Are We There Yet?

First sign the apocalyspe (AKA another Wisconsin winter) is coming - I went out to get lunch a few moments ago and could see the exhaust from cars. I imagine it to be the exhaled breath of a laughing Jack Frost as he ponders all the cruel things he's going to do to me this year.

*sigh*

A co-worker sent me a link to the new Bard's Tale game coming out. It's being made by a company founded by the original founder of Interplay (Baldur's Gate, Descent, Fallout). They've assembled quite the team of people including programmer's from Shiny (MDK, Earthworm Jim) and artists and level designers from Blizzard (WarCraft, Diablo, StarCraft).

Taking a cue from Blizzard and their hilarious character dialogue when incessantly clicking on units in game, I highly recommend spending some time mousing over the various characters on the Bard's Tale front page.

It was a good weekend to be a Chicago sports fan (more on that later), but a bad one if you wanted to watch the Bears play where I live. I have the blessing to live in south-east Wisconsin, which in case you don't follow anything sports related is through and through Green Bay Packer country. It doesn't matter where you live in this state, it is full of Packer-backers from International Falls to La Crosse to Racine. How strong is this tidal wave of love for the local NFL football team? So contagious is the football fever in this state, so strong is the support for one Brett Fav-ruh, so crazy are this state's inhabitants that they made my mother a die-hard, every Sunday, holler at the idiot in black and white stripes Packer fan.

Wow.

Naturally, finding fellow Chicago Bears fans who aren't hiding behind green and gold can be a bit of a problem for me. Don't misunderstand, there's plenty of us, especially in SE Wisconsin where we're closer to Chicago than Green Bay. But showing blue and orange around here will do more than get you arrested by the fashion police. You'll have to endure the ridicule of Packer fans who won't miss an opportunity to point out our paltry record against the Packers since the QB from Southern Miss took the reins (4-19 with 10 straight losses at home).

It was with great relief that I visited ESPN.com Sunday morning to see that the Seattle @ Green Bay "Reunion of Former and Current Packer Coach Hate Fest 2003" game would be broadcast on Fox while the Oakland @ Chicago "Da Bears Still Suck" game would have a home on CBS. I diligently went to work getting some important assembly programming done in the morning in anticipation of seeing my Bears' feeble attempts at crossing the elusive goal line in the afternoon.

Imagine my surprise when I turned on CBS several hours later when I saw not an NFL football game, but an infomercial for Chef Tony's stainless steel, super sharp, imported from Taiwan, whizzbang, super-duper, all-in-one cutting utensil!

Sadly, this has happened before. As if it's not bad enough that Bears fans must endure disappointing season's dotted with successful campaigns labeled flukes by opponents. Or the embarassment of the Super Bowl Shuffle during our most recent days on top of the NFL. Or the voicing of disappointment from former Bear's great, Dick Butkus, on the current state of a proud franchise.

No, the state of Wisconsin also sees to it that the misplaced, disenfranchised fans of Da Bears living in the refugee camp of Wisconsin aren't able to watch their team on television when their precious Packers game is being broadcast on an entirely different channel. As if I'd find Brett Favre dancing and hugging other men in the end zone more entertaining than the lovable Chef Tony.

Bah.

I've got Ian converted over to Movable Type now and copied over the template to him as well. He's discovering the joys of having 100% control over your blog. First on his list of things to play with? Auto-trackback.

So, here you go, Ian. :-)

To our regularly scheduled programming.

Ok, so my blog turned in to an all Cubs 24/7 affair during their playoff run. But it's over now. The better team won and will go on to play the Red Sox / Yankees in the World Series. Best of luck to the Marlins.

What have we learned here?

1. Steve Bartman did nothing to ruin the Cubs chances two nights ago. Let it go.
2. Dusty Baker may be a genius when it comes to pinch hitters and motivating players, but it seems he decides to pull his starters one inning (and 3-5 runs) after the rest of us knew he was done.
3. The Cubs have a lot of decisions to make this off season. There's a lot of players who's contracts are up. It'll be interesting to see what MacPhail, Hendry, an Co. do this off season.

[UPDATE]: See http://www.futureviperowner.com/cubs/ . I've moved all baseball / Cubs blog content to this blog now.

Busy.

I haven't given up on blogging. I've just been incredibly busy lately. What with my assembly programming, tight deadline at work, and family related plans these past few weekends, I haven't had time for anything lately. I've got some things queued up that I'm going to comment on, so stay tuned.

My place of employment recently got a "free" temporary upgrade to our DSL package from SBC. I have no love for SBC whatsoever as their DSL reliability has been wretched from day one and the equipment they provided us with was utter junk. I'm also well aware that this "free" upgrade is nothing more than a business ploy to get us to upgrade our account once we've gotten used to the extra bandwidth and the "free" time runs out.

Nevertheless, it's pretty damn cool to get these types of transfer speeds. Check this out (89K image). This was done from my machine on our network with approximately 6 machines using the Internet connection at any given time.

Our paid for DSL service is 768-1500kbps downstream and 256kbps upstream. We're currently receiving 1500-6000kbps downstream and 384kbps upstream. Seeing as how I can look out of the window in front of my desk and see the CO, I would imagine we'll hang around the upper limits of the downstream.

I've scrapped together another blog where I can put all my baseball / Cubs / sports related material to keep it out of this one. I guess I'm somewhat of a rarity among geeks since I care as much about the Cubs and baseball as I do about TCP/IP, my email, and what Blizzard is doing.

Anyway, check out http://www.futureviperowner.com/cubs/ if you're interested in that part of my blog. Warning to all visitors - a graphical artist I am not.

This Fall has been a busy season for the music industry in a variety of ways. Outside of the usual belly aching of the RIAA and their arrogant attitude towards their consumers, perhaps the biggest news has been the release of a variety of online music services.

Personally, I prefer Yahoo's free streaming music service, LaunchCast (click here to check out my station). I've been using LaunchCast since this Spring and have been more than impressed with it. The quality isn't the greatest as it's probably slightly worse than FM radio. However, unlike FM radio, you do have the ability to pause and skip songs plus their remarkably good rating system. You can rate songs, artists, albums, and genres. Once you've rated these things, LaunchCast uses it to generate your playlist. You can even select to never play the song, artist, or album again. On the surface, this means you get to listen to more music of the kind you like. I've had times where I've heard a new artist, gave them a favorable rating, and within the next hour had heard a couple more songs from them. The rating system even recommends artists and songs you haven't heard before if they are popular with people who have rated similar artists and songs as you. That's how I discovered Blindside; it was recommended to me by fans of Taproot.

Of course, if you dig a little deeper, Yahoo is able to use this information to "recommend" new artists and songs to you. LaunchCast features artist and events on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis during which time you'll hear a lot about whoever is paying them for that time period. There are other frequent ads in LaunchCast (that can't be skipped). Sometimes, they are more frequent than I can stand and other times they're very reasonably spaced aprt. LaunchCast does offer a premium service (LaunchCast Plus) that increases the quality of the streaming music, eliminates commercials, and provides other features as well. The free LaunchCast only offers a finite amount of time where you can skip songs, but I can't recall how long it is (I've only reached the limit once).

Other musical offerings of late includes BuyMusic.com, iTunes for Windows, and now Napster 2.0. I've tried out all 3 services and abandoned each one. Here's why:

• BuyMusic.com:
1. Archaic licensing agreement - very restrictive on where you can use your music and how often you can burn it to CD, copy to a portable MP3 player, etc. Really, do I need more reasons than this? Ok...
2. Requires Internet Explorer (I use Mozilla Firebird) since it's all based around WMA and Microsoft's DRM technology.
3. Poor website design - could they have made it any wider?
• Apple iTunes
1. Their application was horribly slow on my machine. It's like running Windows XP in a window on your machine.
2. Their license explicitly states that when iTunes is installed, ONLY iTunes can be used to transfer media to an iPod. I'm sorry...who owns my iPod?
3. M.e.m.o.r.y. H.o.g. - Beyond the eye candy layout they've developed for the application, it also runs services for burning files to CD and transferring files to an iPod...regardless of whether or not you have a CDR(W) or iPod connected to your computer.
4. iTunes wants to do EVERYTHING in AAC format. MP3 support almost seems like an afterthought. It doesn't even support OGG.
• Napster
• I played the least with Napster. Why? I couldn't even connect to their service. Their server doesn't respond when I try creating an account.
• The app is very similar to iTunes.
• Also like iTunes, Napster installs a Roxio burning engine and runs it with the app even if you don't have a burner installed.

Ian sent word to me that the new User Friendly web comic had something I'd be interested in. See for yourself.

I had iTunes search for files on my machine as well. It was definitely slow, but what really annoyed me is that it added any media it was capable of playing - videos included. I thought it was called iTunes, not iMedia! So then, I had to go through and hand filter out the non-audio files before I had a usable playlist of mp3s.