So this is one I don't think I'll ever understand. I've got a WaMu Online Savings account, and somehow they're providing 3.93% interest / 4% APY. How is this possible when they basically went under and got bought out. 4% is one of the best rates around. Meanwhile looking at my 401K is rather depressing, since January 28th, it's -23.4%. I know it's stupid to look at it short term but it's just lame to think I would've been better off putting my money in a failed bank than putting it into a well diversified 401K (not counting the tax stuff of course). Either way, I don't think I'll ever get over the way credit and savings works. Seems like a complete sham when we can be charged 10% or more in interest yet we're lucky to even be getting 4% on the money the banks hold for us. Sure banks are a bit more reliable at paying up but still. I think maybe I should just invest in salt for the forthcoming apocalypse.

So one benefit of my job is that I get to work on some cool hardware long before it's released. While I couldn't say either way if I've played with the Inspiron 910, I have played with a PC running the Atom chips and such. I must say it ran Windows just fine and was totally usable. The form factor of x unit wasn't quite right for me, but this Inspiron 910 looks pretty sweet.

For the longest time I've had the thought that I'd only ever get laptops from now on. Figuring I could just get one with DisplayPort or HDMI and get an external keyboard, mouse, and 24" or 30" LCD for the 1920x1200+ experience. But that sort of requires a dock and such. Fine dandy, but I'd be paying a lot of money for lower end hardware. While I'm sure it'd run my daily stuff just fine it doesn't quite cut it for more hardcore stuff.

So I've sort of been thinking that a quad core iMac would be perfect for me. At the same time I want something mobile. Perhaps a quad core Mac Book pro or a Latitude would do it. Anyway, this got me thinking, why not get an iMac or regular Dell desktop. Then just get the Inspiron 910 as my Internet and IM box :). When I really think about what I do on a laptop... the only thing I do outside of IE is Messenger and some file management. So what's the point of having some crazy high end mobile PC?

I'd probably do a lot more if it weren't for the form factor or the fact I'm sitting down on the couch doing it. It's sad, in this day, I still can't quite live away from the de facto standard of PC usage, desktop, monitor, keyboard, mouse.

I really love Netflix and I'm sure I'll love it more once it's built into the Xbox. Still though there's a couple things I really want.

1. Maintain a complete history of every movie that I've been sent and have watched instantly. Denote these movies with a different icon or something. I can't really remember half the time if I've seen something or not. The rental history is obscure and annoying.
2. The new releases feature is kind of annoying now, not at all useful. I'm sure some love it, I personally hate it. What would serve me better and I'm sure anyone else who prefer home theaters to the overpriced counterparts would be a release history similar to what IMDB does for movie releases. Just list movies by release date in the theater from now until 6 months back. Even if the movie isn't on DVD yet at least then I could save it for later.
3. Allow me to share my list of watched movies in a nice view on the web more easily. Especially if it were possible to tag movies as "owned".

Heck, if there were a Media Center app to expose this that also worked on the Xbox as well that'd take care of one other little thing I'd like to have :).

Today I finally managed to prevent history from repeating. For the past two or three weeks I kept on thinking of stuff I needed to do before and after work. The odd thing is every single time I thought of something I'd make a mental note to remember it. Then I'd just forget it. I'd get to work or get home and realize how stupid I was for forgetting, and then... nothing. I'd not bother making a note to remind myself the next day.

Self defeating really, I know my memory sucks when it comes to a lot of stuff, why I don't make notes is things is beyond me. I guess I just figure it's a waste of paper and I'd lose track anyway. Making notes electronically doesn't work for me either since it's too slow and I never have the method for input readily available.

So the bottom line? Well, yesterday and today I broke out of it. Not sure why but I finally remembered to bring the Silk coffee creamer from the fridge at home into the one at work. Lame? Yes, but it's a perfect example of the crap I forget on a daily basis. In this case I bought the stuff over a week ago, and every day I'd arrive at work and forget it and slap myself mentally for being a dumb ass.

How to combat this mental block is beyond me. I just figured I'd finally remember to write about this sort of stuff instead of thinking, "oh I should make a note of that on my blog" then never doing it.

Went to refresh my camera equipment listing on Expo and instead got this...   

Windows Live Expo will discontinue service on 31 July 2008. In preparation, the following features are no longer available:

• Create a new account.
• Post a new listing.
• Extend a listing.
• Upgrade a listing to a premium listing.

All current listings will remain on expo.live.com until they expire.

We thank you for your patronage and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
-The Windows Live Expo Team

Annoying, but not too unexpected. I've never actually seen anyone use Expo outside of the Seattle/Redmond area. Oh well. Back to Craigslist. Unless of course Microsoft buys them out and does a redirect :).

Lately I've been digging the idea of selling my 06 GTI and somehow acquiring a good EV. I figure an EV combined with solar power on the roof of a house would be a wicked way of doing things. I guess the only real limitation at this point is financial. I can't afford a Tesla, but that's exactly the type of car I'd go for, especially since I only need something that'll do 80-100 miles a day. It's a shame the thing is so expensive, normally I'd never consider spending more than $30K on a car but somehow an EV would be the one exception to that. The Wrightspeed X1 would be cool if it were $50K, enclosed (only because of Seattle rain... and street legal.

I wonder how hard it would be to convert the GTI to all electric.

So this discussion came up recently about home theater's and what various people are doing, I just kinda figured whatever and throw my info out here as well.

First off, here is a link to an RSS feed that has some home theater examples which are pretty sweet:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/eh/rss/C154 via http://www.electronichouse.com/

Photos can be found here: http://cid-491062c199155578.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Home%20Theater

Not the ideal set up in terms of layout but it’s an apartment…

Equipment:
56” Samsung HL-T5689S 1080p - currently $1400 (through a long history I originally paid a lot more)
Denon AVR-3808CI - $1200
Dell XPS w/dual OCUR and a LG HD/BD drive (dvi w/hdcp to hdmi) - believe this can be had for $1200
Dell PowerEdge 2900 with 4TB RAID5 in a closet up stairs - $3000
BostonAcoustics VR3 * 4 (front and rear) - $250/ea
VRC (center) - $250
VRX (sides not in use) - $250
XB6 (sub) - $250
Xbox 360 Elite (plugged in via HDMI), Wii (component), PS3 (HDMI) – retail

All the furniture is the cheap but decent Ikea stuff. Unfortunately because it is an apartment and the layout kind of sucks the rear speakers are way too close to the couch, but using the Audyssey in the Denon helps adjust for that and the surround experience is still pretty good. Oh and the fact I’m totally blocking the fireplace that’ll never be used anyway. The main thing for me was finding something cheap and simple to put all the equipment and TV on. Luckily the TV stand thing has space underneath so the cables are tied nicely under there. The only cable that’s visible is the wireless receiver for the KB and mouse. That new Logitech looks like it might be a good replacement though.

Monoprice.com for all the cabling which cost about $60, and considering that included 100ft of 12 gauge speaker wire, banana plugs, 3 spdif cables, 2 HDMI cables, cable for the sub… that’s pretty sweet. I also had previously bought a lot of CAT5e so the entire apartment is wired now though the cables are run under the baseboards.

There’s a single HDMI cable going from the receiver to TV and the TV is permanently set to that input. Luckily there’s no real overscan issues with the TV and MCE. The Dell w/OCUR is plugged in to the receiver via DVI w/HDCP to HDMI, for audio there’s a SPDIF cable as well as the normal 5.1 analog cabling. This allows me to normally use the digital output and get DD and DTS to the receiver, if I want WMA 5.1 and Uncompressed 5.1 PCM I switch to analog and that’s as simple as pressing the Input button on the Denon remote (it cycles through HDMI and Analog quickly). Now I did have an issue with the ATI 2600 card and the HDCP stuff when I added the receiver into the mix, the picture and audio would just cut out every 30 seconds or so. I switched to a nVidia 8600 and the problems went away (ATI driver issue I guess). There’s nothing too special about the setup though beyond that.

I actually use MCE for everything with no standalone players or devices other than the game consoles. It’s just nice and simple that way. The complexity is added by having ALL media stored on the RAID5 upstairs with everything in a domain. It’s pretty well organized but there’s still not enough room to rip all the DVD’s, though Network Media Sharing and Zune handle all the other media.

The speakers are possibly the best part of the setup since they were a total steal. I bought them from OneCall.com who pretty much is the only online retailer for BA. I had some Bostons way back when but they were stolen so it was kinda nice finally getting some again. I had looked at Magnolia and Definitive. I compared Klipsch, Monitor, Definitive’s, and B&W’s. I actually had no way to hear the Boston since Circuit City sucks like that.

My first choice was the B&W’s the 703’s were just awesome and at some point far in the future I hope to have some B&W’s. Randomly though I noticed OneCall had all the VR stuff for insane prices $249 vs. $629 so I ended up jumping on that. Turns out Boston EOL’d the VR series so they were just clearing inventory. They disappeared for a while but it looks like they’re up for $399 now. But this is a good point I think, you can get an awesome deal if you buy slightly used or EOL’d products, as long as you know the product is quality to begin with and the company making them is decent you can’t really go wrong. If and when I go for some B&W’s I might buy the current model year product just after the updated models are out.

All in all it’s a comfortable setup and the budget really isn’t that bad. I personally feel that however much is spent on the TV should be spent on the audio and however much is spent on the audio should be spent on the receiver and stuff that powers it all. So everything is right about that level. Flaws would be the fact it’s all in an apartment with a crappy layout and not a lot of wiggle room. It sucks I have to block the fireplace but that’s the only option in my case, we’ll see what it’s like when I move this month. The center channel is a little weak but I’ve adjusted that. I’m probably going to get a ButtKicker LFE after I move to still be able to enjoy things a bit. Though I’ve actually turned the sub down all the way I’ve still had noise complaints, the VR3’s go down to 35Hz and at a decent volume on some music can probably bug neighbors. I also can’t even use the VRX speakers at this point since I don’t have walls to mount them to, they are dipole surrounds which create a more theater like experience but even so I probably will use them in a dual surround config not 7.1. I mainly bought them because of their discount and the fact they’re EOL.

Anywho, there’s my quick personal review of my own setup. Hoping that at some point in the future I can do a proper home theater room with seating, acoustically transparent projector screen and so on. :-)

I was in a team meeting thing the other day and had my laptop out taking notes. Unfortuantely despite the fact I always run with all system sounds off, I kept on getting the annoying system beep every so often. It was maybe coming from Outlook and holding down the backspace for too long. It happens even if you mute the sound on the system, and heck, even if you disable the "System speaker" device in Device Manager which is listed under the System devices. And man is the beep loud, amusing really, since the mono speaker on my Dell Latitude D430 is barely audible but that bloody system beep is loud as hell and definitely attention grabbing.

So here's how to disable the Beep, yes that's actually what it's called.

1. Press WIN+R
2. Type in devmgmt.msc and press Enter.
3. Click the View menu then click Show hidden devices.
4. Expand the Non-Plug and Play Drivers branch out.
5. Look for Beep and double-click the device to bring up the properties window.
6. Click on the Driver tab.
7. Under Current status, click Stop.
8. Under Startup type drop down switch the driver to Disabled.
9. Click OK

You'll now have true silence from your desktop or laptop PC regardless of whatever crazy error messages pop up or however much spam gets delivered to your Inbox. Though this won't help if you if you've got a bunch of 80mm fans running at 8000RPM still :-). But that's for another post... Tip though, voltage converters for fans or fans with a high CFM and low dB rating work amazingly well as do rubber gromets for fans and HDD's and not to mention that Dynamat isn't half bad for noise absorbtion as well.

So I was just talking to Mooney about how I used to have my PC audio hooked up. Which immediately led me to talk about the Creative DDTS-100. In this day and age I really have a bad taste from using most Creative products. They can't write drivers to save their life, their audio cards suck, their speakers suck, just about everything Creative makes these days suck. But it's not all bad for Creative, they've got one good product that I know about. They simply need to look at products like the DDTS-100 and then go to eBay and see how much those products go for used.

The Creative DDTS-100 quite simply is the equivalent of a PC audio receiver in that it'll take SPDIF, TOSLINK, PC multi-channel analog, and RCA and it will decode Dolby Digital as well as DTS and it even includes DD and DTS upmixing, I was especially fond of the DTS NEO:6 Music setting. Why would anyone need this? Well it was great, I had multiple PC's all connected via SPDIF and one via analog. I could switch between PC's and use a single set of speakers. I even had an Xbox connected to it as well. I sent out a nice digital signal and it decoded all my content awesomely. Sure it's not a real receiver/amp, but when you're using Klipsch 5.1 Ultra speakers it's perfect.

Like I said though. You know you have a good product when you can look on eBay over 3 years after you bought it, and it has actually gone UP in value! I buy a lot of crap, and usually after a while and some upgrades I buy better crap and sell the old stuff. The two things I'm very very reluctant to sell though is the Creative DDTS-100 and those Klipsch 5.1 Ultra speakers. The speakers, sure, maybe, but the DDTS-100, one day a year from now I'm pretty sure I'll need it.

That being said, it's questionable if the DDTS-100 would be worth as much a year from now. It does the job it does amazingly well. Yeah it's ugly as all sin and they could've saved a shit ton of money by cutting down on the LED's and silverness but as far as I know the product is the only one of its kind.

There's a reason why I could sell it for $200 tomorrow and take a $75 profit though.

Creative needs to learn something fast, which is that people want quality. There's a reason people even still would consider Creative products today, it's not because of the crap that's made today, it's because of the stuff that was made back when the word SoundBlaster meant sound on PC's.

Through some act of God or maybe just a certain person I know in the North Central division, the Internet has returned here. I used to have two Internet connections, one for the server, one for personal use. But now it's just one, so if things go down, there's a total feeling of disconnection. Oddly, despite things being down for 2 weeks I've not been too bothered, though I think that's partly because I've barely been on anyway.

Anywho, the problems started (again) on the 8th, when the web just died, the crappy SMC business gateway reported the upstream ranging was in progress and just sat there. Comcast sent a guy out the next morning but things were back up when he got here. Then a week later it goes down again the same exact problem. I call once more and the Comcast person says they're having problems with the headend, I think maybe she meant CMTS, but who knows, she says to give it 24-48 hours. Things come back up shortly a couple days later and go down again, this time the upstream ranging is fine but I can't ping the Comcast DNS servers I've been given. So I call once more, now they're saying they're having DNS issues. The weird thing though is that apparently incoming traffic is still working fine, but I can't ping jack on the outbound. I can't even get into the internal customer admin pages on the modem either, even when I plug directly into the server.

At this point they've already said they're going to give me a week free, now she's saying a month since it's been down for over a week. I keep asking if they should just send someone out to replace the modem but this guy is saying to just give it time for the DNS stuff to be sorted. "Fine whatever, I give up, I don't care, just sort this out and give me the credit", that's about all I say. I've already been on the phone with them for at least 2 hours to get this stuff sorted and it's been too long for it to be down. Topping it off the service didn't work well at all from day one, I had the modem replaced twice, and the current one is only working well because I got some "special" firmware running on it. Before the firmware the modem had to be logged onto and the firewall reset once a week.

Finally, Julie calls Comcast today hoping that the feminine touch will do the trick. After a bit she hands the phone to me and this guy isn't any more helpful. The entire problem I've been having is that I can't log onto the modem as a cusadmin to see anything, I can't tell what he's doing remotely or anything. But he's telling me the settings are fine except the subnet mask, it should be .252 not .0, uh, err, wrong. I keep asking about the DNS but he says it's fine, and there's no issues. The issues with the DNS and the other crap were apparently resolved already so there's no reason why our Internet shouldn't be working. I still can't ping jack from the router, and I plug the server directly into the modem. Whatever he did though made it so the cable and traffic lights wouldn't even come on after power cycling the gateway and such. He ends up just giving up and sending someone out tomorrow morning.

Fed up, I give in, call the real help. After about 20 minutes of digging, we finally get the modem back online, she gets in remotely and we get it going again so I can log on as cusadmin. Turns out that Comcast had turned on DHCP even though we're static, had the subnet wrong, and had disabled the manual DNS entries. She also switched the port to half duplex since apparently the SMC has issues with auto detection. After all that I can finally log into the modem, can see everything. She mentions something about some work being done switching the rules in the RIP to force business customers to use the business DNS not the residential, so we switch to those DNS servers and everything magically works again, switch back to the residential just as a check and stuff stops again.

This is a huge rant for no purpose, but I just don't get why someone in a completely different division without complete access to my modem can sort stuff out in 20 minutes but it takes the Northwest Comcast people 2 weeks, and 3 service calls and they still couldn't do it. I guess their solution to everything is not bother on the phone and just replace the modem regularly.

Now I just have to call up and cancel the service call and make sure they give us that month free that they promised. Hopefully it doesn't go down again after I call.

Okay, so Comcast has been giving me the runaround with getting my business Internet connection back up and running correctly but one of the upsides of running your own server with DHCP, DNS, Active Directory and all the other overly complicated things is that I can still access all of my own content since it's local and can write this right now.

I've decided to take this time "off the net" to go through and organize the terabyte or so of data I've got sitting around including the 500GB+ worth of music. Now there's this one folder though, that's only like 60GB but is completely filled with various file formats and bit rates of individual tracks that I eventually wanted to complete and sort.

What an eclectic set of music. It's got everything, even stuff that I would dare say shouldn't even be called music. But I love it. I love it all. Even the cheese, since even after only sampling a 30 second clip of the music it brings a smile to my face.

For example I'm listening to We All Die Young from the Rock Star soundtrack, just seconds before I was listening to a Phish cover of the Cheers theme. This random assortment of tracks is totally bringing back to my days of spending all day and night on the Internet and on Messenger just fiddling, talking, and listening to music, and laughing my ass off.

That brings me to listening to the I AM advert song, Kazachok, Protest the Right Way, and all the other gold from back in the day. Sure this stuff is close to trash, but at the right moments it's also a treasure.

So not really sure where I'm heading with this other than to say I miss the days of having music playing all the time, even while I slept. Music really does get every bit of me, the best and the worst. Right now it's just putting a huge smile on my face though.

I heart Boing Boing sometimes. It's my fav of the big 3 RSS feeds out there, sometimes I love it even more than Engadget, but whatever. They linked to this page showing how little nutrition is in most of the big fast food places burgers and fries. I'm still in shock over this:

"The Double Six Dollar Burger from Carl's Jr. contains an insane 1520 calories. That's not a typo. One sandwich contains more calories than some smaller females need... PER DAY."

I do miss In-N-Out though, there was always something nice about the way the bun was just a bit crispy around the edge from the grill. On the plus side I've gotten pretty good at a home made burger in the last couple of weeks and the grill I was given is pretty sweet too. Now if only I didn't live so far away from everyone I know, I'd have people over to join in :-).