I hardly every watch DVDs directly anymore. I almost always rip them to my media center and watch them from there. Yesterday I got Wall*E in the mail. They have an interesting bit of copy protection on it. They have 70 different versions of the movie on the DVD with the chapters scrambled.
Even through I had not seen the movie yet I was able to narrow it down to two versions after about 15 min using the video preview feature in HandBrake. I set HandBrake to rip both and found that #30 was the correct one on my DVD set.
This evening I got around to watching it. It was pretty good. It may be my least favorite Pixar film to day but with that said a bad Pixar film is better that 80% of what else is out there.
Forever the fashion junkie, my eldest daughter Phoebe bought some Ugg lookalikes while attending a friend’s birthday at the mall. Later Phoebe and her sister had the following conversation:
Phoebe: (sniffing the boot) They smell like puppies!
Andrea: (sniffing the boot) They do smell like puppies!
Phoebe: you don’t think…
Both: (crying)
That pretty much sums up what it’s like to be in my household…
I actually feel a bit sorry for Barack Obama. Getting elected was the easy part. Now the hard part of the job awaits him…
In addition to their reputation of using soft core porn to advertise* I have discovered another shocking fact about American Apparel. Those extra soft shirts can hold a lot of static charge! Yesterday was dry and cold. I picked up a laundry basket of freshly folded clothes and could feel the charge on the basket when suddenly a 9 inch arc goes from my hand to the AA shirt on top. I could see it clearly even though I was in direct sunlight at the time. My hand was a bit numb for about 20 minutes.
Note to self: don’t do laundry while swapping out ram chips.
*By definition NSFW
In the Microsoft earning report today Microsoft went positive again with a net $178 in their EDD (Entertainment and Devices Division). This brings their net loss so far down to a $6.784 billion. They project that this year will be lower than last year, presumably because Halo 4 will not be out this year.
| Year | Net income | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|
| 2009Q1 | $178 | ($6784) |
| 2008 | $426 | ($6962) |
| 2007 | ($1969) | ($7388) |
| 2006 | ($1339) | ($5419) |
| 2005 | ($539) | ($4080) |
| 2004 | ($1215) | ($3514) |
| 2003 | ($1191) | ($2326) |
| 2002 | ($1135) | ($1135) |
(in millions of dollars)
It must be a funny place to work at as everybody there must be a comedian. Take for example UAC (which, coincidentally is the imaginary evil corporation in Doom) in Vista.
When I rebuild a work machine I have to apply a bunch of Vista Studio patches in order. It’s a tediously long process (~1 hour). So I’ve written a batch file to do it for me so I can go away for an hour and do something else.
So I right click on it, pick run as administrator, and it pops up a UAC dialog to run this as admin and then runs my script in the Windows system directory, not the current one!
So I patch my script to take me back to the current directory and re-run it. I get the admin UAC dialog, I click through it, and it proceeds to UAC me for every Visual Studio patch, coming close to eliminating any benefit of the script in the first place!
I sometimes wonder if Vista is really a grand psychology test to model abusive relationships and the Stockholm syndrome.
In the spirit of the Guinness ad campaign: Brilliant!
The next time I do a machine build I’m turning UAC off for the build part.
...and John Gruber got pretty much everything. The only thing he missed was Apple keeping the white MacBook and dropping it’s price to $999.
Nicely done!
Actually I’ve been really impressed at how much Apple has been able to keep secret before these press events given how many vectors exist for leaks. With that said it seems like this is about the most leaked event so far. I think about everything to be announced has been leaked already. Daring Fireball seems to have the most complete round up of what’s being announced.
So it looks like we’ll get:
- No netbook but a 24” monitor at the $899 price point.
- New notebook building process
- Aluminum MacBooks
- No 17” MacBook Pro
- Glass trackpad with no visible buttons
- Black air-like keyboard on all models
- Two GPUs in the pro
- Switch to NVidia for chipset/GPUs
- Incremental update of the MacBook Air
In about 7 hours we’ll see if Gruber got it all….
Given what a control freak Steve Jobs is about secrecy I cannot imagine Apple headquarters is a happy place to be this morning…
Love them or hate them, you have to admit Nike knows how to make a commercial that calls up the image that the NFL wants to put forward:
I like this NFL “leave nothing” commercial better than last year’s one which I thought was awesome. Maybe I’m just a sucker for “Ecstasy of Gold”.
Hat’s off to the Nike marketing folks.
P.S. Help Microsoft out.
Nothing in this world is simple. At first glance the claim by Mike Nash, VP of Windows at Microsoft, seems straight forward:
“Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore ‘Windows 7’ just makes sense.”
It does except for the fact that I’ve owned in some shape or form:
Windows 1
Windows 2
Windows 2.11
Windows 3
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.11
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 3.51
Windows NT 4
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
and that’s ignoring the 286/386/SE/64 bit/SP#/OSR# versions in addition to the server OS versions.
Of course what he’s referring to is the major part of the internal version number for Windows, the one you get when you type “ver” at a command prompt. For Windows 2000 this was 5 and for Vista was 6. Some people call this the windows kernel version.
Ultimately I like Microsoft going back to a version number or year scheme. I think ultimately this is simpler but I think the year scheme would better serve them. Now will start the arguments what Windows 7 is not a major upgrade and should really be 6.1. Like when Windows 2000 was version 5 and WinXP was 5.1.
Let the flame wars begin!
