately, that’s exactly what Apple’s delivered.  When I bought my iPhone a year ago, I paid $599 for that sucker.  The price for a 16gig iPhone 3G (twice the size of mine) is now a measly $299, fully half the price it cost a year ago.  For 8gigs?  $199, 1/3 of the cost less than a year ago.  Damn!

I want to warn you this post is probably going to put the ‘ol spit glands in overdrive. You know, with the drool and such. It might not happen–it’s not really something I can promise. I just felt a warning was appropriate.

People who know me have most likely noticed I use the phrase “that’s how I roll”. So, I figured I owed it to everyone to know what that actuall entailed. This is what I came up with.

There’s my brand new 50″ 1080p plasma. It’s a Samsung FP-T5084, to be exact. It’s amazing. My buddy Ian and I beat Halo 3 on it last night, and I enjoyed every second of it more than I would have on my old 20″ RCA.

Every good TV needs a good stand, and this one is no exception. That stand is 62″ wide, and as you can see, every bit of that shelf real estate is used. From top to bottom and left to right we have a 360, PS3, Xbox, Comcast digital cable box, and my Media Center Edition PC (aka my mythbox).

Lastly is just a quick side shot to show off how thin this beast is. So far, I really couldn’t be happier with this thing. Also, I’d like to give a big “Happy Birthday!” to the K-man.

I need to brag a little bit, so I’m gonna use Newegg’s help to show off the components of the computer you got to see in the last post.

Case: Antec Nine Hundred (link)
Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 (link)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz (link)
RAM: OCZ Platinum Revision 2 2GB (link)
GPU: EVGA Nvidia GeForce 8600GTS 256MB(link)
HDD: Western Digital Caviar SATA150 400GB (link)
DVDRW: LITE-ON 20X DVD±R Dual Layer SATA w/ LightScribe (link)
PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-620HX (link)
Keyboard/Mouse: Logitech LX 710 Laser (link)
Monitor: Acer AL1916WAbd Black 19″ DVI Widescreen LCD (link)

It runs Windows Vista Ultimate with a 5.4 user experience score. That would be higher if I hadn’t skimped on the hard drive. I got a deal though. As did I with almost every part on this thing. I’m so proud.

So this is my new rig and the desk it sits on.

I managed to procure an iPhone today. While it definitely seems to have been worth it so far, I have to mention that I was right when I said waiting in line with a bunch of Apple fanboys would suck (though at least I only had to wait about 1.5 hours). Most of the people I was around were alright, but some of them were just assholes. That doesn’t matter, though. What does is this:

My initial thoughts? The keyboard is surprisingly easy to use–significantly easier than was implied by the first reviews. I haven’t had issues using dual thumbs at all. The screen is simply amazing. I’m consistently delighted by its clarity. The interface, as expected, is great. In particular, this really is the best iPod Apple has ever produced. As you can see from the last two pics, it’s relatively small. My previous phone was an E815, which isn’t exceedingly large. It’s no RAZR in terms of slimness, but most phones aren’t.

Oh, and Safari on the iPhone? Magnificent. It really does render pages exactly as it should. Zooming in and moving around is very easy, and I imagine I’ll do it a lot when I’m just sitting around. Lastly, as a nice little surprise, when I dock the phone I’m able to pull pictures off it directly through Explorer. Windows just recognizes it as a camera, which is pretty handy.

[Edit:] Wow, I really need to dust off my desk, eh?

If you find the weather getting warmer, and you happen to be a college boy desperate for some college girl pie, there are certain things you must clothe yourself in. First, find your wrinkled khaki shorts, the more wrinkled the better. Chicks dig these, and since they are the only kind of shorts you own, you are off to a good start. Next, the shirt. Try looking through your little sister’s closet. You are trying to find something bright, preferably pink, and way too small for you. If you are out of luck, get a shirt emblazoned with fraternity letters. It doesn’t matter if it’s your fraternity or even if it’s your shirt, just make sure it isn’t clean. Get yourself some flip-flops, because shoes are so faux pas in the spring time. Finally, if you’ve showered, shaved, or brushed your teeth in the last week, you might want to stay in a few more days. There’s nothing that turns a girl off more than fresh breath, a smooth face, and the sweet aroma of Axe.

Yeah, I saw some interesting characters on my way to class today. All of them looked like the above. I think I might be getting the flu.

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.

Well folks, PuzzleCrack 2006 began on Monday and The Big Enchilada was back in full force.  We tied for first on Monday through a snafu (I’m still not entirely convinced we didn’t win), we got second Tuesday, and we won today outright.  So far it’s shaping up to be a pretty good competition for the meta puzzle on Friday.

Through this part of the competition we’ve won a wireless mouse and two wireless 360 controllers from Microsoft.  If we win Friday, the prize would be a 360 Pro, 3 wireless controllers, and 5 games.  It would be pretty sweet, to say the least.

So after recent discussions with my sister and Scott, I decided that a shout-less Shouzer had gone on long enough.  After about 4 hours of work tonight, I finished a beta of a Shouts plugin for WordPress.  Once I tidy this thing up and add a few new features, I’m going to put in on the web for anybody who wants it.

There’s some new features since last time.  Now it’s all AJAX.  Most of the things I do lately are AJAX, cuz it’s spiffy.  So here’s how it works..  You type in your info, hit “Shout!” and your browser goes to work.  It posts the shout and shows it on your page without reloading the page.  The really fancy feature, though, is that other people’s shouts will show up in real time automagically on your page.  That’s right.  If you’re viewing Shouzer, and I leave a shout, it’ll update on your page.  Now that’s just sweet.

Thursday morning was my last final. I finished up with it around 11am, and went directly to work on ChallengeX. Around 3:30am Thursday night, we took the ‘Nox out for the first road test ever. I was riding shotgun as we drove down Wabash Ave (45 mph speed limit) at 72mph with no headlights. The car performed amazingly, especially in high speed charging mode, in which we drive >40mph and charge the 360V battery at the same time. The car drags a little between 0-50, but it hauls from 50-70. We lost the vehicle tailing us when we did the 50-70 test that night. Afterwards, we went for the mandatory celebratory trip to IHOP. I got home that morning around 6am, took a shower and a 1.5hour nap. Then, we reconvened to prep the ‘Nox for shipping. That’s right, we did our first road test 7 hours before shipping it. Not something I would highly recommend btw. I would have liked to have had more time for testing, but this makes for a totally cool story.

While I’m talking about ChallengeX, I have to tell you about this guy on the team named Tom. Tom is 2nd in command of the Fab team, which means he puts all of the mechanical stuff in the car, and he was instrumental in the design/building of our custom transmission. Anyway, Tom pulled an all-nighter Wednesday night fabbing up a new driveshaft. (We sheared the bolts on our previous one). He showed up 45 minutes late to his 8am final, and then left about an hour later. Edit: I was also in this final, and it took me around 3 hours. He told me later that he only needed to get a 55% on it so he wasn’t trying hard. End Edit Then, he proceeded to return to work on ChallengeX. Around 11-12 that night, he got bored because we were doing some electrical/controls testing. So he decided to build a little 5hp moped. It took him like 30 minutes. The guy is insane. He ended up staying up for like 50 hours straight, working on ChallengeX almost the whole time.

Today, I moved into my new place in the Haute. That went pretty smoothly actually. On Tuesday, we’re flying our to Phoenix for the big testing competition. I’m really looking forward to it now that our car is fully functional. I was starting to dread it up to that night because I didn’t think we would finish. I believe I’ll have internet access there so I’ll try to post updates.

In other news, I had yet another hard drive replacement yesterday. Hooray Compaq! Actually, the hard drives are Hitachi so Hooray Hitachi!

Shouzer now has a new host. The switch from one to the other was actually rather painful, as everything on the site seemed to keep working. The biggest pain was moving the DB, but I got it done without too much problem.

In other site news, there’s a new version (version 3.0, actually) of myPad. I decided to go straight from 2.0 to 3.0, because I rewrote the entire thing. It should be quicker now and there’s a fancy little “loading” image you’ll see when it’s pulling data from the server. We’re fancy now.

I partook in my first day-after-thanksgiving shopping today, affectionately known as “Black Friday”, symbolizing the first day of the year in which retailers are said to get “in the black”. I’m sure you are as interested in reading of my experiences as I am in writing them, so I will spare you. I saw Quint at JCPenny around 5:15, and a Russell trio + Jordy at Staples around 5:30. Staples was without competition on their BF deals. I’ll let Jared edit with his deals, and here are mine:

Best Buy
Spinter Cell: Chaos Theory for Xbox
39.99 – 30.00 sale = 9.99

Kohl’s
Black & Decker Crush Master 450 watt blender
Reg. 34.99; 17.64 – 2.65 Early Bird Special = 14.99

Staples
Wireless Intellimouse Explorer x 2
49.98 – 35.00 instant savings = 29.88

PNY 512mb Attache Flash Drive
54.98 – 35.00 instant savings – 10.00 easy rebate = 9.94

Staples Surge Strip
5.94 – 6.00 easy rebate = FREE

PNY 512mb PC3200 DDR400 Desktop RAM
89.98 – 30.00 instant savings – 20.00 easy rebate = 39.94

Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM internal hard drive
119.98 – 50.00 instant savings – 40.00 easy rebate = 29.94

Digital Research 16x double-layer dual-format internal DVD drive
89.98 – 50.00 instant savings – 20.00 easy rebate = 19.94

The last 3 items will be used for my Windows Media Center box that I plan to construct.